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I get frustrated by the minutia of parenting declarations sometimes.

Participation trophies make our children grown up with a false and heightened sense of self-worth!

Putting our daughters in pink and our boys on tball teams before they’re old enough to ask for either is enforcing gender stereotypes!

HFCS and Processed Cheese will increase the chances that our children are obese and depressed!

Breast is Best!

Crying it out is the only way a child learns to comfort himself!

I believe there is truth in all of these statements, but these blanket declarations like someone knows FOR A FACT that this one thing is true for all children in all families…they make me crazy. Every child is different. Every family is different. I nursed NikkiZ perfectly and she would never take a bottle. Both my boys were supplemented with formula, but for different reasons. I used to be able to let E play by himself without coming back to disaster, if I leave Wes in a room alone for 5 minutes he’ll tear apart furniture and break 12 bones. Nikki puts on her princess dresses to play t-ball outside. Wes eats raw fruit by the truckload and Nikki prefers her chicken processed from a drive-thru.

I wish there was a way of knowing what was the exact right move for every kid, but there’s not. And acting like anyone knows better than anyone else, no matter how trained they are or how perfect their offspring turn out, is ridiculous. Not a day goes by when I don’t remind myself of this fact.

I read a brilliant blog entry today talking about how our parenting decisions may or may not affect our children. You need to read it…NOW. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Of course whether we get it all right or all wrong doesn’t matter. It’s their story, and they are sketching the outline of it every day. We have no control over the way they remember it later on. Will they remember only the days when I was cranky and frazzled and couldn’t get them to class on time because I locked my keys in the car but didn’t know they were in the car so I spent an hour stomping around like dumbzilla RAWR I SUCK AT STUFF upturning furniture and emptying drawers and CAN’T FIND KEYS and retracing my stomping steps through the apartment over and over? Or will they remember finding a giant limb in the back yard and draping sheets over it to make a fort, and eating strawberries, and laughing at their hilarious parents’ hilarious jokes? Will they be glad that we homeschooled? Will they be grateful for our choices, or resentful? We can’t know.

AMEN. Let me say it again. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. This is the point I arrive at whenever I start to doubt myself and my decisions. Like, when I hear the latest news about the next thing that is going to cause my child a lifetime of health issues. Oh, Crap. That mix mac-n-cheese is bad for my kid because of some color or dye or processed something or another? I’ve fed it to them everyday for 15 years. I suck. But then I remember…it doesn’t matter. I do the best I can, with the information I have in that moment, and the rest is up to my kid. When he/she grows up, if they want to tell the story of their childhood as “awesome” or “awful” – they will be able to tell it exactly how they want by choosing certain bits to include in their story. It’s going to eventually be up to them. I look back on my childhood in the following way: I was raised by a single father who was the most wonderful father a girl could have asked for. But let me be honest, there are other ways I could have spun that story. I could have had the same amount of proof to support several other not-so positive narratives. We all can. We all do. So it’s going to be up to our kids in the end…what story they want to tell.

One time I was talking to my Dad about something and I brought up the show A-Team. “Remember, you loved that show! We used to watch it together as a family!” To which he replied, “Kim, I hated that show. I watched it with you guys because you all liked it but I hated it.”

WHAT THE HELL? It was one of the most shocking revelations from my childhood…I kid you not.

I had built a big chunk of my childhood narrative around my Dad, brother, and I watching A-Team together because Dad loved it. Turns out? WRONG. So very wrong. Not only did he not love it, he hated it. And yet, I told the story to random friends throughout my whole life about how I remember on really cold nights, we would cuddle up in front of the one baseboard heater in our house and watch A-Team with our Dad because he loved it. It was a great story that painted the picture of the childhood I liked to talk about. And it was wrong.

So, yeah. We do our best. But I can’t bring myself to freak out over the little things. Hell, I can’t even bring myself to freak out over the big things a lot of the times. Sometimes I yell. Sometimes I don’t and count to 10 instead. I don’t let my teen do things on school nights, but I have been known to allow a co-ed sleepover. All of my kids have cried themselves to sleep at some point in time, but I’ve also spent sleepless night rocking/singing to each one trying to help them sleep. I let them watch tween shows for awhile, and then changed my mind after deciding it was making them rotten. I just try my best in each moment, even if the best at that moment is not the best the moment before. And I always remember that no matter how bad I screw up, or how awesome I am, this is still going to be my kids’ story to tell. And they’ll tell it how they want. I may be the villain, I may be the superhero, or I may be just some ancillary character that sometimes made cake poppers for school functions.

I just hope they remember the important things, like what TV shows I liked. Because obviously I failed Dad on that one.