Being a parent

Being a parent
The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard. —John Lennon
That was John Lennon. That is me, too.
I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have found being a parent a responsibility too big for my boots. I chose to be a parent, but I did not choose whatever came along with being one.
Being a parent is a serious job, and being a conscious one can only make things tougher. What is the right way to raise a child? Do we discover as we move along, or do we discover after we have made our mistakes? Does one clueless mistake make for horribly turned-out children or is it many mistakes put together? Will the one something that I say and do now have an impact on my child’s entire future? Can I undo what I have done once I have understood what was wrong? These are questions that can plague a conscious parent.
What seems acceptable behaviour to you may seem like misbehaviour to your friend. How much freedom is too much freedom? How much constraint is too much constraint? Some us try so hard to make sure that the children have more freedom than we did, or more restrictions than we did, that we end being like our own parents. Does that mean we are the kind of parents our parents were, consciously or unconsciously? Is that why our children are a reflection of who we are? Do we dislike in them what we dislike in ourselves? Are we worried they might end up with the flaws we so hate in ourselves?
It’s been almost nine years of parenting, and I still haven’t got it right. Every single day is a challenge, with each moment throwing up some parenting puzzle I struggle to solve, and by the time I am done, I am facing a new one. It doesn’t get any easier with horror tales of children being kidnapped, molested, put up on porn sites, stalked through e-mail, and finding out one fine day that the “nice uncle” down the street was an organ trader! It gets tougher as they go from toddlers to tweens to teens.

Abuse is a common word, a nightmare, and a disaster of a parenting hurdle. Drugs, sex, child, verbal, physical, mental—abuse is all around us. As parents, we always wonder if we can keep our children safe in world that is far from safe. How good a parent does one have to be to make a child grow into a responsible, mentally and physically healthy adult? It is a responsibility that parents choose to take and yet find no perfect way of going about it.
Is there any such thing as a perfect parent or a perfect child? The child wants a perfect parent, and the parents want a perfect child. That is the way it has always been and always will be. Some things we do, or do not do for our children will always be held against us. It is very long learning curve. We keep learning to be the right kind of parents until we breathe our last and yet might end up feeling some things could have been done differently.