If I could sum up the most important thing I have learned in
my almost three years of parenting, it would be “Don’t judge.” I’m not by
nature a merciful person. I tend not to give myself much grace, nor others
either, and that has caused me a lot of frustration over the years. I’d like to
think I’m improving on that front, and much of that is due to the hard-knocks
education of surviving my children’s early years.
Maybe it started with the fact that I couldn’t breastfeed
Rose. Breastfeeding is a big deal these days. The tables have turned over the
past couple of decades, and now it seems the breastfeeders have claimed the
moral high ground and feel justified in declaring (or at least privately
basking in) their superiority over their bottle-feeding comrades. I probably
would have taken that route myself had it not been for the cleft palate thing.
My baby was 100% unable to breastfeed, and the only way to keep her alive was
to let go of the vision I had of my baby peacefully nursing in bed with me and
instead to embrace 2 AM dates with my Medela Pump-in-Style (I’m not sure I will
ever hate any sound as much as that of the rhythmic electric sucking of that
infernal machine), while my husband was the one sleeping on the couch with my
newborn by his side, getting to be the one to nourish and bond with her by
painstakingly squirting tiny amounts of milk into her mouth in rhythm with her
instinctual but ineffective attempts to suck.
It was a few months before I stopped crying about my own
sense of loss, and several more before I could let go of my desire to explain
myself to everyone who saw me offering her a bottle in public. I wanted them to
know how well I had prepared myself for a nursing relationship that turned out
not to be possible, how hard I had worked to give her as much pumped milk as I
could, how hard it was to feed a special needs baby…but as it turns out, it’s
rather awkward to start volunteering that information to perfect strangers.
So I would sit there feeling ashamed and misunderstood. In
some cases, I’m sure I projected all those attitudes from my own insecurity and
people were really thinking nothing of it. But I know my own prideful heart, so
I would be naïve to think I wasn’t sometimes right. I’m sure I was boosting
some people’s ego by my apparent lack of concern for giving my child the very
best.
So the first lesson I learned was the importance of giving
others the benefit of the doubt. Even though I was blessed enough to be able to
have a wonderful nursing relationship with my second baby (one that is still
thriving at 14 months and that I cherish every day), those first couple of
months of extreme pain and exhaustion reminded me that breastfeeding, even when
it ends up working, is rarely as simple as just deciding to go for it. Without
a great support system, in less-than-ideal circumstances, or in those cases
where the baby or the mother’s body simply won’t cooperate, I can 100%
understand why someone would decide that it’s not the best choice for their
family to keep fighting the battle. Families with newborns are nearly always
under tremendous pressures of various kinds, and there may be things they have
to prioritize above their desire to nurse. We never know what someone else is
going through.
The other lesson I learned is that I can’t really justify my
own parenting choices, or anything else in my life, to others and expect them
to understand. We will all be misunderstood frequently, by many people, for
many of our choices. The desire to feel superior to others and to justify
ourselves at their expense is central to our fallen human nature. We can and
must work hard to tame that pride within ourselves, over and over, as we
repeatedly fail to approach others with the proper grace. And we cannot expect
others to have conquered that in themselves. We have to live with knowing that
other people will never fully approve of us, and that that is ok, because we do
not have to answer to them (unless they ask us, in which case we can unload all
of our cleft palate back story). There is so much freedom in letting go of that
Mommy Shame, even for the thousandth time.
Breastfeeding, or the lack thereof, has been just one of
many aspects of childrearing that have shown me how little control I have and
how unable I am to handle, much less thrive in the midst of, parenting two
small children. I could go on about my failure to have the natural childbirth I
wanted to pursue, or about my failure to have either of children sleeping
through the night by their first birthday, or about 18 months of futile potty
training, or about how my home can go from spotless to health hazard in just 48 hours when my housekeepers leave for the weekend, or about disregarding the warning on the Bumbo seat and sending my
8-month-old plummeting head first from the kitchen counter…Suffice it to say, I
am nowhere close to having it all together, despite my quest to get that
magical snapshot of toddler-management bliss and frame it and pretend that our
life is actually like that. I have two domestic employees and a fantastically
supportive husband, and I can still barely make it through the day.
There is a part of me that will always long to be that mom
who is the embodiment of all the calm collectedness of Supernanny, the
creativity of Martha Stewart, and the domestic charm of June Cleaver. But all
things considered, I guess I would rather be the frazzled mommy learning slowly
and imperfectly to embody the grace of Jesus Christ, accepting it for myself
and extending it to others. May I always endeavor to let Him work in me.
