Just a quick one between under-6 soccer and an afternoon of work.
Devra M, over at Blue Streak (whose link I’ve fixed on the blogroll, BTW) has a followup on Dawn’s parenting post I’ve commented on below (enough dependent clauses and links yet?).
Devra’s post is a great, nakedly honest, self-revelatory comment on her fears about being a good enough parent.
I think the fact that she has those fears and can articulate them certainly means that she almost certainly is someone who can be a good enough parent. I largely raised myself; my parents, while competent adults in the outside world were certainly not competent parents, and my brother and I carry the burden of that. I resolved long ago that I would be the parent my parents couldn’t be, and that’s the rock I’m always pushing up the hill.
She says:

But I wonder if they weigh the mistakes they’ve made against the positives & find they’re somehow lacking. I can’t imagine that a loving parent would say they ‘regret’ having children, but I wonder if there isn’t a small voice inside asking “Are you sure you made the right decision?”
If you’re a parent, are you allowed to wonder if you’re the last person in the world who should be trying to raise children? If you’re a parent, are you allowed to doubt yourself? How do you get past that terror? How do you get through each day without thinking you’re fucking it all up?

Let me answer for a moment by telling a story.
When my oldest was an infant, we had a dinner party and had some friends over. It was early, he was still up, and then as happens, he needed changing. I ran upstairs with him and changed him (with poop, sub 30-second changes were always my goal – I was the Woods Brothers of diaper changers), then not wanting to miss the conversation, hurried back down.
I was barefoot, as I often am in the house, and slipped on the carpet at the top of the stairs.
Today, seventeen years later, I still remember what it felt like to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to recover; to feel my body stretching out over the stairwell, and to know that I had my son in my arms. I thought I had killed him. I thought my life was over, that I had through carelessness failed as a father and that I was worthless as a man who should take care of his children. And while I was thinking that, some other part of me…some part more active and less articulate…dropped my shoulder and pulled him into my chest so that when I fell, I hit and rolled around him.
I wound up lying on my back on the landing, my feet in the air, with two cracked ribs…and my son was laughing and waving his arms, suggesting, I’ve always felt, that that was a lot of fun and we should do it again.
Every parent I know has a story like that.
Not all these stories end well. But what I know about the good parents…the ones who try, the ones who, when the moment comes, drop a shoulder and roll into whatever is being handed them…is that regardless of the outcome, they are better people for having tried it.
This doesn’t mean I think everyone should have kids. I desperately wanted them. But I do think that fear is a bad reason to choose not to, because what I’ve learned from being a parent is that a child brings out the part of you that has the will to walk through whatever fears you have and come out the other side.