I must say that parenting definitely has a learning curve.  This is particularly true when you can manage to get just shy of 18 years in between child one and child four.  By the time you roll on into child four you should be a seasoned pro…not perfect (is this whole parenting thing ever an exercise in perfection?), but definitely skilled to a level where regularly played-out rookie mistakes are mostly a thing of the past – mostly.   Of course the practice children – namely children one through three – are not entirely delighted that pro status developed only post most of their childhoods.  Indeed, they maintain fairly amazing recall about a whole series of rookie mistakes and love to reminisce about them when we all get together – yippee.

I was acutely aware of how much improvement I had made in my parenting skills this morning when while taking Cheyenne to school she proclaimed that when she grows up she wants to be the smartest person in the world.  Cheyenne has decided that she wants to be paid to come up with intelligent and thoughtful solutions to the world’s problems.  She added that she doesn’t want to be a movie star of someone famous because that is just too much work – she just wants to be the smartest person in the world (apparently, this takes less effort in her mind than being famous).  She already has an internal list of the issues she would like to tackle right out the gate – everything from eliminating war to improving the eating habits of Americans (watch out McDonald’s – she is gunning for you).

You may wonder why I believe that Cheyenne’s career goal evidences my increased parenting skills and capabilities – I can see why the linkage may not be immediately clear.  It requires me to go back to when child number one, Sarah, was about 14 and told me that when she grew up she wanted to be a nail technician.  Now, not that there is anything wrong with nail technicians – indeed, we could certainly use one in the family – it is the limit in the potentiality that Sarah envisioned as her options that I am focused on here.  Back in the days of being a younger mother my portrayal of female potency was not as strong – I was not able to imbue in my child the expansive potentiality of her options…the notion that she could be anything she chose and put her mind to.  She looked around at traditional female service jobs that did not require a college degree and saw being a nail technician as the one that best suited her. I view her lack of vision back then as a failing of my parenting.  Thankfully, that parenting error has been remediated and Sarah no longer sees any limit on the potentiality of her options.

I wasn’t able to role model or convey the level of potentiality I would have liked back then, but fast forward a decade and a half later and my 11 year old is already focused on curing the world’s problems with her brain.  As a parent I paint with a bigger brush these days and my role modeling of fierceness has increased exponentially.  I am more confident in my role as a parent and more knowledgeable about how far a child can take their dreams.  So Cheyenne sees no limitations in envisioning her future because I learned from my previous parenting experiences that one of the most important things I needed to give my children was a sense of how expansive the potentiality of their goals can be.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that Cheyenne has three older siblings who also encourage her in a like way…but, on this front I am putting this as a win in my parenting column – and not a minute too soon I might add.  We are having a family get-together on Saturday and the older kids are bound to roll out all their favorite rookie mistake stories…that win will be one of the things that I will need to point to as having lifted me from the ashes of parental failings…there is, after all, a learning curve. 😉

Day four hundred and thirty-eight of the new forty – obla di obla da

Ms. C