Why Being a Parent is the Hardest Job on the Planet
My first week as a mother started with a surprise C-section followed by overwhelming, inexplicable love, and ended with a sob-filled fit over breastfeeding, which came as naturally to me as twerking, which I can’t even begin to figure out.
Where the hell was my Parenting 101 manual? And why didn’t someone tell me about the emotional roller coaster? I would have brought my barf bag and a bottle of Xanax.
When you become a parent, you’re suddenly granted the World’s Hardest Job and a blank page for a job description. You don’t need a license, a degree or experience. You just need a baby—and voila, you get to be responsible for another human being. For 18 years. And a frenetic worrier for many more.
I’ve been a mom for over 20 years now, and I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for all the wine in Tuscany (and if you knew my love for Italy, that’s saying something). But it can be a freakin’ tough ride.
There’s no vacation. Sure, you can “take” a vacation. You can gallivant off to Puerto Vallarta with your spouse or spend a weekend waltzing down Michigan Avenue with your mom friends. But don’t think for one New York minute that you’re off the clock. Truth by told, you’re just one ER visit or babysitter’s mental breakdown from heading back home. Your kid is your responsibility, 24/7, 365 days a year, until they’re not. End of story.
Kids are brutally honest. “Mommy, my Barbie is driving her car on your back and your butt makes a HUGE hill!” Perfect. “Mom, you’re really gonna wear that? I mean, don’t you think you’re too old?” Well, yes—apparently I am. And they can be embarrassing. “Is this good to eat?” my 3-year-old son said at the grocery store when he found a tampon in my purse, then held it up for everyone in aisle five to see. Let me just hand my kid this box of fruit snacks, then shrink quietly under my cart. Kids will be more honest than your mirror and make you just as afraid to be seen in public.
Sometimes you feel helpless. The first time I heard my daughter cry from a broken heart, my own heart shattered. She sobbed big tears, I hugged her, I told her, “It gets better,” but I knew in the moment that her pain was deep and I couldn’t fix it. I cried for my son when I moved him across the country and kids at his new school told him to “go away” at lunch. Or for my other daughter when she totaled her car and I was 1,800 miles away and incapable of calming her down. As much as we want to protect our children, we can’t—not always. And sometimes, feeling their pain hurts worse than feeling our own.
Then one day, they grow up and move away. I bought pillow pets for my high school seniors (twins) a year ago. I was stumbling down the aisle at Costco, shopping for graduation party food, when I saw some furry animals in a bin and threw a few in my cart. This is the kind of thing that happens when you’re on the brink of letting go. You want to reach for anything that reminds you of your kids’ childhood and hold it. Of course you want your children to grow successfully into adulthood, but still. You also want to tell them, “I love who you are and who you are becoming and I’m so thrilled that I get to cheer you on — but if you don’t mind, I may have moments when I need to break down or flip through your baby pictures or look at you with a bit of sentiment and remember the way you used to reach your chubby hand to my cheek and say, “Hold you me, peeze.” I may have moments when I feel the need to slow this train down, because as much as I love watching you become, I don’t want to let go of who you were.”
Parenting is not for the faint of heart. But if I could go back and say one thing to myself as a young mother, I’d tell her, “Capture it.” Don’t wish anything away. Capture every emotion, every difficult moment, every laughable scene, every silly conversation, every exhausting day. Don’t just take pictures; capture it in your mind and in your heart and breathe it all in. Then carry it with you for the rest of your life.
Because one day, you won’t be a young mother anymore . . . and you will long for it. Even the hard parts. You’ll miss the way they needed you. The way seeing them every single day was normal. You’ll miss cooking meals for more than just one or two, even if you didn’t really love to cook to begin with. You’ll miss car conversations. And battles over what music to play. You’ll wish they would just randomly walk into your room at night to talk about something important or nothing at all.
Sure, parenting continues. It’s a lifelong venture. And parenting adult kids is fun and beautiful and exciting and full of so, so much joy. But raising your baby from infanthood to adulthood is something we get to do for just a short time, and it’s the wildest, most difficult, most thrilling, most rewarding, most painful-but-exhilarating ride of all.
And I’m sure that when I reach the end of my life, it’s everything I carried throughout my life as mother that will provide the peace and comfort I need to make my journey to the other side.
