Maybe it’s more like I’m running out of steam by the time I get around to writing. Night time and the lead up to it ain’t what it used to be. Abby and I were talking today about what makes parenting hard or easy; like most things in life, it’s expectations. I had written out a few things you’d do better not to expect, but it came off as whinging and I hate it when fellow parents do that so I don’t intend to do it myself, certainly not here on this holy of holys, the blog.
The path to satisfaction and even Happiness while parenting, it seems to me, from within two months of the project’s beginning, is understanding the difference between goodness and pleasure. Our goal as parents is no longer the maximization of our pleasure, but the maximization of Roby’s good.
I’ve argued before that nobody’s goal should rightly be the maximization of pleasure and that parenting is a goodly way to avoid that bias; this take is a bit of a zoom in on that. Once you’re in the parenting bit the proper understanding of pleasure and good doesn’t happen over night, it doesn’t happen automatically. It happens the way all habits happen, which is to say, it happens the same way all virtues happen, through practice. You’ve got to cut a groove into the vinyl of your life.
You know how to get to Carnegie Hall, don’t you?
Every day and in every situation, granular choices decide our reality as well as our perspective on it, and not always in that order. Deciding that we’re Parents with a capital P, and that is our Priority with a capital P, not our comfort or our TV shows or our phones, makes the notion of bouncing on a ball for an hour go down a lot easier.
We all know that our children are the most important thing in our lives, nobody would aruge against that, but really naming that and communicating it and agreeing on it with your parenter makes things easier somehow.
I have a lot to learn, and a lot of groove to cut, in anycase.
