The Push & Pull of Parenthood

Parenthood is an aberration of insanity. In a sense, it’s its own mental affliction or state of mind. It’s like living with a never-ending battle between push & pull within your brain.  Being faced with new challenges in every waking moment, it’s like running stuck in overdrive, turning the brain into a computerized robot of sorts. Input challenge, output choice of push or a pull. Yet, as with all computers there’s always the occasional viruses, glitches, & freezes. Some parents have way better upgrades & seemingly more sophisticated equipment to work with, while others have the most primitive of electronically connectible devices. Either way, the systems all run on the Push vs Pull method.

Every decision is made based on whether you give em a little rope to hang themselves with, or reel em back in. You want to go on a sleep strike the second week you’ve slept more than six hours straight consistently? The choice to pull & risk their health to stay awake as long as the newborn is, to provide endless amounts of comfort tactics the interweb swears is guaranteed to induce slumber with ease is the right solution for some. On the other hand, there some who chooses to push says: Screw It! Go ahead & wear yourself out with that crying, I’m going to crank this fan on high & take a fifteen minute power nap before I jump off the nearest cliff & welcome hell with open arms. You want to stall the whole household from getting out the door on time because you don’t want to wear your coat in the dead of winter? If you want to push, go ahead & let them learn how cold it is without the coat, taking the coat along if & when they change their mind, making sure to get an apology before handing over the great provider of warmth on an icy day. Go with the pull & you’ll be the one who chases them down to the ends off the earth to hold em down, forcing them to bundle up until they look like a mini-abominable snowman.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a helicopter parent, a soccer mom, a baseball coaching dad. A white trash baby mama with eight kids all from different dads, or, an executive CEO of a major corporation who provides private jets & boarding schools galore. Every single moment of parenting is filled with choices that require a response to push their child’s limits, testing their own self-reliance capabilities & life knowledge skills or pull them in closer, maintaining their innocence, aiding their reliance on you as their caretaker of all things, & keeping them from learning anything on their own the hard way. The greatest thing about this unbiased system, though, is how flexible it can be. Yeah, some challenges may cause a major malfunction with the complexity of the situation at hand, freezing up the system for a bit which will throw off the entire balance of the household, which some never recover from. It can also glitch & lead you to choose to pull when you would’ve preferred to push, but your brain was under fire from other battles of life coming at you, that you glitched for a moment & made the wrong choice. Shit happens, right? You get over it, learn from it, move on, & continue with the pushing & pulling with the new knowledge ready for next time.

Life is all about finding balance to keep from going insane & somehow, no big surprise there, so is parenting. There’s a rhyme & a reason for every season. Just as there is a push & a pull for everything in raising the offspring of your once steamy loins; before those crotchfruit washed away all the sex appeal down there in the netherlands with visions of their crowning moment, or the separation & clamping of the abdominal wall for all those c-section parents, forever burned into our memories. Sometimes you gotta take the pull, keep your babies close & protected, sometimes you have to go for the push & show them exactly what their made of, but in the end, it’s all for their own good & no choice is right or wrong. It’s just about what choice is necessary for maintaining the balance of the entire family. Some have the newest & greatest models, giving them an advantage of those who only have the antique editions, but there’s no law against upgrading, that’s just a matter of wanting to keep that aberration of insanity from turning into a living nightmare.

Thanks to More Than Cheese and Beer for another opportunity to write for her Sunday Confessions prompt! Check out her page for more awesome confessions from other bloggers & page followers alike. Today’s prompt was pull.