parenting lessons

So, I had to stop posting for the summer because so much else was going on, between nursing school (which is done in a week and a day, and I didn't start feeling this way until about June, but I'm so ready, now), booking three hundred free, subway-accessible, between-the-hours-of ten-and-and-one field trips for the twelve hundred kids my agency served this summer, and, mostly, my son becoming a toddler and the challenges this posed to my marriage, followed closely by the realization -- a cliche for almost everyone else who is married, I guess, but relatively new for me, even five years in -- that marriage takes work.

Basically, after a decade of dating people who acted like children -- because it allowed me the sense of invulnerability enjoyed by bullies everywhere -- I married an adult, and was able to enjoy the license that afforded me to act like a child, myself, as I worked through the collection of slights, real and imagined, that I've been carrying around like fetish objects for most of my life. And then an actual child, a human being who wants things and really can't understand why he can't have them, who needs things and still expects that those needs will be met, entered the picture, and my extremely patient husband aside, our hip little apartment was no longer big enough for both of our drama.

And T-Mac, this new permutation of our son, has drama to rival half a dozen seven grade lunchrooms plus a reality tv show. This is a child who has no compunction about full on flinging his face onto the nearest surface, be it dirt, wood, concrete, or freshly-smeared tar, because I ever-so-diplomatically inserted myself between his body and the brewing pot of coffee/box of cat excrement/oncoming traffic into which he is so purposefully header.

And this is the maddening thing about parenthood: it's a one way ticket into a universe into which rights, justice, and cause and effect have no meaning. It is not fair that, after a solid hour of attempting to operate a stove in an unconditioned, ninety-eight degree house, cleaning as I go, desperately attempting to redirect a toddler away from our patently unsafe, blazing-to-the-touch stovefront, I wrestle the kid into his high chair just in time to function as an audience as he full-on flings a fistful of the food in my direction (thankfully, his gross motor coordination is still undeveloped enough that I can remain fuzzy on whether or not he was going for the eyes), then, casually as your textbook sociopath, pulls the overpriced, suction-equipped, frog-shaped bowl from ikea off his tray, adducts his right arm, and watches as the aforementioned labor of love plops onto the floor. In a perfect world, my son, and not myself, would be subject to teeth-sucking from our various neighbors when he appears in forty-eight degree weather without a hat, since I am not the one who repeatedly rips the many hats that have been purchased for me off of my head and drops them onto the street when those charged with keeping my head covered are negotiating Park Slope sidewalks (and, let's not play, occasionally texting). One is tempted, in one's darker moments, to believe that simply dumping one's screaming child into his crib "for his own good" since he is clearly in need of a nap, or giving him a time-out for not listening when one reiterates that the cat box is dirty and mommy does not want to pull any more of her textbooks out of it, might be considered something other than totally self-serving.

But it's been the absolute best thing for me, as a (one-day) nurse and current youth-developer and volunteer walker/changer of diapers/spoon-feeder of disabled and medically fragile kids. Because Mac's total inability to cope with not getting what he wants and needs stems from an absolute lack of awareness that sometimes you just have to deal. Whereas, for most of the kids and adults and clients and students with whom I work and hope to work, life has been a long stretch of dealing with everything from being talked to as though one's presence is a personal affront, to having one's food mixed together and shoveled into one's mouth like an animal, to being handled xeroxed copies of word searches out of a third grade textbook by one's special education teacher. And for all the fun dialogue and talking points about those kids who deal by remaining defined and dominated by outrage, and all the havoc that population perpetuates on the lives of others, I'm equally stricken by those kids who, like my kids in the pediatric nursing home where I volunteer, just stop crying and kicking and screaming over it.

The indifference seems totally intractable at some point, and I've outgrown the sanctimonious rage, blind in the truest sense of the word, that I once felt at nurses and techs and everyone else who lets people suffer. I can't absolve them for failing to act as though their patients are human beings, however hard they may work and whatever the conditions; but I recognize now, that absolution is not useful and is not mine to give, anyway. Some people can be saved or sustained by a single person, at least for awhile. Most can't; certainly the kids I work with can't. They need lots of people to recognize they are human; they need their nurses and speech pathologists and every single tech they encounter to recognize it. And the only way to get to a world in which that need even bears articulation is to focus one's life, over and over again, on the reality that what one does, matters; to see the needs of others, not as whims they need to learn to suppress or as deficits, the cure for which is maturity and some imaginary virus or "doing without" that those with more are so eager to recommend to those with less, but as real, their method of dealing with them notwithstanding.

However deserved a given episode of pain or loneliness or grief might be, I don't want my son to have to experience it if it can be avoided, or to go through it alone, if I can be with him. And the fear of "spoiling" a child notwithstanding, I've found that the world delivers all of the above to even the most cared-for, privileged children with some regularity. I don't ever want to be a nursing student again; but I do want to be a nurse, more than ever, although the path seems longer now than I'd thought and although just finishing the degree with my excellent child en tow almost killed me. Because while everyone eventually learns their needs can't always be met, no one, least of all little kids, should organize their worldview around the belief that their needs do not matter.