We Moms Wobble
September 5, 2009 by MommyGirl
Filed under Grace for Life, Mothering, Positive Parenting
It seems like new parents often have to learn to get balanced, like learning to ride a bicycle — some are comfortable with authority and wobble to the side of being too rules-oriented and need to balance that with more grace and flexibility and others are natural nurturers and wobble to the side of being too permissive and need to balance that with firmness and authority.
One nice thing about getting older is that I find I have so much in common with parents no matter which side they wobbled to early on — in the end caring parents generally are balanced out.
Did you find you “wobbled” a bit to one side or the other in your earliest parenting years? Did you find you overcompensated as you found balance? What ideas helped you find balance? What encouragement do you have for other mothers during the wobbly years?
I know I wobbled in the early days, but I can’t really describe how. But I think I still wobble as I try to strike the balance inherent in respectful authority and healthy attachment. Sometimes I’m too permissive and let my kids get away with more than they should, sometimes I’m too harsh in my demands for compliance. Sometimes I work so hard at meeting my children’s need for me and to be in my space, I neglect my own needs to the point of utter depletion and I worry about my children’s insatiable sense of entitlement. Sometimes I spend so much time on self-preservation, I worry that my children feel like they are little annoyances in my way.
Where I’ve settled down is in accepting my wobbling. In recognizing that my child’s entire future is not dependent upon every choice of every moment of every day. In doing so I extend myself some grace. When I’m overwhelmed by the imbalance, when I’m overwhelmed by having gone too far in one direction or the other, I remember that the end product of my children’s childhood is an amalgamation of a myriad of experiences and encounters with me and with every other person in their lives, a product that is more than the sum of its component parts. And that I am not the only influence in their lives. I am not fully responsible for how they turn out. It helps me to take a step back and take the longer view. So I might screw up a dozen times a day, but it’s a dozen screw-ups in the context of a larger schema where love in the form of grace comes first.
And then I pray. Really hard. That these kids will turn out to be exactly who God has called them to be. In spite of me. And that’s probably the part that encourages me most. That these people are God’s first, and he’s at work here too. And it releases me from the pressures of perfection.
I don’t know. Is that encouraging?
I really liked what Rylee said here, “Where I’ve settled down is in accepting my wobbling. In recognizing that my child’s entire future is not dependent upon every choice of every moment of every day. In doing so I extend myself some grace.”
I feel wobbly on many days–sometimes even moment-by-moment. I’m still in my “early parenting years,” and I tend to overthink things anyways, so maybe this is just part of the package.
Having two toddlers the same age has helped me so much in realizing that there isn’t a single formula for parenting. Already–even though they’re at the same developmental age and have many similar needs–they are such different people. In some ways, parenting feels like a process of negotiation, and that process feels wobbly sometimes.
Also, even though we both wobble at points, having a concerned and thoughtful father/husband in the mix helps to keep us balanced. We might each individually lean towards one side or the other, but as we swap notes and encourage each other, we both grow into more steady parenting.