What If You're Not Supposed to Have It All Figured Out?
When my first daughter was a newborn, there was one day I will never forget. She was crying and fussy without any obvious reason. We had changed her, fed her, burped her, checked her fingers and toes for a hair tourniquet, and made sure she'd gotten enough sleep. We were racking our brains trying to figure out what was wrong.
My husband must have noticed the exasperated look on my face because he said, "This is our first time doing this. We aren't supposed to have it all figured out."
I remember feeling immediately seen and relieved. He was right. We were doing the best we could with the information we had. And somehow, acknowledging that we weren't supposed to have it all figured out made the situation feel a little less overwhelming.
He wasn't offering a solution to the crying. He was helping me change the expectation we were putting on ourselves.
And over time, that realization grew into something more.
Over the past 15 years as a clinician, I have had the privilege of working with people navigating all types of difficult life circumstances. And one thing has become clear: this statement is quite literally always true.
This is everyone’s first time doing life. We aren't meant to have it all figured out.
In parenting, this remains true long after the newborn stage. I find myself often reminding clients that they have never had a 7-year-old, or a 16-year-old, or a 25-year-old child before. And even if you have other children, you've never parented this particular child through this particular stage of life. Every child is different, and each stage asks something different of us.
But this idea extends far beyond parenting.
There is something freeing about remembering that none of us has done this before. Of course, we can draw on experience, learn from others, and make informed decisions. But we're all navigating circumstances we haven't encountered before, doing the best we can with what we know at the time.
There is no one "right" way to do things. I'm incredibly skeptical of anyone trying to sell you the notion that there is. What works for one person or family might not work for another. We have to figure out what makes sense for our individual circumstances.
Maybe the goal isn't to become the person who always knows what to do.
Maybe it's to become a little more comfortable with the reality that we won't always know. To give ourselves permission to be human, to feel confident making decisions with the information we have, and to hold ourselves to more realistic expectations.
Mary Alysse Mark, LPC, PMH-C
