I'm Old

No it's true I am, I'm old. I figured it out just this afternoon. I was swapping war stories with another Mom at work. Our daughters are the same age so we have a lot in common. We got talking today about what stage our daughters are at. Abby sleeps in a bed and doesn't use a bottle where as her daughter still sleeps in her crib and hasn't given up her bottle yet. We talked about discipline and how she can't find anything that works with her daughter.

She asked me how I managed to get Abby to give up her bottle and I told her I just stopped giving it to her. "Well didn't she ask for it back?" the other Mom wanted to know. "Sure she did," I said "but I told her she couldn't have it." She then told me that she had tried to take the bottle away from her daughter on 5 occaisions and always gave in and let her have it.

It seemed odd to me that this Mom just didn't seem get the common sense approach to parenting that I was talking about and then it hit me. I'm old. Well older than her anyway. Twelve years older in fact. She's a baby raising a baby.

I've spent a lot of time with kids over my lifetime and I've watched other parents with their kids (not to mention the great example I had in my own mom) so before I ever got pregnant I knew what kind of parent I wanted to be. Now that I am a parent it is a 24 hour a day job, there's no time off... ever. Abby can be demanding, frusterating, exhausting, amazing, incredible and so much more in the matter of minutes. At times it's an overwhelming experience. I can't begin to imagine doing this as a teenager. That's not to say I'm a better Mom than her because I'm older or that she's not a good Mom because she's young. I guess I just figured we were both Moms and it was all the same thing, but it's not. We're both Mom's but in different ways and in different places.