MamaBlogger365 - It’s Simply Complicated by *Dr Mama* Amber Kinser

Mothering is both harder and easier than we make it out to be. It’s tricky trying to figure out, in a given moment, whether this moment is the kind where you should lean toward: this is really not that complicated… breathe… just move forward with purpose and trust what you already know. Or whether this moment is the kind where you should lean toward: not all answers are evident, get some input from people you trust… it feels hard because it IS hard… you are going to make mistakes and this is OK but search beneath the surface to find what isn’t volunteering itself to you. Most moments are probably the kind where we should do a little of both, and this bothness is the great intellectual puzzle of parenting, through and through.

Our children are not going to turn out the way we thought they would. It’s exactly that simple. Even if you are a solid planner and executer of the plan, even if you’re one of the incredibly hip and open-minded parents who thought your plans or hopes for them were loose and totally open to their interpretation, even if you’re otherwise really good at “letting go” and “releasing it.” And, admit it, this fact is pretty disappointing.

And then that other fact—that you have the gall to be disappointed (it’s so some other generation)—is disappointing. You worked so hard to avoid “disappointment” in your mothering practice. It sounds so trite when you hear someone say your children will go their own way that it’s nearly impossible to grasp that you haven’t already accepted it. (I mean look how YOU turned out, relative to what your parents had imagined for you, for heaven’s sake).

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Photo credit: Ducks in A Row by beglib |MorgueFile

MamaBlogger365 - The Road to My House is Paved with Good Intentions (Part 2) by *Dr Mama* Amber Kinser

In last week’s post, I sang a song of respectful melancholy about intentions that never made it to the execution stage, having lingered in the idea stage so long that they just ended up taking up valuable psychological and physical space and were better served abandoned. Most of those were about meals that never got cooked but for fear of misleading my readers into thinking that a single post could possibly represent this issue of unspoken but no less broken promises to my self and my family, I offer up another one.

My problem, in part, is that I am a planner. I’ve always been weak in classroom math (though I was awesome in geometry, so much so that when I got my first exam back from my teacher in tenth grade I got up to hand it back to him thinking he’d given me someone else’s. Oh sorry, you gave me the wrong… hey, how’d my name get… oh… wait… this is mine? Anyway, I think of planning as my math. It feels like math to me anyway, except that I like it and enjoy the mental workout—more geometry-ish than math-ish for me I guess.

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