Raising a Family

Published in The Broomfield Enterprise, 11/12/07

Years ago, as a new mother, I had moments of self-perceived superiority over my husband when it came to making decisions for, and about, our child.

My resolve to follow “mother’s intuition” outweighed and trumped all outside forces. I even went so far as to shower pity upon the man misguided enough to assume his care could be comparable to mine, gleefully telling friends and family about his parenting mishaps.

Mishaps that to me were incomprehensible mistakes, such as one midnight hour transfer of our crying first-born to the recipient of the next wakeful shift. Taking hold of our discontented baby, I felt something unexpected inside his diaper and–like a red-nosed clown pulling the never-ending scarf from his mouth–I drew out a long, primary-colored cord, to which a child’s cassette-recorder microphone was attached. My face twisted in anguish as I pictured my husband changing our baby’s diaper in the middle of the night and including any arbitrary items that just happened to be on the changing table at the time.

“He’s lucky he didn’t get the whole recorder in there,” he said, yawning at my judgmental glare and padding into bed for a few hours of sleep before heading to work.

From driving off with expensive baby gear on the roof of the car to letting our son stay up late without brushing his teeth, I was convinced that I knew what I was doing and that he, in fact, did not.

And then, one snowy day in upstate New York, I hit my husband’s car.

With my car.

While we were both driving…as I was following him to the repair shop to have his deer-jumped-out-from-nowhere bumper fixed.

And even though our entire family was in my car at the time (no one was hurt), my husband didn’t label me incompetent or dim-witted as I may have done to him. Instead, he gracefully acknowledged that we all make mistakes, that we all have lapses in judgment, that—though this particular car incident was a tough one to swallow–no one is immune to the slip ups, oversights and inaccuracies that make each of us “human”.

I slowly, but very surely, began to appreciate that all the focus I had spotlighted on my husband’s mistakes was my mind’s way of shadowing my own blunders.

A cassette recorder microphone folded into a diaper was not nearly as dangerous as what I had just done. And driving off with a brand new Baby Bjorn on the roof of our car not nearly as expensive.

Many years have gone by now, and I continue to learn from my husband’s effortless forgiveness of my faults. Better still, has been the realization that his ideas and intents for our family most often have significantly better outcomes than what would have occurred had I been the only one in charge of making the plans and decisions.

Every now and then, a glimpse of my “mother knows best” syndrome sparkles in my eye, and such was the case this summer when I impudently told my husband “no” to the tackle football league for which he wanted to sign up our oldest son. Ultimately, I saw the errors of my own self-importance and relented.

And, last weekend I watched my proud son stand in front of his team and receive a trophy with a confidence and self-respect he gained from accomplishing something he had previously assumed he couldn’t do—until his dad encouraged him to try.

Certainly, there are limits when it comes to accepting our partners “contributions”–I took over diapering duty while it lasted…and he’s taken over driving…forever…

But, we continue to grow as a result of our combined efforts and respect for each other’s roles and involvement in this life-long endeavor called “raising a family”.