FamilyEducation Blogs

A favorite blogger friend of mine wrote the other day about a recent study out there claiming that parenthood does not, in fact, bring joy and fulfillment,  that children are a source of misery and stress, and that raising them is a "lifelong challenge to your mental health." Where the data for this study came from is anyone's guess, actually, but I thought a lot about it yesterday--and about my blogger friend's counterpost as I sat during morning remarks at the faculty "development" workshops I attended. (I developed many thoughts during these workshops, so it was all good--mission accomplished.) I tend to think about my kids a lot when I'm at these workshops, because they're held three times/year in the same room in the same building. The first one I ever attended was when T. was a small baby, and every two hours I excused myself to go into the over-air-conditioned restroom to pump milk. I'd sit on the toilet seat with the pump attached to me and listen thoughtfully to the whirr-whirr and wonder what on earth I was doing there, pumping milk in a cramped stall.

But yesterday I thought about all the many positive and wonderful things that parenthood has brought me AND taught me. For as a parent I haven't been sitting back passively basking in the feelings of love and joy you get when you watch your children behave delightfully and you just want to scoop them up and kiss them and hold onto them forever. Being a parent is a lifelong learning process--a challenge, of course, as all learning is. Sometimes it gets ugly and exhausting, and it's dirty work. As I washed my hands in the bathroom sink yesterday, I looked in the mirror at my face, now four years older than the face that had looked back at me those times when I pumped milk so diligently in the bathroom stall. I thought about every little thing my kids have taught me, and about the big things, too.

I have learned about courage:

When my daughter was six months old and in the hospital recovering from her surgery, she refused to nurse at all for four days post-op. On Thursday at 3:30 a.m., she woke me up (I was lying next to her in the hospital bed, which I fought hard to get the nurses to bring in to exchange for the institutional metal crib) and fussed and thrashed a bit. I picked her up, negotiating the tangle of IV lines, and tried to nurse her. And, to my surprise, she feebly started sucking. Then her eyes opened a bit wider in surprise and she looked at me and it was as if everything clicked back into place again. I held her against me and she nursed and nursed and only then did I cry, after all those days of holding it inside; only then did I realize not only the extent of her courage, but mine as well.

Stamina and Strength:

You never realize how much stamina you do have (piles and piles of untapped stamina) until you pace the kitchen floor, alone, with a wide-awake baby, your body aching to curl back up into your bed, and the floor feeling hard under your feet. But you walk and rock and sing, and just when you think you have no more stamina at all--not an ounce of it--your baby is asleep. And then you do it over again a few hours later, and then you get up and go to work and, tired as you are, you still think about your baby constantly, your mind back in that dark kitchen, where you are rocking and singing.

And if you're a parent, you have to be strong for other people, even when you don't feel like it. You do this constantly, until it becomes almost second nature, and then you realize that you are strong--much stronger than you thought you were before you became a parent. And it's the kind of strength that has nothing to do with how much laundry you can carry upstairs, or how heavy a screaming four-year-old is when you carry her off to her room, but about a deep strength inside that could go on and on.

Love:

There are, of course, so many different ways to love. If I didn't have my kids, I'd only know how to love a few ways--all good ways, of course, but the love you have for your children is something entirely different from any other type of love. Once you do know this love, it gets transferred across to all the other ways you love, making those richer and better than they would otherwise have been. It's like being given a key to a secret room and once you unlock it, everything you do is made so much better by it.

You also learn what it means to love during the worst of times--those times when your child makes you see red, or says "I hate you," or accidentally-on-purpose damages your favorite picture, or your favorite anything. The love is still there, steady as ever, waiting out the storm.

Patience:

You have to be patient to be a parent. You can be an impatient parent, of course, and you can have huge moments of impatience, as sometimes happens to me. But even at those moments, you're practicing patience--trust me. Also, you learn that while patience does run thin at times (it's not a bottomless well, of course), somehow it refills itself over night, and you wake up with lots of it again. And sometimes you need it all, and sometimes not much of it, but it seems to work out in the end that there's always just enough.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that I can't imagine life without my kids--I can't imagine waking up each day and not having them around me, with all their noisiness and quirks and the chaos that flutters around them like Pigpen's dust cloud. I think the thought of life without them is dark and depressing, and that, THAT--that thought itself--would be a terrible lifelong challenge to my mental health.

T. has her own way of doing everything. You can show her the "right" way--or the way YOU think things ought to be done--but then she'll turn around and give the task her own personal trademark spin. If I give her a plastic bag, for instance, and ask her to help me empty the bathroom wastebaskets, she'll dump the trash onto the floor first, then spend her time picking it all up off the floor and placing it into the bag. [more]

About once a month or so I meet for coffee with a group of women from a parenting group. My husband and I are both closely involved with this group, but the coffee mornings seem to belong to the moms. These mornings are not regularly scheduled events, but about once a month someone will send an email out to the group suggesting a meeting at one of the many coffee shops in this area. [more]

I was recently invited to a virtual baby shower for a blogging friend of mine who is expecting her second child. I had never been invited to one of these before, although I've attended quite a few flesh-and-blood showers (that sounds kind of gruesome, actually, but I hate referring to the world outside of the Internet as "real life," since I blog in real life and real-life people read what I write). [more]

Last night, while dozing and resting with the kids during their respective bedtime routines (rituals), I realized yet another one of the many marvelous things about being a parent: It must be the only job (vocation? state-of-being?) where you can spend a solid 10 minutes with one child at bath time discussing the virtues of various body parts and, 45 minutes later when that child has drifted off to sleep, spend 20 minutes in a darkened room with the older child discussing evolution, the possibility of life in outer space, and the Big Bang theory.

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