Part 1: You’re never ready

I love it when friends ask me, “How do you know when you’re ready to have a baby?”

My response is usually to smile and say, “Oh, you’ll just know.” And that’s true, in part. My body was screaming at me to reproduce when we started trying to get pregnant.

The part I leave out though, is that (and I feel I should whisper) you’re never going to be ready. Not for parenthood.

Infancy

Nothing can prepare you for the abrupt transition from a self-centered life to one that spins around a small, squalling infant (or two, in my case). You’re never ready for sleep-deprivation, for first cases of croup, for that first call to poison control, for that first heart-stopping moment you turn around in a store and don’t see your toddler. Or trips to the grocery store that involve projectile vomiting in the produce section.

And how could you prepare for those first well visits to the pediatrician with all those shots and screaming? I knew what was coming and still sobbed along with my babies. Of course, that might have been the postpartum depression, and let me tell you, you can’t ever be ready for that, either. No matter how sure you were that you were ready for motherhood, if you find yourself in a full fledged sobbing breakdown in your pediatrician’s waiting room, as I did, you’re going to think you made a mistake. Especially when two other women come over, pick up your screaming infants and ask if there’s someone they can call for you.

There is no prep course, no manual, no boot camp, no basic training that covers this.

Believe me, I looked.

Post-infancy

Post-babyhood, I assumed it could only get easier. No more diapers. Constant reflux, finally banished. Regular (mostly) full nights of sleep.

I could not have been more wrong. The hard part was just starting. Infancy is about taking care of your children’s most basic needs. The rest of their lives they need you to help them navigate the minefield of the world. And it’s a lot more dangerous that it used to be.

Bullying

There’s plenty of advice out there for what to do when your kids are bullied, but it’s mostly aimed at high school students. When it happens to your four-year old, what do you do? I raced down to the preschool and scooped up my baby boy, ice pack clamped to his bloody nose, and cried with him. That night I was torn between reading him “Chester Raccoon and the Big Bad Bully,” yet again, and giving him my grandfather’s advice to “just knock the crap out of him.”

I went with Chester. Invite the bully to play. Be nice. It’s a new era of parenting, after all.

But a few weeks later, when my daughter came home crying because of the same bully, I’d had enough. My grandfather’s voice came out of my mouth and I actually told her to hit him back. And she cried harder, and said, “I can’t do that, Mommy! I can’t hit him!”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not a bad girl!”

You can never be ready for this.

Finding the right words

How could you ever prepare for tender pieces of your own heart to walk around outside your body, finding a new way to get trampled each day? My daughter asks me if she’s fat, and what the numbers on the scale and her clothing tags mean. My son is left out of a game. Both have been taunted and teased. It’s normal stuff; childhood stuff. But it hurts so much more when you’re the one trying to make it better, and you don’t know what to say.

My children are the most priceless treasures I’ll ever have, and I can’t so much as insulate them in bubble wrap before sending them out into the world. They come back with bruise, cuts, and scrapes, but what really worries me are the wounds I can’t see. The times when my daughter curls her knees to her chest and whispers, “Mommy, I’m stupid.” The times when I know something is bothering my son and I can’t figure it out because I grew up in a house full of X chromosomes and don’t speak boy.

Lord, help me find the right words to comfort them, I pray. Help me find the words.

Words have always been there for me, but the right ones for parenting are not easy to find. How do I explain to my kids about their friend with a mommy and dozens of donor siblings? Or that some children have two mommies or two daddies, and that’s ok?

 The new “talk”

Having fielded a number of questions about how babies get out of their mothers’ stomachs, I was mentally prepping for the initial sex talk with my twins a few months ago. They’re six and in kindergarten, and honestly, I’m a believer in the free flow of information, the accurate naming of body parts, and that they should learn what they know from me, not from rumors and whisperings on the playground.

But then we got home from a lovely day and turned on the television. The tragic shootings at Sandy Hook happened that day, in a kindergarten class. I began to read news stories online, and as my kids ate dinner, I started to cry. There they were, safe at the dinner table, and several states away, children their age were dead.

“Mommy, why are you crying?”

I told them. Simply, yet truthfully. “I’m crying because a bad man went into a school today and did some horrible things. It was far away from here, but he went into a class full of kindergartners and shot them.”

What I couldn’t say is “I’m crying because now I’m going to have to tell you about things you shouldn’t have to know for years. You’re going to learn about lockdowns and places to hide and security procedures, and that’s not what I wanted for you. I wanted ABCs and library time and unlocked school doors and dodgeball. I don’t want you to know which tree is the place where you hide on the playground, and where all the closets are in the school.”

I wanted to wail and punch pillows. We weren’t even the victims, yet that night, my children’s innocence fell like scales from their eyes.

There is no being ready for this. No being ready for, months later, the random morning when your daughter calls from the bathroom, “Mommy? What do I do if a bad guy comes in while I’m in the bathroom?”

We still haven’t had “the talk.” I’m trying to talk them through bad guy scenarios when I don’t know if the answers I’m giving are even right in the first place.

So to my friends who ask, the real answer is this. You can never be ready to be a parent. You may be ready to have a baby, but it’s not the same thing. Not at all.