Carlos invited me to play Hide and Seek in his room yesterday afternoon. “Mumma? Mumma? I count to ten and you hide, Mumma.”
Ten? That didn’t give me much time to find a hiding spot. I tip-toed across the hall and hid behind the open door of my bedroom.
“Seben, eight, nine….TEN! Ready….” He paused then shouted, “Ready I’m not…Here I come!”
My son, trying out a new game and trying to remember how the words are supposed to line up. And BOOM–his version was even better than what was supposed to be. My heart cracked open with a little more love for him than I ever thought possible. There we were, filling up a Saturday afternoon with playing. Him using new words. Me letting him boss me around. Shrieking and giggling and tumbling around, together.
Ready I’m not…Here I come.
Hide and seek
That’s how we head into parenting. I don’t care if you’ve been a big sister to twelve kids, or spent 10 years as a nanny, taught second grade, worked as a NICU nurse–not one of us goes into parenting READY. For the first couple of years of Vivi’s life, my therapist’s main message to me was “You don’t have to be perfect, just good enough. Good enough parenting is what parenting is. Stop trying for an A+. Shoot for ‘Satisfactory.'” You’re in it, ready or not.
I had spent the first part of my life hiding. Hiding anything that I messed up. Hiding from anything that I might mess up. Hiding my shame. Hiding my own needs. Hiding myself because I had become absolutely convinced, somewhere along the way, that I wasn’t enough. Good enough, kind enough, smart enough, pretty enough. So I hid. Ready I’m not.
But here I come. Parenting is urgent and tedious, immediate and theoretical, all in one moment. It’s incessant. Still, I keep showing up. Less hide, more seek. I get up every day reminding myself that my good enough is enough. We’ve gotten this far and we’re having a pretty good time of it. I pour the milk and I add a blue bendy straw because blue is his favorite color.
So, today? Ready I’m not…here I come!
I think everyone needs a therapist like yours.
I think ‘Ready I’m not’ is a great way to describe dedicated parenting. You are going to have so many tales to tell about Carlos. (I’m remembering the one where the props were Vaseline and Pledge.) I look back at a lot of ‘nots’ but mostly ‘Readys’ because I loved being a mom. My daughter and Marykay loved being moms, and it shows in their two great kids. They used to look at each other {or sometimes g&g) and say “We got the best ones.” I think you can say that, too.
I play hide and seek with my cat. Last night we teamed up to catch one of those big flying roaches. She did the locating and chasing and I finally got it with the vacuum cleaner.