Do We Exaggerate the Joys of Parenting?

I admit, I'm a distracted sort. One who sometimes gets more done without an Internet connection. I even know this about myself, and try to limit distractions. I love facebook, but know that while it keeps me connected to people I've met while living everywhere, it can also largely be a time waster.

But sometimes I see things there that I have to respond to, in which case, I rationalize, makes facebook much like NPR or the newspaper when I can't start my day until I've written a letter to the editor to give him a piece of my mind.

Today, it's this article from Time, on how raising kids makes us all delusional, or at the very least we over exaggerate the joys and satisfactions of parenting. Its theory comes out of cognitive-dissonance theory, and the idea that the more things suck, we have to pretend like they don't. The whole thing simultaneously rubs me the wrong way and gets me thinking, so that I wonder if it's perception. Mostly, I hear people exaggerate the horrors and hardships of parenting. I rarely hear - sadly - people talk about how much they love parenting.

There's no denying that one's plate gets considerably bigger when a child is born. Yes, you sleep less. And I say this as someone who slept a lot after my son was born. For the first year of my son's life, we wondered what people were talking about or why they were all asking if we were sleeping. We'd point out that babies sleep 18 hours a day - if you can't work out a 2 hour nap or a shower during those 18 hours, your priorities are off. But we co-slept - getting up to nurse baby in the middle of the night simply meant rolling over without fully waking up.

No, no. I sleep less now that he's a toddler. And admittedly, I sleep less only because I get up early to write and get work done. And I admit, Husband and I sometimes miss the days when we slept in until 9 or 10. Last week, Husband took Fyo out for an outing. I crawled into bed for a nap, and as I did so, it occurred to me that I didn't remember the last time I had been in bed alone, without husband or child.

And yes, there's more to manage with a child and everything takes longer, from getting out the door to preparing a meal. A forty-five minute subway ride is still forty-five minutes, but with a child you have to allow at least an hour. And while I love love love my collection of vintage handbags, I don't know when I will ever use them again, simply because I can't leave the house without an array of snacks, water bottles, an extra pair of pants, a book or two, and a collection of small cars. Yes, there are diapers and runny noses. Yes, you will have to toilet train your child at some point and inevitably, will have to clean up wet pants. (But if we end up caring for elderly family members, we run the risk of having to do this for them too.)

But the nightmares of screaming fits or wars over bedtime? You hear a lot about these aspects of parenting. I think these aspects, though, stem more from parenting styles, and expectations of what is normal or how one is supposed to raise a child. Some of this is to be expected - many of us were raised this way, and so many assume it's just how parenting is done. As my dad said of his own parenting, that while he hated how he was raised, it didn't occur to him he could do it differently (until he thankfully met my step-mom).

Husband and I recently had dinner with a friend who admitted he and his wife were in such a "war" with their daughter over bedtime. As he summed up, the daughter wouldn't stay in her bed, and eventually it became a game, which sent his wife to the point of proving that she was the one in control and this led to his wife locking their daughter in her room. This sent the daughter into a (nightly) forty-five minute tantrum of crying that (of course) woke up her baby sister, and the next night, (predictably) the daughter didn't want to get ready for or go to bed.

Well, why would she?

Our friend admitted the whole thing wasn't working. He asked what we do. How do we get our child to bed without crying?

Well. Huh. I admit, I think the whole expectation that a child as young as 2 (or 6 months or even as old as 3) should be able to be tucked alone into bed with a kiss on the cheek and expected to fall asleep quietly while the rest of  the house is up is unrealistic. The dark is scary for kids and being alone can be scary for kids. And sometimes - depending on any number of variables - the kid might not be ready for bed at the prescribed bed time. In my view, whether a child goes to sleep at 8:00 or 8:15 or 8:30 - is it really worth a power struggle? Who cares?

The tired parent who has been fighting with a child all day and needs a break at whatever the cost is who.

So, I said, we have a different view of parenting, that rather than the "us vs. them" mentality (which gives families the air of constantly being in civil war, ie we're a family divided into sides constantly trying to overpower the other side) we approach parenting like a partnership, like we're a family, so how can we make it work for everyone? We just noticed that the times when we try to overpower our toddler (generally when we're tired and have to get somewhere) are the times that end up in tantrums, and I get it - because toddlers (like the rest of us) are exploring being independent and want to feel in control of their environment. If we take away the dynamic of a power struggle, then there's little for our son to resist. We rarely tell him what to do. We ask him. (I admit. I'm still recovering from my childhood.  We parent him the way we want to be treated and the way I wish I was raised.)

Our friend's response: "But if you take away the card of the power struggle, the kids always have another card."

We love our friends, we love their children, and we know they love and adore their children and are absolutely committed to them. Still, like after reading this Time article, we walked home wondering not so much about them as parents, but about this mentality that raising a child is war and all the little details are battles to be won or lost, or that every single thing is a power struggle and we wondered, if this is your idea of raising a child, why would you want one? Or why would you go to extreme lengths - like people we know - of paying the equivalent of a house for multiple attempts at in vitro, when as soon as the child is born, it is going to be your opponent in life, always out to thwart and manipulate you?

So to some extent, the article makes a valid point: people feel compelled to have children and they have them, and many of them do not explore why they want them. They don't consider the costs financially or in time or in energy. There are things that people don't think about before they have children. Most people actually don't comprehend that when they want a baby, that the will baby will grow up. Or that the baby will learn to climb - or as my son did last week, shove everything he can get his hands on into the toaster oven and set the whole thing on fire. He's not yet 2 1/2. At some point, I imagine the baby grows up into a smart aleck-y sort (if he follows his mother's example) and will probably tell me that I've utterly lost my mind and he's going to put me in a home.

I sometimes make fun of the people who didn't think about what having kids meant. I have a category of "Things you should have thought about before you had children." A woman on the playground told me of her battle with her kids - they wanted to do creative art projects that created messes and she hated the mess. She was trying to discourage me from continuing the homemade play dough and finger painting efforts I had recently done with my son when the weather got too cold to go outside.
        "It makes such a mess," She said. "Save it for Montessori."
I laughed it off and said, "Childhood is messy. It's how they learn. I don't mind." But in my mind, I thought, "You hate messes and you have three children? Did you not think about this before you conceived them?

On more than one occasion, Husband and I have left an interaction with fellow parents, and wondered why they procreated. Or when a fellow couple admits that they are thinking about having a third, and I'm tempted to point out that they don't like the children they have.

Parenting can be hard. Biology knows this. It's why we have hormones like Oxytocin that give us that happy blissed out feeling and has us fall head over heels in love with these little creatures. And we mommies get a shot of oxytocin not just when we nurse our babies, but a little when we just look at them too.

And I admit, while comparatively, my husband and I have less challenges than some parents in child rearing, there have been things that I have been grateful for on a daily basis: that we have a strong marriage with good communication and we try to see things from the other's point of view, that we had a good solid three years of marriage before having children so our child came into a family with a strong foundation, that we waited until we were both ready and our child was 100% consciously conceived (because when I get tired or it gets hard, I remind myself, I chose this, and I chose it with my eyes open.) I'm grateful my husband doesn't mind that I tend to go over the deep end and research everything, and when I come to a conclusion about whatever - vaccines, pre-schools, nutrition, toys, my husband backs me up, trusting that I've done the research and have thought things through. And I'm grateful we have the ability to talk about all of it, and that we've put a lot of thought into what we want for our children, and how we want to raise them - and there's no aspect of our parenting that we do as knee jerk reaction (or on the rare occasions there are, we apologize to our son) or simply because our parents did something.

But for the point that parents end up finding the time spent with their child disappointing and less satisfying than doing other things? Several have pointed out that this is the selfish point that underlies the entire article, that it's selfish of parents to want rewards, when parenting is all about the child.

It is and it's not. We heard this constantly after son was born, that life was no longer about us anymore. It was about our child. But I disagreed with it then, and I do now. We have another's needs to meet, but this doesn't mean ours fall by the wayside. If I'm breastfeeding and I don't eat, I can't meet my son's needs. Even if I'm not breastfeeding, if my blood sugar is through the floor, I can't see straight let alone parent a child. If I don't do the things that nurture me (reading, hot bathes, walks outside, writing, daily journal time, time with my husband etc) I can't nurture another human being.

I will say the article has a very limited view of how he views satisfaction and rewards. Human beings are complex and multi-dimensional creatures. No one thing can fully satisfy us or give us all the rewards we need. For me, when I finish a story or essay, there's no better feeling than the satisfaction I feel, but yet I can't compare it to when my son sees me, squeals, and runs towards me with open arms, or when we have conversations on the subway and make each other crack up or when we spend an hour in bed reading every book we just got from the library three times. Just like I can't compare the connection I have with my husband with the connection I have with my son. They are completely different and they meet different needs. If they weren't and didn't, it'd be whacked.

And I don't think one need should replace the other. Writing became much more a necessity for me after my son was born. Before he was born, I had five months off when I didn't have to work; I had all day every day to revise my novel. I spent the five months banging my head on my desk and frustrated. Since he was born, however, I've gotten more stories and essays finished and revised and just more done. The gift of parenting for me has been that I've had to focus and prioritize my time - and my life - in a way I didn't before. My husband too. As parents, we're role models, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let my son see us living lives we don't love.

The author writes that the national fantasy about the joys of parenting permeates the culture. I disagree with this too. When we got pregnant, we heard nothing about the horrors about it. We wondered if people had ever heard of birth control. After my son was born, women asked me if I was going to go back to teaching or back to work. I said, no, I had decided I was done with teaching. I was going to focus on my child and on my writing (since that was what I wanted anyway). The women almost always told me I'd be sorry, that I'd miss the adult conversation. I said, I don't know who these women work with, but at three months old, my son made far better conversation than anyone I had ever worked with.

He still does. Spending my day raising him, and getting up daily at 4 to write - sure I'm more tired, and once in awhile I think I might want to go back to work for 60 hours a week, but mostly, I wouldn't. Walking home from the store the other night, I was struck with the thought that I absolutely love my life. Maybe it's delusion. Maybe it's happiness.