Life on the Wire

A friend of mine recently shared some doubts about an important parenting decision. Feeling her angst, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with my graduate school advisor who said: “It doesn’t matter which side of the tightrope you fall from; either way, you’re dead.”  I can’t recall the professional dilemma under discussion when my advisor spoke those words, but the tightrope analogy has proven as applicable to my life as a parent as it did to any of my professional pursuits.

When I was a child, I sometimes whined to my mother, “It’s not fair,” as an older sister got to stay up later than me or a younger and only brother got to go on a special outing with our father.

“Life’s not fair,” was my mother’s predictable response. Mom didn’t seem to agonize over her parenting decisions, and no further explanations were offered.  A lifetime later, I wonder if she lived by that philosophy, or if she tortured herself as I do over what she did for one child and not for another.  As a child I firmly resolved, “I WILL NEVER…”and then the realities of parenting set in.

Family life does not offer equal opportunity for all.  Sometimes our parental resources differ over time leading one child to the conclusion that they are favored less than one of their siblings. As parents, we are young and naïve with the first child, older and more experienced with the next.  We are starting out and of little means with the first child, better established with the second, and then paying college tuition for the older children as the last in line moves into high school.  One child experiences the brunt of family health crises while another suffers the trauma of a parent’s job loss.  One child grows up in the same neighborhood attached to lifelong friends and neighbors while another is torn from his moorings by a parent’s job relocation. Sometimes divorce, dating, remarriage, and blending families add to the juggling act.  And those are just the parent-driven life changes.

The world intervenes too.  Everything from politics to health care affects family life.  Will the children growing up through the COVID years feel differently about the parenting they received than children growing up before or after?  Will high inflation and social unrest affect choices and decisions about things like where to go to college and a child’s evaluation of what is “fair”?  Will there be a medical treatment available for one that was not yet approved for use by another?

The basic and differing temperaments of the child play a role too.  We can’t know what will come wrapped in that bundle of joy.  Temperament is like the seed inside a fruit.  The flesh grows around it. One child is born independent and eager to be out in the world.  “Don’t hold my hand,” she says.  The next child comes along, quiet, reserved, and hesitant:  “Don’t let go of my hand,” he says.  One child needs independence another needs a slow and gentle release.  One child is impulsive and needs plenty of rules and oversight.  The other is capable of adult judgment and full of moral resolve in preschool. Sometimes a child’s temperament is at odds with that of a parent or parents.  Despite great love, there is also great opportunity for frustration and misunderstanding.  And just when you think you’ve got the system down, one child suddenly blossoms in an unexpected way and another suffers an unexpected crisis.

As our parents warned, the worst payback can be when a child is too much like us.  Our worst or most challenging features can slap us in our faces making every interaction a contest.  Other times, our children are so different from us that we feel lost about how to nurture them or their interests.  As everyone weighs in:  family, friends, casual observers, teachers, coaches, therapists, parenting “experts,” Dr. Phil, and even uneducated TikTok influencers with issues of their own, we teeter on the tightrope wondering if we are just overly-sensitive and embarrassed, or if we are experiencing an actual boundary violation or invasion of privacy.

Society grooms us to believe that if we are competent, if we love our children enough, parenting will be easy.  While we have to make room and find opportunities for the gifts our children carry, we still need to keep our own lights on.  There is no practice or dress rehearsal regardless of how large a family you come from, how much babysitting you did as a teenager, or how you make your living. With parenting, we don’t get any pre-performance practice.  The 10,000 hours of rehearsal that makes one a master, comes while on the job.  In those 10,000 hours, your child becomes a grown-up.

I never saw myself as an athlete, but I wish I had understood at the outset that parenting is a tightrope act considered by many to be an extreme sport. We step onto the wire with a baby in our hands.  We have to develop mental fortitude, toughness, and a comfort with heights while in the thrilling but risky emotional state of ecstasy combined with terror.

Making our way on the parenting tightrope requires focus and small, thoughtful steps, while never giving up on the belief that we can make it, we will make it, even at those times when we live suspended in mid-air unable to move.  Inch by inch we pray that our children will come to understand it all on some day in the future, perhaps when they have children of their own. 

Parenting is life on the wire, my friend. Sometimes it seems like a circus, but there is only one way to do it: keep looking ahead.
 
 
 

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