• 1 •INTRODUCTIONS AND WHAT-NOTS
Hello. My name is Gwenna Laithland and I am not a parenting expert. I am, like, 98 percent sure that is not how the author of a parenting book is supposed to open said parenting book. However, I’m not a writing expert either so this feels like the move here. Truthfully, I have chosen to open a book on parenting by clearly stating that I’m not a parenting expert because I need to set the tone for what you’re about to read. That feels important.
Let’s get this bit out of the way. There is no such thing as a parenting expert. No one knows better how to raise a kid than anyone else. There are some people with good ideas. (I’d like to hope I’m one of those good-idea folks.) Some of those ideas will work for some but fail miserably for you. It doesn’t make them bad ideas, just makes them bad for you. And that’s okay.
I do believe there are experts in some fields that sort of hover around parenting. There are absolutely experts in child development norms. Behavioral therapists, childhood psychologists, child development researchers—they know their stuff surrounding some very specific elements of child development and standards of behavior. They also speak in generalities. They work in averages and norms. If a child is falling below the average, it is their job to ascertain why and provide assistance, guidance, and tools to bring that kiddo back up to normal.
That doesn’t make them parenting experts.
Pediatricians, pediatric specialists, childhood nutritionists—these are also folks who have an absurd amount of knowledge about a very specific part of how kids are, how they should be, and what to do if said kids are encountering struggles of the physiological variety.
That doesn’t make them parenting experts.
It makes them uniquely equipped to give advice to the only known parenting expert on any particular kid—their actual parent. Yep, if a parenting expert were to exist, you’d be one. You’re an expert on your child. And if you react to this revelation the way I did when it first occurred to me, you now understand why I say there’s no such thing as parenting experts. I’m most definitely not an expert. Even on my own kids. That I made. With my body.
I, like you, am simply doing my best.
Oh. You’re still here? You got through that preachy part and are like, yes, Gwenna, give me more?
Alright.
Let’s do this then.
* * *
This book is not a memoir. And, as I made abundantly clear several paragraphs ago, I’m not a parenting expert. But in order to understand how I’ve come to some of the conclusions I’m about to describe, it’s important you know how I got here, who the hell decided to publish a book I wrote, and why any of it might be useful to you.
THE BACKSTORY
The United States Air Force was an awfully dull place in the 1980s. Vietnam was kind of fresh in the collective memory but it was a fading entity as far as the armed forces were concerned. Also, it was the air force. Not the Top Gun type. The pencil-pushing, makers-of-red-tape type. My mom was in facilities planning. For a brief period in the late eighties to nineties, Tinker Air Force Base was absolutely drenched in a putrid taupe, burnt orange, and cream color scheme. That was literally my mom’s fault. She picked those colors as part of her super-important, patriotic duty–upholding, serving-the-country job in the air force. For those of you who lived on or near Tinker during this period, she is sorry.
My mom, by her own admission, joined the military because she couldn’t think of anything better to do. She was socially awkward and insecure but she was detail-oriented, levelheaded, and low-maintenance. She had a slow-burning wit. She’d say something and you wouldn’t even register how funny she was until moments later, once you’d had a chance to take a good swig of your beverage. There were a lot of spit takes around my mom as a result. It was one such spit take that helped her pull my dad.
My dad was an overgrown toddler with the emotional capacity of balsa wood who was strangely good with wrenches. He was a mechanic who worked on the AWACs, the big radar planes with the black domes perched on top of the body. Since those were peak technology at the time, it meant that my dad was an overgrown toddler with a really high security clearance. He did not have a slow-burn wit. His was loud and obvious and rakishly devastating. Look, Imma make it awkward for a sec, but my dad, in his heyday, was fucking hot. And he knew it. I’m talking Tom Selleck didn’t stand a chance. And if you understood that reference, hi, Mom.
They met through a friend of a friend, and instantly created their own maelstrom of emotional chaos. It wasn’t just sparks. It was Tesla coil meets Faraday cage with enough electricity coursing through their twenty-something souls to black out the Eastern Seaboard. They fell in love with the idea of each other. Unfortunately, they sort of had the wrong ideas in their heads. More on that later.
They married in 1980, got stationed at Tinker the same year. I was born in 1984. My mom left the military to be my mom. My dad stayed in. Mostly because being funny and turning wrenches were kind of all he was good at. They brought me home to their fifties-built, two-bedroom house but not before covering every square inch of it in the drab, earthy tones of mud, old coffee grounds, and cockroach wings. Really, my parents were sort of ahead of their time, readily embracing the tiny-home life and the preternatural appreciation for shades of sepia.
Hazelnut carpet, faux-wood wall paneling, coffee-stain paint, burnt sienna Formica countertops. Umber, ochre, beige. Everywhere. It was suffocating. The only room that escaped the tawny tidal wave was my room. They painted that one a baby blue. Even though I was a girl. And they knew that before I arrived. I once asked my mom why my nursery turned childhood bedroom turned teenage angst den was blue instead of pink and she explained that one time she read an article that said blue made babies calm and pink made them hyper, so she painted my room blue.
“Did it make me a calm baby?” I asked.
“No. You had anxiety,” she replied nonchalantly. In that brief conversation I learned two things. Parents have been swinging for the fences and missing for generations and I was just born anxious. Cool.
It is important to note that not only was I born anxious, I was born deaf. Not profoundly, just deaf enough to not hear words and sound distinction properly. My mom was understandably concerned. (Because moms have felt an unnecessary amount of pressure involving infant and toddler milestones since the dawn of time.) She took me to our family doctor on the air force base, a stoic officer clearly biding his time until his retirement from the United States Air Force medical machine. According to my mom, he spent about six minutes with me, asked me to repeat a few words, showed me a few pictures of fruit, and then confidently declared I was clearly exceptionally delayed. Except he didn’t say “exceptionally delayed.” He used the R slur. The military healthcare system of the eighties was actually terrible at pretty much everything.
My mother was having none of it. She sought a second, civilian opinion. That doctor examined me thoroughly and easily decided I was not exceptionally delayed. I just couldn’t hear anything. A quick surgery, a set of tubes, and intense speech therapy, and I was as caught up as could be. It was the first time my mom advocated for me. It would not be the last time. But again, this book isn’t about me.
Due to the nature of what he did for a living and that he did that for the US military, my dad spent more of my childhood abroad than he did at home. Constant temporary duty assignments (TDYs) and quick trips to Alaska or Japan or Germany to work on a plane were the rhythm of my earliest years. My dad once sent me Kool-Aid from Egypt while on a temporary duty assignment. He spent a lot of time over there in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Note of interest: Egyptian Kool-Aid either (1) doesn’t taste any different than American Kool-Aid, or (2) does not exist because my dad just bought plain ol’ regular Kool-Aid at the base exchange. The latter is most likely. I still thought it was cool because it came from Egypt. And Egyptian stuff was cool.
My life continued in the traditional suburban way until 1992 when my parents realized two very important things. First, my dad was not one with the big brain thoughts. Instead he was the kind of stand-up guy who brings a girlfriend home while his wife is halfway across the country at her sister’s funeral. The kind of dude who expects his mouthy eight-year-old to keep that mouth shut about Daddy’s special friend. My dad was an absolute shoebox who wildly overestimated the secret-keeping abilities of an undiagnosed ADHD kid. Second, they actually despised one another. They wanted to be married. Just not to each other. And yeah, that led to divorce.
Advanced for my age and in one of the first generations of academically advanced students referred to as “gifted and talented” kids, I entered my angst stage younger than many. Upon learning about my parents’ divorce, I skipped the preteen exploration and dove straight into my weepy period. There was a lot of the color black. There was even more really bad poetry. Luckily for all of us, I also enjoyed a pyromaniac stage and destroyed the evidence.
A lot of that poetry, written primarily in red ink, focused on my being a statistic. Divorce was still pretty demonized in Oklahoma in the mid-nineties. Our state often made national news for having one of the highest divorce rates. I did not enjoy my two Christmases and two birthdays. I would have settled for one if I didn’t have to deal with custody exchanges. I would have settled for next to nothing if it meant I didn’t have to endure a stepmom.
The girlfriend my dad brought home eventually became my stepmom. We hated each other. That’s not an exaggeration. The resentment was very real from both sides. To me, she was a home-wrecker and an invader (although I’d later learn those titles really belonged to my dad). To her I was the usurper and liability. We screamed at each other. My dad gifted me his genetic proclivity to humor. I honed those sarcastic genes to a razor’s edge at my stepmother’s expense. The relationship was beautifully complicated.
And then it wasn’t. One May afternoon in 1996, I sat out on my porch waiting for my dad to pull up in his ghastly blue Pontiac for a visitation exchange. He never showed up. I waited until the sun sank below the horizon before moving inside and waiting some more. This was in the days before cell phones, but we did have a house phone. Ours never rang. I tried to call him. All it did was ring. Years later I’d find out he didn’t die in some fiery crash. Instead he let his little girl die a slow death by attrition on a porch barely warmed by Oklahoma’s spring sun. What was left behind was someone new.
Copyright © 2024 by Gwenna Laithland