Years ago, a lovely woman who had been married several decades confessed that there were times in her marriage when she was madly in love with her husband and times when she couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him. “The trick to marriage,” she shared, “Is letting the times when you are madly in love carry you through the times when you aren’t.” This absolutely stunned me. I had never before heard anyone so in love tell me that sometimes they weren’t. Many years after that, a dear friend explained that her own mother, a kind, loving parent, had occasionally found herself wanting to toss one of her babies out of a window. Again, I was utterly confounded. Why weren’t people talking about these things?
We women are known for our ability to share our feelings (whether true or not, it is the prevailing perception), but sometimes I think we don’t share enough. We are frightened that somebody will judge us (and they do) or that people will be shocked (and they might). I sense that once we enter the realm of parenting, many women have little desire to hear honesty from others as well. When I found myself mothering three children in 11 months (via adoption and birth), I also found myself completely alone in my moments of misery. That’s right—misery. I loved my children from day one with every ounce of my being, but I was also exhausted and overwhelmed and usually covered in somebody else’s bodily fluids. Most people did not want to hear this. They wanted to celebrate the joy of adoption and the miracle of birth with me.*** They wanted our story to be consistently uplifting.
So I gave them uplifting. I told them about all the moments of beauty, when my son would crawl up under my shirt to fall asleep or how my eldest daughter’s giggling tickled me to no end. We talked about nursing and co-sleeping and cloth diapering and organic food and wooden toys—we were a walking/talking Magic Cabin catalog. They did not know that my baby was such a quiet baby because she nursed 20 minutes out of every hour (EVERY hour) or that my eldest needed me to hold her throughout a large percentage of each day. Or that my middle’s diapers were extra special, second only to his regular bouts of projectile vomiting.
Or that I missed my job. And I wanted my mommy, but could not have her. And I feared I was betraying feminism.
One of the things I love about the blogosphere (with all that is good, bad, and ugly about it) is that more people feel comfortable being honest about parenting. Recently, I had to try and figure out how to handle a rather hilariously sensitive matter with one of our kids, something no book had ever mentioned and no parent I knew had ever explained. So I googled it and, sure enough, I found that I was not alone in this predicament. There were several message boards, in fact, where people could “chat” anonymously, that helped me through it. I think this trend has extended into our face time as well. I notice more moms sharing their struggles and more dads opening up about what parenting is like for them. When my husband gets together with his dad friends, they divide their time pretty evenly between talk of computers, current events, movies and the like, and family matters. This is a rather hefty shift from almost eight years ago, when our children first entered our lives.
If you are new to parenting or preparing to parent, I encourage you to look for openness. Do not settle for advice on burping and diapering. Trust me, once they arrive, the actual care and keeping of children is the easy part. Whether to start them on mashed carrots or peas, the subject of many a book, is pretty insignificant when you consider the effects of having your heart filled by a smile one moment and then broken by a tear 20 seconds later. Or the not-so-subtle dissent into 7-year-old-hood and the way it makes a parent want to shoot Tequila. Or how watching a pre-teen slowly explore autonomy can rip your soul open. When they are babies, you don’t need books about how to change a diaper. You need friends and family who will listen to all you have to say about every aspect of parenting and who will share their honest experiences with you.
And, if you are smart, you will also surround yourself with people who will laugh hysterically with you when a hilariously sensitive predicament pours into your life and you cannot blog about it no matter how badly you want to tell the world.
***I remember, during our adoption process, watching a friend trying to parent her four year old and her newborn triplets. I didn’t want to hear how difficult it was for her either. It stung me as we waded through our slow, tumultuous adoption process—so I understand the sentiment.
This post was first published April 2011.
