An Open Apology

This is an open apology to my children for the injustices they will endure as they are being raised.  There are a lot of things that, as my oldest son would say, are ‘not fair’.  Unfortunately, that is the way it’s going to be.  We are doing the best we can as parents, but I can already see that the demands of life and family are going to give each of them a unique experience as they move toward adulthood.

Griffin has the privilege of being the first child, and for nearly three years of his life, the only child.  He reaped humongous benefits out of that deal.  Mommy and Daddy were particularly careful with him, the house was childproofed to excessiveness, and his every cry got the attention it needed.  This, in itself, could account for why he needs to be around people so much.  The point is that he got the most attention poured into him that we possibly could.  The only other child to get this sort of attention will be our youngest, but she’ll be a teenager at that point and could probably care less.

That brings me to our second child…the middle child.  I’m sorry Gage, but sometimes you just draw a bad hand.  I first noticed that our youngest boy wasn’t getting the same consideration when his cries from the crib weren’t met with immediate attention.  We did our best to get to him, but sometimes you were in the middle of a myriad of other things and couldn’t be Johnny-on-the-spot.  In the question of nature versus nurture, it might be that our little boy learned patience and independence from the mere fact that we couldn’t hover about him and attend to his every want.  Regardless, there are also a few benefits to being second that the first child got cheated out of.  For instance, Gage gets to go to bed later than Griffin did at his age.  Also, Gage gets to watch cartoons that slightly outpace his age level.  We had Griffin hooked into Elmo and Sesame Street at his younger brother’s age, but Gage started right into Curious George and Phineas and Ferb.

Finally, there’s the youngest, who has yet to arrive.  I wish her well.  If we had less attention to share with the second, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like for the third.  Hopefully, the fact that we’ve learned a few things along the way might make for more efficient parenting.  For example, if the situation arose where a child is stuck in a jammed car-seat strap, we might approach it differently with the third as opposed to the first.  In our earlier years, we’d have called the fire department to come and use the Jaws of Life to delicately extricate our precious snow flake from the restraint.  Now, with the third, we’re more likely to grab her by the heel and pull her out of it backwards so we can get dinner on the stove.  I’m not trying to be mean here, I’m just sayin’, through years of parenting you learn things like “kids are resilient” and “babies have short memories."

All kidding aside, when we headed into this parenting thing, I thought we could surmount these familial obstacles with style.  It turns out that we’ve found ourselves in the same place that most every other parent of multiples has.  You face challenges that get increasingly complex with the size of your family, and most of them center on not having enough time.  Unfortunately, none of us have the power to extend a day by even a second.  We can merely do our best with the time we have.