Sometimes when I am feeling overwhelmed by life's responsibilities, I enjoy losing myself in a good mystery. I like mysteries that have recurring "detectives" because I like to follow their lives and watch them evolve. One such author is Jon Katz whose fictional private detective is a stay at home dad who left the finance world to focus on family. As he solves the latest crime, he also weaves in some wisdom about parenting. In his book, The Family Stalker, he offers this insight about parenting:
"I've come to see the experience of being a parent as so extraordinary and absorbing and emotional that you can't comprehend what it's like before you have a kid and can't quite recall the details afterward... When your kid comes into the world, you are up at bat in probably the most profound way you ever are. Not that having children is the only meaningful experience in life - I know that's not so - it's just that for most people child rearing is the time when your successes and your mistakes so clearly and visibly affect, enhance, damage, or even destroy a helpless person's life. It's your turn to put your instincts, values, and experiences on the line. With little real training or preparation, you suddenly have all these choices to make about school, bedtime, TV, religion, toys, chores, allowances. How many water guns to buy, how much reading to require, how much civil conversation to insist upon, how much to trust them alone, how much punishment (if any) when rules are broken. When they can cross the street by themselves, go to sleep-away camp, pierce their ears, or stay up for Saturday Night Live."
"The list goes on forever. And you don't know for years, maybe decades, how it's really going to turn out.... To me it is this process, this endless dialogue - a complicated tapestry of decisions, regulations, sensitivities and ethics, conversation and negotiation - that is at the core of parenting and determines what kind of people our children become."
Yes, we don't know for a long time what the effect of our choices for them will have on who our children ultimately become. But, we do the best we can, every day. And sometimes we even learn something along the way.
I hope you have some time to relax today with a good book, or take a walk, or whatever suits you. We all need a break from the many challenges and worries of everyday. And sometimes as we take it easy, we become especially open to new insights.
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