One of the interesting tensions about having a kid, our kid, was the perception of the two parents. My wife thought she had a pretty good handle on it, whereas I felt I knew nothing.
Okay, that’s a bit hyperbolic. My wife knew there would be some learning curve, but that she’d “get” it. I watched my nieces and babysat a couple of other kids, so I figured that I wouldn’t totally wreck a child – or I hoped not.
The moment I realized we, as a couple, didn’t know something was when we both failed at swaddling. Hospital nurses tried to teach us, but we both sucked as students.
I think my wife was shocked that she couldn’t “get” it. My response was more nuanced; I figured that if I failed at origami, I’d also fail to master swaddling. It’s not that I was HAPPY that my wife and I didn’t catch on to it; that child had powerful lungs. But it did make me less incompetent. Or we were equally incompetent.
But in so many other ways, she was and is a very good mom.
Trudy
Sometimes, I think about my mom. She worked outside of the home, often leaving us in the hands of her superstitious mother. How did she feel about that? Did she wish she could have afforded to stay home like many of my friends’ moms? It is true that I knew some of my friends’ moms more than my friends got to know my mom.
(Interestingly, my dad got to see my classmates, and vice versa, when I was in 3rd to 6th grade because he came to my classroom every semester to sing folk songs.)
I often got the sense that my mom thought she was still “figuring things out.” It could have been a function of growing up with her grandmother, mother, aunt, and at least one uncle, who seemed overly protective, I’ve heard. Since my mom died 15 years ago, I can’t ask her, alas.