Maybe Baby
Hygiene Chronicles | October 25A month? I haven’t posted here in a month. Geez, where has the time gone?
Have you ever tried to describe how you parent to someone? If you ever tried to really encapsulate your thoughts, you’ll realize it’s not easy to cover the nitty-gritty of all it takes.
This past weekend, my partner and I were part of a speaking panel for a group called Maybe Baby. It’s a service that educates gay couples on the different ways to become a parent. Throughout the day, various people spoke about adoption, surrogacy, and in vitro-fertilization. My partner and I spoke about co-parenting.
As I mentioned in my introductory post, we co-parent our son with a lesbian couple who live 15 minutes away. He lives between the two houses with a bedroom in each and we each have different roles and responsibilities.
As we spoke to this group about our situation and routines, it occurred to me how tough it was to truly describe not just our parenting style, but parenting in general. There are no fast and hard rules to being a mom or dad. In a way, so much of it is trial and error.
We’d get questions from the prospective parents and each time response would begin with, “Well, this is what has worked for us.” It was funny to watch some of them taking notes, as if they’d refer back to them during the course of their parenting.
In our closing, we both just acknowledged that neither of us truly had the answers on how to parent, but we could advise on how to be parent. “It’s about listening, adjusting, guessing, forgiving, and finally realizing that once you have it figured out, it’s changes by morning.”
We certainly didn’t wow these folks with our insights, but we did offer just one more option in this crazy world of parenting. However, it was exciting to see the enthusiasm on the faces and in their voices about the thoughts of someday becoming moms and dads.
[…] Over at the BlogFathers, Hygiene Chronicles summarizes (”Maybe Baby“) what parenting is all about: …how to be parent. “It’s about listening, adjusting, guessing, forgiving, and finally realizing that once you have it figured out, it’s changed by morning.“ […]
It’s hard to say what’s right, but all too many times it’s easy to see what’s wrong. We don’t all agree on that, however, making the discussion all the more complicated.
I just attended a ‘daddy conference’ this weekend, and came away knowing they were right when they said ‘the most important thing is to keep talking about it’. Women do it all the time. Men get into stupid discussions of everything BUT parenting.
Nature and nurture are tough opponents to defeat, but we need to fight back and open up to one another. As Benjamin Franklin stated “If we don’t hang together, we’ll most assuredly hang separately.”