So often, I find myself thinking that my daughter is so much easier than my son. In some ways it's true; Goldie is a bit more easygoing than her brother, a bit less prone to frustration. But as time goes on, I'm starting to realize more and more that the primary reason why my son sometimes seems "more difficult" than his sister is that every single parenting question or problem or situation that arises with him marks our first time taking a crack at it.

When Indy was a baby he cried endlessly, and it was only once these episodes were many months in the past that I realized that he had been colicky. Had my daughter cried like that I would have known what I was looking at immediately. Potty training was endless and exhausting because we tried to start training our son before he was ready; this time around we know not to push, and already the process is far less stressful for all involved.

I went into parenting very certain of how I'd react to things like temper tantrums: I would not tolerate them. If they happened I would ignore them, and in that way my children would learn that screaming and crying achieves nothing.

Before I had children, I never spent much time with them. I have no siblings; none of my friends had kids; I never even babysat very much. And so when I brought Indy home from the hospital, I had to figure out - very quickly - what this whole "mothering" thing was about. I cobbled together a parent-persona that I'm pretty sure was based largely on Kirstie Alley's character in Look Who's Talking, and when I heard someone say "Mom" I often found myself looking around, wondering who they were talking to. I watched other moms for clues, wondering how they seemed so confident in their decisions: my child will eat only organic food, my child will breastfeed for a year, my child will never hear his parents raise their voices.

I made my own baby food for exactly one week. I declared I would breastfeed until my children were at least six months old, and then stopped at 13 weeks for the first, 11 for the second. Kendrick and I fight - sometimes loudly - and although I wish this weren't the case, our kids have certainly seen it.

I think part of why Erin and I became such close friends is that we recognized this uncertainty in each other; this struggle to find a label that might help us navigate this strange new Mom World we found ourselves living in. But above it all, I think what we shared was a profound desire to have someone tell us that the kind of mom we should be was the one we already were.