Parental stress all part of the fun

Before your children are born you imagine wonderful things: The pregnancy will be easy. Delivery will be fast. You won’t gain a pound.

The rest is a blur of soft-focus daydreams: You picture a placid child; an early talker and early walker; the smartest kid in the class.

Through it all, you imagine, you will have the patience of a saint. Serenity will shine around you like a halo, and your children will worship you. They will look adoringly up at you; their arms wrapped tightly around your waist.

That’s before they’re here. What comes after is a little less rosy. That glow gets lost in a queasy fog and the delivery stretches out over two full shifts in the maternity ward. The early talker’s first words – strung together at church – just happen to be the choice phrase you shrieked when the driver ran the red light and almost hit you broadside. The early walker runs you ragged. And the smartest kid in the class? He gets suspended for high spirits and low grades. You don’t have anything in common with the saints, unless it’s a desire to let go of this world and move on to the next. You’re tired and grumpy and if the kids did put their arms around you, you’d assume they were reaching for your wallet.

The whole thing is almost more than you can handle. And you still can’t see your toes when you stand on the scale.

Then, without any warning, there are days when something clicks and for a moment, a tiny slice of an ordinary life, you get it right. When something, the tilt of her head or the sound of her voice, tells you a daughter needs you and you hold her while she cries out a litany of complaint and teenage angst. Or you realize that your usually busy son keeps coming into the room where you’re working because he is trying to find a way to talk to you. So you put down what you’re doing and you listen, and for once you have the right answers. Or, when you look at your child – the person who only minutes before was driving you completely out of your mind – and you’re so overcome with love it feels like a fist is wrapped around your heart and squeezing hard.

When you start a family what you think you want is a paint-by-number life; where the colors are matched and pretty and it’s easy to fill in the blank spaces. We want a reality that mirrors the daydream, but that’s not what we get.

Instead we get sleepless nights and days that are so long and trying that a trip to the dentist looks like a treat. We get children who come into this world anything but placid; individuals with their own DNA, their own set of talents and gifts. We get tantrums and stubbornness.

Because of us, and in spite of us, they grow out of childhood and become people with their own dreams. And, by that time, you’ve begun to realize how dull – how predictable and plain – it would have been if you’d gotten the life you planned.

Raising a child isn’t easy and it doesn’t bring peace of mind.

But it’s a wonderful thing.