Not bored.
Two weeks ago, I took Skipper to a library story time for 2-year-olds. The room was packed with excited kids, all running around, dancing, pushing up to the librarian to get her attention and see the books up close. Skipper sat in my lap, scowling, the whole time.* There were a lot of parents there, too, of course, and I suddenly became aware of my total disinterest in engaging with them or paying any attention to their kids. When Dutch was little, I would have been all over something like this. I would have been chatting with people and comparing parenting strategies, checking out their kids... but no. Not now. I just wanted to get out of there. I was bored.
Parenting small Dutch was a nice period of blissful ignorance- there was a lot of stuff about it that was hard,** but for the most part we were able to trust our instincts and feel pretty good about the way things were going. When she got old enough to talk and be independent, a whole new world unfolded to us, a world in which we were parenting an actual human being, her own ineffable self, whose problems were increasingly hard to solve, and often seemed to be really not our job to fix anyway. I think we've come around to embracing that. Dutch is a person, with flaws and strengths, and she lives with us, and our relationships with her are fluid and challenging. What we're supposed to be doing to "parent" her is rarely clear, and there's a lot of seat-of-the-pants "parenting" going on around here.*** And that's good. I'm usually not bored. I'm often annoyed, frustrated, or tired, but almost never bored by this job.
Today a baby came to our house, and I really enjoyed seeing him and chatting with him. He was absolutely adorable - exactly in that adorable window of adorableness at 5 months when babies are eager to interact but really can't screw anything up yet and are interested in and entertained by stuff like jar lids. Adorable, I tell you. I got to hold and play with him for a few minutes while his parents were busy, and I loved holding his dense, interested little body. But it felt weird, like I had never held a baby before. And I had no idea what he wanted to do. And while he was adorable, I didn't want to hang out with him any more than that 5 minutes.
I'm done, you guys. No more babies, no more toddlers. Give me the gap-toothed 7-year-olds with their weird conversational leaps and their endless questions. Give me the arguing preschoolers raging against the unfair rules. Babies and toddlers are so last year.
Postscript: I don't mean to imply that babies and toddlers are boring, because they're not, or that parenting babies and toddlers isn't hard, because it is. For me, though, parenting babies and toddlers felt a lot simpler than parenting older kids feels. Still challenging, but more straightforward. (Though sometimes the straight way forward felt like it was up a really steep hill.)
*Though she later wanted to talk about it a lot (no, really, a LOT), and she wants to go back. Her general pattern is that she has to do things two or three times before she can actually enjoy the activity.
** If you want to talk about parenting a baby who hates sleeping, give me a call.
***There's also a LOT of acquisition of knowledge going on around here, on both kids' part, and that's super-fun. I know babies are learning an incredible volume of stuff, but they just don't share much of it with you. Dutch, on the other hand, tells us EVERYTHING she's learned, and, better yet, tells us about it as she's learning it. "Oh, Mom! So! 20 times 5 is 100, and also 5 times 20 is 100! Wow!!!!"
Parenting small Dutch was a nice period of blissful ignorance- there was a lot of stuff about it that was hard,** but for the most part we were able to trust our instincts and feel pretty good about the way things were going. When she got old enough to talk and be independent, a whole new world unfolded to us, a world in which we were parenting an actual human being, her own ineffable self, whose problems were increasingly hard to solve, and often seemed to be really not our job to fix anyway. I think we've come around to embracing that. Dutch is a person, with flaws and strengths, and she lives with us, and our relationships with her are fluid and challenging. What we're supposed to be doing to "parent" her is rarely clear, and there's a lot of seat-of-the-pants "parenting" going on around here.*** And that's good. I'm usually not bored. I'm often annoyed, frustrated, or tired, but almost never bored by this job.
Today a baby came to our house, and I really enjoyed seeing him and chatting with him. He was absolutely adorable - exactly in that adorable window of adorableness at 5 months when babies are eager to interact but really can't screw anything up yet and are interested in and entertained by stuff like jar lids. Adorable, I tell you. I got to hold and play with him for a few minutes while his parents were busy, and I loved holding his dense, interested little body. But it felt weird, like I had never held a baby before. And I had no idea what he wanted to do. And while he was adorable, I didn't want to hang out with him any more than that 5 minutes.
I'm done, you guys. No more babies, no more toddlers. Give me the gap-toothed 7-year-olds with their weird conversational leaps and their endless questions. Give me the arguing preschoolers raging against the unfair rules. Babies and toddlers are so last year.
Postscript: I don't mean to imply that babies and toddlers are boring, because they're not, or that parenting babies and toddlers isn't hard, because it is. For me, though, parenting babies and toddlers felt a lot simpler than parenting older kids feels. Still challenging, but more straightforward. (Though sometimes the straight way forward felt like it was up a really steep hill.)
*Though she later wanted to talk about it a lot (no, really, a LOT), and she wants to go back. Her general pattern is that she has to do things two or three times before she can actually enjoy the activity.
** If you want to talk about parenting a baby who hates sleeping, give me a call.
***There's also a LOT of acquisition of knowledge going on around here, on both kids' part, and that's super-fun. I know babies are learning an incredible volume of stuff, but they just don't share much of it with you. Dutch, on the other hand, tells us EVERYTHING she's learned, and, better yet, tells us about it as she's learning it. "Oh, Mom! So! 20 times 5 is 100, and also 5 times 20 is 100! Wow!!!!"
Comments