The fourth parenting video I made was snarky, aimed at shutting down any arguments against breastfeeding in public. I had to rerecord it four separate times because of technical issues (read: technical incompetence). A few days after posting it, I was trying to get some of Ari’s breakfast out of my hair when my phone started blowing up with texts from friends letting me know that Ashton Kutcher had shared my video on his Facebook page. I don’t know how he’d stumbled onto it, but he posted it on his social media pages and wrote, “Sometimes sarcasm is the best way to combat ignorance.” Suddenly, people were sharing the video all over the internet and it was quickly going viral. I remember Philip and me lying in bed late one night, refreshing the screen over and over again as the counter neared and finally reached a million views. A million views! People had watched something I’d made a MILLION times! That was probably more than the views on all the episodes of The Ambush Cook combined.
The next day, Philip took me out to a fancy restaurant. “This needs to be celebrated. You put yourself out there. You won this huge thing, and then when that didn’t work out, you had the courage to get back up and do it again your own way.”
My hobby turned into my career. I loved being in complete control of the content I was creating and not having anybody try to make me an expert or suggest I “tone it down a bit.” A lot of people seemed completely okay with me just being me. Finally.
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WHAT WE’RE TOLD about ourselves as children follows us into adulthood. As a little girl, I was told I was too talkative, too loud, too hyper, too impulsive, too candid, too, too, too, too . . . much. I asked too many questions, cried too much when I heard a sad story, felt too much enthusiasm about everything. And so I grew up and became an adult who was too much. Being told you’re too much can often leave you feeling like you’re not enough. Weird how that works, right?
What I tell my kids, through my words and actions, about who they are really matters. This is both scary and empowering. Even in those crazy mom moments when I find a part of their personalities or their quirks annoying, I need to be careful how I respond to them. I am one of the most powerful, influential people in their lives, whether I want that power or not. They will remember and carry the words I say for a very long time. And they will believe them.
My first son, Luka, is the loud, hyper, talkative type (it’s genetic), and sometimes I had to bite my tongue to avoid criticizing him for or defining him by the same personality traits I struggled with, and to instead give him an appropriate outlet. I want my children to be respectful, but I also want to encourage them to become their most authentic selves. So when we had people coming over for dinner, instead of giving Luka the impression that children should be seen and not heard, I would ask him to prepare some fun questions for our guests. That way, the conversation he started was about other people, but it also gave Luka’s outgoing, funny personality a chance to shine.
For a while I described my daughter, Matea, as “the shy and reserved one.” Her kindergarten teacher told me that she couldn’t even get her to raise her hand in class. But telling her—and others—that she was shy didn’t help her confidence grow, so I made a conscious effort to stop labeling her and to pay attention to all of the ways my child would show me who she was. To my surprise, once the label was off, she started doing theater in school and now she’s a teenager who is comfortable onstage in front of hundreds of people.
It’s easy for us adults, once we decide to become parents, to allow the excitement and authority of the role to fill us with ideas about who we want our children to be: the personalities they’ll have, the interests they’ll develop, the hobbies they’ll pick up. But we forget to take time to get to actually know our children. My job is not to decide who my kids are. My job is to get to know them, really get to know them, and then be their cheerleader and help them make the most of their strengths, even the ones I might find annoying at times. (And, trust me, there are things about your kids’ personalities that will annoy you. Totally normal! There are things about your personality that annoy them, too.)
Think about it this way: we don’t buy tickets for the best seats in the house to a brand-new, never-before-seen play and then walk into the theater having already decided exactly how each scene should look and who each character is. Where is the fun in that? We walk into the theater with our minds completely open. We pay attention to every line, every detail, every emotion, every scene change. We don’t write the script as we watch the play; we let it all unfold before our eyes. We let it surprise us. And hopefully, we learn from it.
We spend a lot of time and effort teaching our kids to respect others, but I think it is also important that we show a certain amount of respect for our kids as human beings and relate to them as real people, not as prototypes of who kids (even our kids) “should” be.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean I’m the “cool mom.” I believe in discipline and rules. But I strive to spend as much time learning who my children are as I spend cultivating traits I hope will take root, like kindness and trustworthiness. They are motoring along their own paths of social, physical, and intellectual development, propelled by their own blend of strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. I may never get to know them if I tell them who they are before they’ve had a chance to figure it out for themselves.
When I was nineteen years old, I was babysitting a little five-year-old girl. She kept drawing picture after picture, and as I sat there watching her draw, I asked, “Do you want to be an artist when you grow up?”
“What do you mean?”
“An artist,” I replied. “Is that what you want to be when you grow up?”
She looked at me, confused, and said, “But I already am an artist.”
She was right. She didn’t need to wait to grow up in order to be an artist. She already was one. Childhood is not a rehearsal for life; childhood is life and children are already whole people.
Part of the process of getting to know my children is helping them figure out what they’re passionate about. And when I say passionate, I don’t mean just, “What do you love?” I also want to know, “What angers you? What angers you about the world? What breaks your heart?” Pay attention to all of the strong emotions, whether they’re good or bad, because intensity shows how genuinely they care about something. If I can get my kids to pinpoint what really makes them feel and then combine that with who they are—hyper, talkative, patient, great at math—I can help them begin to map out what they’re meant to do with their lives. Careers evolve a lot over a lifetime, and if we attach our self-worth to our job titles, we set ourselves up for an identity crisis if our careers don’t pan out. But if we focus on the bigger question, the deeper one, of where our passions and our gifts intersect, it becomes easy to pivot and work with whatever life throws at us while still maintaining our sense of self and purpose.