How To Parent With Intention. HOW?

My kids don't like rules and it hurts my feelings.

Last Sunday, I took my children to a two-year-old’s birthday party at My Gym, not to be confused with my gym because I don’t have one. This was my first brush with a My Gym, for you see… while these trademark venues are very popular in Los Angeles, I am not. But my kids run this motherfucking town. Some LA parents use their children to supplement the family income or live out their own deferred dreams. I use mine to socialize, or at the very least, to be in social spaces, hoping that I’ll somehow absorb friendship through osmosis. A parent’s purpose at a My Gym can be confusing. It’s a large space full of padded blocks, inflatable balls, and not a single ledge far enough from the ground for a person to be injured should they take a tumble. I wasn’t supposed to just leave my kids there, but there didn’t seem to be any actual parenting for me to do, so I watched them crawl on stuff, occasionally telling them ‘no’ and ‘careful’ as a parent set to autopilot does. Hey, I’m not complaining. This is my favorite way to exist, adjacent to fun, a vague purpose to my presence though nothing active is required of me. I’m not the most lively party guest, but I make a great party decoration.

Things were going smoothly, until it was time for cupcakes. The sweets were already arranged on a table that was exactly as tall as a child’s mouth, meaning that as the birthday crowd transitioned from play mode to treat mode at the speed of a glacier melting (which is of course happening faster than we want it to but in kid-birthday-time is actually pretty slow), the only thing keeping the most sugar-crazed children (mine) from snatching the cupcakes off the table was sheer self-discipline. Self-discipline, and me. So fuck. All the sudden I was supposed to do something. My 4-year-old stationed his face inches away from a chocolate cupcake, tears welling up in his eyes as I told him, “Wait! Wait! We have to wait for the birthday boy!” As his sticky, trembling hand approached the besprinkled frosting, as if it were light being sucked into a black hole, I grabbed it, but he shook me off with surprising violence. “Don’t touch me!” Don’t touch me? DON’T TOUCH ME???? I grew that hand! Mere months ago (like roughly 42) you thought your hands and my hands were all part of the same person! Reader, I ask you, how could that not hurt my feelings?

At first, I blamed the situation. My dear sweet boy would never have cut me so deep, humiliated me so profoundly, if the orchestrators of this party had not set us up to fail! What kind of sick fuck expects a child to stand in front of a cupcake for minutes on end and not eat it? I thought this was My Gym? Not GITMO? But mere minutes later, after the My Gym docents had validated our parking and shoved us out the door — because actually they do run a tight ship, it just doesn’t feel that way when you’re the only thing standing between your fiending child and his glucose fix — I recognized my flawed thinking for what it was. Panicked impotence, hysterical resentment of circumstance, these are feelings I’m very used to feeling. I remember being in my early twenties in New York, close to tears every morning as I waited for a train that was running behind schedule, feeling targeted by the universe, like a very cruel god was determined to make me late to work for sport. This is not a mature or productive attitude to model for your children. I could almost hear the words of my husband (because he always says shit like this) reminding me that life is never out to accommodate us, and our job as parents is to teach our kids how to fucking deal with it. Then I started replaying my nagging voice over the course of the day. Don’t do this! Be careful with that! Wait wait wait! It’s not telling my children NO that bothered me, but more that I didn’t really know why I was doing it when I was doing it. I was just throwing out unspecific discipline to prove to other parents, to MYSELF, that my presence was, if not necessary, at least vaguely useful. But in what way? My kids have no idea what greater lessons I’m trying to impart, because half the time I’m telling them wait and the other half I just throw up my hands and say okay fine eat the fucking cupcake.

When I was sixteen, I moved to Argentina to live with a host family and learn Spanish. I had never studied Spanish, nor had I excelled at the French I did study. And yet, a year after touching down in Formosa (a town affectionately referred to as “the armpit of Argentina”) I was fluent. I didn’t take Spanish language classes. I just hung out with a bunch of Argentine teenagers who tolerated my inanimacy because they liked Mickey Mouse and thought I looked like Sabrina La Bruja Adolescente, and eventually the words they used started to make sense in my brain. I mean really, in retrospect I could not have done less. My favorite past-time in Formosa was to ir a pasear, which just meant climbing in the back of my host sister’s boyfriend’s VW Golf and so we could drive circles around the city’s plaza and maybe glimpse people we knew driving around in their cars, also doing nothing. It was, and continues to be, my platonic ideal of learning. All I had to do was get out of bed in the morning and position myself next to Spanish speaking people, and all the sudden I had acquired a highly valuable skill! They say some very high percentage (the exact number varies) of success is just showing up. I love showing up. I live to show up. It’s the small leftover percent that baffles me.

I’ve never had a particularly precise vision for the kind of parent I want to be, besides, like, a nice one. I didn’t really set out to have kids with any goals aside from wanting to know what the experience was like. I know that I want my kids to be happy, and currently they seem to be, which is why I try not to worry too much about the fact that my two-year-old broke a plate over my four-year-old’s head the other day and my four-year-old has pink eye because he refuses to get his hand out of his butt. But I know that I hate when people who have authority over me lack clarity. When bosses contradict themselves, when superiors give me such vague directions I can tell they don’t even know what they want, it makes me feel resentful and disrespected. And yet here I am, parenting my children like a shitty manager. I want to just show up and have that be enough, but shouldn’t that be my kids’ luxury? We can’t ALL just show up, right? Someone has to bring some sort of lesson plan, right? Unfortunately, I’m really feeling like that someone should be me. Cuz how are my kids supposed to make a lesson plan? Those idiots can’t even read.

Do you understand what I’m getting at? Am I making any sense at all? What upset me when my son said “Don’t touch me!” was the confusion in his eyes, a look that said, why are you riding my ass, mom? Lots of times you don’t make me wait! How could I explain to him, well, sometimes I feel like teaching you manners, and sometimes I just don’t give a fuck? Would it help to let him know that usually it’s other people watching that makes the difference?

When I was pregnant with my first kid, I, like most expecting moms, was encouraged to make a birth plan. Even then, the idea seemed stupid. An unusually insightful part of me intuited that parenting was going to be chaos, and things like birth plans were placebo gestures to create the illusion of control. But maybe I’ve gone too far with surrendering to the chaos. I ask myself, what do I want my children to know? How do I want them to be? I don’t want to force them to obey rules for the sake of rules, just to familiarize them with succumbing to authority. All I want for them to know is how to be kind, caring people who don’t aways have their hands in their butts. I want them to have common sense. But that’s the annoying thing about human beings. When you’re born, you don’t even know how to sleep, let alone know anything about common sense. Common sense isn’t a free program that comes pre-installed in your brain. You only get it because someone (like your mom) teaches you.