I’m tired. My 13-year-old son just told me now he’s listening to Marilyn Manson. I know, I already pulled a Mike Brady on him, poor kid. Somehow we started at Manson and the influences of music and drugs ended up talking about God and the Devil and then subliminal advertising and by the time I was through I was exhausted and he was lecture-weary and we mutually called it a truce. I retired to the bathroom, the only place I can really be alone, and spot-on cue my nine-year-old was banging on the door saying he spilled something all over the living room floor. I just sat there on the throne with my head in my hands and thought, parenting is so crazy.
Parenting is crazy, and it’s hard. It starts the second that squirming bundle is in your hands, screaming it’s little red head off and you think, what did I get myself into? All those sweet baby book pictures with clean, embroidered pastel outfits and smiling, perfectly coiffed couples holding a sleeping infant, they don’t warn you what’s about to happen to your life. They can’t describe the overwhelming chaos that arrives with this bundle, changing your whole life around, turning it upside down; they don’t convey the utter exhaustion from groggily rising three times each night to feed a baby, from doing double duty taking care of multiple kids who have vastly different personalities and needs, from dealing with the hormonal rants of rapidly changing teenager, from watching and worrying (on a level you never thought you could) when they drive away for the very first time. The books don’t tell you what it’s like to have your heart running around outside your body, a little heart so vulnerable to life’s infinite mine fields of danger, and how surprisingly and suddenly you can go from panic to anger to guilt to sorrow to joy.
I never thought I would have kids. Or, I thought, if I did have them (which, at 7, was a big if) I would go back to work and let the maid or my husband take care of them. I would, this 7-year-old me declared resolutely, never stay home with the kids—I would have my career of course and be very successful and have lots of money and live happily ever after. Then, after the birth of her real baby, that 7-year-old-turned-28 gave up her career, her independence, her riches and the illusory maid, and at times her sanity to stay home to care for him. This decision was made with a sacrificial love I didn’t know I had and didn’t know if I could sustain, but which happened as naturally, and as terrifyingly, as love does. My second son was born five years later, and I stayed home eight more years. They were long years, and they were hard years, and still are hard years. I wish sometimes—often—that I had more time, more energy, more of me to go around. And, if I’m being completely honest, maybe more credit for sacrificing my personal dreams and ambitions in order to raise my kids.
And yet…I can’t adequately describe the moments, even if I try here now, those moments when my kids do and say the most unexpected things and I know that I’m experiencing something terribly important, something beyond even me and what I thought I wanted for my life. Like when my younger son said to me with a quiet significance, “When I look at you, I see my reflection”. Nothing else I did for the rest of the day impacted me as strongly as his words. Or when my teenager handed me an expensive bar of chocolate, the indulgent gourmet kind I wouldn’t buy for myself, spending his last few dollars to do so. Or when I’m sick, and the kids cook “dinner” (Captain Crunch cereal, toast with a miniscule piece of butter hanging off the edge, peanut butter on a graham cracker, lots of cookies, a huge glass of milk filled to the edge spilling over, a flower from outside) and bring it in with the grand presentation of an academy award, taking care of me. Or when I overhear them saying something I taught them four years ago and thought they’d never absorb, or doing something unexpected and rare like laugh at each other’s jokes, or when they come running in with flushed faces just bursting to describe their day, I know I’m where I need to be. I wonder, what could I have done, or will do in my life, that will be more important that this?
I know this. I also know that I am human and, in the midst of everyday life, can forget this. In this human spirit I emerged from the sanctuary of the bathroom, tired from taking care of everyone and listening to their moaning and their issues and solving everyone’s problems and doing menial unpaid tasks day after day. I found myself indulging in a small rant that I indulge in, oh, about every four months or so, replete with a heated inventory of all my job duties as a mother. My kids had thrown themselves on the bed and were listening patiently as my rant wound down and ended with my signature statement: “I mean, I don’t even get paid for it all, you know? Who would do a job like this and not get paid for it, not one cent?”
My younger son came over close by me and, with the simplicity and clarity that only the young own, said quietly, “But mom, love is your payment”.
Love is my payment. What could I say. Nothing at all that I can say, could touch the wisdom of that statement.
* * * * * * *
I know it’s a tough job, tougher than anyone could have prepared me for even if the baby books were brave enough to tell the real story. It’s as tough as any other meaningful “job” in life: marriage, or enduring faith, or relationships in general, or long-aspired to vocations. They all have their great moments and their grievous ones. They all have great potential and great rewards, but heartache and sacrifice, too. Maybe that’s what it is, then, this job of Parenting. One of those things in life that is so grand and important, in which we could never know how much it will take from us, for we might not have the courage to undertake such a mission if we had known. And yet, when all is said and done and if we’re blessed enough to enjoy our grandchildren and maybe their children as well, and imagine the many lives we’ve created and influenced and guided, we understand it is unequivocally our greatest sacrifice and perhaps for this reason alone, our greatest achievement.
