Some years ago, before I started the chocolate business, the children asked if I would write down some of my thoughts about parenting. I’m pretty sure they wanted a written record to show their therapists. At the time, one of my peripatetic investment banker friends wanted email updates from home as she traveled the world so I pounded out a few chapters in between sending and receiving emails to and from Asia; it was February in Houston and there was only rain so both activities passed the time. As you will see, it’s still a work in progress. Feel free to send me your own thoughts for future chapters. As Bon Qui Qui says, “We can do it your way, but don’t get crazy.”
Foreward
If a license were required to have children, with a certain number of prerequisites to be completed before accreditation, there would be no need for this book. People more learned than I could teach others who, if they didn’t get it, could actually flunk parenting and be judged “not yet ready” which, in many instances, would be a blessing. I’m not a therapist, a counselor, a member of the clergy, a teacher, coach or social worker. I’m just somebody’s mother and these are some of the things I’ve learned along the way.
Chapter One: When you’re it
Enjoy your youth. Go to school, finish school. Read. Travel, if you can. Loll about. Do some really nice things for other people. Rent. On more occasions than not, be recreationally irresponsible. Stay out late dancing. Dream in the bathtub. Develop an identity and hang on to it. Figure out what you believe in and polish it up. Put yourself first and then, slowly, begin to leave behind the childish thought that you should come first. My mother says having children is a lifetime sentence.
Chapter Two: Pregnancy
By 2013, 50% of all obstetricians/gynecologists will be women. Find one.
Chapter Three: Uncle Wiggly
When my first child was about 3 months old, I came home from work to find her crying in the arms of her babysitter, Jane Sewell. I presumed as my mother and grandmother had, that the baby was “hungry, tired or needed to be changed”. Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, as we began to call her because we remembered Uncle Wiggly, was not rocking or patting her or singing. She was just rubbing the baby’s head from front to back. She looked up at me and asked, “How do we know they don’t have headaches?” That question changed my thinking about babies and parenting. You might as well believe that babies are just small human beings who, unlike us, cannot tell us where it hurts, what feels good or what frightens them. It makes sense and it will come in handy. The notion of empathy that Jane suggested is the one that makes you be on time for carpool, if not always, at least almost always no matter what.
