Alyssa Rosenberg
THE WASHINGTON POST – “People love to tell expecting or new parents that their lives are going to be miserable,” Reason magazine senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown tweeted in March. A reckoning with the hardest parts of motherhood, she argued, has become a dire overcorrection. “Parenting needs better PR.”
Indeed it does. And when I asked, these 12 other parents were eager to share what they’d tell anyone considering having kids. Their families come in all sizes, and these moms and dads have a wide range of political perspectives. But they all agree that parenting is sublime – even, and maybe especially, when the job involves illness, loss or an out-of-the-blue creepy question about construction-site skeletons.
THE JOY OF SOCKS
The best and hardest things about parenting are, for me, the same: You care about your child’s happiness to an infinite degree. When they are down, or struggling, it can feel impossible to pull out of it.
But on the flip side, when something goes well – even something completely mundane – the joy is unparalleled. I remember vividly a time when I got an email with some extremely good professional news. I called my husband to tell him about it, and we agreed that in terms of daily happiness, it ranked second only to our daughter figuring out how to remove her own sock that morning. Parenting: when socks can bring joy. – Emily Oster, author of The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years.
LIFESAVING BREAKFASTS
The best part of parenting is getting to be a kid again for them. Colouring, Play-Doh, hopscotch, Little League, bounce houses and playgrounds (and way better than the ones we had as kids).
Even relearning long division was interesting. Just don’t revisit your own youth so passionately that you tear a rotator cuff. The hardest part of parenting is that you have to be an adult for them. Boundaries, guidelines, the very long learning curve of teaching kids to behave in public without a screen? Yuck.
But being a mom got me through the hardest time in my life because they needed me, no matter how scared and sad I was. My husband died, and I had a toddler and a newborn.
For me, there has never been anything so simple and profound as getting out of bed every morning because my kids needed me to make them breakfast. – Mary Katharine Ham, host of the podcast Getting Hammered.
LITTLE HANDS AND BIG ONES
One of parenting’s first joys is the feeling of a little hand in your palm, that small gift representing a child’s trust and desire to learn from you in a world full of pointy edges.
These moments pass far too quickly as adolescence and young adulthood emerge – and these years usher in an independence that keeps their hands from reaching for yours.
But the time in between is precious. I taught my sons how to hold a football, throw a football and catch a football until they were far better at these things than I could ever be.
And while their little hands will never be in mine again, the high-fives that replaced them after winning games and the hugs that followed tough losses bring a new joy that befriends the wistful memories of the first one. – Theodore R Johnson, Post Opinions contributing columnist and senior adviser for New America’s US@250 initiative.
GEOGRAPHY LESSONS AND MORBID QUESTIONS
The best and also hardest parts of parenting all stem from the same thing: that you have literally created a new person, who is absolutely not you or your partner and has a completely different brain and different personality. My favourite moments are when my daughter surprises me by being a totally different person than me – when she turned out to be an amazing artist, or how she can actually read a map, unlike me – or when she pulls utterly original thoughts from her little goth head, such as asking construction workers if they’ve found any skeletons yet or telling me that at night the woods are full of, and I quote, “the floating dead.”
The hardest parts, though, are also when she’s being her own person – when she’s too scared to perform at a school talent show, too full of temper and prone to strongly held opinions and stormy outbursts. But I find that treating her, always, like a person I respect, and not just a little kid, has helped me balance out all the ways she delights me and all the ways she frustrates me. It helps me to see her not as a little doll but as a messy, cool, fun, amazing human whom I’m lucky enough to get to be best buddies with for a while before sending her off into the world. – Amber Noelle Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges.
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
When my mother died, I lost the only relationship whose foundation is unconditional love. Ten years later, I entered into another with the birth of my first child.
Most people go most of their lives in a parent-child relationship; either as a child or as a parent and often as both. I went 10 formative years without it, and it is irreplaceable; being without it is disorienting and isolating (especially without close relationships to grandparents or siblings, which I also didn’t have).
As wonderful as it is to be unconditionally loved as a child, it is that much better to love as the parent. It was so healing and fulfilling to have that relationship back when I had children, albeit on a different end of it (the better end, at that). And to have it six times over – it’s amazing how the heart can just grow. I feared when I was pregnant with my second that I would love my daughter less; but the love just multiplied. – Bethany S Mandel, editor of the Heroes of Liberty series.
THE END OF REGRET
I am someone prone to regret, second-guessing decisions I’ve made even far back in the past. Having kids did nothing less than end that forever for me.
Here’s why. All parents know that if things had been slightly different, even by a second, you would have ended up with slightly different kids. Different eggs, different sperm, a cosmic ray hits the initial DNA in a different place, etc. Any number of things change how your kids will turn out if you change a single variable. And because I can’t imagine wanting them to be anyone other than who they are, it resolved my regret and second-guessing. I can’t look back anymore and regret things, because if anything had been even the slightest bit different, I wouldn’t have these two wonderful boys precisely the way they are. – Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
MIDNIGHT DANCE PARTIES
I looked at the baby monitor in relief. The crying had finally stopped. Maybe this sleep-training stuff was working after all. Then I noticed something odd – flashing lights in her room. I tiptoed in to find my child wasn’t asleep at all.
She had scooted to one end of her crib, put a hand through the vertical slats and somehow managed to reach the Hatch night light on a nearby stool. She figured out that if she tapped the top of it, the light would change colours and play different sounds and lullabies.
She was basically throwing her own disco party – at six months old. She looked over and beamed at me. I was exhausted. It was well past her bedtime, but I found myself throwing up my arms and trying a few gangly dance moves. This is parenting: the midnight dance party you didn’t want but somehow needed. – Heather Long, Post Opinions columnist.
NEW WONDERS AND TINY WOES
I had my daughter in April 2020, at the start of the pandemic. It’s not an exaggeration to say she got me through those early difficult days. Coming home from a challenging day at work, there was always this happy, sweet and cherubic baby who couldn’t get enough of kisses, cuddles and bedtime stories. (Unfortunately, the terrible twos set in when she became a toddler, but that’s another story).
Another amazing part of being a parent is watching the joy in my children’s eyes as they have a new experience or go through an “aha” moment. There are so many of these, even in a single day. We adults would do well to seek new wonders like these, too.
My kids are at the age now (three and five) where it’s a Hallmark moment one minute, where they’re playing together and saying how much they love each other, and then there’s crying, toys being thrown, and accusations of the other sibling “being mean!” or “being a poopyhead!”- Leana S Wen, Post Opinions columnist.
UNEXPECTED WARMTH AND WISDOM
I once woke up on the sofa after taking care of a sick seven-year-old all night. It was 5am, and my three-year-old was holding my hand and kissing each fingertip one at a time. I asked her why she was up so early, and she said, “I couldn’t sleep because I just needed to love my mommy.”
And she crawled into my arms. I was so tired, and she was so beautiful. That moment remains the perfect example of what parenting has been for me these past 16 years. – Hannah Grieco, editor of And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative.
