Highs and Lows

Does anyone else find parenting a completely up-and-down experience? One mom wrote about how after she heard about a friend’s child who had died of leukemia, she went to hug her kids, then two minutes later was yelling at them for something they had done. That’s what parenting is like. It’s a bipolar experience.

I didn’t really get this before I had kids. When I’m in public with the kids, I’m pretty sure other people don’t see this about us either: they don’t see the times I really lose it at them, but they also don’t see the spontaneous, incredibly touching moments.

The bad moments can be really bad. Sometimes it’s a one-time event, like her waking up at 4AM with a bloody nose that has stained her security blanket. I know she won’t go to sleep until the blanket is washed, then it has to be dried in the machine, by then Eric will have woken, and bottom-line is that none of us are sleeping any more that morning, which means the whole next day will be one morass of fussiness. Sometimes it’s a build-up of badness, so subtle it’s hard to describe. Like incessant whining for the entire day. Or when they can’t seem to stop bickering for two seconds. Or like the other day, when Eric threw a fit the entire thirty-minute ride home because I wouldn’t stop the car to give him a cough drop, then threw another fit during lunch because I couldn't spoon-feed him on my lap due to having to take care of the baby, then another fit because I wouldn't let him eat fruit until he had eaten more of his meal. By the third fit I had yelled at him and had to apologize. It’s usually about then that D texts to ask how the day is going and I don’t know what to say.

There are the good moments. Like when I can’t get him to change out of his pajamas and somehow Ellie not only cajoles him into it, but helps him choose his outfit and change (“you want the monkey shirt or the stripey shirt? The stripey one? Okay. That goes with the stripey adidas pants.” “Adidath,” he replies). Or when I walk out of my room and trip over a gift bag that she has carefully placed in the doorway, with a gift wrapped in tissue paper that is a drawing she has made of our family. Or when he demonstrates the ballet moves he’s learned by having to come along and watch her ballet class every week (it involves a lot of twirling and leaping). Or when she says to him, “do you want to see something?” and he runs off after her exclaiming, “Thee thom-thing! Thee thom-thing!” Or whenever I tell her I love her and she says back, “I love you too, mommy."

I watched a TED talk once that showed a rather depressing graph indicating that from the time you have your first child, average happiness plummets, and doesn’t rise until the kids start leaving for college:

The speakers postulated that if you layered in a representation of moment-to-moment happiness, the graph would look more like this:

When you’re a child, there’s a huge variation in moment-to-moment happiness (I get a cookie! She snatched that toy!), which obviously continues into adolescence (the world sucks; I hate you; he is so awesome), then levels out in early adulthood. Then you have your first kid, and while on several levels life in general sucks more, there is a lot of momentary variation. Sure, there are major lows, but as my sister reminds me, usually anything really bad will be over in about twenty minutes. And there is the potential for moments so good you can’t put it into words. We trade average moments for moments of transcendent happiness.

Personally, D and I were at relatively stable, happy levels before we had kids. It’s a challenge to traverse the constantly-changing, emotionally-volatile landscape that is any given day with the kids. It requires emotional margin and preferably a normal night’s rest, and especially when we lack that, the spiritual discipline and insight to ask for God’s help and wisdom and maintain a wider perspective. And I think part of it is accepting that, for now, this is a normal thing. To remember the wanting-to-pull-my-hair-out moments will always pass, and to be intentional about recording and recalling the good moments, the ones that make it all worth it. Because as trite as it sounds, they do.