Ah, Sally, what icy, dicey terrain you would have us gaze upon. Is any subject more loaded, more fraught, than how best to parent? I'm not sure anything could have prepared me for parenthood. Having worked as a nanny for several years, I thought I knew what there was to know: the rhythms of a toddler's day, the tricks to getting a fussy five-year-old to eat. But when it came to my own children, to the very relentlessness of them, to the sheer viscerality of my love, all that blood and milk, the sh*t and the wind, the physicality of it all, well it knocked me for six.
So, while I understand how some women feel motherhood gives them a lifetime membership to an exclusive club, I don't believe not having had children should preclude you from having an opinion. I say this with confidence. As the daughter of a lesbian I had three parents - my mother, my father, my other mother. My upbringing was a combined effort. And as a friend of both adopted children and adoptive parents, I know their familial bonds to be undeniable. To suggest you are a parent only if you have yourself sown the seed or personally carried the child is wrong. It would imply we we even can compare loves. That one love is more pure than another.
What bothers me is not so much the advice of those who have not, themselves, borne children, but the freeness with which so many make pronouncements on parenting. When I chose to feed/rock/sing my babies to sleep, there were those who told me with a terrible sort of glee in their eye that I was, "making a rod for my own back", and when I chose to leave my baby to cry to sleep, there were those who told me that they didn't want to worry me "but it can be harmful". Sometimes I've used sticker charts with my children. Sometimes I've screamed at them. Once I sought cranial osteopathy. Sometimes something works and then it doesn't. The only consistency has been that no behaviour, neither good, nor bad, has lasted. I made a decision early on that I would offer parenting advice only when it was sought.
In your words
In the past four months Maureen has lost her husband, retired and been badly injured. "Planned and unplanned 'pockets of joy'," she writes, "are what have kept me sane. From an unexpected invitation to the movies, to the anticipation of my first granddaughter in a couple of months, these are what keep me from completely falling into the abyss of grief and sadness." As for Tony, he reckons the best recipe for happiness he's ever heard is, "Someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to."
