pep talk!
In hindsight it was probably a bad idea to schedule for The Husband to go back to full time right after Christmas. We went straight from hectic crazy holiday time into hectic crazy holiday time is still around and suddenly I'm alone all day with two kids. And next week I'll be alone all day with THREE kids at least sometimes, when LB comes back from vacation.
I wrote a long depressing piece here about how I feel incompetent when I measure myself against what (I imagine) everyone else is like and how I feel so isolated in my lone and surely unique awfulness. Which is a lot of BS.
Insert that cartoon with a whole lot of people standing in a public place, with one thought bubble coming from everyone's head, saying "Everyone else seems to have it together. What's wrong with me?"
In particular I've come to a realization that I think I want to share, based partly on my own experience and partly on my observations of the larger families at my parish. You may have heard of the Malcolm Gladwell theory that it takes 10k hours to become an expert at something. One thing you will hear a lot, if you are in the traditional Catholic counter-culture at least, very very frequently, is stuff like "it gets easier after three", "one to two is the biggest challenge," etc. And it isn't so much that the older kids help. It's vague stuff like "you're more confident", "you know what you're doing".
I've come to realize lately that a huge part of that is just brute practice. These moms of five and more have put in their ten thousand hours with the first kids. Parenting is like muscle memory for them. The first big gotcha of parenting, in my experience, is that at least with the first one, by the time you've figured out what you're doing, that kid has moved on to another stage.
Parenting Mary-Alice--if she were all I had to deal with--is sooooo much easier than parenting Pippa was, even when you balance differences of temperament. And I haven't even done ten thousand hours of pre-crawler yet. I've only done about 6-7k hours. And at Pippa's current stage I've hardly put in any time at all, so no wonder I'm floundering a bit there.
So, self, don't wallow in self-pity! You are just putting in some more hours!
Now if only I could get some kind of "achievement unlocked" badge with snappy sound when I hit 10k hours in a certain stage of parenting.
I wrote a long depressing piece here about how I feel incompetent when I measure myself against what (I imagine) everyone else is like and how I feel so isolated in my lone and surely unique awfulness. Which is a lot of BS.
Insert that cartoon with a whole lot of people standing in a public place, with one thought bubble coming from everyone's head, saying "Everyone else seems to have it together. What's wrong with me?"
In particular I've come to a realization that I think I want to share, based partly on my own experience and partly on my observations of the larger families at my parish. You may have heard of the Malcolm Gladwell theory that it takes 10k hours to become an expert at something. One thing you will hear a lot, if you are in the traditional Catholic counter-culture at least, very very frequently, is stuff like "it gets easier after three", "one to two is the biggest challenge," etc. And it isn't so much that the older kids help. It's vague stuff like "you're more confident", "you know what you're doing".
I've come to realize lately that a huge part of that is just brute practice. These moms of five and more have put in their ten thousand hours with the first kids. Parenting is like muscle memory for them. The first big gotcha of parenting, in my experience, is that at least with the first one, by the time you've figured out what you're doing, that kid has moved on to another stage.
Parenting Mary-Alice--if she were all I had to deal with--is sooooo much easier than parenting Pippa was, even when you balance differences of temperament. And I haven't even done ten thousand hours of pre-crawler yet. I've only done about 6-7k hours. And at Pippa's current stage I've hardly put in any time at all, so no wonder I'm floundering a bit there.
So, self, don't wallow in self-pity! You are just putting in some more hours!
Now if only I could get some kind of "achievement unlocked" badge with snappy sound when I hit 10k hours in a certain stage of parenting.