On a cold Saturday morning some weeks ago, inspiration—or maybe desperation—led me to an unusual (for me) resolution: I wasn’t going to do anything but be with my children. I didn’t sort laundry while keeping the baby from falling down the stairs and the toddler from dragging a toilet plunger across the bed. I didn’t write emails while keeping one child from whacking the other. I didn’t come up with a craft or activity. I just sat there. The baby was on and off and on my lap. The three-year-old flitted around us, occasionally involving us in her pretend games while she systematically turned the living room upside down.
It occurred to me, then, that the less I tried to do with my kids, the more clearly I could witness them, which was a wonderful activity in itself. I listened to their cadences and their banging toys. I watched their interest thread its way around the room.
Hours passed. When my husband returned from his morning obligation, he found a messy room and an almost shockingly peaceful wife.
But this post is not about how I discovered some parenting secret (or, worse, “hack”). Frankly, I haven’t been able to recreate the experience. What I ended up with were questions: mainly, why did those hours feel like such an exception? What is it about parenting that makes simply enjoying my own children for more than a few minutes at a time feel so out of reach?
Part of the answer to this question is simple: because parenting is hard. But there are lots of hard things in life—jobs, relationships, chasing dreams, coming to terms with one’s own existence, etc. I don’t mean to say parenting is always harder than those things (I’m sure it isn’t, for some). But I do wonder why, for me at least, it can feel—in addition to the deep joy it brings—so very overwhelming.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the verb “to parent” to the seventeenth century. Back then, though, “to parent” was a transitive verb; it took an object. Just as today we would not say “she makes” without saying what she makes (“she makes money”), four hundred years ago one would not say “she parents” without naming the object of her parenting (“she parents a son”). It was only after 1970 that the verb came to be used intransitively—the OED traces this first intransitive usage to the book How to Parent, by Fitzhugh Dodson. Since the seventies, one no longer needs to parent a child, grammatically speaking; one simply parents—just as one might breathe, or exist.
In other words, parenting is no longer limited to describing a particular adult caring for a particular child to whom they are biologically and/or legally bound. These days, it’s inclusive of action in any category remotely related to child-rearing—diet, sleep, playdates, emotional development, discipline, manners, education, environmental toxins, independence, screen time, reading books about parenting, etc. Also, since there is little consensus on the best practices for any of these categories—and because children have this unnerving way of changing as they age—parenting is also an exercise in constantly adjusting one’s approach to all of these matters while never being quite sure one is doing it right.
I’m not arguing that parenting now is harder than it used to be. I lack the expertise to make that claim. And anyway, I find it a little too easy to assume that my experience of the world and my role as a parent is somehow more confusing or demanding than was, say, my grandmother’s—I know, for example, I have many more options than she did.
Still, this recent shift in the use of the verb parent indicates something particular about the current demands. These days, parenting feels like an everlasting set of infinite and complex standards, a kind of unfillable void into which we willingly throw all we can summon of our available effort and knowledge and care.
Which is why I keep thinking about that morning where, for three hours on end, parenting felt so unusually easy, so simple, so deeply joyful. See, I saw the void created by parenting and stopped trying to fill it. I released, for the time being, every impulse to instruct or inform, to engage in play or song, even to say I love you or offer an embrace. I took a break, that is, from trying to do all the things “parenting” requires: establishing connection, building resilience, instilling compassion—even proving, for all time, how much I love them.
I finally got, on a gut level, that I can’t achieve those things. To state the obvious, to risk cliche: raising children is a process. Framed as the intransitive “parenting,” this process becomes immense and overwhelming. Returning to the transitive verb, though—reclaiming a grammatical construction in which I parent my children—helps me see the process for what it is: a relationship.
I don’t mean I’ve figured it all out, or that parenting my children is now straightforward (or easy). I don’t mean that other parents need to change how they talk about parenting. (I don’t even mean, contrary to the title of this post, that I can actually stop using the intransitive form of the verb parent.) I don’t mean that I won’t get pulled back, again and again, into all the wild expectations, imposed by self and society, about what being a parent is supposed to look like.
All I mean is that I got a little bit of clarity, a beautiful reminder, about what is at the heart of this exhausting and exhilarating adventure. Because here’s the thing: the more I watched my children—not in the protective but in the curious sense—the less they made sense to me. The less they made sense to me, the more I asked them, in so many unspoken words, Who are you, anyway?
And the more I asked that question, the more I was sure of two things: first, that I never wanted to stop asking it; and second, that I didn’t actually want an answer.
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I liked the first part of your essay where you shared a different parenting technique...a mini revelation!
Thanks for the lovely thoughts! I also like the moments where I'm able to just "be".