What I Did Wrong Before Becoming a Parent—and You Can Too!
The biggest mistake I made is the one everyone lauds me for: unplanned parenting.* I thought it would be easy. I thought I could figure it out. I thought I would have help. Wait, I take all that back. I didn’t think. Not actively. I was nineteen (if you’re just joining us, start at the beginning). My plan for parenting didn’t develop until my daughter was nineteen. One day, sixteen years after becoming a parent, I had a stroke of genius: Hey, I should get married.
Most people put more conscious thought into changing jobs than family planning. Thinking about what you will need to raise a child is the most important part of parenting. I made the mistake of single parenting. That was a huge problem.**
Before starting my second family, I made up a parenting priority list of how to avoid everything I did wrong the first time. I’ve drilled this list into the heads of my new kids (even though I’m still short on a few items). This is what I now believe is the right preparation before the first pregnancy attempt:
1) Go to college
2) Go to graduate school
3) Get a job that you love AND makes money
4) Buy a house
5) Get married*** and commit to that marriage for life
6) Stay married for a few years. Have fun, work out your problems, go to Paris
7) Volunteer with an organization that helps troubled families/teenagers
8) Decide why you want children.
Long list? Do I sound like a fundamentalist? Far from it. I’m a former anything-goes hippie who lived through the sexual revolution and Woodstock (vicariously) and survived experimentation and other things I’m not ready to admit. I came to understand those eight steps after adding up my mistakes and reading the Bible.
WHOA — the Bible? You’re not turning this into a religious thing are you?
No. I highly recommend a spiritual life—but some of the best parents I’ve known are atheists, so … who knows?
What I learned from the Bible, a thirty-five hundred year old record of parenting, is: Families have been messed up for thousands of years. Just ask Ishmael. His folks wanted a kid, so they had him through a surrogate, then all of a sudden the barren mom gets preggers and *wham * Ishmael gets a pink slip quicker’n a North American auto worker.
When I hear fundamentalists talk about family values, I wonder if they know that Abraham married his half-sister. Or that Lot, having escaped Sodom’s demise because he was a righteous man, slept with both his daughters. We’re not even halfway through Genesis.
When I was adopted by my daughter, I had a job but no career, a homemade education but no college, a party lifestyle with no partner, and family with no support. When, later in life, teenagers would say to me, you did OK despite your obstacles, my response has always been: You can get to the top of the Empire State Building by climbing up the outside or taking the elevator.
You’re smarter than me. Take the elevator.
My first mistake was taking responsibility for a child before finishing Steps 1-4, above.
No matter how easy they make it look on TV, raising children is hard.Fictional Temperance Brennan on the TV show BONES is a genius, has huge income, a child, and an unmarried partner–yet she runs off in the middle of the day or night to chase bad guys without ever stopping to say, Hey, who’s going to watch my baby for the next hour or three? Try that in real life and you’ll meet Child Protective Services. Unplanned parenting only works in fiction.
My second mistake, #5: I did not get married before taking responsibility for a child. Two heads are better than one. What makes America great is the government’s checks and balances. You need those same checks and balances at home. You will lose your patience. You will be too patient. You will be too tough. You will be too lenient. You will not care when you should and vice versa. That second head brings a little sanity to your decision-making process.
Getting married (not hooked up) is taking the elevator.
I’ll leave numbers six through eight as self-explanatory. Whatever you do, don’t skip Number 8.
The best parenting advice I’ve ever heard came to me from a janitor at my engagement party. He said, “Remember, if everything goes right, the kids will leave you and the wife won’t.”
Peace, Seeley
* I am not referring to abortion. My view on abortion is simple: until the males of our species collectively provide more emotional and financial support for our errant sperm than the current rate of 42.5%, we should keep our collective mouths shut. Mine is.
** Not everyone becomes a single parent willingly or intentionally. This is not about blame. I’m stating a fact: single parenting is exponentially harder than double parenting.
*** My marriage is currently under construction—and has been since the beginning, twenty years ago. The only thing I’ve learned from observing other marriages is: staying married or falling apart has nothing to do with gender, sexual orientation, income, education, class, or arrangements (as in arranged marriage). Most of the divorces I’ve witnessed had more to do with ego than insurmountable problems. Staying married requires someone to surmount problems.
