Our Short Story
Welcome to Clueless Parents Club — where nobody has it all figured out, but at least we can laugh about it together.
We’re a family of four in South Florida, raising two tiny humans, wondering daily if we’re doing any of this right. Our kids are 4ish and 2ish and we are in our early 40s (yeah, we got going on this late). For now, we’ll go by Jim, Pam, Cece, and Phillip.
When we got married we agreed we weren’t going to have children. That went well. To be clear, our children were not mistakes, we changed our minds about a year into marriage. Neither of us are really sure why our minds changed, but it ended up being what we both wanted.
We are both what you may call “unlikely parents”. Neither of us saw ourselves in the role of mom or dad, and the whole concept of caring for anyone, other than ourselves, was completely foreign to us. In a futile attempt to prepare ourselves, we read the books, we watched the videos, and we talked to other parents in our lives.
I’m not sure anyone is ever really prepared to be a new parent, but if there was anyone to label as unprepared, it probably would have been us.
Cece was our first. She is what folks might call an easy baby. So easy, in fact, we decided to make her a sibling. Once Phillip arrived, shit got real. It was as if the universe was reverting to the mean. We got cocky as parents and the universe put us in our place—fast.
After Phillip joined us, we had the infamous two-under-two for a bit. And yeah, it’s a thing. Try it. Since then, it really feels like we’re just making it all up as we go —throwing spaghetti at the wall daily, and seeing what sticks.
Things we think we figured out: sleeping (seriously). Things we know we don’t have figured out: everything else (seriously).
And all too often we genuinely feel clueless. Which is how this site came to be. We cannot be the only ones. I suspect pretty much everyone feels like we feel at least sometimes, but I’m not sure how many people are cool openly saying it. Maybe people don’t want to be labeled as a bad parent or stupid, but eff that.
I read in a book saw on Instagram that said “being a parent is only hard, if you’re a good parent.” It was on Instagram—so obviously it has to be true. And right there it is confirmed: we’re already good parents for thinking this whole thing is hard.
So that’s us—clueless and figuring it out (using that phase loosely) one day at a time. If you’ve ever felt the same, welcome to the club. We’re glad you’re here.