What Is Enough?

I am reasonably vigilant for signs of feeling entitled to things being easier, but there is a baseline level of emergency around parenting toddlers that feels out of balance for me. Just the standard levels of readiness and responsiveness required, the amounts of medical and logistical knowledge.

I am sincerely trying to control for appropriate levels of maturity and endurance, but I can’t avoid feeling like I am Hurting from it, and it’s Compounding, and I’ll need to Recover.

I really can’t stress enough that I UNDERSTAND this is compounded by things like gendered expectations about parenting and caretaking. That shaped my psychological and emotional capacities, but it also determined my level of ancestral training and actual readiness, so it’s a LITTLE fair that I’m overwhelmed, I just have to compensate with strength.

But I have a gut feeling that there is something BEYOND this, in the place where moderns put observations like, “The Village doesn’t exist anymore.”

I feel some resistance to that framing because it seems like a cop-out in my case, or at least that my advantages relative to the typical atomized first-worlder qualify as differences in KIND, not DEGREE. We have all four grandparents and one younger sibling each, locally. We have trustworthy neighbors, etc.

But, of course, they’re all fried, too. It may just serve to illustrate that the demands on adults in this society are untenable in the absolute best case.

Every time I get into a hole about this (like right now, on day 3 of 6 of solo parenting [with workday nanny]), I begin to deploy self-talk strategies like, “This is the real practice!” “You’re getting stronger from this!” “Imagine how powerful you’ll be in a few years!” &c., and I have recently realized how that is just Horatio Alger rugged individualism bullshit gaslighting disguised as virtue.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, either. It may just be the form (lecturing) that annoys me.

Being in this situation of having to do it all myself — at least for the most harrowing parts, which as all parents know are between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., the times when one is supposed to be resting — has me thinking about when my partner gets upset and says things along the lines of, “You aren’t doing enough!”

I feel that way sometimes, too, of course.

But I only sometimes have enough perspective about how absurdly impossible doing “everything” would be.

And given that, what IS enough?