the 5 worst moments of parenthood

I am ready to admit that I had no idea what I was getting into when I became a parent. If we were in group therapy together, I would be holding a cup of coffee and somberly staring you in the face as I speak the truest truth:

I didn’t know it would be like this.

I thought I would cruise along, being myself, and take care of my kids like a boss. From the outside that’s how parenthood appears to non-parents, like another simple stage of life that changes your day-in, day-out schedule, but is completely manageable.

I am sad to say I have not found it to be anything like that.

This is the specific narrative of parenthood I assumed was true before I birthed my first baby: Have a baby. Then every day afterward, get up, take care of kid/kids, then go to bed. Rinse and repeat for eighteen years and then be an old person who can’t wait to have grandchildren to spoil.

But it’s not like that at all when you’re the one on the journey. While being a parent can be wonderful and fun, it’s certainly never boring and the truth is parenthood is chock full of horrible moments. I’ve named five of them here, and I bet you’ve lived every single one if you have someone in your life who calls you mom or dad….

 

1. The fifth day of no sleep.

   I completely undervalued sleep in my twenties. I was clueless that taking a long shower, putting on completely clean pajamas, and slipping into bed for however long I wanted to on a Friday night would become a fairy tale dream after I became a mom. Babies and toddlers are UNRELIABLE AND FLAKY in the sleep department. Sure, you can put those small people in their beds every night, but you are powerless when it comes to making them stay there all night. Sleep is every baby’s favorite torture tactic to BREAK YOU DOWN so they can prove to you that they own you in ways you thought no one ever would. I have not-so-fond memories of staggering through the house for the eleven hundredth time to pull screaming children out of cribs. I have shamelessly begged fussy toddlers to JUST LET ME SLEEP already. I bounced them on my shoulder and said things like this: “Please, please, let Mommy sleep. Mommy is so tired. She feels like she is having a nervous breakdown. She is hallucinating about Sesame Street characters singing U2 while eating tofu. Mommy is about to snap mentally and if she doesn’t get at least four hours of uninterrupted sleep she may talk about herself in the third person for the rest of her life, and you will be very embarrassed by her in middle school. It will be all your fault that Mommy is such a weirdo and you have no friends at all. For the love of all things holy, GO. TO. SLEEP, child!!!”

   

2. Public humiliation.

   I have been pooped on, peed on, and vomited on in public places many, many times. I once carried a screaming baby and a hysterical toddler out of Barnes & Noble with another sobbing toddler following behind me repeatedly yelling, “I want Thomas the Train! NO ONE ELSE CAN HAVE THOMAS THE TRAIN!!” because sharing trains is too hard for people without developed frontal lobes and even remotely established consciences. There was another precious day in Nashville when I was confronted by a woman in the Target parking lot because she was POSITIVE my kids would be better behaved if they napped more often. (Get back in your car, lady. You are making me very angry and I haven’t slept in five days. I will not be held responsible for what happens after your speech about naps is finished.) My preteens have acted like a gaggle of two year-olds in restaurants while so. many. people. have stared at us in horror. (Why is burping so funny to them? Why does it always become a competition? When will they grow out of it? I have no idea.) When parental embarrassment becomes cultural shame, it is so tempting to pass that on to our kids (I cannot believe you acted like that! All those people were watching! How could you??), but that only creates bigger problems later in life. I try to remind myself that if I haven’t been embarrassed by the inevitable immaturity of my children every now and then, I’m probably not parenting right. All the haters who have parenting perfected can please now leave the rest of us to flounder around and figure it out. Solidarity, my friends.

   

3. ZERO chill.

   If you survive the no sleep and the humiliating years of toddlers, you inevitably end up with older kids who go places without you for long periods of time. During these times, your babies are frequently surrounded by other completely untrustworthy children who are their same age and therefore just as ridiculously unstable as the ones that sprung from your loins. After all those early years of direct influence and control, when you only left them with babysitters you personally vetted, or in a daycare with live video feed you could log into anytime, or at grandma’s house, you now drop them at birthday parties or new schools or (Sweet Jesus, be a Lion in our midst) amusement parks for middle school band trips where anything could happen at any given moment. Have you equipped them for this? Do they remember what to do if they get separated from their group? What if they get bullied, sick, hurt, or of course every parent’s greatest fear: What if a robber prowling about thinks your kid is Richie Rich with a bag of gold coins hidden in his backpack and he attacks them with his hyper freeze-ray gun?? How would your child who cannot even remember to wear deodorant handle that situation??? There are a million ways your life could never be the same again if something horrific happens to your child, and in all of them, the awful thing is really all your fault because you were the adult who was supposed to know what to do and YOU WERE NOT WITH THEM. But then you pick them up after the fun is over, and GOSH MOM THEY HAD A GREAT TIME! They made new best friends, they can’t wait for the next Day o’ Fun, and you’re positive that when that next time comes you will be SO MUCH MORE CHILL about leaving them. But you won’t be. Because you have watched too much Richie Rich in your life, and therefore, parents have zero chill.

   

4. You realize you’re a dunce.

   At some point, depending on the intelligence, development, and sass of your child, parenthood teaches you that you are a total dunce. And idiot. A big dummy. Maybe it happens when your kindergartner knows more about dinosaurs than you have ever known and flaunts it when your friends come over. Perhaps your middle school daughter can build her own website and garner SEO traffic that would make Bill Gates swoon. It’s possible your child will score higher on the SAT than you did, or get into a college you only dreamed of attending, or is capable of fixing a mistake you made without even realizing it. It could really happen at any given moment, and you need to GIRD UP for that day. Parenting is not a competition, but to the kid who longs to be her own person, it feels an awful lot like an episode of Survivor. All she can see is that she wants to stay on the island and win the grand prize: the respect and admiration of her parents. So, you choose to be the idiot who needs help with these  silly old new-fangled bluetooth devices. You let them educate you about the slang of their generation and all the ways you learned the wrong way to do Algebra a bazillion years ago when math made sense and had no real-life application. Once you’ve been fully humbled, you take them out and SCHOOL THEM in all the ways you are a freaking genius to retain some shred of dignity. Or you just go get milkshakes after they mow the lawn and clean the windows. You may be a dunce, but you’re still their only hope for survival, and they still need to work to earn the right to live in your house and eat all your food.

   

5. Let them earn trust.

   It’s hard to trust people who once ate dead flies off the floor of Walmart. But alas, that is what is expected eventually for every parent. I desperately want to trust my kids, but I also want to protect them from all the hard things in life, from the evil in the world, and from their own naivete. Because I’ve been alive longer than they have, and I’ve watched the news, plus Law & Order, in addition to reading books and stuff, I know buckets of things they don’t. I am well-acquainted with how poorly their decisions could go. I was once a teenager who made really poor decisions, and I don’t want them to suffer in the same ways I did. I mean, I totally want to trust them; however, I want to trust them in our house, where I maybe give them tiny matches while they sit in a bathtub of water that will extinguish any dangerous flicker that escapes their fingers too soon. For some reason kids don;t want to do that, though. Kids want to go to concerts, and hang out at people’s houses whom I’ve never met, and try stuff that scares their parents out of their minds. I hate that being a parent means I have to send them out into the world and find out right alongside them whether or not they’ve got the character to deserve the trust I’ve already given them. I really hate that I have to give them space to fail; that I have to catch them when I also want to clobber them, an then give them the chance to earn trust back after they’ve dealt with the consequences of their mistakes. There are too many things I won’t be able to save them from and I never get to read their minds and know for sure that they understand what’s really going on in their lives. The only available option is to trust that my kids will find their way through the hormonal and psychological fog of youth as they become adults with fully functioning brains. My lack of super powers is so annoying. In my imaginary world, my kids never, ever get hurt or are vulnerable because I’m so much more like this:

Since none of us is Wonder Woman or Black Panther or even remotely perfect, I often wonder how parents find their way without faith. How do they survive the storms of parenting when they don’t have a God of all peace promising to redeem  the hardest parts of their family’s stories? Even in the absolute worst moments of parenting, the gospel offers us the promise that beauty rises from ashes and that the lowest place is where we find the greatness of God in abundance. Even when I am an exhausted, covered-in-vomit total basket case who knows nothing and can’t trust the child she has loved for over a decade, there is a God who can make something out of my willingness to get up and try again today. I am cradled by a mercy that covers all my shame and lack as it raises me out of my incompetence. My weakness makes space for God to prove over and again that love saves the day, every single time.

How many long nights has God sat with me, enduring my mess and pride? How many times has the Holy Spirit comforted me and the Father trusted me when I least deserved the safe place Jesus won for me on the cross? An infinity and five, probably. The demands of parenthood will not save my soul, but they do draw me deeper into my need for God.

And maybe, as I follow God through the darkness, I’ll be able to show my kids how he can be more than a legend or a list of rules in their lives, too. Maybe, just maybe, when they ask for wings to fly, if I can stand to watch them fly away from the safety of my own arms, they will find their way to a place where only God can catch them.

How terrifying and wonderful would that be?