Your Moms Guide To Screwing Up Your Kids

It's easy!

This year, my son started Kindergarten - and of course, the whole thing was super emo: I was obviously proud of him, excited for him, sad for his babyhood, teary-eyed where did the time go! Except, for the most part, I know where it went. I was there, and now that we’re out of babyhood and fully into boyhood I can confidently say: babyhood was not for me. THIS is my time. Is there anything sweeter in the world than a five-year-old boy? And watching him bravely go out into a brand new school, with brand new people to learn brand new things - I could just explode.

However! A different feeling keeps popping up, making me feel weird, and it’s been harder to identify. It’s a lurking, creeping anxiety that I haven’t felt in a while. I keep trying to assign it to different things, a new phase of my professional life, the planet being on fire, etc. and meanwhile, being a millennial Dr. Becky style parent (or mostly trying), I find myself probing my kids for their hard feelings. Trying to mine their days for tricky things, and also using her script more or less verbatim to try and make my son less nervous to meet new people at school. “You know, when I used to start at a new school, sometimes I’d feel ~really nervous~ right before. Do you ever feel like that?”

He barely looks up from his breakfast, grunts a no.

Fine, I’ll keep trying.

But I think I sort of solved where my anxiety is coming from.