"Now, we don't have children, we parent."

"Now, we don't have children, we parent."
David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

Ben and I were on route late Friday, June 27th for a long overdue visit with friends in Tahoe. Stopped at Starbucks for our late evening drivetime adult sippee cups, as our friend Ailish calls them. Mine a chai. His a big ol' java. (I still say National, not Reagan Airport. I don't use the Starbucks code. It is a large cup of jo to me. Some small effort at being a citizen and not a faithful consumer of consumerism. Perhaps I am just a prudish Henry Higgins of the day -- "Why CAN'T the Americans?!!?....)

Waiting for our brews to come steaming from behind the reliable silver machinery, I opened randomly to a page in Sheff's book sitting atop the shelf and my eyes first settled on this quote. Parenting as a verb. Parenting as a way of life. Like our careers. We don't have jobs now, as perhaps our grandparents and parents did, we "career" and we set intention about how our contributions look and what we give and get from them. We create paths, we create new forms and we share them with others. So, to choose to have a child is in a new paradigm as well. We dont simply to add the being to our existing life, or "have" it. Parenting now has us. Parenting is a transformation from one form to another. And, there is much more room to fail, or believe that our acts have fundamentally failed our children. Maybe because we believe our parents did - leaving us a world with a whole lot more to be fixed to support life for the next generations. Maybe because we take greater responsibility for the act. Likely because we view the world from a narrow and class-based view in which collected research and resources give us room to worry about the organic mattress with no fire retardants or the new blue carpet that won't off-gas in our new baby's lungs. Likely a new becoming for us all as we find our way in an out of the aisles of Babies R' Us and Earth Mama websites, where we notice, yet again, who is and isn't shopping those same aisles. I feel deeply as I become parent the ways in which we are so far apart - separated by class, race, history and education - and the ways in which we all share the same aspirations for ourselves and for loving our children well. All of us parenting our way into the future, one small choice at a time.