Why this? Why now?

There is a lot of information out there for new parents – tons, a plethora. From “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” to “The Baby Whisperer” to the often revered Dr. Spock, there is never a lack of information. In fact, even into the toddler years you are trying to figure out not where to find information, but just how to sort through it all. Unsolicited advice on parenting is every new mother’s worst nightmare, until that well dries up, and it does. About the time you realize you’ll never nurse another little one or never buy formula again, just when you do a happy dance because you don’t have to have a line item in your budget for diapers, the advice stops coming. You’ve made it, right? Your child is three or four years old and is alive? You must have the hang of this parenting thing by now. This is when the silence that you once longed for all of a sudden becomes deafening. The world of How Tos and What Not To Dos as a parent is mostly silent until the dreaded (dun, dun, dun) teenage years.

There’s even more information available for empty nesters. I challenge you to do an internet search for “coping with empty nest syndrome” and not find hundreds of thousands of books, chat rooms, support groups and other aids available for parents of adult children. You can find books upon books in the “self help” sections of most major stores. In fact, there’s usually an area dedicated solely to this phenomenon of not knowing what to do when your children leave home.

What about the forgotten years? From first days of school to first talks about personal hygiene, there is a lack of helpful information out there for us moms that are just, well, stuck in the middle. This is the place that parents of younger children can’t wait to get to…that dreamland where you may possibly sleep again (possibly is key here – I’ll address that in another entry), the thoughts of how nice it will be to go to another child’s birthday party and actually get to drop them off for a bit. This is also the place to where empty nesters long to return. Their children having flown the coop, they long for the days when their children were still under one roof, when they were still revered as the keepers of knowledge, and where Santa and the Tooth Fairy were still regular topics for dinner conversation. Yet, this, I have found, has been the hardest stage for me.

Right now, as a mother, I am just surviving. Between teacher meetings and carpools, afternoon activities and grocery trips where the children are too old to ride in the cart and too young to leave at home, I am struggling. Maybe you are struggling, too. Perhaps you identify with the desire to both squeeze your children as tight as you can and simultaneously keep them at bay just long enough to read a chapter of a book by yourself. I used to consider myself an academic. I have multiple degrees from a variety of schools and would spend my free time reading anything on the New York Times’ Bestseller List. Now, I am trying to just read a book, any book, with chapters again. Maybe you are fine in the middle. Maybe this is the area of parenting in which you thrive. Maybe reading this blog is an opportunity for you to share some of your wisdom. Either way, this is the place for you.

As I tell my daughters, now ages 10 and 5, this is a “judgment free zone”. You can come here just to read, delight in my valiant failures as a parent and maybe feel less alone in your own shortcomings. You can come here to share. Read what I have written and take from it what you will and share your own experiences. I often tell my closest friends how thankful I am for my “little village” of mamas. I could not raise my daughters without them. The idea of the village gained popularity from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early 1990’s book with the same title. It truly does “take a village to raise a child”, but this idea is rooted much more deeply than that. This advice stems from ancient cultural practices that have long been abandoned in which women (and men) worked together to instill in their children the very best each of them had to offer. This blog is an attempt to expand my village, and maybe you can expand yours, too. You can seek advice here, but you may also take refuge. Know that, like you, other parents out there are struggling and wanting support, wanting to make their village larger.

I hope you will laugh along with me. I hope you will allow yourself the space to cry along with me as well. But most of all, my hope is that any reader here will feel a little less alone while they are truly stuck “in the middle.”