Parenting is hard.
If you are a parent you know this. If you are not, try as you might, you really cannot begin to understand how difficult it can be. If you spend any significant amount of time around children or parents you may gather a little bit of perspective into the world that is parenthood but you will never fully appreciate the challenges of raising children until you dive in and start to swim in those tumultuous waters yourself.
You also cannot possibly understand how rewarding it is either. It’s this crazy alchemy of experiences… some are the best, most sacred, pure and precious moments of your life while others are some of the worst, most painful, infuriating and exhausting experiences you will ever have.
I remember a few months into being a brand new parent myself, walking around looking at families through brand new eyes. Parents who had two, three, four children suddenly became real life super heroes to me. I remember just thinking, “My God! How are they here today? Walking around? Everyone appears clean, clothed, looks put together. They seem sane.”
I was awestruck by the mother’s who had done “this” more than one time, who had willingly, of their own volition chosen to put themselves through the rigors of pregnancy, child birth and motherhood, over and over and over again.
“There must be something that happens,” I would muse. “Either this gets easier or you just somehow adjust.”
It is true that, in many ways, it does get easier. The initial shock of the instant and drastic life change that having a baby thrusts upon you does wear off. You arrive, eventually, at a “new normal.”
There are however, some curveballs Life can throw at you that make it seem nearly impossible to endure the already challenging season of new-parenthood.
After we got my daughter’s feeding situation figured out, you would have thought it would be smooth sailing from that point on. Not so… not so…