Here’s one thing I have learned about myself: I like to know what “the best thing” is. I want to know the best way to discipline, the best way to get my kids to eat healthily, the best way to budget, the best food diet, and the best products. I spend a lot of time reading and researching and learning to try and figure out the “best” method, product, or practice.
Which is why I find it so difficult when “best” things seem to contradict.
Here’s an example— having an orderly house vs. spending time with the kids.
On one hand, and extremely pervasive in social media right now, you have the emphasis towards pushing all chores and work aside and “breathing in your babies.” The memes and short videos will remind you, at the cost of great guilt, that your babies are growing up fast and if you don’t soak them in right now, they will be off to college tomorrow. This parenting philosophy will encourage you to do dishes another day, revel in the Cheerio crumbs dusting your floor, and hold your babies and read to your preschoolers and breathe in their sweet little smells.
On the other hand, you have the pushback. The reality is that while I can push off dishes and ignore Cheerio crumbs for a day, if I do that every day, our house will soon look like a version of Hoarders and mice will gleefully dwell with us. You have the generations before us where moms worked around the household constantly (like my great-grandmother did). And you have books that encourage you to have your children take on chores and responsibilities to avoid the entitlement that defines so many young people these days.
The other night, I expressed my frustration to my husband: “I want to do both of these things, but I can’t do both. Now that there are three kids, between making meals and cleaning up meals and nursing and diaper changes and naps and whatever else, I feel like I have to pick— parenting philosophy #1 or parenting philosophy #2? And since I like them both, but they feel so opposite, what do I do?”
And so we talked about the concept of “managing tensions.” That is, you can have two good ideas/philosophies, and you have to manage the tension between them. They don’t fit neat and tidy on top of one another. You can’t completely ignore your house. You certainly can’t completely ignore your children. Somehow you have to tightrope on this middle ground between them both.
For me, I’m learning to let go of total order and embrace more chaos in housekeeping, because I’ve noticed that even if the only thing I do all day is clean up, it still keeps getting dirty. Instead, I have a few quick cleaning/tidy sessions throughout the day and save the big pieces for later. And that allows me to have time to also snuggle my babies and read books and breathe them in. Some days my house gets uber clean and my kids play more independently; some days my house goes to utter chaos and we build a lot of play dough together.
This is managing tensions. It’s realizing (for people who think like me, anyway) that there is no perfect solution, no best practice that eliminates tension, that eliminates difficulty. But this concept has been freeing for me because with it I have realized that there is not a specific mark that I’m aiming at that I keep missing. There’s no formula (20 minutes cleaning and 20 minutes snuggles) that equals ‘best mom practice.’ So when I can begin to let go of this idea that there is some perfect scenario, some perfect routine/schedule/method, then I can begin to live a bit more. To walk the tension knowing that I’m doing a good job walking it because I’m recognizing it and I’m doing the best I can to hold up two good ideals.
Are there parenting philosophies that you hold onto that seem to contradict? Could there actually be a way that they fit together; a way that you can hold them in tension in a way that’s freeing instead of crushing? I would love to know more examples of this!
