Jen and I don’t frequent Mimi Smartypant‘s weblog much anymore (for various reasons), but I happened to look at her site the other day and came upon this astute observation:

Things are kind of hard right now. I feel a dreadful split (oh great, now I am the one being all Lord Byron/heavy metal dramatic. Dude. Get over myself.) between two goals: Keep Life Humming Along and Big Picture. Sometimes they intersect; obviously all this working and health-insurance-having and fiscal responsibility is kind of Big Picture-ish. But more often they don’t, quite, exactly, such as when you work all day and then come home to a tired toddler and a frazzled husband, and everyone has to eat and small girl has to bathe and be played with and put to bed, and somewhere in there we are supposed to be teaching her values and demonstrating our love and affection and developing her rapidly growing brain and oh, also having fun. It is not really the work/home divide that I am bitching about: LT and I have each stayed home with Nora all day, many days, and the same difficulty exists vis-?-vis the split between keeping her alive, fed, changed, healthy and teaching her everything she needs to know. I know (believe me, I know) that children are learning all the time—that they learn love, relationships, emotions, and attitudes about work and leisure and discipline and frustration just by observing their parents actually perform all that mundane stuff. BUT ****, THAT IS EVEN SCARIER. Because you can’t just take time out from mundane frustration to teach your toddler about life; she will learn that just by watching you cope with the mundane frustration. Which means that you have to work on being a better person. All the time. IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO JUST GET DINNER ON THE TABLE ANYMORE, YO. Am I making too much of this? Probably.

I actually don’t think she’s making too much of this. In fact, she’s probably not making enough of it. We can be wonderful parents, spending lots of time with our kids, reading to them, and playing with them, but if we can’t lead by example the entire time, we’re still failing our kids to some degree. Of course, we aren’t perfect, so we will screw up some of time, allowing the frustrations of life to override our good sense of parents. We set a bad example. But all that’s left to do after that is pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and do a better job next time. Our kids learn from that too.

Posted on 9 January 2005