When I started the ISOrumors site I occasionally posted items other than rumors.

But things have changed over there (in a good way, I love all of the information we can gather together as a group), and I’d like to have a place to talk about general parenting issues (with some adoption stuff here and there.)

And really, once you come home, it’s going to be mostly parenting stuff. The adoption stuff will be there only because you will be working on attachment activities and fun developmental games. And sleep.

When we came home with our daughter, after a very very very long wait, we just stayed home as a family for a week with only a few short visits from other immediate family members. It was nice.

But then we started bringing outsiders into the mix, and I learned a really big “mom” lesson. Sometimes you have to put your foot down when you know what is best for your child and others think they know better. And if you don’t do it with complete self confidence (whether faked or not) then they will get pretty pushy about you doing it their way.

And this doesn’t necessarily get better. Years later I still have to reign my mother in. I bought two dozen of the same kind of plain white socks for my daughter. My mother bought three or four dozen fancy (all different colors and all different kinds) of socks and thought I would throw away the “plain white ugly” socks that I’d bought. In her mind, since she bought all of these fancy ones, we didn’t need the ugly ones anymore. It never occurred to her that I was working on simplifying my laundry chore and that she had just made it three dozen times more complicated (or, maybe it did and she is getting some kind of revenge on me for not keeping my room clean when I was young).

This is obviously not a huge thing, and is more about my mom’s need to control things than it will ever be about socks, but we have gone from arguments about why an 18 month old can’t have peanut butter (after all, I was fed peanut butter at that age and I lived to tell about it) to control issues around socks. I would have been happy just putting the fancy socks in a drawer and using them very sparingly, but my mom knows that’s what I’d have done, so she started changing my daughter’s socks when my daughter was at her house. So, she left in plain white socks and came home in fancy colored socks that matched her outfit.

I won the argument about peanut butter. I’m amused by my mothers feeble attempt to control the socks – because, in the long run, socks just aren’t that important, so it hasn’t been worth getting into a control struggle with her over them.

My best advice for new parents is to make it clear to your parents (and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and best friends) that you welcome any advice they may have, but that if you choose not to follow it then they are not to get their feelings hurt.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 11:36 am and is filed under Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.