The Magazines Got It Wrong

Remember when Playboy published that article that said the average American family was two parents with 2.5 kids? Me neither, it happened before my time. But my parents' generation sure liked to make reference to it. Oh, it was all in good fun, surely, but it ingrained something into me that I never got away from: to have a properly functioning family, you have to go nuclear.

Today for Global Hug Your Kids day and National Child-Centered Divorce Month I was reminded of just that discrepancy between the narratives we are raised with, and the reality we end up in.

Parenting can be a cold abyss full of loneliness and uncertainty. I have two co-parents – one my wife and biological mother to my child and one my metamore – and another pair in my ex and her fiancee. I also have my wife's parents and a whole village (quite literally) who love and adore my children. I never hide anything from the family I've found for myself and my lovers especially. Yet, parenting can be a lonely business. The kid wakes up in the middle of the night? I have my method of putting him back to sleep. Is it the right way? It works sometimes. Sometimes I just can't find the right formula of crying, attention and attention-withdrawal. The alchemy of blankets and pillows just doesn't line up. Maybe he'll sound like he wants a bottle and then throw it away like so much detritus. Then another parent offers to do the job and he's out like a light – did I “soften him up?” Did he just want someone else? Am I not as “good” a Dad as I'd like to be? These are fears I can share with my partners, but they are questions I ask myself alone.

It doesn't stop no matter what age they are. No matter what situation they are in. I hugged my son again this Sunday to send him back on his way for two weeks with his Mommy and future Stepdad – and I do that every other Sunday as our routine. If I stand up for myself too much to his mother I look like I'm picking a fight. If I don't, I look like I'm giving in. He begins to see the cracks. We communicated to him this weekend that a certain activity he loved to do was being limited because he had made it seem as though that's “all” we did – in typical six-year-old manipulative fashion. But his eyes went ten seconds of thousand-yard-stare as he realized he had inadvertently summoned his own mother's ire onto his father and stepmom. It was a necessary lesson. So why did it make me sick to my stomach to teach it to him?

I kissed my metamore on the forehead for the first time in front of him this weekend. Now it was apparent something was going on there. Something non-traditional. “Nuclear” may have always been the wrong word to refer to families – semantically speaking, the “traditional American family” is binucleated, with two parents and their revolving children-atom-things. But the metaphor breaks down either way. This family looks more like a bulbous flowchart than a diagram of an atom. But the narrative was instilled in him even if he understood that's now how it was going to go – he desperately wants to watch Sophia the First when he's with us. A feminist children's show that is centered on a non-traditional family that deals with adoption and jealousy between biological and “outside” children. His love of the show demonstrates just how deep these issues cut with him. He doesn't even talk about it with his “custodial”.

It's poignant to talk about these things, all the same. I promised to lay with him but then had to get up and ended up spending the whole night with the baby. What did that do to either of them? I hugged them both hard all day that day and night, every chance I got. Somewhere between their various conflicts is an unobtainable Nirvana where playtime is perfect and sleeping is bliss. But playtime is a rollercoaster of wanted and unwanted attentions, and sleep is always a kind of child-politics.

Parenting is lonely, because you can share these fears, but they are yours. But BEING a parent is by definition never lonely. Don't forget that.