Any parent will tell you that the best part of having a child is that everyone has a piece of vital, life-saving parenting advice for you. Tips ranging from “must have” gadgets, to home remedies for illnesses you hadn't even thought of yet, to opinions on co-sleeping and, subsequently, an explanation for why it’s really less of an opinion and more of a fact. The truly incredible thing is that, oftentimes, the advice is offered by people who have never parented, read a parenting book, babysat, taught children, or, potentially ever encountered one, and yet they know everything there is to know. Really, the amount of resources surrounding you at any given moment is amazing.
For instance, the man behind me at the grocery store who just happens to be an expert on the vaccination debate. Has he ever had to make a vaccination decision for another human? No. As he told me, he doesn't have any children, but he knows exactly what he would do if he did and he was glad to tell me why that’s what I should do as well.
As fate would have it, I was also lucky enough to meet an elderly woman who stood next to me in the escalator. She was, I can only assume, born with an actual superpower which allows infants within a mile radius to communicate to her that they are cold. She was kind enough to convey this message to my husband and I, explaining that the reason our daughter was cold was “because she doesn’t have enough blood!”
How will people know that it’s a girl?!
Recently, I had the pleasure of encountering another expert at a local cafe. She approached me as I was hurriedly pouring my almond milk into my coffee and doing the ‘please don't cry’ bounce-and-jiggle (a move all parents are familiar with) and asked, “How old?” as she moved the fabric from the sling away from my child’s face. I responded, “She’s about six months.” I tried to politely smile and move away from her clutches.
It was at this time that The Expert in the Cafe exclaimed, “She?! But… ‘she’ is in all blue! How will people know that it’s a girl?! That’s really unbecoming. You can’t do that to her!”
I considered posting in the “Missed Connections” section of Craigslist in an attempt to track her down and explain the impact she’s had on my daughter’s life
To think that I might have walked through the next seventeen and a half years of parenting not knowing that I couldn’t dress my daughter in anything other than pink still sends a shiver down my spine, and I feel eternally indebted to the woman in the cafe who explained the infant dress code to me. I considered posting in the “Missed Connections” section of Craigslist in an attempt to track her down and explain the impact she’s had on my daughter’s life, but I never did get around to it.
Here’s the thing, I know how it must look—I’m 22 years old as of last month, and I look young for my age. I would assume that half of the people who see me with my daughter file me under “teen mom” and think to themselves that I got myself into trouble and need all of the advice I can get. People tend to think that I, at my tender age, couldn’t possibly know how many layers of clothing a baby needs to leave the house during a New England winter.
I try to think that most people are trying to be helpful, that they’re recommending gadgets that really were “must haves” for them, or else they’re giving me advice that they wish someone had told them earlier. As a woman, I’m fairly accustomed to people making judgments about me based on appearance—it’s not new, but it remains annoying.
Inevitably, one of my liberal friends will get into an argument with my southern, republican relatives
Maybe I’m being oversensitive, maybe every mother gets uninvited advice, but does that make it any less invasive? If I really have a question about a symptom my daughter's experiencing, aren’t there hundreds of websites that will diagnose my daughter, my husband, and me with stage four cancer? If I need a recommendation for gadgets aren't there hundreds of listicles with links to Amazon reviews? And, if I ever get really desperate, I can always post on Facebook where every acquaintance I’ve ever had will crawl out of the woodwork to give me hundreds of conflicting answers before, inevitably, one of my liberal friends will get into an argument with my southern, republican relatives? At least that would be trauma I’m inviting into my own life.
In the end, I think we would all do well to chill out on the judgments and acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, we don’t all have all of the parenting answers. And, at the very least, I think we would all do well to acknowledge that my daughter probably has “enough blood.”