At the end of two days at the office I am so glad to be home and to know that I don’t have to get up and out tomorrow. I can be with my family.
At the end of a day with my kids I am so overcome with exasperation that I can’t believe I looked forward to such a day.
I try to be grateful for every moment with my children. And of course I am, ultimately. But as the moments are happening, so often filled with whining, talking back, protests, refusals, I find myself wondering how, and why, I got myself into this situation.
For as long as I can remember I wanted to have children. I wanted to identify myself as a mother. When I met my now-partner, I started dreaming of our children before our courtship had turned to commitment. And now we have this family that I love and cherish and take in daily with love and wonder and an almost equal amount of disbelief. How am I to be trusted to raise these three children to be fulfilled, happy, healthy, productive adults? How can I be selfless enough? Honest enough? Tough enough? And why is it so difficult?
There is no way to adequately prepare for parenthood. For the sleep deprivation. The pure joy of seeing your infant smile. The pride of watching as your preschooler writes his name for the first time. The gut-wrenching fear when the unexplained fever won’t go away. The pure range of emotions felt in the course of one day are more exhausting than the training I used to do in my days as an athlete. A day at work can be intellectually exhausting. But the work can be left at the office. A day at home is emotionally exhausting and sometimes continues into the next day without a break if one of the kids wakes in the night. And now, with an infant, we are starting all over again. I am tired. So tired.
But I am letting this baby be a baby. I am not hurrying her toward her developmental milestones. I know they will come. And soon. And as I watch her grow, I am also watching my son learn how to be a kid. How to communicate his feelings without whining. How he is proud of his name-writing. And my now-middle child. Until now my baby, all of a sudden she is three-and-a-half, and I am so amazed at her nurturing impulses and so sad that her speech is more and more without lisps and misspoken words. She is soon to be a big kid. And that’s the irony.
These days with little ones are so long sometimes. But the weeks, and months, and years go by so quickly. Every parent says the same thing. Because it is true. The best parenting advice I’ve ever received is, “Enjoy them.” Simple. And true. The children are worth the exasperation, of course. Because the rewards are beyond measurement.
Which doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t look forward to tomorrow at the office.
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Originally posted in March 2009