The First Born: Parentally Challenged

Last night Mimi played host to all of her Japanese cousins to celebrate her aunt Kayo's birthday.  By 6pm our little home was inundated with 6 relatively sedate adults and their 5 little ones.  Mimi, the youngest, worked extra hard (i.e. yelled even louder than usual) to make sure she wasn't lost in the shuffle.

Here's Mimi with her cousin Nana.  "Just a moment.  I'm drinking my milk!"  Nothing, not even family, comes between Mimi and her bottle. 

Steve's personal toy collection proved to be immensely popular and provided an excellent source of entertainment for the kids (and some level of anxiety for Steve).  Yes, if you haven't guessed already, that's an original Transformers "Megatron" in Shuhei's excited, but actually quite gentle, hands.  "Jetfire" looks on as Mimi goes to work on "Thrust" who, shortly after this photo, had both his wings ripped off and thrown into the other room.  That's my darling little girl.

Although Mimi was the youngest in the group, she was definitely not the most inhibited.  She's much closer in age to Sayuri and Asuka, who are both the second born in their families, but when it comes to temperament, she seems to take after her older cousins, both first born like her.  This surprised me at first, but then I got to thinking: maybe, despite family differences, all first-born children go through a somewhat similar experience.  Parenting has perhaps the steepest learning curve of any profession.  It's not that new parents do anything wrong, they just don't do much right.  And this has to leave some sort of imprint on the kids; something that all first-born share. 

But why is it that all new parents are so similarly challenged?  Shouldn't parenting be innate?  We see it, experience it, and talk about it all our lives, so why, when it finally comes our turn, do we struggle so?  I still don't know for sure, but this morning, while passing a laundromat, I stumbled across a possible analogy.

Sheet Folding and the First Child

It's the first day of your new job as a professional bed sheet folder for Reynholm Industries.  You are charged with expertly folding 300 individual sheets by the end of the day.  At 30-something years old you've done your fair share or laundry and feel confident that folding sheet after freshly-pressed sheet shouldn't be all that much of a challenge. 


How wrong you are.  The first 20 to 30 sheets you fold are a massive challenge.  Your hands never seem to move the cloth correctly and the resulting pile of linen is a haphazard and jumbled mess.  However, by the 50th sheet you seem to be getting the hang of it.  At the 100th sheet you are really moving along and with excellent accuracy.  This continues all the way up to around sheet 280 or so.  You're almost finished and, with the prospect of a free afternoon and some cash thanks to a job well done, you stop thinking about your work and start focusing on the evening to come.  You get a bit lazy and your folding, while still acceptable, is definitely sub-par.  

Right now, as a new parent, I'm still making my way through those first 100 sheets.  I think I may be somewhere around sheet 37.  There's still a long way to go.  Hopefully, by the next kid, I'll be around sheet 100 or so and I'll be able to forget that I ever proposed this rather sheety analogy (sorry, I couldn't help it).