Being There

Having been in this job now for almost fifteen years now, this much I know: you tend to get out of it what you invest in it - and I don’t mean money. Parenting is by far the most time consuming endeavor you could take on apart from being human. It will require every last iota of your cognitive and emotional ability and it will make your brain grow new pathways in nanoseconds, simply because often your life (and your child’s life) depend on it. From learning to skillfully handle various kinds and amounts of bodily fluids to efficiently communicate with the parents of the class bully, from keeping an open mind to ever changing health and safety advices to forming a clear and consistent set of rules, from establishing a relationship of trust to admitting fault when necessary, and from being believable to being unbelievably goofy, it will help to acquire a certain level of agility in a variety of areas. All of this takes time and lots of practice...years of practice, but then, we are in it for the long run anyway...!