Parenting 101

If you are not prepared to wade through jello up to your middle while battling headwinds of 50 mph in the driving rain, you are not prepared to parent. For the last approximately ten years, I have been fuzzy-headed and frantic, sweating through the early years of the lives of my children and feeling sufficiently challenged in keeping them warm, fed, clean and loved. It was exhausting, but so physical. The mind slept while the body buzzed.

No more. My mind is scrapping against the wills of my growing offspring, and I become sharper by the instant. At some point, a shift occurs (but that's not the right word at all--too gentle and natural, as if to enhance comfort) in which you begin to stop throwing fish to your babies and start handing them the old rod to do for themselves. My children, it seems, have little interest in fishing for themselves.

I remember sitting with my sister at a playground and watching our little ones crawl around eating bark. One mother was trying to inspire her little one to leave the playground, and as she wearily wrestled the child into the air, the kid went slack, slithering to the ground like a wet noodle. My sister recognized the move for the classic it is and said, with resignation in her voice, "The limp fish. Very effective."

My kids have mastered the mental limp fish. They just can't. Can't what, you ask? Get breakfast. Fold their laundry. Find their soccer cleats. Figure out their homework. Practice piano. And on and on we go. The limp fish of incompetence against the soft muscle of my wasted brain. Game on.

I suppose it is their job, this feigned inability to perform even the simplest action for themselves. They are aggressively researching the causes and effects of the world around them, but that leaves me with one option: to be a force of nature, as immutable and consistent as gravity. I must keep my eye on the prize. Independence, both for them and for me, and the joy of knowing you have mastered a thing, and could master another. Wish me luck.