Where Do You Get Your Parenting Advice?

Don't Say Your Mom

Over here at Chez Ophira, school starts tomorrow. Two weeks after that the new season of Parenting is a Joke kicks off with my conversation with David Cross and Amber Tamblyn, so look forward to that! And we’ll be continuing with new episodes every week.

I did work and travel a ton this summer (mostly for work) but I also spent a lot of time with my son, so I learned a lot!!

I mostly learned that I suck at parenting. And, I can see it clearly now because we’re at the age where it becomes clear. I suck at it. My kid has fresh food, we do have a home, and he is loved and told he is loved every time all the time. He has clothes and activities, but I’m NOT killing it as a mom. I’m inconsistent with decisions, and consequences, I used the word punishment the other day - you get put in mom jail for that right? And I plainly don’t know what to do most of the time. They say follow your gut but my gut is mostly saying run away! But I figured this out - how do you juggle a career and a family and still have it all? Well, you just don’t do a huge chunk of it. That’s how. Dads have been doing it for decades. It’s time we took a page from them.

So I bought some books (in the Positive / Gentle Parenting realm). I wish I could go to my mom for advice, but I can’t because she’s dead. Even if I could, it just wouldn’t be applicable. You see, I had my kid older and my mom had me when she was 43 years old (and I’m the youngest of 6) - and that equals a lot of time between the world my mom grew up in and the one my son is growing up in. And I don’t just mean she had a flip phone, my mom grew up during World War 2 in Nijmegen, Holland okay? 

I sometimes think about what advice she would give? For example, my son claims he hates school and doesn’t want to go. If he told that to my mom, what would she say to him? Maybe she’d tell him that he’s lucky to go to school, and then perhaps she’d launch into a story I heard a lot as a child:

One day my mom stayed home from school because she was sick. On that same day, her school was bombed (by the Americans, she would point out. They meant to bomb this bridge in Germany, and Njjmegan is right near the German border, but they missed. This was before Google Maps) All of her friends died, but her. A few days later she rode her bike by the wreckage and the teacher she hated the most, this nun who had it out for her (her school was run by nuns, and this one would punish her by making her sit with her bare knees on the classroom floor that was covered in sawdust and pebbles for some reason) — well, she saw that nun that she hated the most, hanging dead in a tree.

And then she’d laugh and laugh and say, “See sometimes things work out. Life is full of mysteries.”

And to be fair, English was my mom’s 4th language so sometimes she would use common expressions a little inaccurately.

All and all, I have no trauma or baggage! And I won’t be relaying that story to my son. I might just say, “If you don’t go to school I’ll take your iPad away,” or something equally as dumb, mismatched, and empty. Or I’ll try my other favorite response: Nothing. I’ll just put his lunch in his bag, ask him if he has his glasses, and keep moving forward.

...to the next season of Parenting is a Joke! Coming at your ears on Tuesday, September 19th. I look forward to sharing that with you!