White Knuckle Parenting: Prepare to Feel Good About Yourself

I'm not a bad mom. I'm just hanging on for dear life.

Welcome to White Knuckle Parenting, Patch's newest parenting column, which is partly designed to make you feel better about your own parenting skills. I'm your columnist, Jean. In the online world, I also answer to Stimey, and in my real life, I answer to "Mom," "Mooooommmmmm!" and "You're a weirdo, Mom."

You may have seen me running around Wheaton or Silver Spring with my three kids. I'm the lady constantly admonishing a small herd of boys to, "Stay where I can see you!" and "Look both ways before you cross that parking lot!" and sometimes "Who can win the Quiet Game by being the last person to make a noise?"

The last time I tried to get my kids to play the Quiet Game, two out of three of them ended up in tears. I still don't know what went wrong there.

I told a friend of mine that I would be writing this column and she asked if it was going to be an advice column, at which point I burst into hysterical laughter and followed up with, "You've met me, right?" The implication is that I am qualified to give advice to exactly no one. I've been parenting for  10 years and 19 days and am still hanging on by the skin of my teeth. What you'll read here is more in that vein than Dear Abby. (Also, tooth skin? Gross.)

I do, however, have two thoughts to dole out, and they are as follows:

1. Parenting is hard. Wait. What I actually meant to write there is this: Parenting is HARD. No matter who you are, no matter who your kids are, parenting is incredibly difficult. 

2. The good news is that we are all in this parenting thing together. No matter how isolated you've felt, no matter how dark your day has been, no matter how many times your kid has yelled at you today, you are not alone.

I've had my fair share of hard parenting and feeling alone. Among my three sons, we deal with autism, ADHD, sensory issues, giftedness, and some garden-variety jerkiness. We have a lot of challenges, but then again, who doesn't? Our life isn't typical, but we're not all about overcoming adversity over here either. For the most part, we're a regular ol' family, just like any other.

Granted, we're a family with a mom who regularly runs over her kids' toes with the Target shopping cart and the family with a kid who jumped into the water feature at the National Geographic Museum. We're a family who has had to decode special education law and worry about calls from the school principal. We're a family who celebrated the first time their autistic son told a lie. We're also the family with one kid who made a mad dash for Sasha and Malia's swing set on a tour of the White House grounds and one kid who fell off a statue of James Garfield in the Capitol rotunda.

We're THAT family. And that's okay.

We keep trying. We're doing the best we can. My munchkins are good kids and I'm a good mom. Quite often, my guys—Sam, Jack, and Quinn—astound me with their kindness, intelligence, and joy. Those good qualities, their giggles, their hard work at growing into good people—they make the whole white-knuckled ride on this parenting roller coaster worth it.

I hope you'll join us in our ups and downs. Maybe you'll laugh. Hopefully you'll feel less alone. But definitely, you will feel better about your own parenting.

Stimey writes a personal blog at Stimeyland; an autism-events website for Montgomery County, Maryland, at AutMont; and a column called Autism Unexpected in the Washington Times Communities. You can find her on Twitter as @Stimey.