I am fascinated by
the sports of gymnastics and figure skating. It’s not because I have any
background in these areas. I could never do the straddle roll to pass beginning
gymnastics, and my favorite part of ice skating is the hot cocoa afterwards. In
spite of my limited talents — or perhaps because of them — I love to watch
athletes defy gravity and leap, spin and flip their way to the awards podium.
I can’t say I
completely understand the scoring in either of these sports, but I do
understand the oft-used phrase, “degree of difficulty.” The more complicated a
routine is, the higher the possible score the athlete can get if he or she does
it perfectly.
I have decided we
need to apply this phrase to parenting. Every child equals one point, or one
degree of difficulty. Two additional points are awarded for each child age four
and under. Parenting while pregnant earns an additional point, as does
parenting anyone who is not yet sleeping through the night.
Therefore, my friend Carol, who has four
children — ages one, three, five and
seven, is working with a degree of difficulty of 8. My own degree of
difficulty, now that we’ve added a one-year-old foster daughter, is up to 5,
having been recently down to 2, when we just had the boys — ages 6 and 9.
My friend Patty,
whose five children are now between 6 and 12, once had a degree of difficulty
of 10, when she was pregnant in addition to having 4-year-old twins, a
two-year-old and a one-year-old.
I don’t have
preteens or teens yet, but from what I’ve heard, they may require an additional
point of difficulty, just as the very young children do. And teenage boy
drivers may add even more, just as they do to insurance premiums.
Degrees of
difficulty would be helpful for two reasons. First, because they would be
applied to everything a parent does, they would turn small daily successes into
major triumphs. “Did you see that, ladies and gentlemen? She’s going grocery
shopping with her children. That’s a degree of difficulty of 8, remember. Look
at that. She’s actually moving down the aisle. She’s keeping the three-year-old
away from that display of sugared cereal, and handing a cracker to the baby —
all this while getting the best price on spaghetti noodles and answering the
seven-year-old’s questions about dinosaurs.”
Degrees of
difficulty would also be good because they would be a concrete way for parents
to gauge when their lives would get easier. “Hmm. When the baby starts sleeping
through the night and Johnny turns five, my degree of difficulty will drop by
two.”
I think the main
reason I am in favor of degrees of difficulty, however, is that conscientious
parents are often too hard on themselves. I’ll go over to a friend’s house who
has three children six and under (degree of difficulty, 7) and she’ll apologize
because there are toys on the floor and the kitchen’s a mess. But her crazy
climbing 17-month-old is alive and relatively unbruised, and so is her
three-year-old, who has been known to wander away from the house and down the
street. Toys on the floor or not, we need to call it a successful morning.
Perhaps it’s my
contact with the foster care system that also makes me want to publicly give
voice to the difficulty of parenting. I know firsthand that what most parents
consider the basics — keeping their children clothed, fed and attended to, all
while making a living — can be an insurmountable task for some parents. I’ve
seen firsthand that a parent can love a child and still neglect him or her.
That the all-consuming task of parenting can become downright impossible in the
face of addiction. My degree of difficulty scale did not even include parenting
while in poverty, parenting while living in a dangerous neighborhood or
parenting while in an abusive relationship. At some point, the degree of
difficulty becomes so high that some parents give up.
And if parents are
the athletes, we are also the judges. We judge each other and we judge
ourselves. We judge our next door neighbor, whose degree of difficulty may be
similar to our own, and we judge those who live across town, who are dealing
with degrees of difficulty that we cannot even imagine.
But the thing that
we too often forget as we’re balancing and leaping (and judging), is that
parenting is not a competition. In ice skating, athletes may not rush out onto
the ice to help each other. And a gymnast certainly may not lend a supporting
hand to a teammate about to fall off the beam. But parents aren’t bound by
these rules. As we acknowledge our own degree of difficulty — and forgive
ourselves for our missteps — we must simultaneously reach out to other parents.
We must cheer for each other and be ready to spot without being asked. And
after a fall, we must remind each other just how complicated the routine of
parenting really is.