I woke up sometime this week to a profound quote posted by a friend on Facebook. I can’t remember the exact words but I remember that the anonymous quote was referring to how annoying it is that some people can do anything for anyone but can’t be parents to their own children. How profound and also, how absurd. In the comments section, the comments moved from talking about people who sire children and don’t want to take responsibility to the parents who are in their parents’ lives but hardly ever make time. I don’t know about you but I am always struggling with balancing work, parenting and also living my life. I fear being the kind of parent who is not hands on with their child but also I am worried about losing myself into the whole parenting thing. I want it all but making sure that the job, the child and the social lifestyle all get their dues is sometimes hard. One would argue that the child should take precedent. That’s true but I made a promise to myself a long time ago that while I will try my best to be the best parent I can be, I will not let the sacrifices that I have to make also stop me from living a full life. I do think that in the long run, failure to live a full life has the potential of getting in the way of good parenting because an unhappy mother is not really a good mother. Are we together? Writing this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend recently. He was asking me what kind of children we would have been if our parents were the kind of parents we are today. Well, I think the comparison is unfair. What was required of our parents, especially our mothers, is not what is required of us today. We are have 8 to 5pm, sometimes even later jobs. We have bills to pay. We have school to attend and on top of this, we are required to be perfect in our relationships with our partners and children. On the other hand, most of our mothers were housewives. I am by no means trying to undermine the work that they put into raising us. It was a lot and they are the reason we are who we are today but their dynamics were different. They were in charge of the home and no one expected them to be educated, to go to work so that they can split the bills at home and no one pushed them to add more classes to what they had already taken. My submission to our conversation came from something that I read recently. We cannot raise our children the way we were raised because the world that we were raised for does not exist anymore. There seems to be so much to do and so little to do. Someone needs a new invention; I need more time in my day.
