Prison and poles

Me, age 39

One of the highlights of my week is my small group training session (“SGT”) at the Y.

Here is a snapshot from SGT: my friends Julie, Kate, Corrie and I sweat copiously while Will, our trainer, barks at us to push tires, do mountain climbers, and run up and down three flights of stairs.  

SGT is torture for my body, but it’s fabulous for my mind. From the moment SGT begins, Julie, Kate, Corrie and I do not stop talking. We literally spend the entire hour commiserating about our children – what struggles they’re having at school, how they’re misbehaving at home, why (in my case, at least) they steal things even though we tell them it’s wrong, etc. etc. SGT is brilliant: as we burn calories, we expunge some of the anxiety we have about our kids.    

“Do you guys ever shut up?” Will yells at us. He should know the answer by now. No, we never shut up. From the plank position, Kate calls out, “I just got an idea! We need to rename SGT ‘small group therapy’ because that’s really what this is!” Will rolls his eyes and tells us we worry too much about our children.

He is probably right. I worry about the small things: Does my daughter have an ear infection? Is my son getting a sufficient amount of protein? Are they going to be late for school? And then I worry about the big ones: Is my daughter self-confident enough? When will my son develop impulse-control? Will my three kids ever stop fighting? What if they are never best friends like I am with my sisters? If they aren’t best friends, whom will they lean on when my husband and I die someday?

My husband, like Will, kindly suggests that I quit obsessing.

Easy for him to say. He is far more laid-back, distilling his philosophy of parental concern into the following statement: “Our job as parents is to keep our son out of prison and our daughters off the pole.” (Stripper pole, he means.) “If I see any behavior now that leads me to question if our kids are headed that way, then I’ll worry.”

OK. Well. I certainly never factored stripper poles into my childrearing approach, but I suppose he has a point, even if it’s a bit oversimplified. I think both of us have the same end-goal of raising healthy, well-adjusted, responsible young people. But whereas I have the ability to take one concern (why does my nine-year-old daughter still have temper tantrums?) and completely inflate it (will she ever grow into a mature, reasonable, emotionally well-balanced adult?), my husband is calm and pragmatic. He seems to think we’re doing a good job pointing our children in the right direction. He's sure they’ll figure things out as time unfolds.

***

While swinging kettle bells at SGT, I tell Julie, Kate and Corrie about the prison/pole concept. We laugh about it for a few minutes, conceding that my husband might be on to something.

Then, with Will (bless his heart) trying his best to be patient with us, we go right back to worrying about our kids.