Two worlds collide

The day I graduated from NYU with my Masters in Clinical Social Work was one of the proudest days of my life. I had spent countless hours writing papers, analyzing my friends and driving my family crazy by diagnosing them with every disorder in the book. I had always been the type of person that people for some reason wanted to tell their deepest darkest secrets to and I genuinely cared about the well being of others. My husband would joke around and say that I uncovered more about the people he knew in five minutes than he had learned about them in their entire friendship. "Did I just overhear John telling you about his childhood?", he'd say. I decided to go with what I knew and become a therapist. If people were telling me their problems, I might as well get paid for it.

After a short period of time working in a hospital, I found my calling working in two elementary schools, providing counseling for children. It was my dream job, honestly. Not only did I find myself supporting the children, but I very quickly fell into the role of a parenting consultant and behavioral therapist as well. I have had hundreds of conversations with parents on how to encourage their children to listen, decrease undesirable behaviors and make positive choices. I would listen to parents tell me about how they couldn't get their child to do homework or put on pants in the morning, how it was a struggle in the evening to take a bath, brush teeth or come to school every day. I would sympathize with them, without truly understanding what they were going through, and would recommend a sticker chart or positive intervention strategies. "Make sure you try not to react to their anger by raising your own voice. Try your best to stay calm and say, 'I need you to put on pants now'." Knowing what I know now, it makes me laugh and kind of hate my former self a little.

In May of 2011, I had my beautiful daughter Cara, who changed my life in so many ways. The life I had known before was over and I quickly realized how amazing, yet incredibly challenging, parenting could be. For someone who had spent years guiding other people on how to parent their children, it was amazing how foreign parenting felt to me at times. As I rewarded my screaming daughter with the toy she wanted in the store just to get people to stop staring at me, I would hear my own irritating voice saying "you know, giving a child what they want when they are throwing a tantrum will only reinforce the negative behavior." I would tell my childless self,  "You try getting a screaming toddler to pry her sticky hands off of these bubbles in the dollar store while the checkout lady stares through your soul and 800 people behind you in line breath impatiently down your neck."  

Over the past two years, I have grown to appreciate that sometimes all of the handbooks, schooling and experience in the world cannot prepare you for what being a parent may bring. I have also grown to realize how incredibly judgmental I was of other people's parenting choices. Until you have a child, you sincerely do not realize how difficult things can be. When your eyes are bleeding at 3am because you are so tired and your toddler that recently figured out how to climb out of their crib tries to come into your bed for the 1000th time that night, it is easier to bend the rules than fight with them for an hour, especially when you have to be up for work in two. I used to shoot disapproving looks at those parents who had monkey backpacks on their child with the furry leash because I assumed they were lazy or didn't feel like chasing after their child. Or even worse, that they couldn't control their child! But at that moment in the grocery store when your curious two year old darts around the corner of the aisle or into oncoming traffic on a busy street and your heart is in your throat because you feel like you have lost them forever, the furry leash backpack doesn't seem so awful after all. 

I think the biggest wake up call that I have had as a parent so far is that you can be doing ALL of the right things, correcting negative behavior, rewarding the positive, giving love and attention, etc and your child STILL MIGHT NOT LISTEN TO YOU. They may look you right in the face as you tell them to stop throwing their dinner on the floor, smile, hold out their hand and drop it. I hear echos of my single childless self saying in a judgmental whisper to my husband, "our child will NEVER do that". And I want to slap her in the face. The bottom line is parenting is incredibly hard. Some days are better than others. None of us are perfect. It's impossible to do the right thing ALL of the time. And it's a hell of a lot easier to tell other people how to parent their kids than it is to parent your own. As long as I know I'm trying my best and my kids know that I love them more than anything, that's good enough for me.