Confession: I find parenting really hard a lot of the time. I often wonder if I am temperamentally suited to be a parent. I am impatient. I get bored reading the same books again and again. I say this as someone who experienced years of infertility and really wanted to be a parent for a long time. I didn’t have many illusions that parenthood would be blissful, but I had the ratios off.
In my mind, I guess I thought having kids would be at least 50% snuggling and game nights. Instead, much of my time as a parent is spent wiping butts, refereeing about whose turn it is, and nagging little people to get their shoes on. But, sometimes parenting doesn’t suck. In fact, sometimes it’s really awesome. Like yesterday, when you take your six-year-old to the first soccer practice of the season. She loves soccer, but she is struggling with anxiety in new situations. You expect to sit with her on the side of the field for most of the practice and work on tiny baby steps toward getting in the game. Instead, she shocks you by taking a step onto the field. She is still scared, but is willing to try. Then through her tears, she says, “I’m ready,” and runs onto the field. She comes back crying and frustrated several times. And then she tries again. Tears are running down your cheeks because… because… you can’t put it into words.
Then, as if to prove that yes, parenting is often a slog, the six-year-old wakes up vomiting at 3am and the three-year-old wakes up at 5am with a low-grade fever. Then, as you are laying in bed this morning, wishing, wishing for more sleep, willing yourself to get up, you hear giggling. You walk into the bedroom to see your children (YOUR BEAUTIFUL MIRACULOUS CHILDREN) snuggling as your six-year-old reads a book to her younger sister. The lost sleep and vomit clean up suddenly don’t matter at all. The ratios just have to be calculated differently. For the foreseeable future I will probably spend more time on slog than on bliss. But that one moment of bliss (watching your anxious child run onto the soccer field or seeing your children reading and snuggling in bed together) throws the whole frickin thing into the win column.
Written: February 23, 2020