I’ll be seeing you …

In the beginning When I started writing the Slightly Crunchy Parent in March 2003, I was full of things to say about the choices I had made as a parent. I spent hours and hours researching all of the decisions I made for our family. It is such a large responsibility – I don’t think a person can fully comprehend the pressure and the desire to “do it right” unless they’ve raised kids. We all know what happens to children when parenting goes wrong: years of therapy and unfulfilling adult relationships and neuroses and medications and maybe even jail time. Okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it feels like it when you’re the mom. When I was offered the opportunity to write a column I jumped at it. I had done a lot of writing before I had kids, but it slowed down a lot while I carried babies and chased toddlers. Every month, I loved sitting down to vent some of that pent-up creativity. The Slightly Crunchy Parent (or Crunchy P, as we call it in-house) has been a fabulous outlet for the last five-and-a-half years. During that time, I have talked about some of my best and worst experiences as a mother. More than once, I have found myself crying as I write, re-experiencing some difficulty or triumph. It has also happened that I open the pages of VITAL Source and can hardly remember what I have written. So many times I am in the zone, writing things that were secrets until my fingers hit the keys. Then and now Lena is 13; in 2003 she was seven. As a home-schooled second grader, she was right on the cusp of reading and she could whoop some serious backside at pretzel poker. She was a bossy, sassy, sweet master strategist who liked to be glued to my side. She was simultaneously very proud of and very annoyed by her younger siblings and cousins. Her desire to mother and control them was so strong – I felt like I was constantly saying, “Lena, you are NOT the parent!” Lena has been trying to grow up fast since the day she was born. Looking at her now, it seems like she has gotten her wish. Though she was my fattest baby, she is now a slender young woman with a core of self-confidence that’s hard to rattle. While she still likes to be the boss (very much!), she typically channels it into helping out with her brother and sister and babysitting a lot. For the most part, she has refined her sass into something far more palatable in our family: irreverence. At 13, she obviously still has some pretty mouthy moments (and what is up with the eye rolling?), but we work through it. In March 2003, Emma was approaching her fourth birthday. That girl has always walked to the beat of her own drum. In manner and nature, she is completely different from her siblings. Emma was already working […]