When it comes to parenting, everyone has an uninvited opinion they’d like to share with you. Your job is to let them say whatever they’re going to say and to not hit them after they say it. It has been my experience that even those who are not parents inevitably fall into the pontificating subset. From the moment you leave the hospital, the birthing room, or the living room in which you delivered, you have signed yourself on to more scrutiny, analysis, and laborious self-restraint than you could ever have imagined.

I’ll never forget eating at a Bay Area restaurant—I was eight months pregnant—and a 20-something year-old woman sitting at a table a few feet away from mine was expressing herself rather loudly with her dinner date. “It’s so selfish to have your own baby when there are so many needier ones out there waiting to be adopted!” So, now, after I’d waited until I was nearly 40 to make the decision to procreate, I was selfish. And another time, at a dinner party, I mentioned to someone that one baby was probably going to be enough for us. I subsequently received a lecture about how self-centered and maladjusted only children were. Now, it seemed, I’d probably be raising a selfish child as well.

Since I had only planned to do this once, my wish was to go through birthing without drugs. But everyone kept telling me that I would change my mind once I got to the hospital and discovered that I had to have a c-section, which I was told, I should, as an “older woman,” also prepare for. Call me selfish, but I just wanted to have my own experience without constantly being told beforehand what it was going to be like. And I want to die someday knowing that I experienced the unadulterated sensation of childbirth. I imagined it could be a great reference point when things got tough. I would be able to look back on my drugless childbirth and say, “if I did that—I can do anything!”

I did end up doing it without drugs. It wasn’t easy, but I’m glad I got to stick to my plan without a lot of complications. I would never suggest that it is the right choice for every woman, by any means. But it did lead me to my bigger realization that childbirth is so hard is because parenting is so hard. I think the pain of childbirth, and the mental and physical strength it requires, prepares you physically and mentally for the challenges ahead. And you need all the preparation you can get.

You go into parenting with so many aphorisms handed out to you. Everyone has already figured it all out and they can’t wait to tell you what it’s going to be like for you. The best example of that was the Attachment Parenting sales representatives I encountered. After announcing that I was pregnant at work, I curiously got an e-mail from an executive co-worker mom with whom I had never before shared a conversation, or even a glance. “Congratulations!!,” she’d written. “Would you like to have lunch sometime this week? We can talk about mom stuff.”

Bewildered by her sudden interest in me, I accepted the offer. We spent an hour picking at our roast turkey sandwiches while she told me all about Dr. Sears and the attachment school of parenting which, among other laudable contributions, credits itself with producing well-attached, more secure children. It seemed that she has sold me.

Why not?, I thought. I grew up insecure and turned into a neurotic, so why not at least try to produce a well-adjusted child? Wouldn’t that be something I could be proud of doing? My coworker/sales rep spent a good deal of the hour telling me how much happier I would be if I kept my baby on my body in a sling, co-slept with her, never put her down when she was crying, breastfed her until she was four, and gave her my undivided attention 20 hours a day.

She forgot to mention how sleep-deprived and anxious I would be trying give this baby more than I was giving myself. She didn’t mention the strain that babies who never leave your sight put on your marriage. I guess you just figure that into the reason that the divorce rate grows among parents with very young children.

But I took on this parenting “style” as she did, effectively inviting a school-bus load of more reasons to feel anxious, since really what I was “learning” was that I had some control over the outcome of my child. I fell prey to the thinking that if I could be that kind of a mother, I could mold the person that I had always wanted to be myself: secure, grounded. As writer Judith Warner points out in her book Perfect Madness: Parenting in the Age of Anxiety, women of my generation, who have put some time into re-parenting their inner child, attachment parenting seemed like the perfect theory to raise your kid by.

After reading so many books about how to take care of my baby, whether to let her “cry it out” or not cry it out, whether to pick her up or not pick her up, watch Baby Einstein videos or not, I had lost my ability to trust my own instincts. So, as so many women do, I ceded to the experts, of which there is an endless supply. After all, I’d never done any of this before. I decided to take what seemed to be the kinder, gentler approach with my baby. I wanted my baby and I to be synchronized, harmonious. (Ha!)

Needless to say, the parent I imagined I would be is not the one that I have become.

One of the most common maxims you hear as a new parent is, “It goes so fast!” By this, well-meaning people are trying to tell you that you should slow down and enjoy every precious moment of your baby’s existence. In my experience, the first two years of mommyhood went very slowly. Day after exhausting day with my “spirited” toddler (euphemism for very intense, very demanding, very high-energy child), I thought, this is not going fast at all. In fact, I couldn’t wait until the twos were over.

I was looking forward to going out to a restaurant with her without having to chase her down the street as my husband and I took turns eating by ourselves. I was looking forward to starting the day without the meltdown that erupted from getting out of our pajamas, or a day when I wouldn’t be cleaning off the yogurt that had been smeared all over the TV, or pleading with my daughter not to jump on our dog’s arthritic leg or hit the crawling baby who lived next door over the head with a plastic castle.

I didn’t imagine myself reacting so strongly to her outbursts, the fear that would emerge in me prior to one—some of the worst fear I’ve ever encountered. I guess I didn’t imagine I would become such an unpleasant person. I don’t think I was naïve in choosing to become a parent—I knew my life would change. I knew I would grow into someone that I might not recognize. I just didn’t know how much strength it would take stay composed every day. I didn’t know how attached I was to my former non-mom self (that calmer person) and that I would need to set aside some grieving time to deal with that loss.

And, I certainly wasn’t prepared for one of the most difficult aspects of being a parent, which is enduring the wrath of judgment from other parents. Because not only is the advice being doled out constantly, if you’re not doing it the way that parent would do it, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be told, albeit subtly, that you are not doing it right. It no longer becomes about your instinct as a parent who shares some of the genetic traits with your child—temperment, personality, energy levels, ways of interacting with the world—it’s about what they that parent thinks is right or wrong, a conclusion they’ve arrived at based on their own offspring, who may bear no emotional resemblance whatsoever to your child.

It takes a village to raise a child, yes. But you kind of want that village to at least be on the same page, or at least reading the same book. The trouble with contemporary parenting, as I see it, is that everyone is reading a different book, or operating from a different set of instructions that has been handed down them as fact. The clash of parenting styles makes for some pretty uncomfortable conversations and situations. I watched a friendship break up over it, and it seems ludicrous to even have to admit that.

Since that painful experience, I naturally gravitate towards women who have a parenting style more akin to mine. If I sense a hoverer or a micromanager, I take a step backward.

For me, every day is a battle—however oxymoronic this is—with trying to let go. I have to let go of the urge to make everything ok for her, let go of person that I was and the person that I am now, skating between the clutches of parental “control” and the promise of an easier tomorrow, or at least one with less screaming, kicking, and biting. I have to let go of caring what anybody else thinks about me or my child or the way in which I am raising my child.

Probably the best piece of advice I’ve received so far did not come from a parenting expert. It was something I heard singer/poet Leonard Cohen say in an interview. “You have to let go of the master plan you have for yourself—then you’ll discover what the real plan is.” My former self knew I could turn to Leonard when in doubt, and I guess this much is still true.