Parenting by Danielle Johnson (Inspired by the opening of Eleven by Sandra Cisneros)
What they never tell you about parenting is all the stuff that comes with it - tennis shoes and crocs and slides and Friday Folders and lunch boxes and deodorant and hoodies and socks and Shopkins. You are pretty sure your kids drink hand soap and eat toilet paper as often as you run out of each. And even if you do laundry every day you are never caught up and the socks will never equally pair up even when you think you have washed every dirty thing in the house. And when you empty the dishwasher there is always another load waiting to go in. You never feel caught up. You never feel like a real parent. Instead it’s like a game of house that is never as much fun as it was when you were seven and you never really feel good at it.
Like some days you wonder if you are a failure at life because you can’t even get a four-year-old to stay in bed and you want to cry because it feels like your shift was supposed to end at nine so you could squeeze in one selfish and exhausted hour of Netflix but instead you are in the hallway begging your child to just fall asleep. No one really tells you that parents can’t clock out.
What they also never tell you is that you want your kids problems to not exist because problems means hurt and the last thing you want is for someone you love that much to hurt. So when your kid tells you about someone being mean to them at school you brush it off or undermine it. This makes your child think you don’t care about their problems, but really it just shows that you consumed their assumed fragility when you first felt that baby soft infant skin or saw their scrunched up face cry for the first time. You would do anything to keep them from ever feeling pain. But you know their pain is the only way they can have a full life - and you want that even more than you want their safety and innocence. Their best life becomes your driving force. That’s just how parenting is.
Excerpt From Eleven by Sandra Cisneros
What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you don't feel eleven at all. You feel like you're still ten. And you are --underneath the year that makes you eleven.
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you're three, and that's okay. That's what I tell Mama when she's sad and needs to cry. Maybe she's feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.
That's how being eleven years old is. You don't feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don't feel smart eleven, not until you're almost twelve. That's the way it is.
