Somewhat Mindful Parenting

The real bummer of parenting is that once you start getting good at it, your skills are already obsolete. By the time I started to really get the hang of diapers, my daughter was out of them. Like most parts of parenting, that was a blessing and a curse, and I spent the next few months wondering why parents ever decided to deal with potty training children in the first place. Better, I thought at the time, to just keep them in diapers until fifth or sixth grade, at which point peer pressure would solve the problem.

The same has been true of just about every stage of my daughter’s life to date. Once I finally figured out the nuances of elementary school and navigating the relationships between her friends and their parents, we were at a different school. Middle school posed its own challenges. While I can’t say that I rocked it as a parent during those years, I can say that my daughter and her mother and I all came out alive, if not unscathed.

High school will be a different animal and full of whatever fresh hell kids are cooking up for themselves these days. Whether it’s huffing paint thinner or surviving the next wave of TikTok challenges, I’ll help my daughter navigate the years as best as I can.

Like every other portion of her life, I’m sure that, by the time I think I’ve figured out what I’m doing, it will be over. Maybe she’ll be off to college or, if she wants to land a job after she graduates, a welding program. That too will also pass, and then my daughter will be out on her own, without the benefit of my occasionally dubious but always well-intentioned wisdom.

That’s the real tragedy of parenthood, as I may have mentioned earlier. That all of my knowledge and experience will be outdated by the time I really know what I’m doing. I suppose I could adopt or volunteer at a Boys and Girls Club, but that seems like a lot of work. Instead, I’ll have to wait until my daughter has children of her own.

Of course, I’ll be mindful when I give her advice on how to raise them, knowing from experience that it will likely be ignored. Then, like many parents before me, I’ll try not to pass judgment when things go south. Instead, I’ll simply take satisfaction in knowing that if my daughter had listened to me, things would have turned out differently.

About the Author

derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.