By MELAY LAPENA

DISCUSSED: Breastfeeding, Bears, Eating Habits, Questions, Answers

There’s nothing like having a kid to make you question your sanity. It doesn’t begin with labor. In the larger scheme of things, labor is actually one of the more painless parts of parenthood. Even twelve hours of it, without anesthesia, is a walk in the park compared to other parental requirements.

Case in point: breastfeeding. I know this one’s optional, but I figured it was pretty simple. Why would I give my kid cow’s milk when I could produce my own? It was free, too. What it wasn’t, though, was easy.

Yes I got milk, get your own.

First of all, the logistics of it. With a tiny infant, the only way to breastfeed is sitting down. Fortunately, tiny infants with tiny stomachs only need a very small amount of milk to feel full. Unfortunately, they get hungry again very quickly. This means the breastfeeding mother will have to sit up every thirty minutes or so. This means no decent sleep. And we haven’t even gotten to the pain of swollen breasts.

Fast forward a couple of years, and you realize those days you were breastfeeding were actually pretty good. At least, then, almost everything could be solved with milk. Now, you’ve got a toddler, and when you aren’t worried about everything and anything (Does that toy have small parts? Has it been disinfected? Is it safe to feed the kid leche flan? She caught a few minutes of that purple dinosaur, will she be scarred for life?), you’re racking your brain trying to come up with answers to the world’s most difficult questions.

I have taken some pretty difficult exams in school, but nothing that prepared me for the sort of questioning I now have to deal with constantly. The What category was easy enough. “What is that?”, she’d point at random objects, and I could answer without much thought, “A bowl,” “A knife,” “A doorknob.” But then her repertoire expanded to include the “Why?” questions, and I was doomed. “Why does the sun set in the water?” she asked, and I said something about the sun wanting to save time by taking a bath and sleeping at the same time.

It wasn't a particularly healthy relationship.

The nice thing about being a parent (of a toddler, at least) is they accept whatever you say as the truth. Of course, this will backfire. Ten years later when your kid is full of angst, everything that can and will go wrong in their life will most likely be traced back to their formative years, which you were, of course, the most influential figure in. Keep this in mind whenever you make things up in an attempt to escape the neverending questions. And no, telling your kid to Google is not an alternative. (Or is it?) Keep this in mind, also, when you use Tom and Jerry to illustrate why you and your sperm donor no longer live together.

But wait. It gets better. At some point, the” Why?” questions will taper off. By this time, your toddler is only a toddler physically. Mentally, your toddler is already a teenager, equipped with enough deductive skills to embarrass you and that feeling of invincibility (Oh, youth) that allows them to argue with you with full force and conviction. You will not win.

“Draw me a bear,” she demanded. I drew a bear, or what I thought a bear might look like, given my lack of artistic skill. I knew it wasn’t much, but I did my best and I was not expecting what happened next. “Mama!!! This is wrong. Bears have no tails,” I was informed. All of a sudden, I questioned my knowledge of bears. Did they not have tails? Needing validation, I dug up a Care Bears stuffed toy. “Look! Bears have tails!” I said, pointing to the stubby mint green tail. Not particularly accurate, but it was all the tail I needed. She shook her head at me and gave me a look that said I was hopeless. She disappeared for a bit and returned with another stuffed toy. A generic teddy bear. With a very smooth, very tail-less bottom. “Only Care Bears have tails,” she told me.

Only Carebears have tails

And that was that.

While embarrassing, these debates still fall under the entertaining part of parenthood. If nothing else, it’s the sort of thing you can file under “Things to Tell My Friends When I See Them”. There’s a large chunk of parenthood that causes you to lose the ability to converse like a normal adult. Whether or not you baby talk, there’s a limit to what you can talk about with a toddler. On the other hand, there is no limit to the attention that your toddler will demand from you.

This means you will spend a whole lot of time (all the time, actually) with your toddler talking about everything under the sun except things you normally talk about. This means that when you finally manage to get away for a few hours and meet up with your friends, you will find yourself incapable of catching up, and you will wonder if anyone wants to know about your kid’s eating habits. Lately, she’s refused to eat anything that isn’t white or yellow. Pasta is okay, but only if there’s nothing on it, except cheese. Rice is okay, too, and egg.

Just thinking about it bores you to death, and you’re the parent. Just when you realize you’ve cut your friend’s food up in tiny pieces, you remember the bear story, and for a few minutes, you have something to share.

You’ve been waiting for months to get out of the house, but now that you’re there, you can’t think of anything other than being at home. You wonder if your kid is okay, if she ate enough, if she misses you. You hate to admit it but you’re probably suffering more from separation anxiety than she is. You’re right, too. While you are worried to death and aching to be with your kid, she is happily playing, and she probably doesn’t even remember you.

Well, not really. Whenever you leave, she tells you to come back after zero minutes. She follows you everywhere, even to the bathroom. She draws a girl and labels it with both of your names. You ask her who that is, and she says it’s her. You ask her where you are, and she says it’s you, as well. You wonder if this counts as an identity crisis. Or maybe you’re the one who’s nuts, and it makes perfect sense. After all, you were pretty much stuck together for ten months.

You think you know heartbreak, but you don’t. Not until your kid tells you that they hate you. In my case, those weren’t the exact words. “I don’t love you!” is what she said, but it was the worst moment of my life. I think. The first time I hit her comes very close. It was punishment for something – I don’t recall, but I remember running away right after so she wouldn’t see me crying.

Of course, she didn’t mean it. Or she did, but took it back after. A few minutes later she hugged me and told me she was just angry, and she did love me, and no, she didn’t want another mama. It’s moments like those that make everything alright, cheesy as that sounds. And then you forgive each other and fall asleep, and with her next to you, the softest skin, the tiny person you want to make the world better for.

You feel infinitely happy and infinitely afraid.

You know that no matter what you do, bad things will happen. Bullies, terror teachers, mean girls from exclusive schools, thieves, liars, earthquakes, red tape – not arranged in any particular order. Part of you wishes you could keep her at home forever – social interaction is overrated, anyway, right? But you know that isn’t the solution, either. You pray, even though it isn’t something you normally do, that you won’t make a mess of this whole parenting thing.

You think about yourself and you ask yourself who you’re kidding, thinking you can raise a decent human being. What have you done?

On the other hand, you realize that you never really were grown up to begin with. As much as you’re raising your kid, she’s raising you. You aren’t going nuts, you just don’t have all the answers. No one does. And maybe, just maybe, that’s alright.

Melay La Pena is an accidental journalist, who is this close to finishing her MA in Creative Writing from UP.

She gets distracted by parallel universes, and looks almost okay in photos edited by people who think normal photos don’t do justice to how they see her. She likes run-on sentences and gets cold a bit too easily.

She last wrote in these pages about a former non-relationship.