Parenting When It’s Hard

Newly engaged and converted, I was full of pep, vinegar, and vague hope during my senior year of college. At my bridal shower a woman I respected offered her solicited advice: “We all keep waiting for life to get easier, but it never does. Life is just hard-but there are different types of hard. Be sure that it’s hard for the right reasons.”

As wise words can be, these were deflating.

I recalled them, though, when just eighteen months later I was losing my composure trying to soothe my colicky newborn son. Why is this so hard? I wondered. Nothing in my life has ever given me so little reward for so much effort! During one long hot afternoon of both of us crying in our dirty house I yelled back at the hollering baby, “you are the worst boss I’ve ever had!”

Of course there were certain problems with that perspective. The baby was not a boss and I was not an employee. I was a mother. Mothering is not principally a job, but a relationship. It was the relationship for which my entire physiology (though little in my education or experience) had prepared me.

My attitude on that desperate day, however, was not unique. It was simply an expression of the values I had inherited culturally, an attitude I had unwittingly learned as surely as I had learned the alphabet and calculus.

This attitude is on display in Sophie Gilbert’s review of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, a collection of essays defending elective childlessness. She highlights, for example, “The inextricable links between increased education and intelligence, and opting out of procreation.” She quotes one author from the collection, Laura Kipnis, who precisely and demeaningly says that smart women prefer employment. Enlightened women “soon wise up to the fact that they [mothers] aren’t getting enough recompense for their labors.”

Of course this is unsatisfactory. Since money was coined it was considered an insufficient measure for real value. We live for the experience of potent, non-material, and non-quantifiable pleasure—which is, perhaps, an alternate definition of joy.

Though joy-full, I was unprepared and overwhelmed by the dullness, grossness, and frustration of caring for an immature human being. Indeed, another unambiguously titled Atlantic article, “Not Wanting Kids Is Entirely Normal,” suggests that lots of people would ditch their kids if given half a chance because parenting is so difficult. As one mother said, “I love my son, but I hate being a mother. It has been a thankless, monotonous, exhausting, irritating and oppressive job. Motherhood feels like a prison sentence.”

I’ve been there and sobbed into that pillow. But the question remains, “Is it hard for the right reasons?” Parents feel frustrated because they are slowly and excruciatingly having their shallowness dredged out of them, their selves extracted from their selfishness, and those same selves then absorbed in someone else. It hurts. It is confusing and very hard, but that doesn’t mean it is bad.

That parenting is difficult means instead that others must help, but right now fewer than ever are. Instead of having kids and the empathy that accompanies the common experience of parenthood, we have people who, based on fleeting interactions with children, say they “just don’t want them.” As contributor Kipnis put it, “They would have messed up the apartment.”

I myself never had great yearning for motherhood. I’ve never been a kid person and I think there’s a reason why human beings don’t stay children-they are immature, on their way to something more. But there is purpose behind parenting. We too, as fully grown adults, are on our way to being more.

Soon after my blow-up at my newborn I was at a yoga class when the instructor read a meditation to the dim room full of cleansing breaths. She read:

“…grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console”;

I considered my wailing infant.

“Not to be understood as to understand;

Not to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive…”

In very important ways, I was the one who was undeveloped. I was the one who needed to grow up and this undesirable baby was helping me do that.

Trying to explain what it is to love a child, I once told a friend that it felt like a door opening in my heart. It was as if I’d been contentedly living in a studio apartment when suddenly a wall fell and there was an entire room that I didn’t know existed. Exploring this new space was a great joy: I never knew how much I’d enjoy a bathroom! Other children brought the same feeling: I never knew how much better life would be with a front porch! A library! A breakfast nook!

There are, it turns out, far more wonderful things than keeping your apartment exactly the way you once wanted it. Renovation makes life hard. That’s okay, though, because it is hard for the right reasons.