I have said it before and I will say it again: parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done. I found out I was pregnant at 35 years old. By then, I had resigned myself to not giving birth to a child because it was way past my initial idea ‘to have 4 children by the time I was 30’. After I found out I was pregnant, I bought “the” book about pregnancy and another to get a different perspective. I changed my diet to eating healthy, no alcohol, no junk food, no caffeine, except I couldn’t get away from chocolate, I would still indulge now and then. I sang to the baby inside me, his father talked to my tummy and in the end we had a wonderful boy. And, then came parenthood.
When my son was an infant and a toddler, parenting was a breeze. My son, hands down, had me at my best. I cared for this little precious thing with patience and love. There was only one time, he was less than 2 years old, when I even recall having a sense of frustration from giving all of myself: I let out an almost guttural sound that was so deep within me it forced me to acknowledge that taking care of a toddler requires a lot.
The first significant change to my parenthood came when my son was almost 3. I decided it was time for him to interact with other people on a daily basis. I chose a Montessori school; I hoped it would teach him enough independence to withstand my helicopter mom ways.
During his first 3 years, I would run to his beck and call, and prevent him from doing anything that may cause him physical harm, like climbing too high (which for me probably meant an inch off the ground) and his father was forbidden from throwing him up in the air. Funny enough, at 4 years old, I was the one who ended up giving my son a permanent scar on his back. He was on a counter and was about to fall. When I caught him my fingernails dug into his back and made a horrible looking scratch down his back, the kind of scratch that I am sure made the people at his school wonder if something was going on at home that they needed to know about.
It was when my son started middle school that parenting became not so much fun. By then, he wasn’t listening to and doing the majority of what I said without question. He was actually insisting on moving from my precious little “thing” to an independent thinking person. I was not ready for that. I was not ready to have my sweet little boy try to turn into his own person. That’s when I was forced to begin to see a person separate from me, not my son, but the person I had given birth to.
