A Decade in Parenting and I'm No Expert
A decade. I can’t believe it. My son turned 10 on the weekend and so did my life as a parent.
It’s a little strange when the first object of your parental obsession grows so large that you can no longer pick him up and his feet seem like some strange floppy attachment to his legs.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell floats the idea of the 10,000 hour rule. That you can be an expert in something after putting in 10,000 hours. Well that makes me an expert on Aaron. Except that you can’t be an expert on a moving target. I was an expert yesterday, but tomorrow I won’t be again.
Parenting is the only job that you can never master. Once you have figured out one stage and one crisis, along comes something completely different.
And double digits – 10 is a big change. Aaron is quite proud to tell me that he is a tween, and you know what comes after that right? Just take away the W. He is wise and cynical beyond his years and just on the cusp of understanding that the world is not quite what it seems.
But I don’t want to write a maudlin, the years go by too fast post. Instead, I will just report on the breakfast conversation of three ten year old boys, straddled between the world of naïve childhood and cynical teendom.
“You know babies can come out of their mother’s stomach. Or you know, the other thing.” Says Friend A.
“What thing?” says Friend B.
“You know…” as he casts his eyes down.
“How does that happen? It would have to grow to be enormous…” says friend B.
“I don’t know maybe it’s some kind of doctor magic.”
“All I know is my dad told me that I came out through the zippe in my mom’s stomach,” adds in Aaron. “That means I didn’t have go through you know, down there. Phew.”
“Wow, you are so lucky!” say the two friends, shaking as if they had cooties.
It’s an amazing thing about parenting, you never quite know where it is going to take you: crying in the bathroom or laughing hysterically in the kitchen.
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