Have you ever been in a situation where you and a close friend ‘do’ some aspect of parenting differently?
How did you deal with it? Did you keep your mouth shut and silently chastise yourself for not being able to calmly, maturely put your side of the argument over without it becoming just that?
Or did you calmly and maturely put your side across without it becoming an argument but afterwards a) agonize about whether you offended your friend (was I too opinionated? Did I make her feel bad?!) or b) Feel like you yourself have been doing the wrong thing and are therefore a bad mother.
Have you ever talked in depth about a parenting issue with one friend, knowing that another mutual friend does the opposite to the two of you, and then felt terrible, just terrible, when seeing your beloved first friend?
My answers (and I’m guessing, yours) are yes, yes, yes and yes!
Parenting is such a personal thing it verges on ideology. Sometimes we are making different choices to our own parents, or to society at large and this means that our choices are backed up by reading, solid research and a fist-full ‘o’ facts’. Our choice becomes our position, our ‘thing’, part of our identity.
The facts are our ammunition, our defence against all those people (or companies) who would convert us to bottle feed/to breastfeed, to vaccinate/to not vaccinate, to make fresh baby food/to buy jars, to use washable nappies/to save time and an already overloaded laundry basket and harm the planet and use disposables (delete as appropriate).
We justify our choice many times by putting the other choice as ‘wrong’. But what if the other choice is being made by someone you love and respect? What if while lining up all those other ‘haters’ your best friend slips in? Hands up you cruel ferberising maniacs! Oh, sorry mate, not you, obviously…
I once heard someone say “each family is its own culture” and I couldn’t agree more. There may be overlap with others, and if we are lucky even overlap with friends and family, but one thing is for sure- there will be differences.
So what ever happened to respecting difference? Or not just respecting, but enjoying, even revelling in difference?
This means listening non-judgmentally (hard), discussing while not preaching (harder) and actually beginning to enjoy that we do things differently, enjoy that there is conversation, information, being flexible and open to change if it seems right, while not feeling either self righteous or guilty if we carry on just as we are.
I think an important part of being parents is working on accepting that probably every method of childrearing is at once both right and wrong, and that not one of us will do things perfectly, no matter how many facts we own. In the long run, our mistakes as well as our triumphs become part of who we are as people, as parents.
Let’s admit that, at times, we are all scared witless by this insane task and have no idea what we are doing. And, as the old saying goes- wouldn’t it be boring if we were all the same?
