As a parent I can’t help but wonder how much I am screwing up my kid. I think the art of child raising is a lot like the old time travel conundrum* you know where you have to decide if going back to change the outcome of an event makes it better or something else worse.

When I first got laid off I thought ‘oh, I’ll save so much money and just pull her out of aftercare’ and then I thought, ‘ooh, I don’t know – is that going to be better or worse for her?’ Not often, are the kids in daycare buying her ice cream just because she sat still during an eye exam, not often do they let her pick out something from the Disney store because she managed to not wonder off in Target while they were shopping. They don’t scoop her up from every scratch and bruise and kiss it and tell her everything is ok – they punch her in the arm and tell her to suck it up.

Sometimes I think she really should be punched in the arm and told to suck it up, you know because life is hard and because she is my daughter she’s probably going to fall down a lot. But I can’t be the one to do that, it’s just not in my DNA, I have a crazy strong maternal instinct to protect her and assure her that everything is going to be okay.

Maybe I’m really doing her a favor by not subjecting her to too much of me – everyone knows I’m better in small doses.

Not today though, today I’m picking her up from school and letting her pick out a new shower curtain, you know, because she was tired of the old one…

*Might not be old or even a conundrum