Parenting is many things. I just wish I knew how to make all of them easier.
I have found, however, that it’s easier on my children when I temper the regrets I feel about my own life and the choices I’ve made in it. I have many regrets. And I have finally learned that they color many of my interactions with my daughters, and rarely in a positive way.
I was a timid kid. By nature as well as circumstance. I tended to sit back and observe when faced with a new situation, and moving as my family did every three years in my formative years meant I was often in a new situation. I was also self-conscious about entering late into an activity, so even after I felt like I understood what was going on I was reluctant to engage. So I regularly sat apart and wished I could be a part of the action.
My daughters are reserved as well. Which was evident from their births. They are decidedly different in many respects, but in this area they are the same. They are shy on first meeting, like me. They are slow to jump in. We’ve moved just once though, when they were both very young, so I think perhaps their comfort with familiar friends and familiar places is higher than mine was at their ages..
Knowing how excluded I felt as a child, and knowing how sad that felt to me, I encouraged my daughters to throw themselves into new situations, to embrace change, to step forward at every opportunity. I did so with the best of intentions, trying to help them avoid the isolation I felt when I was their ages. But I fear all I did was add stress to their lives, which is, of course, just what kids these days need more of. I forgot the first – and really only – rule of successful parenting: love the child you have, not the child you want. Or, said specifically to me, love the child you have, not the child you were.
I did the same with sports and with musical instruments, insisting not just on their participation, but their dedication. We did let them choose their activities, but we also insisted that they have activities, their mother for her reasons, me in the hope they would engage more fully than I did with the world I so desperately wanted to be more a part of. But rather than let that be the end of it, rather than let them decide how much of each activity they’d bite off, I tried to force engagement. Which runs counter to my daughters’ natures. And mine too.
As adults, they both feel anxious at times, and I wonder how much of that is just their nature and how much I contributed to it with my prodding. They are also more accomplished than I was then, so how much of that is their nature and how much the result of my hectoring? I tend to give them credit for their achievements and take blame for their stress. If happiness is the goal of life – and I believe it is – both stress and accomplishment are important parts of the happiness equation. I hope I’ve balanced some of the stress I induced with some of the striving they’ve experienced. But I don’t really know, and I suspect they’ll never know either.