At least twice a day I am overwhelmed by the thought that I should be better at this than I am, and by this, I mean parenting.
I am, after all, not a newbie – my kids aren't babies: They walk, they talk, they wipe their own bums. Well, one does anyway.
Yet, I am always searching for more – more answers, more information, even more things to worry about. There are still nights when I wake up in a cold sweat, not to check if they are breathing, but in a panic that I haven't done enough – that they don't know how to skate yet, that my eldest is only just beginning to read, and that my youngest is a preschool dropout.
The worst part is that I have no excuses – I don't balance a high-powered position that pays and my children. No one e-mails me telling me to return from the school play and sign important documents. No one e-mails me, period. I'm a stay-at-home mom. I should have more to show for my efforts.
In other words, I am the target market for those parenting-based-on-nationality books.
You know the ones I mean; tiger mom this, French bébé that, Italian mamma this and that.
I am sure these ladies are well-intentioned and just want to better us as parents, and have no ulterior motives such as, oh, fame and fortune. Well, I'm almost certain.
They know that what we want our children to be is a) highly successful in everything they do, b) highly obedient and c) highly civilized in every situation. Taking the books individually, these traits seem both reasonable and even achievable, but take them collectively and you suddenly get a robot.
I don't know about you, but I for one didn't vomit four times a day for nine months, twice, to give birth to two fully formed adults. Adults aren't that cute.
"Well, if you don't like what they have to say, what are you suggesting as an alternative?" my husband oh so kindly asked me one night.
"I have an idea," I replied, "but it won't make a good book."
The first problem is that the title isn't catchy. "How to Parent like a Half-Korean, Half Swedish/Czech Family" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
The second problem is that the book would be filled with contradictions. You'd be hard pressed to find two countries with more different views on parenting than Korea and Sweden. One views parenting as a triangle with the eldest on top, the other as a circle where the three-year-old sits side-by-side with his 35-year-old mother.
Part of the difficultly with parenting is that everyone has opinions about it. When I was still just pregnant and blissfully clueless, I also had opinions. I had loads of them.
Let me give you a sampling. I strongly believed that the only right way to feed your newborn was to breastfeed. In fact, formula was evil and would no doubt result in some irreversible retardation in my child. I also hated the pacifier. It was not only evil, but also dirty, like someone sucking on a bathtub stopper. The only parents who used the evil thing were people who wanted to stop-up their babies and prevent them from expressing themselves.
I also believed that unhappy babies cried and happy babies were calm and smiley. It took exactly 72 hours for me to turn each of those beliefs on its head.
My milk failed to appear and my son developed colic. Parenting, I realized on day four, wasn't going to be easy. It's only gotten more difficult. So much so that I was buying any parenting book I thought looked even semi-reasonable, and was spending a lot of money that I hadn't earned doing so.
It wasn't until last year when the "parenting by nationality" books came out that I realized that I had to stop. Things were getting out of hand, and suddenly I knew how I wanted to parent.
The key, I think, is not to look at our children, but to look at ourselves. What in our lives are we the proudest of, what can we not live without, what are our biggest regrets? I don't think many of us would answer "our jobs" or "being a good, obedient citizen."
The answer is almost always our relationships. Without those we love, and those who love us, our lives would feel long and lonely. I now feel that my first responsibility is to teach my sons how to give and receive love. As long as they know how to do that, the rest will fall into place.
The problem, of course, is that learning how to do this is a messy process and it's more of a marathon than a sprint.
It means that our job, as parents, is never done and there will be no trophy or certificate of merit to show for our efforts.
It means that we can't stop when they've learned how to skate or how to read, or they've been accepted into the university of their choice. It will take a lifetime commitment, but we know this – we know that we must continue to show and teach them what love is, what it looks like, in all its different forms.
I know this as well, but it has taken a good part of six years as a parent to realize that my husband and I are on our own as to exactly how to do it.
There is no book, no instruction manual.
And no single nationality has it covered.
Katarina Ohlsson lives in Toronto