THE EVOLUTION OF PARENTING

As successful living increasingly enjoins all humanity toward “MENSA-esque” time management, babies must share their lap tops with laptops. Diligent parents are pressured to dismiss all “dismissibles”, AKA matters of interest which serve to define our individuality. We schedule-in fun plans with the same enthusiasm that we bring to reconciling our checking accounts. Today’s parents must cleverly and competitively strive to surpass yesterday’s workplace successes (which often means work follows us home), while sustaining and creating a “soft place to land” on the home front. We are compelled to trade in the here and now for unrelieved strategizing. Such ambition usually produces in us a diminished availability for sensing how those closest to us are feeling or thinking.

My older daughter is fortunate to be able to work from home most of the time. With a more flexible schedule, I, or “Gammy” am usually able to be present at the criticaltime of day known as “One Hour Long Phone Conference Lasting Three Hours.” Unfortunately, my granddaughter happens to be a five month old who entered this world with an agenda, all-impervious to even the most ardent expressions of Grandmotherly love. (This is why the first doll this grandmother gave was a Barbie, not Baby doll.)

Resistant to bring it up, I dearly wish she could have enjoyed the simpler and community-supported era of parenting when I was her mom. Those days, doing one thing at a time was sufficient. Without consideration of latest findings,,I confidently availed myself of all rights and entitlement to focus exclusively on being the best mommy possible, without the encumbrance of demonstrating daily allegiance to a cash-paying employer.

Foremost among all that I own are grateful remembrances of an eternal stream of lazy summer days with my children. I fondly recall those early years with my firstborn, my daughter. Without fail, Friday afternoons would find me walking my baby in the stroller with our dog on a leash. We would merrily traverse four miles of sidewalk leading to Charlottetown Mall, where I would purchase a new wind chime for my backyard collection. Later, Daddy would join us there, for ice cream or other mall fare. With dinner hour approaching, three spent-but-happy travelers would enjoy a welcome Daddy-mobile rescue from hoofing any additional miles homeward. This was how we would kick off every weekend.

In this present age of parenting, an adoring parent will be required numerous times daily to divert her attention away from her babies. Anything but simple, parenting must include an ever-pressing myriad of outside responsibilities.

It has been my greatest privilege to have been gifted with twenty-some years as a mom, (with the most recent fifteen as a single one). From three down to only one (sob) nestling, (but here, insert “Grandmother of two”), it is my hope that parents feel hopeful and happy about parenting today, while never allowing the dreams they have for their children to overshadow their children's dreams.