At a mere fourteen months I cant help but think it’s started early. Aren’t they the ‘terrible twos’ because the kid is, you know, two?! It’s a cruel blow to our carefully crafted parenting timetable that The Boy seems to have gone and got all ‘toddler’ on us already.
No comprehension or ability to reason, inexplicable outbursts, untamed emotional reactions to the world, deliberate defiance and a dogged determination to walk in the opposite direction, bee-lining for roads, escalators and stairwells, are just some of the subtle clues I’m basing this on.
If it has started this early, I cant help worrying that I will be a haggard, wretched shadow of myself by the time he starts to shake it off at around three years, at which point the questions will probably start rolling in (astutely noted by the NDM), giving me only the softest nudge needed to tip right over the edge.
But it was actually not The Boy’s trying ways that lead me down this line of thinking, so much as the exasperated father I saw in the playground the other day. The poor man looked like his hair had turned grey in a day. He was sweating profusely over a furrowed brow, tripping over his own feet as he muttered to no one in particular, “Oh. There she goes again”, as his daughter raced into the distance leaving him to eat her dust.
It was something about the delivery of what he said; the flat, deflated tone of a matter-of-fact observation without so much as a hint of surprise or wonder. At first I smirked at what I imagined to be dry humour, but later it got me thinking about how we weather the storms of parenthood.
While I feel certain that I will continue to have days of defeat, deflation, frustration and feelings of failure, I am also beginning to suspect that I just may escape being condemned to a bone deep weariness.
The reason for this, and I’m almost too hesitant to say, not wanting to weight into the heavy weight world of over-opinionated, judgemental and righteous parent commentary, is this: I co-parent.
Not in the sense that my partner had 3 months off when the baby was born, not in the sense that he takes one day off a week to stay at home with the kid, and not in the sense where I work 9-5 and he stays at home but we call that co-parenting because its easier than asking people to accept that a mere male is the primary carer.
No. I co-parent in the sense that I work the occasional freelance job from home, and he works a few short night shifts a week as a musician. The rest of the time we spend parenting, baking cookies and knitting scarves, spurred on by our altogether noble ideal of sacrificing money for time.
Ha Ha Ha. Well, that’s what life would look like if we weren’t too busy running around after our wind up toy toddler and lamenting the loss of time we used to spend writing, making music and getting shit-faced drunk. Oh, and if it was Pleasantville in a parallel 1950s universe where men stayed home with children and I magically developed craft and baking skills.
But because I am prone to dwell on the negative and incessant worrying over what other people think, I sometimes find this an isolating experience, finding it very difficult to find other people to relate to, and inexplicably, end up thinking that because my partner is so extensively involved in this ‘woman’s’ work of child rearing, that I am somehow inadequate in my own role.
And because co-parenting is not without its own issues, I have sometimes failed to appreciate the beauty of this arrangement.
The experience of a true lack of gendered boundaries in our relationship with our child is awesome.
We are sometimes challenged on this, with friends insisting that, at the end of the day, The Boy surely must seek the comfort of Mother than Father, boob rather than hairy chest, but he doesn’t. He seeks us both in different measures at different times, and has done from the day he was born.
And while it does mean that I find it difficult to relate to many parenting books and blogs, of hair raising and hair pulling experiences of the stay at home mum, it does mean I can appreciate the beauty of passing The Boy back and forth between four “primary” carers (I’m throwing the grandparents in, because they are raising him too).
I indulge in the belief that this will help him be a well-rounded dude, as he so far happens to be. And when he is not, there is The Yang, my opposite and my balance, tag teaming with me to enter the ring with all of his patience and laid back attention for a whip whirling wind of a toddler that wants to touch the surface of every object, walk in the manner of a butterfly guided by pheromones (and inexplicable impulses), pick up all foreign objects in his path, and go and go and go from sun up to sun down.
And when I saw the frazzled father in the playground and suspected that he was utterly reeling from his a taste of what many women experience day in and day out, I couldn’t help but come to think: Thank fuck I don’t do this ‘on my own’.
For The Yang, who I am so proud of for pursuing an approach to fatherhood not dictated to him by convention. And for me too, a bit of kudos for my own role in cultivating this life together.
RubyTwoShoes 