Learn As You Go

I don’t know for sure where they got my name. I suspect that they use the birth announcements in local newpapers to gather a list of new mothers. But when the company called me one day, wishing me congratulations on the birth of my new baby, I assumed they were selling something, and I was right.

I’m not very good at getting rid of salespeople, although I never want to buy what they are selling, so as the woman on the line told me about the parenting magazine I could subscribe to, full of helpful tips and information for an amazing price, I tried to think of some plausible and polite excuse I could use. I didn’t come up with anything and it was my turn to speak, so I said the first thing that came to my mind, not knowing where I was going from there.

"This baby that I just had," I began, "this is my seventh child . . ."

"Oh, my goodness!" the telemarketer exclaimed. "Well, thank you very much for your time, and have a nice day."

And that was that.

I hadn’t expected that the revelation of that simple truth would so effectively make her flee, and I wondered why it had. Was is that she figured the mother of seven wouldn’t have any money to buy a magazine? Or that she guessed I wouldn’t ever have time to read it?

The most likely possibility, I finally concluded, was that she assumed that a woman who had already experienced motherhood six times would already know everything there is to know, and therefore find the magazine unnecessary.

While I appreciated her vote of confidence (if that was indeed what it was), I found that I was uncomfortable with it, because, frankly – here comes a confession – I don’t have a clue what I’m doing here. After a period of time in this job that would, in any other field, qualify me as experienced, I still feel most of the time like I’m making it up as I go.

It worried me a bit when I pondered this, because I had assumed when I had my first child that my lack of confidence and competence in parenting were the natural result of inexperience. How should I know? Gosh, it’s not as if I’ve ever done this before!

But now, after a decade and a half in the biz, I thought I ought to have learned a thing or two, and I wasn’t sure I had.

Then one day a friend asked if she could bring a group of 12- and 13-year old girls to my house so they could learn to make bread. Bread making is something I do know how to do, so I gladly went through the steps with them, allowing each girl to try every step of the process as they made their own loaves of bread.

Everyone’s bread was edible, but I noticed that many of the girls’ loaves had a crumbly texture, or were a bit heavy, or looked lopsided. As I looked at their bread, I suddenly felt the kind of nostalgic affection I would feel looking at a Holly Hobbie lunch box: Hey, I remember that!
It had been a long time since my baking efforts had produced that kind of bread, and I had completely forgotten that when I started out, my bread was usually substandard. Improvement had come gradually, through trial and error, and I hadn’t even noticed how good I’d gotten.

So maybe, it occurred to me later that day, I am better at lots of things, including motherhood, and I just haven’t noticed it.

It’s probably an act of mercy that we forget just how helpless and confused we feel in those early days of parenting. Things get harder, in many ways, as your children get older, but you do have a new competence, born of day by day mistakes and occasional successes, that gives you a firmer ground to stand on when everyday crises try to tip you over.

Now I kind of wish I had saved one of my first loaves of bread. It would serve as a reminder of how far I’ve come. Of course, I didn’t keep one. But I did keep my oldest child, and I look at him and realize we did okay.

I hope that the girls were happy with their bread. I hope they ate it and enjoyed it, and I hope they try again. And I hope they can figure out on their own something I wasn’t wise enough to tell them that day – that no one starts out being an expert at anything, whether it’s playing the piano, or kicking a goal, or making bread, or raising children. You keep trying, keep messing up, appreciating the good stuff and learning from the bad, and one day, you realize, you know what you’re doing.

So give me a little more time. I’ll get there.