Yeah, I can’t wait to recount tales of my kids’ childhood that don’t involve fart jokes.
Of course, after the first or twenty dates.
This is really good advice. It think it’s really important to remember that where we are as parents is also really important.
A big thankyou to Marienee and Salem, your posts in this thread are thoughtful and comforting to this soon to be dad (girl due on 2nd June).
Friends of my partner and I are also having a baby in October (their first) and my friend asked me the other day if I’d been reading a bunch of books. I told him no I hadn’t, because no matter what book I read, there is bound to be another one out there telling me to do the exact opposite. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for good advice, but the best piece of advice so far I’ve been given (which this thread has highlighted) is that babies are different and we as parents go through a learning process every bit as important as the newborn.
Yep, pretty much.
More than a few seem written to be deliberately alarming to (especially) first-time parents. I leafed through one whose main points seemed to be: (1) Your instincts are wrong; and (2) if you aren’t miserable, then you aren’t doing it right. It tossed around the phrase “accidental parenting” a lot. I tossed it promptly aside.
I married a foreigner and so did my husband. Somehow this did not strike home in any visceral way until the kids came. I knew that his notions of family and boundaries were not exactly the same as mine shortly after he discovered it was entirely normal for me to come home to find one of my Many Beautiful Sisters or my mother already in my house waiting for me. Evidently this is not normal in Holland, imagine. On the other hand, we had some advantages because, well, it was not normal in the US either. So I had some practice in negotiating culural differences.
However, this was a mere bagatelle compared to childrearing and even pregnancy. Over the years I have come to be grateful for it actually; I know many families who had to struggle through the “it’s how we have always done it, everybody does it this way” stage in order to get to where we started out – realizing that our fundamental notions were really not self evidently correct and that other options exist.
We have had to think a lot more than most people about why we do what we do and what the purpose is and whether we really can get behind that purpose together. I think talking a lot does help. I think being able to realize what is for the other a deal breaker helps even more. Some values really are important to the one and not the other, and some values are important to be able to get by in the society you live in and you can hurt your kids if you try to fight the dominant culture even when you think you are right. Those last are the tough ones.
Gotta go get Youngest from swim lessons (would you believe a swim diploma is a deal breaker if you are Dutch? Strange but true) and I promise more later.
I think so. Having a kid really made a difference in how I view Japan. I also agree that it takes more work to communicate the whys. We’re really just getting into that now as we look down the road and think about education and what we want for her.
For the first year of my son’s life, our ‘theory of parenting’ went from this:
**“Oh, we are going to do everything exactly as we plan it, and breastfeed, and co-sleep, and he will sleep through the night early and never wake up before 8 AM and birds will crap daisies and lollipops on our front porch to welcome each new day!” **
to
**“Oh, shit, why can’t I make more than a quarter ounce of breastmilk at a time, and no one told us about reflux, and why won’t he stop crying, and why did he start sleeping 12 hours straight through from 8 PM until 8 AM at nine weeks old, only to start waking up 5 or 6 times a night at 4 months old, and I am going to kill someone with my bare hands if I don’t get more than 2-3 hours of sleep in a stretch one night and if those f*cking birds don’t shut up, I’m going to go buy a BB gun.” **
Even now, at 2.5, I’m sometimes stumped. He is fairly good about going to bed for us (he has a routine, but he prefers his ‘routine’ to be Mommy singing along with his lullabye CD through “Here Comes The Sun”, and Daddy to hold his hand for another 5 minutes after that, and then he usually passes out), but he is a very RESTLESS sleeper. We’ve thought maybe it’s the binky (which he now naps without at daycare, but not at home), but that usually falls out of his mouth after he falls asleep. He will moan and groan in his sleep, roll around, and once in awhile, he falls out of bed (he has a toddler bed with side rails, but he moves around so much that he will fall out of the foot of the bed. Luckily, it’s only about a half foot off the ground. However, it IS adorable to walk in to find that he’s fallen out of bed, is on his knees, arms folded on the bed, and head on his arms, sleeping that way sometimes. We always hear him, so he’s never like that for more than a couple of minutes.). Everyone tells you what to do for a ‘bad’ sleeper, but no one seems to know how to handle a ‘restless’ sleeper. We’re just hoping he grows out of it. He’s not waking up on purpose, he’s not fighting us on bedtime, he’s just restless.
I read some books, but mostly, I’ve gone to my friends. They all have different advice, so I take what works, and try new things. Sometimes what worked two days ago doesn’t work now. And I’ll be honest - it was a lot easier at 9 months because he couldn’t talk back 
.
You figure things out and get through them. Sometimes, you might be a damn zombie, and sometimes you might look forward to going to work simply because it means you can go to the bathroom alone, but when he was born, we decided that our first rule of parenting was: “Don’t leave the carseat on top of the car.”.
That pretty much covers it.
I promise not to get started.
But yes, once kids go off to school and begin the process of being brainwa- er, socialized in a whole new set of values, the whole “how did I come to give birth to a foreigner” thing gets thrown into sharp contrast with the whole “get your hands off my kid” thing. 
And I think, (since I do have a very large family, even if it is far away) that this happens to everyone who has a child. It is only that it has this extra dimension because of the culture gap and the language gap. I speak Dutch just fine, all day every day, but I was well into my fourth decade of life when I heard my first word of it and I am unlikely to become as a native speaker.
So people do not always mean what I think they mean. And I do not always mean what they think I mean. And all the while everybody thinks the other one knows what they just said. Add to this the almost overwhelming temptation to blame the foreignness of the other should we fail to agree, (despite the fact that we all know better when we are being fair which we are not all of the time) and things can get right out of hand right quickly.
I am pleased that by the time the third parties came in we had already had some practice in working these matters out and were on the same page. Otherwise it would have been much harder.
Okay, back to you. I find having a large family really useful and healthy; but I have a very useful and healthy family. I decided to do a large number of things which went against the main trend. However, I listened to and even solicited their views on these matters, because they love my kids also and want to see them grow up to be happy and healthy men. Then I did what I thought was right, as I had to do. And when it turned out to be wrong, I changed it. Sometimes I even changed it to the main trend.
Big Picture discussions come in more frequently after babyhood, when values start to conflict more. And maybe Dearly Beloved and I are just fond of them. But ultimately there are decisions to be made and what you do with your children reveals in many ways what you think is important. You may surprise yourself, it is not something people think about. In a third culture you will have wrinkles which we do not have, as people do not think about their own cultural values very often when they are in it. So at any moment one of us is likely to think things are just fine and to have the support of the surrounding community in that belief.
There are also many people who do not challenge themselves concerning their beliefs. My sister and her husband do not see eye to eye on childraising, and they are both Americans. BIL sees no reason why his beliefs could not be absolutely correct, and they have a difficult time even discussing their differences.
OTOH, since we have three cultures involved, we have no choice but to discuss them, which we’re starting to do so now. Fortunately, we have a few years to make the major decisions. . .