Parenting - will you survive it or will you thrive on it?

To Thrive or To Survive?

Are you still convinced that parenting will be one long kodak moment? 

Or have you come to the conclusion that the best you can do is to keep your head under the parapet until you can legally turf you children out of the house at 18? 

Maybe, like me, you find yourself flitting between the two extremes all... day... long...

I call it thruviving - it's a combination of 'thriving' and 'surviving' - and it's the most I aspire to.

I really feel that anything else is setting yourself up for failure. You can't expect every moment of parenting to be a delight, nor should you accept that it will always be horrible. Like anything else in life, parenting is all about the journey. 


Parenting is an extreme sport

Unlike most other areas of life, with parenting, the 'good' moments can be so wonderful (when we remember to notice them) whilst the tough ones can be monumental. And oh, how quickly it can switch from one to the other!

Like adults, children are full of contradictions. They can be shy, and they can be wild; they can reasonable, and they can be hysterical; they can be easy-going, and they can be enormously demanding. 
My husband says they take after me.

Navigating the turns

I think I once learned that motorcyclists 'lean in on the turns'. That's what I try to do with my children. For some reason, when they get really silly, my husband and I react by getting really serious. Mistake! The family is pulled in two different directions - adults vs kids. And you know that always ends in tears. 

If, instead, we 'lean in' to the mood, allowing it, joining in, letting it run its course, without letting the kids go wild, we spare ourselves the tears and aggravation. Better than that - we create a wonderful family memory. It's counter-intuitive, but it works. 

Make a choice

Very often, maybe always, the only difference between surviving and thriving, is mind-set. If I can get into the mind-set of a thriving person - a person who feels pleasure and pride in her daily life - then even the most annoying thing becomes merely a hurdle in the race of life...

But if I'm in my survival mind-set - where I just keep reminding myself 'it will all be over soon' - I just live for bedtime. I'm rushing through our life, missing all the good stuff.

Remember why you wanted kids

Free and single is not all it's cracked up to be. Remember? When I was single, I wanted to be married; once we were married, we wanted to be parents. Because human beings want to expand, we long to invest, we need to create.

We wanted all this! The mess, the nappies, the nightshift, the constant drain on all our resources, the constant challenge to our peace of mind. We were bored before.

I'm certainly not bored now.