Choices. Since childhood, I have relished the opportunity to make my own. I have always regarded it as a right rather than an opportunity, one afforded to me by my good fortune to have been born here in the U.S. I chose to attend college, where to attend, what to study and how to spend my free time. I choose whether or not to vote in governmental elections, and I choose for whom I cast my vote. I chose to pursue a serious romantic relationship with a wonderful man, and I chose to have his baby, to build a family with him. Little did I realize at the time that the decision to have a baby would just create a seemingly never ending daily array of choices that I would be making on someone else's behalf. That opportunity is not so relished.
As a stay-at-home mom, most of the daily responsibility of caring for Sofia falls to me. I make breakfast, lunch and dinner. I schedule her doctor appointments and playdates. I do the grocery shopping and other errands with a toddler (and snacks) in tow. I change her diapers and dress her, sometimes multiple times a day. I read books to her (often the same three over and over again), I kiss her boo-boos, I dry her tears, I carry her around on my hip. Along with those responsibilities come many choices: what, when and how much I should feed her; when I should go shopping and what I should buy; what clothes she will wear; what lines/pages of her books I should skip over on the second, third, fourth, and fifth consecutive readings; when she really should be carried around versus when she should just try to occupy herself - the list goes on and on. Most of these choices are easy enough to make and come as second nature by now as she is almost 21 months old. It's the larger, more serious choices with which I struggle.
Just this weekend, while playing with her daddy (that wonderful man I mentioned earlier), Sofia sustained an injury to her left arm. After a fair amount of tears and toddler hysterics, it became clear that while she was not comfortable, she was not in pain as she allowed us to squeeze her hand and rotate her wrist, elbow and shoulder. Still, she wouldn't use her arm - not to high five, not to bear any weight, and, perhaps most tellingly of all, not to accept a snack. Instead, it just hung limply by her side. We both felt that Sofia needed some medical attention, but a trip to the emergency room seemed like overkill and definitely something to be avoided right now while the flu epidemic is raging. We placed calls to several nearby urgent care centers, and either they wouldn't treat patients her age or they couldn't treat those types of injuries. So, after speaking with a family member who is a pediatrician, we chose to skip a trip to the hospital, unless of course her condition worsened. We both agonized over whether or not this was the smart choice, the right choice, even a good choice. In the end, our choice was a safe one (this time) - Sofia started to use her arm again without any issue within 48 hours and quickly resumed engaging in monkey-like shenanigans around the house.
The choices we make for Sofia won't always turn out as well; we won't always luck out. At least once or twice, we will likely choose poorly for her. We will aim not to, of course, but we would be fools to expect that we will always have the foresight or good fortune to choose correctly. My hope is that whenever we are faced with making a big choice for her that we will do so with love and care and that we will not allow expedience or convenience to influence us. We must remember not to make the self-serving choices we normally would for ourselves but instead to consider Sofia's well-being first and foremost. Of course, most parents probably aspire to achieve the same goal; I know that we aren't unique in this way. I do believe this to be one of the greatest challenges of parenthood, though, and I hope that when she is old enough and experienced enough to understand all of this (likely not until she becomes a mother herself), she'll realize that we tried to do our best for her. I hope that she will choose to forgive us our poor choices just as readily as she will choose to celebrate our good ones.
For now, I will choose to savor the opportunity to make choices for Sofia rather than regard it as burdensome, because much sooner than I will care to admit, she will be yearning to make choices for herself, and that's when the real worry will begin.
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