Parenting Excerpts
Volume 1, Number 6

The Mother of All Parenting Books
By Ann Douglas

The following excerpt was reprinted with permission from John Wiley & Sons.

The Truth About Parenting

Back when my first three kids were all under five and still small enough to fit in the bathtub at the same time, we had this crazy bath-time ritual. I would put everyone in the tub, pop in my favorite CD into the portable stereo, and crank the tunes up loudly enough that the floor would begin to vibrate. (Hey, where is it written that mothers can’t be party animals?)

Anyway, the CD in question was Momnipotent singer/songwriter Nancy White’s ode to motherhood. Although the CD is mainly filled with songs that speak to how frustrating and exhausting it is to be a mother, one song on the CD touched my heart like no other song about motherhood ever has. The song in question, “Mammas Have a Secret,” talks about the powerful bond between a parent and child – and why it’s impossible to explain that bond to anyone who is not a parent.

Here’s how the song starts out:

Mammas have a secret
Daddies have, too
It’s a little secret they’ll never tell you
‘cause if you don’t have a child so naughty and sweet
they don’t want you to feel that your life is incomplete
And if you have a child there’s nothing to say
because you know the secret anyway.

I think what’s inspired me to write (literally) millions of words about pregnancy and parenting over the years is a passionate desire to capture some of the magic of that parent-child bond on paper. The more I try to write about it, however, the more obvious it becomes to me that a lot of what happens between a parent and child simply defies description….

So, what is it that makes it so difficult for us to talk about the experience of being a parent – particularly the low points? (The high points, after all, inevitably find their way into Hallmark cards….It’s the low points that we seem to want to kick under the carpet.)

I think a couple of things discourage us from being forthcoming about what parenthood is all about. For one thing, we all tend to suffer from parenthood amnesia: a condition that sets in as whatever childrearing crisis you were dealing with last month or last year recedes farther and farther into the parenting fog. I also think that our society fosters a well-meaning desire to save other parents some unnecessary worry. And then, there’s a slightly more selfish reason for holding our parenting cards close to our chests: we don’t want to admit that we haven’t quite got our act together on the parenting front.

You see, although most of us are happy to admit that dishes sit unwashed in the kitchen sink or that we had to forage around inside the clothes dryer in order to find a clean bra to put on this morning, we’re reluctant to turn to others in our lives for support if our nine-year-old is acting like a bully at school or our sixteen-year-old is experimenting with sex and drugs….

If Leo Tolstoy were a modern-day self-help book writer, he no doubt would have rewritten the opening line of Anna Karenina like this: “Every family is dysfunctional in its own way.”

That may be true, but we can still learn a lot from the experience of other parents. There have been countless times in my life when I have thought to myself, “I wish someone had told me it would be like this” – most notable during the extreme culture shock associated with becoming the parent of an adolescent for the first time. (For those of you who haven’t experienced the latter yet, let me give you a quick heads up – it’s kind of like postpartum times 10,000.)

Although I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I feel that I owe it to the universe to put down on paper the few things I have managed to learn about parenting as a result of raising four children over the course of the past 15 years. (Just think of the number of ‘parent hours’ I’ve clocked during that time!)….

Anyway, here are the 10 things that no one ever tells you about becoming a parent, but that you definitely need to know:

1. There’s no job description for the job of parent….
2. There’s no such thing as ‘the perfect age’….
3. Nothing about parenting happens in a predictable, linear fashion….
4. The experts don’t have all the answers….
5. Parenting in the real world is a whole lot messier than parenting on TV….
6. Parenthood is a long-term project….
7. Parenting can be hell on your self-esteem….
8. Kids force you to confront any ‘stuff’ that you may have tried to bury underneath the carpet….
9. Nothing can prepare you for the depth of the love you will feel for your child….
10. The physical demands of parenting are the easy part. It’s the emotional demands that practically sink you….

You can buy this book on Babynut here:

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