I very much liked Lisa Belkin on Sarah Palin, but it was her her blog entry today about how we all airbrush our stories of parenting that got me thinking. She talks about the ugly truths that we keep hidden, either about ourselves as parents or about our doubts about our children.
And my reaction reading this is to nod but also to think: this is just not me … And I found myself echoing the last line of her NYT magazine piece: “You often learn who you are by realizing who you are not. ”
I find that I am consistently more honest and consequently more bleak about my children than most parents. (“More honest than the average HBS student,” as a favorite professor commented). I am intuitively open about my childrens’ flaws and weaknesses, about their speech therapy and their lice, their brattiness and their defiance. I am also quick to acknowledge my own failures as a parent, my short fuse, my distraction, my inability to sit and just be, my frustration and impatience with many of motherhood’s quotidian tasks. I simply feel no deep urge to protect myself by smudging with vaseline the lens through which I see parenting. But why, and is this a bad thing?
When there is an altercation on the soccer field or at the bowling alley, my automatic reaction is to assume that somehow Grace or Whit was the instigator. When they reveal that a teacher was unhappy with them about something I instinctively take the side of the teacher. Does this mean I do not trust them enough? That I assume the worst of them? I don’t think so, but I do wonder. I do know I don’t believe in protecting them artificially from the way the world works, both formally (rules) and informally (opinions and judgment). I have also been wondering lately about where the line is when these stories become not my own anymore, when I begin sharing things that are actually theirs to own and mete out as they see fit.
These thoughts, in combination with the shockingly insecurity-creating responses of fellow mothers about Grace’s solo flight mean, I guess, that I’m having a moment of parenting introspection and doubt. I may have some sense of what I am not, as a mother, but what does that mean I am?