Parenting. After the Fact.
When I found out I was going to become a parent, I spent those nine months doing a LOT of soul-searching and researching because I wanted to solidify what kind of parent I wanted to be. I was young. Twenty-two is not terribly young, but young enough. I was single, but honestly that didn't bother me as much as you would think. I had confidence that I could do this. But, unfortunately, the only parental role models I had were, well, my parents. And frankly, they weren't all that great at it. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't abused or starved or anything so horrendous. But they weren't GOOD at it. Add to that, my mother was mentally ill, and untreated. So, the first admission I had to make was that I was raised by a very mentally ill, probably bipolar, woman, and that was certainly not the parent I wanted to be. So decision #1: Don't be your mom. Easy enough, right? Except what I wasn't willing to admit was that I wasn't 100% mentally healthy myself. I was...