I started this post in 2013, and even though five years have passed, I still experience this all the time.
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Being a parent is so hard. It's one of those things that you don't truly understand until you're living it. People always hinted at it during my pre-kid life, and I was like, "Yeah. I know! It's hard. Duh!" but the forewarning was nothing compared to the actual experience. Now I'm like, "Daaaaang! You weren't kidding!"
One of the most challenging things for me has been parenting in front of other people. I always jokingly say to my children when they start acting up in front of someone else, "Don't make me parent you in front of [insert person here]!" This is my slacker way of begging my kids to behave while simultaneously offering comic relief and warning the bystander that things might not be pretty if my kids keep acting up.
The thing about parenting with an audience is that the audience usually has an opinion on how the situation should be handled, and I can almost guarantee that I will not do what the audience thinks I should do (with that said, I have been the audience for other people's parenting many a time, and I am guilty of silent criticism. We all do it, which is why I don't want to parent my kids in front of other people. It's so much easier to have the "right" answers when you're the outsider looking in).
Take this scenario, for example:
I am at the park with some acquaintances and their children when one of the other mothers turns to me and says, "Your son is climbing the tree."
Does she expect me to tell him not to climb the tree? I mull over this for a minute, wondering if there is any reason I shouldn't let Nicky climb the tree, but frankly, I don't care if he climbs the tree as long as he's not damaging it.
I smile and say, "Yep. He's a good climber." Turns out, this mother does not let her children climb trees, and she wants me to make my son get out of the tree so her kids won't want to climb it, too.
Which of us is supposed to compromise?
And then there's this:
We are at a large extended family gathering with loads of small children. People are preparing the final details of potluck lunch, and we'll be eating any minute. There is a large stack of plates at one end of the table. Several kids are grabbing plates and using them as frisbees. None of the mothers are bothered by this. I see Nicky grab a plate, and I intervene, explaining to him that they are not our plates. We did not pay for them, and we should not waste them. We need to make sure that there are enough plates for all of the people to use for lunch.
Meanwhile, another little kid overhears me and goes running to his mom crying because I told my kid he couldn't throw paper plates (I said nothing to this other child, mind you). So the other mother (who, of course, is a relative) picks her son up and takes him (and his paper plate) away from me to play.
And there I sit. The only mother who won't let my kid throw BRAND SPANKING NEW, UNUSED paper plates THAT WE DID NOT PAY FOR. And need I mention that we're outside in the mountains, and that all of these frisbee plates are making large puffs of black mountain dirt each time they land?
I can't help but wonder where to find the balance in all of this. Sometimes I am the lenient mother; the one who lets my children climb trees, take off their shoes at the park, and eat off the ground at Disneyland.* Other times I am the strict mother; one who won't let my kids throw paper plates at a potluck.
I mention eating off the ground at Disneyland because it comes from a real experience. We were there with my brother-in-law, and my kids spilled a little container of goldfish. They swiftly started eating them off the ground, and my nephew joined right in. My brother-in-law dove toward the kids in a panic, shouting, "No, don't eat those!" Scotty turned to him, and said, "It's cool, they can eat off the ground." I was in sheer panic over how this was going to play out. I was surprised when my brother-in-law took a deep breath, and with much pain, turned to his own children and said, "Okay, kids. Today we eat off the ground." And then they joyfully finished cleaning up the goldfish.
This story both relieves me and stresses me out. It relieves me because my brother-in-law made a choice that made all our lives easier, but it stresses me out because I know that he bent one of his own family rules, and he probably spent the next six months worrying that his kids had contracted a terminal illness.
I realize that every family has different values and expectations for behaviors, but I don't always know how to handle things when we are in a situation where we have one rule and another family has a different rule, and we're in an environment that puts us at odds with one another. It always feels like one of us has to bend to the other's ways, and I don't like negotiating my parenting with other people. My solution is usually to tell my kids, "Their mom will take care of them, and I will take care of you," but that doesn't do much to soothe the tension of the situation, and it doesn't work in every situation. Sometimes it feels like tyranny.
*Our own food that we drop. Although I can't say I would deny them a perfectly good churro if one happened to by lying on the ground close by. It's like finding four bucks in my pocket.
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