The Hardest Job in the World
I grew up with no opinion.
I grew up under a rock, behind a shield, inside a bubble.
I grew up never learning about responsibility, finances, personal growth, culture, cultures — nothing.
I left home when I was eighteen and real life began to saturate my truth. I stayed close, because I was made to believe I had to. I worked for family because, you know, that’s what family does for family.
I broke off and I was never allowed to forget the damage my leaving caused.
By my mid-twenties, I opened my eyes wider—stepped out of the shadows cast. At that point, even after seven years on my own, those shadows bled into my space, spanning distances far and wide, endeavoring to cover me.
Just shy of my thirty-first birthday my eyelids were blown wide open.
My husband helped.
He seems to have had a sturdy moral compass whereas mine was bent, fiddled with by external forces more times than I could count.
He opened me up to social issues, to life outside of my mental perimeter.
Now, I see our children, and I think about what we should share with them, and what we shouldn’t.
I didn’t hear about my mother’s attempted suicide until after they found me carving my flesh on my closet floor at fifteen.
They thought, somehow, it was related—genetic even. That me, slicing solace into easily hidden bits of my body was suicidal.
Back then I couldn’t articulate that it wasn’t about the act itself, it was about the relief from the pain inside my head, nothing more.
I never wanted to die.
The day you stubbed your toe and realized, just for a moment, that all the pain in your head dissipates and you can breathe and think and resolve in a way you never thought possible.
But that’s not what this is about…
This is about growing up blind.
We didn’t want to sway your opinion, they’d say.
Sway my opinion? I’d wonder, trying to consider both sides of it.
Without information, there is nothing to have an opinion on.
Was it fear of the sway or fear of the opposition?
Because children, you know, are too stupid to ever have a legitimate viewpoint.
Information can no longer be withheld.
A modern child has access to a smartphone, a tablet, a computer — anything with a WiFi connection — and the world with all its opinions, its skewed and leveled ideas, its facts and fictions is there for retinal relay.
There’s no filter that can’t be bypassed.
Now I sit here as a mother to three, combing through the Parenting Playbook in my head, wondering how I can better prepare my kids for the future — for their information overflow.
Do we allow them their beautiful bubbles where grandpa isn’t an asshole and their parents don’t believe in anything?
Or give them all the options and let them start sifting the sandpit for their own opinions and ideas?
I look back and realize that no one is perfect.
We strive to do better, to be our best selves, but we’re bound to make mistakes.
I look back and feel like a strategist, picking apart the things my parents did (or didn’t do) to be a better parent myself.
It doesn’t mean they were wrong—they did the best they could with what they had.
But I have more now.
Parenting is hard. It’s the toughest job I’ve ever known.
You fuck up a career, you get a new one. You fuck up parenting, well, you can ruin a life and a slew of other lives intertwined with that one.
So, fuck it. I’ll sit back and dig up those muddied memories, read a parenting book or two, apologize to my children for the continual mistakes I’m going to make, and try to make things right when I do.
When they’re adults and they sit back and assess their childhoods, and all the things my husband and I did poorly become steps to for them to evolve into better human beings, then so be it.
There can be a positive to every negative. It’s all in how you look at it.
It’s all in how you play the hand you’re dealt.
I’m Sara Eatherton-Goff, a writer, visual artist, vocalist, tinkerer, and mom-person. I live and write in Seattle, Washington. Check out some of my collective works on my website, and subscribe to my newsletter Life and Other Stories for the most current essays, short fiction, musings, and more.
