Milestones:  Another Know-It-All Bites the Dust

By Connie Colwell Miller

So, my husband and I found out we’re likely having a girl.

I had deluded myself into thinking that if we were to give birth to a boy I’d be prepared for this one. All of our son’s outgrown clothes are washed and neatly packed away in the attic in clear plastic bins labeled according to their size. I could have just plopped them in the bureau this October where they would have stayed until we brought our new boy home from the hospital. And when we moved last fall, I simply took all the infant items from our son’s nursery and moved them into one of the empty bedrooms in our new home, ready and waiting for whenever Baby Boy Two arrived.

But life has a way of knocking good sense into your head, even when you think you’ve got it all together. Certainly, we’re never as ready for anything as we think we are, and expecting a boy might have been just the excuse I needed to stop readying myself for what was about to be.
 

So when my doctor and her cohort stood scrutinizing the images on the sonogram machine last month, I steeled myself. Then those words, “I think it’s a girl.” The cohort nodded, “I think it’s a girl, too.”

Something somersaulted in my stomach. Do I know how to raise a girl? Think about the dolls, the art projects, the hair-dos, the dress-up clothes. If you know me, you know I’m not exactly the fashion plate type. I can come up with any number of excuses to avoid playing “make-up” with my niece.

Then fast-forward several years to the mood swings, the crushes on horny, pimply boys, that attitude. Years ago, I was a teenage girl. I know. I was horrendous.

Clearly, I’m over-reacting. But the message I’ve glommed onto here is that we can prepare and prepare until we’re blue in the face. We’re still never ready.

Before I had my son, I was one of those young women that are the proverbial thorns in mothers’ sides. I thought I knew it all about kids because I’d been babysitting and watching my siblings my whole life. I’d cared for thirteen toddlers at once, completing a round of diapers changes for the whole lot of them in under 30 minutes. I couldn’t understand why there were three-year-olds still sucking on bottles, why some parents let their kids sass them, why anyone educated could have a less-than-perfect child!

Then, whoa, holy crap, I had my own child, and suddenly the fog lifted. The thing I had failed to understand was this: when they are not your kids, you get to go home. The job ends. You can go for a jog after work or sit down to the newspaper and a big Diet Coke. Parenting is not like that. Parenting is eternal. Even when your children leave home, it doesn’t really end.

But, alas, it is in our nature to try to ready ourselves for what may challenge us. We live under the delusion that preparation will prevent difficulty. And I suppose we believe this for good reason — it really works in most other instances. But parenting is a different beast entirely, isn’t it? My own son’s constant bawling and hysterical infancy threw me for such a loop that when I got pregnant this time I thought, “This should be a piece of cake. No way in hell can this baby be worse than Miles!” Oh, stupid, stupid me. I had to go and open my big, fat mouth.

So when my doctor smiled and told me that I’d better get shopping, I realized my folly. I will never again as long as I live know everything about parenting.