I first dipped my toe in the blogosphere when my daughter was born, launching a blog that featured all of the things she was doing that her father and I found fascinating and that we wanted to share with friends and family who were living too far away to catch all the firsts in person. Together, her father and I posted pictures, videos, and anecdotes written in what we imagined to be (and couldn’t have been farther from) her voice. When my son was born, we started a new site dedicated to his amazing (e.g. totally mundane) accomplishments and hipster fashion. After about a year of trying to update both sites, I realized how ridiculous it was to have two sites when I could just write a blog to feature our family (mostly, my confusion over how equally boring and frustrating and heart-opening motherhood could be). So I wrote about all of the things that I wasn’t hearing anyone else talk about, the things that made me feel like the worst mother, wife, sister, and friend, the things I thought only I was dealing with, the things I wished I could read about in one book instead of having to sift through five to pry the pearls of wisdom from the rotting clams. I made a list of all of the things I actually needed for baby alongside a list of things everyone and everything tells you are required for baby that will take up all of your space and drive you crazy with their uselessness. I created sleep schedules for 6-month old babies and two-year-old toddlers. Eventually, as my friends and sisters began having children, they asked me to share these lists and schedules and tips and tricks, emailing them far and wide for friends struggling with their own fears and insecurities as new mothers.
So the irony of being partnered with a new mother (whose baby would belt out “Mom!” every time she wanted my attention by the time she was a year and a half old) who refused to listen to all of the sage advice I’d been begged for dozens of times by my family, friends, and friends of friends was not lost on me. “It’s not that I don’t listen,” she has said to me many times over the last two years. “It’s that I don’t always agree.” And then, every time I’d roll my eyes at her lack of faith in my experience, she’d qualify, “And when I do agree, I just don’t know how to do it.”
I’m excruciatingly hyperaware that my partner thinks I am too strict with her daughter. Things seem too black and white from where she observes the way I parent her. I know I have perhaps become too laissez-faire with my other two children, now in elementary and middle school. I know my partner thinks I should draw clearer expectations for the older kids, that I should tolerate less, that I should be more consistent. I imagine her calculating the vast difference in my approaches to parenting the toddler and to parenting the older ones. I can feel her raise an eyebrow when I bark at the little one, about to throw herself down on the dirty concrete floor in IKEA in expression of her fourteenth emotional outburst since 10 a.m. I find myself chuckling alone when the little one instantly changes direction at the tone of my voice, gathers her two-foot tall body off the floor, juts out her lower lip, and reluctantly follows her two moms down the aisle. I am proud and amazed at how well she listens when there’s no other option given. Though it’s a win, it’s not one my partner gives me credit for–at least, not out loud.
And yet I am forever forgiving her for her refusing to convert to my way of parenting. She didn’t know me when I was in the trenches raising two little ones four years apart, trying desperately to figure out and maintain sleep schedules, obsessively cooking massive amounts of baby food from fresh ingredients and freezing it for later use, setting expectations for mealtimes, playtimes, clean-up times, behavior in public and at home, and teaching all of the impossible skills I wanted my children to learn before they went off to school. She didn’t know me when I was driving myself crazy trying to meet all of the impossibly high expectations I had set for myself as a new mother, afraid that every next thing I did would have irreversible negative repercussions on my children’s psychosocial development. She didn’t know me when I was impossibly in love with my children and deeply, fearfully unhappy.
She only knows me now, as I have slowly grown more comfortable in my role as parent to a child that is not-quite mine but who loves me as if she is just as much mine as my partner’s. So we dance around this child, my partner in her way and I in mine, and this child learns that dancing can be beautiful no matter how one does it.
(mostly) full disclosure 