Last night I was thinking about the idiom “stick your oar in”… and it got me thinking about how similar parenting is to rowing a boat. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself of its truth.
Once you are a parent, you are always “IN the boat”… and, I don’t mean a yacht or a boat with a motor… I mean the good old row-boat or canoe (or kayak, I suppose, as long as it isn’t for just one person).
You don’t necessarily always have your oar in the water, pulling, but you always have the responsibility for steering the boat in the “safest” path possible. My understanding of this responsibility exhausts me. In calm waters and sunny skies, steering the boat can be a lot of fun and can include many detours to special beaches or lagoons. When the waves are high and the sky is sobbing, it takes everything you have to avoid rocks and even determine the safest path available.
If you’re fortunate, you have people who jump in and out of the boat to participate in the fun, to share in the beauty, and to help pull in choppy water and big winds. But the steering of the boat remains the parent’s responsibility alone… you can’t jump out of the boat and give this responsibility to someone else, even when you want to!
It is this responsibility, I believe, that makes parenting the hardest thing for me. There are moments that our unique journey magnifies the difficulty of steering but it’s also hard to steer through the “normal” stuff. Can we afford a detour to a fun spot when I know we’re going to have a tough time getting to our next destination? What’s more important… how organized the boat is or how much fun we’re having along the way? What nutrition do I need to organize so we’re optimally fuelled? Should we be rowing the same way another boat is… would that help us achieve our goal faster or better?
What I don’t question is that the “ideal” path is different for every single boat, because the weather patterns and destination points are different. And, although we can “stick in our oar” to support another parent, we can’t assume we appreciate how difficult it is to steer their boat.
I’m looking for less wind and sunnier destinations. I’m wishing the same for you!