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But I Read Mothering, So Why aren't my Children Perfect?
by Teresa Pitman
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"I don't get it," my sister says to me. "I breastfed for over a year, carried her around when everyone else was using strollers, fed her only home-made baby food - and now she's twelve and she's incredibly rude and sassy. What went wrong?"

"That's nothing," my friend says. "I breastfed my son for three years and homeschooled him until he was eight. Now he wants to drop out of high school at sixteen so he can become a professional wrestler. A wrestler!! What did I do wrong?"

And I remember the time when my eldest son wanted to use my car for the entire weekend to drive to another city several hours away. I said no, not wanting to be without my only vehicle for that long. Matthew was furious with me, and that anger at me led to a huge fight with his sister that culminated in his breaking the door to her room after she slammed it in his face. As I contemplated the damage to the door, wondering what our landlord would say and where we'd find the funds to repair it, I couldn't help wondering where I'd gone wrong as a parent.

Here's what I think now. Our kids ARE perfect. They are perfectly themselves, perfectly human, perfectly normal. They make mistakes. They have strong emotions. They have challenges to deal with in other areas of their lives that they may respond to well, or that they might struggle with.

And if we look honestly into our hearts, we have to acknowledge that - no matter how carefully we read every article in Mothering - we make mistakes, too, some big and some small. I think I was wrong to have given Matthew a flat "no" on the car issue. When he wanted to borrow it on another occasion, we came up with a compromise: he could take the car but in exchange he paid my taxi fares when I needed to go somewhere while he was away. That felt fair to both of us.

As my first child, Matthew's probably suffered through more of my mistakes than anyone else. In fact, he sometimes jokes that the younger kids should send him thank you cards since I learned so much with him.

The biggest problem with expecting perfection, though, is that it defines our children as "products." It's as though we believe we were given lumps of clay to shape or carve according to our own desires, and that any deviations from the vision we had shows a lack of talent in the sculptor.

But our children are not lumps of clay or products of our parenting. They are themselves. One of my friends who has ten children tells me she's been astonished each time she's given birth by how different they are even as newborns. One responds to being held snugly by struggling, while another relaxes and falls asleep. One sits happily in a baby seat while mom does the dishes, while another has to be held close to a parent's body to feel secure.

Some of those individual traits will mesh easily with our own wishes, and with the ideals of our community. Some won't. How we feel about this probably has a lot to do with how we were raised ourselves.

I remind my friend whose son wants to be a wrestler about this. While wrestling may not be the career she would have chosen for him, perhaps it's the right one for him, at least for now. In fact, I think it's extremely positive that he's grown up confident in his ability to make his own choices, even when they are different than those of his family and his peers.

So why aren't our kids perfect? Maybe the problem is in our definition of perfect. If we're trying to mold our children into something we want them to be, we're doomed from the start. For me, the joy and the anguish of parenting is in watching my children discover who they are, in expressing their unique qualities, in making mistakes and learning from them.

Teresa Pitman is the mother of three adult children: Matthew, Lisa and Dan. She is also a new grandmother. Teresa lives in Ontario, Canada.