My boy was just like me

What does a cat in the cradle mean anyway.

Happy Tuesday, I’ve had some musings about parenting…

I hope you’re well. Last week of school before the holidays is often hard - my kids are so tired! Anyway, here we are, have some thoughts about parents whose kids are parenting kids and the endless quest for meaning in the mundane lol

Ham/Me.

It’s so wild when your kid turns around and gives you the exact look you gave your parent when you were just so very small. Your life becomes a funhouse full of mirrors - Your You, looks at You Now, past Little You looking at Parent You, looking at your Parent looking at you. It’s such a strange alchemy.

So much of parenting is reparenting. Trying not to make the same mistakes, then making them, lying in bed at night wishing you had the answers that your parents didn’t have.

Wondering if they wished for answers too. Wondering what it looked like from the outside, not what you remember in your mixed up memories.

When I’m gentle with my babies I’m gentle with myself. When I’m patient with them I’m trying to be patient with myself.

I’m trying to be the parent I needed and hoped for when I was small. I’m trying to be the best of my parents too, trying to embrace my face in my children instead of being fearful of it.

I know my father wanted to be different to his father and this is the way we mostly are as parents he says - “it’s hardwired into us, we always want to be better than before”.

Looking at your child, really looking at them - is a painful kind of beautiful thing. Even when they’re grown, are parents themselves.

“It’s the dichotomy of hope and despair - that they will be smarter than me, won’t make the same mistakes as me”.

James Baldwin said “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them”. As I watch my boys grow I’m amazed at how alike they are to me but also just how different they are.

Their only little planets, orbiting their own little sun.

My husband and I were talking about our wedding anniversary and my littlest boy said:

“I thought you’ve always been married”.

Because there’s nothing to him before him. He was born and the world was born too. Galaxies erupt in his presence and black and white becomes colour. He can’t conceive yet of a life that isn’t just him. That we have other roles to play outside of mum and dad.

But this, for now is a blessing: A small safe world is what he needs.

I worry sometimes that my eldest boy thinks too much about the world around him and feels too responsible for all that’s not right in this big big world. And my husband, when I tell him this smile and says “he sure reminds me of someone” as he gives me a kiss on my forehead.

And when they’re asleep I look at their freckles that are just like mine and I think about how possessive I feel for them. I want them all for myself.

You never grow out of wanting to eat them. And when they say:“Oh my GOD mum” and you say “gosh” out of some long-past belief, they follow that up with “You’re so weird mum!”.

Then suddenly they’ve slammed a door before you can say “you can’t play on the Xbox until you’ve cleaned your room”. Or you’ve sat on the toilet seat and it’s wet with pee dribbles. Or you’ve sat down with your cup of tea only for both children to crash into your office yelling: “He called me an anus mum!”.

And you think, can someone else have them?

But then, f course, I don’t know - a dimple, a little hand reaching for your neck, little boys dissolving into laughter over some private joke while brushing teeth, and you’ve reset.

You’ll forgive the toothpaste spray on the mirror.

The towel on the floor.

The yell of “YOU ARE THE WORST MUM IN THE WORLD”.

I don’t know why it’s so magical. But it is somehow.

Hope and despair and magic and running headlong into the unknown holding a map your parents tried to improve on that their parents tried to improve on, knowing one day your kids will be holding that same map. Hoping to be enough.