Parenting. With a capital P.
With this baby's arrival coming quickly (along with Braxton Hicks contractions...HELP ME!), I've been thinking more about more about the parent I will be. Or, rather, the parent I want and hope to be. And about the parent I already am.
I've been doing my best to be not just the best mother to my child so far, but to be the best incubator and the best protection. These 9 months are when I will have the most influence on my child's well-being. My child is following me everywhere I go. He's with me, hearing what I hear, eating what I eat, drinking what I drink, all to a certain extent. Though he may not know how I'm behaving or how I look on the outside, he's still around. I admit, it's hard not to swear or not to speak badly about someone annoying me when I can't actually see him. But I try my best.
When this baby comes, I, like most mothers (I'd think) want to be the best mother to my child.
I want to provide the best for him, to the best of my ability. That doesn't mean I want to spoil him or give him all the things I never had. It means that I want to give him what will make him the best person he can be. Although I didn't have a fantasy childhood, I strongly believe that it was the adversity and the challenges that made me a stronger person and helped me to grow. It gave me character and I would never ever change that.
I want to him to know how much I love him and I want him to feel that love without me saying it. I want him never to doubt it. That doesn't mean that I won't say it when I want to, nor does it mean that I will smother him. That doesn't mean that I will forget being his mother, let him do whatever he wants and just be his best friend. It means that even if there may be times he'll feel he hates me, there will also be times where he'll understand why I did the things I did and maybe he'll thank me for it.
I want him to grow up being positively influenced by me and I want him to positively influence me. That doesn't mean that he won't witness my bad habits. I know there will be times where I will forget that I am a parent, but I hope that those times will be kept to a minimum. I hope that he is strong enough to point out my faults to me respectfully and to remind me of the person I should be and strive to be.
I want to encourage him, inspire him and cheer him on for the good things he does. That doesn't mean that there won't be times where I'll feel disappointed. That doesn't mean that he'll always do well, but I pray that he remembers the feelings of success and continues to strive for them. I want him to know that I will be his support, even if he falls.
I want to teach him and I want to learn from him. Although I'm his mother, I believe that he has much to teach me about life and about myself and I'm open to his teachings. I hope that I can teach him to learn from his mistakes and also to learn from mine. I'm not opposed to sharing with him that I have flaws.
The more I think about it, the more I could go on and on. I just feel that this whole parenting thing is so important that I can't even fathom just how big it is. I don't know if there's a formula for how to be a perfect parent. I think it varies for every person as every child is different. I hope I can get close to that formula for each of my children, not just this first one.
I hope that I'll continue to learn from parents whose parenting mistakes are apparent to me. If they can't learn from their own mistakes, I want to learn from them, and I hope they'll see and learn from them too some day. I want to continue to have the "clarity" I have now before my children "blind" me and make me a softy! More importantly, I hope that I'll continue to learn from other parents whose goal it is to be wonderful parents. So far, I'm doing my best to be a sponge to all the advice they have for me.
And here it is again.
