I am a self proclaimed gentle parent but let’s get the facts straight lest anyone has the slightest of misconceptions that I have nailed it all so perfectly.
News flash. No one is a perfect parent. Surprised? Let’s try it again.
No one is perfect.
Okay this seems more palatable.
Why though?
Is it because we hear no one is perfect a lot more than no one is a perfect parent? Why are parents held to such a high standard of perfection when HUMANS run Scot free?
Why is a struggle to be superhuman so predominant amongst parents?
Because somewhere along the line we have been fed the notion that since parents are the primary caregivers of new little humans, they need to display the perfect behaviour and put forth their best self for the children to follow.
Parenting is not Prom Night.
You can dress up for an evening. Be on your best behaviour. Do everything right and nothing wrong by the superficial and/ or public standards. You cannot pull it 24 hours 7 days a week without a break for Eighteen years straight.
Do we need to be a successful pilot project for kids to follow suit?
Frankly, just the fact that we HAD them implies that we consider our lives a success and would want other little buttons to also experience this thing called life in this world. So yes. We are implying that we are a successful pilot and they can now show up as they have a route map or a blueprint to go by in order to make it through this world.
So yes. They do need the blueprint of an infrastructure to grow up. What we need to stop doing is making sure it’s a multi storey mansion with chandeliers and not a single inch of chipped paint in there.
It does not need to be something out of a revered TV show. Those are multi million dollar budgeted sets and locations.
It does not need to be a swamp with 20 animals in your striving to ground your child and to be who you are because honestly if you’re a slob, this is about the time for you to straighten up just a bit before you add another clutter making machine to the household. (Ex Clutter lover here. Separate post another time).
You need to be you on a Friday afternoon. In the older days in Pakistan. When you’re yourself but cleaner.
Like just taken a bath and said your Jumaa prayers. Or even if no prayers, then just an afternoon bath on a day off and sitting down to eat in half decent clothes.
I hope the analogy is coming through.
Be decent. Be wishful, even add things you’d like your child to do and you don’t already (maybe this is exactly how you begin too!) but be yourself. Your true and flawed self.
I went back and emboldened that for a reason. Flaws are beautiful. They set us apart. They form our quirks. Perfection is usually mundane and similar mostly across the board.
It’s the flaws that are each to their own. They make us unique and beautiful and customised to our loved ones. My husband likes to maintain physical contact when relaxing. It could be his foot touching my arm or his elbow touching my shoulder. He needs contact.
I’m a no touch zone. I would normally have slithered away. I’m not the one who will put an arm around a friend and just sit there. I don’t do acts of physical affection in daily life. I need my space. Always
I changed that about me only for him. I still struggle with allowing my daughter doing that.
Yes. She has inherited this quirk and it drives me up the wall. I’m getting better at it but it’s a journey.
So yes. I fail at gentle parenting ever so often when I lose my cool at a toddler asking for attention by climbing on my face while I’m on a phone call but what I never ever do is leave her alone.
I will tell her to stop wailing because I can’t understand what she’s saying but I’ll never not respond to her. If she wants to go outside and play at 1am, I will hug her and hold her close if she allows me to while I deny her the liberty to do something of the sort at an unsuitable hour of the day. I mean a girl can try? Especially when the girl has lived with Insomnia since her late teens (which were quite a while ago). I do try to embed the idea of night is for sleeping and day is for activity in her no matter how farther displaced it is from my own reality. This is me being wishful. This is me trying to stop being the “slob” with my life and health. Let’s hope she picks up on this and not my reality but for the most part, I like to keep it real.
If I’m angry at her, I hug her and I apologise. (I’ve had to dial that back a little because she had started saying sorry in her sleep, for having peed. The last thing I want to do is raise an overly apologetic girl. This country and this world needs a tougher kid.)
So you see it’s a constant tweaking, dialing up or down, strengthening and lightening journey, this parenting a young one.
The only thing we need to be wary of is the inhuman, unfair and unjust portrayal of self as the epitome of perfection and that parents can’t be wrong.
Make your mistakes, show them how you make amends. Fall down so they know that falling is a part of life but make sure they remember how you got up after that.
Talk to them. Not at them.
Live with them. Don’t put up a performance.
It gets tiring. And detrimental.
At the perfect event, the perfect decor and the perfect night, your child will lean in and smudge the cake before she cuts it.
That’s alright. A cake that is smudged in the side is a cake that has served its primary purpose.
Joy.
Don’t lose the joy in parenting as you struggle to “do it right”.
You do you.
Your kids will follow.
Perhaps not mimicking you but knowing intrinsically to be their authentic selves and not put up a facade.
