No one will ever really figure out parenting

The near explains the far.

- Ralph W. Emerson

It doesn't make sense, really.

Before I became a father, 11 years ago this week, I received a lot of birthing lessons. My wife and I went to the hospital and attended a series of them over a multiple-month period in which we got refresher courses on human biology, nutrition and what I suspect was some thinly disguised psychiatric counseling.

All this, so we would be prepared for the big birth event of our first child. It was all great information, I'm sure, but when the day came, I'm not certain how much we used.

We didn't have to.

The hospital birthing room was filled with doctors and nurses and other seasoned professionals who pretty much handled the job. As I recall, my role consisted of feeding my wife ice chips and telling jokes to the nurses.

Then we brought him home, looked at each other and said, "Now what?" It's a question we still ask while sitting at the kitchen table each morning.

While the heir to my baseball card collection remains burrowed in his bed, his mother and I try to figure out what to do next. We plot, we plan, we compare notes. We worry a lot.

I guess we've tried to follow the same guidelines with which we were raised, but it is a different time and a more dangerous world.

Books on parental advice oversimplify the obvious, then restate it again and again.

Television is no help. Family dysfunction is easy programming for a variety of talk shows. Family conflict, solved in clever and humorous ways, is the staple of situation comedies. Real life is rarely that bad and never that funny.

The sneaky secret of parenting is that we watch other parents for clues.

Yes, I hesitate to admit it, but you all know - parents compete with their children.

We smile and pretend to be friendly, but we're really seeing if they're doing something that is working - something we're not doing. Is it discipline, time, attention?

Well, let me let you in on another secret: Most of us worry that other people are doing a better job. We see their child, who publicly presents a pleasant face and polite demeanor, and we think to ourselves: "Why can't my child be more like that? What am I doing wrong?"

Only occasionally do you find out that their angel's no angel. That they have problems, too. And the secret formula of Mom & Pop 101 remains as mysterious as Col. Sanders' fried chicken recipe.

If you check back with me in 11 years, my parental work will essentially be done, and I suspect I won't know that much more than I know today.

If anything, I probably will suggest that parenting is like putting together a very large jigsaw puzzle. You start with the borders, outline the framework, then fill in the middle, piece by painstaking piece. There's no set method on which piece goes next.

The image begins to emerge, and the longer you work on it, the clearer it becomes. Then one day, the last piece goes in, and you step back and say, "Now what?"

Which is pretty much where you came in, and if you're lucky, it's where you go out.

Reach Bill Kirby at (706) 823-3344 or bill.kirby@augustachronicle.com.