“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” As a parent, that line from poet Philip Larkin strikes a lot differently than it used to.

Lived experience doesn’t help much on this front. With a “what are you going to do?” shrug, my mother-in-law informed me that you’ll do your best as a parent but there will still be things that your kids will disagree with your parenting or think are hurtful as an adult. Similarly, I hear people talk about how adults said small things to them – for both good and bad – that the adult probably doesn’t remember, but the person has carried with them their whole lives.

The fact is, doing something to screw up my kids is one of my biggest fears as a parent. Not that I’m perfect – far from it. I know I mess up and genuinely apologize to my kids to make up for it.

What I’m scared of is messing up in some major way and having no idea I did so.

Part of it is a lifelong fear of hurting people’s feelings without realizing it. As an autistic woman, I’ve had many times when I’ve interrupted someone or misinterpreted someone in a way that hurt their feelings. They thought it was on purpose – after all, how could I not know? – but I often didn’t have a clue. I can count the number of times I’ve hurt someone’s feelings on purpose on one hand. I still feel bad about all of them.

So the thought of doing that to my kids – yikes. I love them so dearly and have a deeper responsibility for them than anyone else besides my husband. Plus, with both of them being neurodivergent, a lot of the old-school parenting advice can be more harmful to them than to neurotypical kids.

In addition, my first reactions that people often think of “intuition” aren’t reliable in terms of decision-making. Between postpartum anxiety and auditory sensitivities, my immediate reaction when my younger son cried as a baby was panic. I just wanted to run out of the room. I had to breathe through it and push down that reaction to figure out how to meet his needs. So the sense of responsibility weighs heavily on me without a ton of engrained knowledge to fall back on.

That’s what drives me to read so many parenting books. Especially because each one promises so much, from having a happy baby to calming an explosive child. Maybe if I read enough books, put enough information together, learn enough, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll do this right. Hell, I researched and wrote a parenting book myself.

But all the information in the world isn’t going to solve my challenge. Relationships are hard, complicated, tricky things. Getting to know someone as they grow and you grow with them is both the hardest and most beautiful of all. The learning is in the doing and the loving and the being with them in all types of situations, good and bad. And hopefully with all of that, it won’t be perfect, but it will be good. That’s really all we can ask as parents and as people.

So I’m trying to sit with the uncomfortable truth that I will never be perfect, always make mistakes that I don’t know about, and yet still be a good mom. I suspect it’s a lifelong process, just like being a parent.