Giving birth is the most physically traumatic thing I’ve ever experienced. Of course I knew it would be hard. The pain of labor is one of the most prevalent known things about having a baby. But it was still somehow much harder than I ever imagined. The reams of information I consumed from books, classes, friends, and family could not articulate itself into the reality that was giving birth. It was just much harder than I imagined it could be.

And then there came the parenting part of becoming a parent, which is the most emotionally traumatic thing I’ve ever experienced. Why did no one (everyone) warn me about this (yes, they absolutely did)? I found myself looking around, wild-eyed, asking the world the new parent equivalent of “Are you seeing this shit?!”

The more I wanted to talk about it, ask about it, question the reasoning behind it, the more it felt like crying more tears into the already over-full bucket of parenting woes. I would talk to other parents hoping they could see into the vast cavern of my fear and anxiety, gently pat my hand, and say “Follow me. I’ll show you how to make this easy.” I got great advice, but no one showed me the way out.

Surrounded by such a miasma of pseudoscience, actual science, slap dash advice from harried parents at the playground, and judgement, how they hell are we supposed to figure out how to do this the right way? You know, THE RIGHT WAY. That way of doing things so right that it’s like unlocking a secret door with a secret key that leads to a secret garden where your children frolic happily while you sit in a shaded adirondack chair and read murder mysteries.

Parenting advice is not new. Some of the older stuff will kill your kid. I’m sure some of the newer stuff is very good. Some of it may even help. Some of it might at least make you feel like you’re not alone. But most of it is wrong. And by wrong I mean wrong for me, wrong for you.

We have a desperate need to solve the problem of parenting. The problem is that it’s very hard, tiring, stressful, and long. No doubt every parent has heard the expression, “Kids don’t come with an instruction manual. ” So why do we keep asking for one? Do we think there is a work around for the hardness of it? Is there a parenting hack that will save us from the despair of just knowing that we’re doing this absolutely the wrong way?

After the insane hellscape of the first few weeks of parenthood, my husband and I started to fall into a parenting routine. The routine morphed as my daughter grew but its routine-ness remained consistent. I made sure we were not and would never be fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants parents. The routine worked for us. My daughter slept well, ate well, was generally healthy and happy. So why did it still feel so hard? Why did it feel unfair? For me, it was the nagging thought in the back of my head that even though things were good, I should be doing them better. And a lot of that was because of parenting advice.

Because her birth was traumatic for my body, I ended up needing two additional surgeries to repair the damage bringing my daughter into the world caused. During and for a few days after the first surgery, I was not able to breastfeed her the way I had up to that point. I saved up as much frozen milk as I could, but it wasn’t enough. I remember the night before surgery, I was doing laundry when my husband came in the room and told me he was going to the store to buy formula for the first time. Of course this made total sense and something I would not bat an eye at if another parent was telling me this story. But right there in front of the washer and dryer, I wept into my husband’s arms. I was, once again, not quite reaching my full potential as a parent. Others had done it better.

When you take the long history of parenting advice, throw away the stuff about giving your baby gin and making sure to not love them too much, add in some science about breastfeeding, plus some psychology about the benefits of holding them as much as possible (but not too much), and synthesize it into a very long list of bullet points, you get a big fuck you to parents who actually have to do this everyday.

When you make parenting into a succinct list of dos and don’ts you lose the margin for error. You forget all the messiness and imperfection of everyday life. Parenting should not feel like taking a test that you’re pretty sure you’re failing. But I didn’t know this, or if I knew it, I hadn’t internalized it. When I read what I was supposed to be doing, let’s call it the platonic ideal of parenting, I thought anything less than that was falling far short. The curious thing was that I did not apply these standards to other parents. I mean, of course I might look slightly askance at other people’s choices. I’m human after all. But I certainly would never label someone a bad parent for not meeting up to the standards that I applied to myself. This is what I believed the standards were:

Enjoy breastfeeding and do it as long as possible

Never raise my voice or show frustration or anger in front of my child

Never put the straps on her car seat too loose, tight, or in the wrong position

Always be thrilled about being with my child

Keep an immaculately clean house

Never let my child even catch a glimpse of a screen

Never think about what my life would be like without having a child

Show nothing but excitement at doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again

Only divulge the depths of my anxiety with empty platitudes like “It’s tiring but worth it!” and “We’ll sleep when she’s in high school! lol”

My daughter is now two and a half. While my anxiety is still present and accounted for, it’s no longer what it was in those early days. I have started going to therapy, which has helped a lot. I also stopped holding myself to such impossible standards. I am now okay admitting that I didn’t like breastfeeding and was happy when I stopped. I don’t want to read Busytown every night for a month, and will steer my child to read something else. Sometimes I want to be left blessedly alone.

I have occasionally been asked for parenting advice since becoming a parent myself. I know how desperately new parents want to know how this all works. I know they want assurance that they’re doing it right. I might tell them how we did certain things but I will always add the caveat that it may not work for them. I spent too much of my daughter’s first year(s) trying to fit the messy shape of our lives into the round hole of my expectations. And it didn’t work. I was constantly running up against a wall of perceived failure. Oftentimes this meant feeling that I had made a mistake, that I was a bad parent, or that I didn’t love my kid as much as other people loved theirs. All of these things are patently false. But I still have to remind myself of that sometimes. My eyes will sweep across our very messy living room that hasn’t been vacuumed in weeks and I will feel that rush of fear. Sometimes I let it overtake me and all those same thoughts of failure invade my mind. More often these days, I am able to look the fear in the face and call it the liar that it is.

The other night as I was putting my daughter to bed, we were reading one of her favorite books, What James Likes Best. On one page James and his family are visiting a new mom with twins. The babies’ toys are strewn about the living room. My daughter points to the page and says “Messy, cozy, Mommy.” What I view as a failure of both housekeeping and parenting, she sees as her wonderful home, where her favorite things are always within reach and her family is always there to play, comfort, and love her. So, I’m writing this to my past self and maybe a future somebody else. Read the advice if you want. Ask all your friends. Ask your Mom and your Grandma. And then come home and mess it up. Cut around the edges and leave parts out. Shape it into something that looks like your family. That’s my advice to you.