The Parenting Paradox
You will miss these days…
….and you will be so grateful they’re over.
In my line of work as a Birth and Postpartum Doula, I spend my days with a lot of first-time moms, and one of the most common sentiments I see, especially these past few years, is the pressure and the guilt of attempting to enjoy every moment with your children.
Sometimes the only way to get through something is to fully acknowledge how absolutely awful it feels at a certain moment.
Yes, your baby will not always be tiny and squishy and snuggly – and simultaneously – yes, you will eventually get a full night’s sleep, and you will get to go to the bathroom alone (and I don’t just mean faking needing to use the bathroom just so you can shut the door and be by yourself for 3 minutes), and someday you will even get to go to an appointment without having to arrange for childcare. It’s about acknowledging that all of those things are true, and the existence of one doesn’t negate the other.
I love having a garden where I can go outside and pick ingredients for a meal. I love the process of choosing and daydreaming about what I’m going to plant during the next season, and I love the green smell of tomato vines on my hands after picking a bowl full of tomatoes. I strongly dislike weeding, and spending hours working in the garden when it’s 100 degrees, and I despise our summer water bill while attempting to keep everything alive. There is no shame in hating weeding, and I don’t know anyone who would tell me that I’m a bad gardener because I don’t enjoy standing out in the sun for four hours while awkwardly and painfully bent over. Yet with the things in our life that are arguably the most universally important to all of us parents, our children, I find the amount of shame and judgment surrounding our day-to-day world with them to be intensely disturbing.
Why is it okay to say you hate waiting in the security line at the airport and no one wonders if that particular hatred has anything to do with your enjoyment of spending a week at the beach on vacation, but if you’re brave enough to say you hate getting your child ready for school in the morning, people question whether or not you should’ve had children in the first place?
One thing I’ve been learning as I get further along on this parenting journey is that hard is not synonymous with bad, and relatedly, I don’t have to attach a value judgment to each and everything I experience as a mother. Some things just are; they may be hard, they may be sad, and they may feel overwhelming, but none of it has to mean anything more than that. So often I find myself experiencing something in parenting and despite how minor or innocuous it truly is (my daughter hating a certain food, or feeling sad about something that happened at school), my brain automatically launches into where I’ve gone wrong, what I could’ve done differently, what I should do about it going forward, and how I’ve potentially damaged her into her adulthood. I’ve been practicing stopping that mental loop as soon as I notice it and letting myself feel things for what they are, without attaching all the peripheral junk to it. That example earlier of despising getting your child ready for school was far from hypothetical; there are some mornings that getting my daughter out the door leaves me feeling defeated before the day has even truly begun. And that is okay. It doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that it is sometimes really hard. And that is okay.
Paradoxically, there are two things I love more than anything in the world: 1) Being with my child, and 2) Not being with my child. And that is okay.
