Once upon a time there was a beautiful, intelligent and skinny young woman who entered graduate school. Within the walls of academia, she drank up the psychological theories and diagnostic tools the professors had to offer. She learned solution focused therapy, transactional analysis, group therapy tools, and she discovered herself within the pages of the DSM-IIIR; Axis II (everybody does, by the way). She drank up all the books and professors had to offer. She knew she was going to be fabulous in everything she did because she was beautiful, intelligent, skinny and now very educated.
Upon graduation, job offers were abundant. She worked at a psychologist's office doing group and individual therapy, at a group home doing the same, but finally settled on the career that offered benefits; the public school system. She was wonderful at her job because she knew all the answers. She had studied her books and got straight A's during school. She also knew that she was going to be the best mother the world had ever seen. How couldn't she be?
20 years have passed. She no longer turns heads with her beauty, skinny is a relative term, and she can't remember completing a sentence, let alone being referred to as "intelligent." All the textbooks she had memorized have long been forgotten. The DSM has remained with her as she groans and laments to her husband that one of her children is "Oppositional Defiant" or "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder." (Or, on occasion, a neighbor is "Borderline Personality.")
What about all those theories that would help her be the most outstanding mother? Out the window. On a few lucid occasions, this mother does talk to her herself (perfectly normal and don't let anybody tell you it's not). "You have been a 'critical parent.' It's time to be the 'nurturing parent.'"
The moral of the story: Parenthood evens out the playing field. We're all inept.
*Disclaimer - This story is completely fictional. Any and all similarities to author's real life is coincidental. Author maintains that she never, ever loses her cool, yells at her children, or retreats to her closet in her bedroom where her children don't find her. She always gives logical and natural consequences to her children when (and if) they act out.
Upon graduation, job offers were abundant. She worked at a psychologist's office doing group and individual therapy, at a group home doing the same, but finally settled on the career that offered benefits; the public school system. She was wonderful at her job because she knew all the answers. She had studied her books and got straight A's during school. She also knew that she was going to be the best mother the world had ever seen. How couldn't she be?
20 years have passed. She no longer turns heads with her beauty, skinny is a relative term, and she can't remember completing a sentence, let alone being referred to as "intelligent." All the textbooks she had memorized have long been forgotten. The DSM has remained with her as she groans and laments to her husband that one of her children is "Oppositional Defiant" or "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder." (Or, on occasion, a neighbor is "Borderline Personality.")
What about all those theories that would help her be the most outstanding mother? Out the window. On a few lucid occasions, this mother does talk to her herself (perfectly normal and don't let anybody tell you it's not). "You have been a 'critical parent.' It's time to be the 'nurturing parent.'"
The moral of the story: Parenthood evens out the playing field. We're all inept.
*Disclaimer - This story is completely fictional. Any and all similarities to author's real life is coincidental. Author maintains that she never, ever loses her cool, yells at her children, or retreats to her closet in her bedroom where her children don't find her. She always gives logical and natural consequences to her children when (and if) they act out.
Ditto- ditto-- ditto. And I still have a few years to go. Just a side note: Your still one HOT MAMA! Don't you forget it!
ReplyDeleteBut I'm not the woman who does triathlons. My little sister does. She's the skinny, intelligent, pretty and educated mother of 3.
ReplyDeleteI am so relieved you put that disclaimer in or I would have thought you were describing me. Thank you for keping my secret safe.
ReplyDelete