A Study in Families

Dear Single Parents,
(Past, present, future, single for 18 years or even just a week)

       You have my utmost respect. You always have, but now more than ever. I was in the kitchen today with a sick 16 month old baby on my hip, while trying to make dinner, and there was a three-year-old sitting on my feet. And the little one wiped snot on my sweater while the bigger one pulled off my socks while I burned my fingers on pasta. And they are lovely little girls. They very rarely cry, much less than the other little people I know, they smile lots and they listen when you say 'no'. But it's still extremely challenging. How do you put them to bed? You need enough time to get the baby settled down and quiet and rock and sing her to sleep. So the three year old needs to stay occupied long enough for the baby to go down. But that's a big thing to ask a three year old to do all by herself. So right as the baby is drifting off, the three year old really needs something or is too bored or needs help using the toilet or is hungry, and so the baby wakes and you have to start all over. And there is just one of you. If you need a minute to send an email, make dinner or even pee, you could turn on the TV. But a 16 month old isn't interested in TV just yet. If you need to pop out to get groceries, you can't just leave the kids, everyone has got to get their coats and wellies and hats on, and the stroller has to come out and you'd better bring a diaper bag just for good measure. 'Pop out' is no longer an accurate term. Your au pair who is supposed to be there to help you contracts some mysterious and serious eye infection and so Saturday morning you've got her and both kids waiting for ages in the Accident and Emergency room in the local hospital. And you're a single parent, so you probably work full time to support your family. Your kids are in nursery and day care but you feel guilty about that but it has to be done and good lord is it expensive. And so your life becomes work and kids. And it's worth it and they are wonderful and so full of love. But even that doesn't make it easy. Single parents, you have my respect, and with respect, I never want to be one of you.

Love,
Pia

   Much to my surprise, my gap year has been a study in families as much as it has been a study in self.
I feel as if I'm quite far off from the "settling down" and having kids part of my life, but for some reason  leaving home has made me think about it more than ever. Family usually means the family you know and love, but the farther you go the more you experience and learn from what other people call family and how they do it. And I think it's most interesting when they do it very differently from the way you did. Much to my alarm, I find myself thinking things like "I think I'd like to do that with my kids..." or "I wonder if my kids will react like that..." or "I'm going to make that a rule in my house...", nearly on a daily basis. Throughout Hawaii and certainly in England now, I've met and observed lots of different kinds of parents. Parents who make it point to never actually say no to their kids, parents who always say no, parents who spent all their time with their kids, parents who can only spend a little bit, parents who say no to television, and parents who say television...yes. And yet through all my observations, I can't really say that I've determined that there is one best way to do it. In the history of families, it seems that new parents are usually trying to do one of two extremes; they either intend to raise their children just like their parents raised them, or they intend to raise their children entirely differently and retain nothing from the way they were raised. I don't think either of those scenarios ever really play out entirely. I remember my childhood as a happy thing and I feel as if I have a fairly healthy relationship with my parents. That being said, there are aspects of the way that I was raised that I don't intend to focus on when I become a parent. With complete respect for the lovely people who raised me, I always kind of liked the expression "aim to be better than your parents", because it represented a challenge and the idea that each generation was making progress and moving forward to become greater than the last. But the more I think about it, the more that seems unfair to the parents. As well as putting a certain amount of pressure on the offspring...Perhaps it would be better to go with the idea that you should just aim to be different from your parents. I'm sure that the further I go from home, the more I'll witness how parenting is cultural, situational, educational, and above all, personal.