“If you’re having a baby for reasons of self-gratification, of course you’re going to be miserable. Becoming a parent is less about enriching your life than it is about up-ending it entirely to make room for another human being.”
Being a parent is one of the most amazing and rewarding experiences you can have. At times, it’s also one of the most miserable. When your children are very young and demanding, you just hope the days you go to bed feeling good about them outnumber the days you lie in bed wondering if you’ve made a mistake. (Yes, we all do that.) Then, when they get a little older, you lie in bed worrying if they’ll end up hating you anyway despite all that hard work and sleepless nights (that they won’t remember).
Children don’t come into the world with instructions. Even if they did, they wouldn’t follow the rules anyway. They expect us to know everything and be everything. They get disappointed and angry with us for just having human limitations. They are selfish. Add to this that parents are limited, emotional beings rarely seeing an immediate return on their investment into their children, and you have a recipe for the world’s biggest heartache and headache.
As a parent, I feel the only answer to this is to remember that I was once a child too, and to forgive my children their faults (that they can’t help anyway) just as I was (eventually) forgiven by my parents. In the meantime, I’ve learned to relax my expectations of my children and myself. (Otherwise, I will always be disappointed.) Those first few years are rough. It is work. It doesn’t always feel worthwhile. It is selfless. But I’ve learned patience, I’ve learned to be kind, I’ve learned I have strength I didn’t know I had (strength I thought only my mom had!). Everyday I get a little bit better at it. Everyday feels more worthwhile. There’s even joy! In the end, I hold out hope that the children I raise- and the person I become along the way -will be the sort of people anyone would be proud to know.
So far it’s working.
2 weeks ago
