No pressure, just raise a perfect child (posted Sept 2009)

Sometimes I get scared. It catches me off guard while watching my little boy play, and I start to realize that I can really irrevocably screw up my child. I can inflate or deflate his ego, empower or suppress him, and clarify or confuse him about his place in this crazy world. I can either create a Hilter or a Ghandi and who am I kidding, I am so not ready to take that kind of responsibility. Is anyone ever ready for that kind of responsibility? The idea of making a human being and birthing him is way easier for me to wrap my head around than the idea of me teaching him life lessons and habits that will ultimately make him a success or a failure at life. The last thing in the world that I want to do is talk to him through a phone and look at him through plexiglas in the State Pen, lamenting that I didn’t hold him enough when he was a baby, or love him enough, or discipline him enough or whatever.



Since my time machine is broken and refuses to stay on pause, the shaping of the little human has begun, and good or bad he is becoming his own person. Right now Wyatt is finding his own voice. This is both exciting and petrifying. When he opens his mouth he either says something so sweet it melts your heart or something so crushing it breaks it. Case in point: yesterday I went in to get him out of bed and instead of the ear to ear smile and hug I wanted, I got the scowl-faced-screamer yelling, “Not you! Not you! No. I wan Dada!” This, undoubtedly, crushes my heart. That little monster continued to terrorize me all day telling me “not you, not you, not you,” at every turn (talk about a Debby Downer). Then later in the evening, as if the previous hours of mommy abuse hadn’t even happened, he excitedly climbs up on the counter as I begin to cook dinner and says, with all the enthusiasm of your 6th grade best friend who you haven’t seen all summer because she’s been away at a fantastically fun summer camp you didn’t get to go to, “I help you? I help you Mama? We cook muppins?!” I forget the fowl morning mood and we begin to cook dinner together like old friends who have never been apart, and we catch up on the summer’s adventures- so to speak. We are a work in progress, my little family. We will have bumps the in the road, and, I am sure, knock-down-drag-out fights (because we are the most stubborn people in the world). I hope that we don’t scar each other too much and can always say that we each know we are irreplaceable and loved beyond measure- oh and I hope I don’t get a call from the state pen EVER, you hear that Wyatt? EVER.