Winging It SDF

The Pumpkin That Started It All

This weekend, I took my 7 year old stepdaughter to her friend’s house for a pumpkin carving party while my husband was at work. I absolutely love hanging out with her and getting to spend time together, but I’m always a little nervous about taking her to events by myself that I know will be swarming with other parents. Being a stepmom is super amazing and rewarding, but it can also be really tricky and emotionally draining at times (and if you stick around for my future posts, I’m sure there will be plenty about me attempting to navigate the world of stepmom-ing). I enter many social situations not knowing what to expect–whether certain parents have “allegiances” that have already determined their opinions about me, whether a child for whom “stepmom” is a foreign concept will ask me if I am my stepdaughter’s nanny or babysitter, etc. Nevertheless, I try to enter these events with a smile and an open mind.

Things started out a little awkward, as they usually do. I plopped our pumpkin down unceremoniously on the designated table. As I milled around nervously eating vegetarian chili and listening casually to other parents discuss the various instruments they play and talk about their kids with flower names (all with a beer in hand), I decided that these all seemed like super chill, cool people. I stayed pretty quiet still, but I was able to have a few nice conversations that I was very grateful for.

When it was time to carve our pumpkin, there was really no organization; it was a bit of a free-for-all. I had envisioned all these professional pumpkin-carving parents who would look at me like I had three heads when I didn’t proficiently turn our gourd into a work of art. I quickly realized that–are you ready for this–no one else knew what the hell they were doing either. Everyone was casually glancing around at everyone else in an attempt to get some hints about how to complete our task. We all laughed and drank beer and chopped up our pumpkins, and I was relieved.

The bottom line is this: This weekend, somewhere between the pumpkin carving incident, googling how to get gum out of a blanket, and checking the label on one of our rugs to determine whether I could machine wash the milk out of it, I realized that it is (probably) NORMAL for parenting to feel like you have no clue what you’re doing 85% of the time. And that is honestly the most freeing thought.

Here’s another crazy thing: your kids don’t even notice that you don’t know what you’re doing. Really. They don’t. They don’t notice when it takes 30 minutes to get to the park because you got lost and went the wrong way. They don’t notice that you suck at crafts or can’t keep your house clean or only know how to cook mac and cheese.

They notice when you act silly with them and make them laugh. They notice when you don’t yell at them even when they make mistakes, and cuddle them, and just let them be their crazy little awesome selves.

So, anyway. I spend a lot of my life feeling like I’m just throwing myself into things and hoping for the best (hello, medical school). I also spend a lot of my life doing things that bring me joy and keep me sane. In this little blog I will try to present some of both (and hopefully more of the latter).

To everyone else who often feels like they have no clue what they’re doing, I decided to start writing about my life and experiences…to say, HEY! I’m here, and me too! 

There really will be no rhyme or reason to what I write about–there will probably be a good deal of parenting stuff, but also books, travel, fashion, food, and anything that just makes me smile or cry or think, “Holy shit! I should post about that!” Who knows if anyone is even interested in reading about this stuff. And if I just end up doing this for myself, that’s totally fine too! I settled on tumblr because it’s a venue for me to post about whatever I want without feeling like I’m forcing my life onto others (looking at you, Facebook).