Wouldn’t it be nice if everything was simple and straightforward? That’s what we’d like the job of a parent to be. We’d like there to be a blueprint that laid out exactly what we have to do and when we have to do it in order to guarantee that all our parental i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.
Of course, life isn’t remotely like that.
It’s said of the presidency that only the impossible problems make their way to the desk of the president. The easy decisions get decided lower in the chain of command. It’s the intractable, no-win situations that get escalated to the leader’s desk.
The same could be said for parenting. Parenting, like life, is often a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. It’s about making the best of bad situations. It’s about being pragmatic and realistic. Marcus Aurelius reminds us that we can’t go through life expecting it to be like Plato’s Republic. We don’t live there. We live in the real world. Where there are only hard decisions.
