With thousands of books, hundreds of experts, dozens of friends and relatives, and a handful of well-meaning strangers to give us advice, why is it that no one ever can or does tell us what being a MaMa is really about?

All that information may help in the mechanics of child-rearing (though even that's doubtful) but I've noticed that there are an awful lot of things that people either can't or won't tell a first time Mom about life as MaMa.

Not being the most intuitive of individuals, this fact really only struck me the other night, in the midst of a party, standing on our staircase landing watching a group of kids ...instigated by my five year old daughter... surf the steps on a gym mat. I am standing there with one of the other Moms, watching a mass of giggling, squealing, yelling kids inch the mat over the edge of the top step so they can go bumping their way down and land in a pile accompanied by even louder giggling and squealing. The other Mom and I are clearly in the same parental development stage. We look, we glance at each other for a clue to what the other one thinks, we watch again for a few seconds, we get that little hint of a smile on our faces and shrug our shoulders. The steps are carpeted. The landing at the bottom is carpeted. Kids are built to bounce.

Not that long ago I might have been appalled at the whole situation. Today I take it in stride. I have, I think, become a MaMa. I have now figured out some of the things that no one ever could or would tell me.

Growing up and growing up as parents are actually a lot alike. Infants start out with pretty much a strong sense of instinct and gradually become full-fledged people. First time parents start out with lots of instincts and gradually become MaMas and PaPas. In both cases most turn out just fine and a few end up making you shake your head and wonder what the Hell happened along the way for someone to get so screwed up?

In parental infanthood, we MaMas-to-be are birthed as parents with a lot of very incomplete information about just what this life is going to be all about. Like our newborns we've spent forty weeks in our own kind of wombs, dreaming fetal dreams of cuddly bundles that coo and happily suckle at our breasts. Then we are thrust out into the real world of babies and discover that the real world is bigger, louder, smellier, and far less manageable than life in the womb.

So we go through our developmental stages along with our children, or usually about one step behind them, playing a constant game of catch up. Like children who master one skill only to find that in doing so the world has become a different place, we just about manage to 'get it' and relax a bit only to find that our kids have gone and changed again. How often have I wished that my daughter would just give me two whole weeks of understanding what's going on with her before she becomes someone new!

So now, five years into my parental growing up, I actually feel like someone who has a clue about what being a MaMa is about. It's a nice feeling, and it's even nicer to be there with women who have reached the same point. It's not that we necessarily all agree, it's that we've all reached a point of understanding: it's okay to do things less than perfectly. I've given up actually expecting to do this parenting thing right all the time. Oh that doesn't mean I've given up trying to do it right. I'm just a lot easier on myself when I screw up. As long as I manage to get the big things right, I think she'll turn out just fine.

I've also given up trying to please or impress anyone with my parenting. What's the point? Yeah, there will be those who will look at what I do and mentally shake their heads. They'll wonder at the fact that I could let the kids surf the stairs and make so much noise among civilized adults. They won't understand that I'm not ignoring the behavior, I'm condoning it. I've done all the mental calculations in the flash of a second and I've decided it's okay. The enjoyment, the risk of injury, the amount of aggravation to my adult guests...it's all been weighed and measured and the MaMa in me has spoken.

And when I hear other MaMas talking, I feel like one of the sisterhood. I can laugh along when a friend tells the story of untangling a battery operated spider from her younger son's hair. "I asked my six-year-old how the spider got in his brother's hair in the first place and he said it was an accident." She pauses, and another MaMa comments " 'Yeah, Ma, I didn't mean for it to get tangled in his hair, I meant to put it on his head and scare him with it and make him cry. See, it really was an accident!'" Yeah, that's kids all right. They've always been that way. We MaMas can just be slow on the uptake sometimes.

Could anyone have told me about becoming a MaMa? Would I have understood? I don't know. Kids need to learn some things on their own, so do parents. When some first time parents arrived at the party with their 4-month-old in tow at 10PM they were somewhat embarrassed having the baby out so late. We MaMas smiled and said, "Enjoy it now, it won't be so easy in a few more months." But you know, I'm not sure they really believed us, believed it was OK, believed it that the other parents there weren't looking at them like they were crazy.

So perhaps we can't be told the secrets of MaMahood in advance, we have to live and learn them on our own, experts and well-meaning advice notwithstanding. And even if we could be told, would we really want to pass up the adventure of discovery? Would we want to wish away our own parenting childhood any more than we want to wish away that of our kids? Maybe, just maybe, the most divine secret of all is in becoming a MaMa in the first place, a process as unique and inexplicable as watching children grow into themselves.

So somewhere along the way I've dropped a lot of the shoulds, musts, can'ts and nevers that I picked up from all those books, experts, friends and strangers. My daughter is my daughter and what works for her, what works for us as a family, isn't going to necessarily fit neatly into the pages of the latest musings on *being a Good Parent*. In other words, I've grown up to the point where I'm willing to trust a lot of my own instincts, my experience, take some chances and opt for enjoying my life with my daughter rather than worrying about the consequences all the time. At times I'm even willing to push the boundaries a little just to see what will happen. That sounds just about normal for a five-year-old...parent.