Baby Bottle Bingo or Nah!?
“Babies are a blessing.” “My children are the light of my life.” “I can’t imagine my life without my children.”
Oh, we have all heard these sayings about children and parenting. And for some these are wholly and completely true, for others not so much or not at all. All too often parents only relay the positive aspects and experiences of parenting thus creating a fairy tale idea of what is to be responsible for the care and upbringing of another human being. The negative aspects or experiences are rarely if ever spoken of honestly and fully out of fear of being reproached by others. This is especially true of mothers, who are expected to love parenthood in spite of all of its troubles. It is as if womanhood is believed to be a force field that protects us from suffering the pain within our parenting experiences.
As we watch parents daily on the news or in our families and communities kill, abuse and abandon their children I think we need to start speaking the whole truth about parenting. In my estimation, these are the truths that are missing from our promotion of parenthood:
Parenting is HARD work.
Love is NOT enough to make a good parent.
Parenting is NOT for EVERYONE.
Not being a parent DOES NOT in any way reduce one’s humanity.
Creating the child comes naturally. Parenting is not an innate ability.
You are not expected to LOVE every challenge or every obstacle that comes with parenting. Parents have feelings too.
While it is NEVER okay to mistreat them, there may come some stages when you just don't like their behavior or them as an individual. (Remember number one - Parenting is HARD work.)
Parenting requires resilience, flexibility, and openness to trial and error.
You can read every parenting book, join every parenting group, talk to a gazillion parents who have successfully raised a gazillion children and YOU still are going to get things wrong sometimes. (Learn from it and move on)
Parenting requires putting the needs and often times feelings of another human being before your own and even when it is your own child, you do not always feel good about it.
It is imperative that at this point in human development that we stop pressuring people to have children.
The decision to have children should come after some serious thought and planning. But most importantly, the decision should come from an internal desire to be another soul’s guide through life. That is what it is; not the external pressure to fill societies quota for a husband/wife, 2.5 kids and dog in every home, or your parents desire to be “grandparents”, or your desire to have someone to love you or someone to fulfill your unfulfilled dreams. Being a soul guide aka a parent is an awesome responsibility. It shouldn't be done as a part of one’s recovery from their own childhood or to create a white picket fence picture.
No, parents don’t have to be perfect (nor does their lifestyle or way of living have to be ideal) but how many prospective parents are prepared to admit their mistakes and apologize to a child because that is the type of selflessness it takes to be a good parent? How many prospective parents are prepared to see a child as human being not their belonging? How many prospective parents are prepared to listen to the feelings of their child and adjust their actions to meet the child’s expressed need? And, if you are a prospective parent of color there is a whole other set of concerns about parenting that we don’t often speak of except in our minds like:
How do will you educate the child properly in a school system that is designed to create followers with no substantive knowledge of their history, when homeschooling and culturally relevant education aren’t options?
What to do with the sick feeling that comes with knowing that a child created though you could have their life taken at any moment because our humanity has diminished to basically nil?
Is spanking a child a remnant of slavery that we are unknowingly using to promote violence within families?
Not feeling much like a baby shower after reading this? Well, good! People often spend more time planning a baby shower than planning their parenthood. A child’s life is worth more planning than Baby Bottle Bingo and in truth, so is yours. Finding out after the fact that parenting is more than what you bargained for can frankly ruin your life.
H/T to my contributors Nkenge Williams and Kenya Ray.
