I have a lot of lady friends who are mothers; I have a lot of lady friends who are not. I often hear the non-mother friends make comments about how parenting isn't as hard as we make it out to be, and I immediately go on the defensive. "You have no idea what you're talking about!" "Have you ever stayed up for 48 hours with a screaming baby?" I could go on for quite a while with the different aspects of parenting that I have found to be difficult. Last night, however, I came to realize that although my non-mother friends may not understand exactly what my life looks like on a day-to-day basis, they kind of have a good point. Why are we making everything so hard? The following timeline is an idea of the typical day at my house:
I'm tired in the morning. I have never been a morning person. I will never become a morning person. This is a fact about myself that I know. My children wake up between five and eight every morning and stand at my bedroom doorway asking for various things while I growl and try to convince myself that they actually need breakfast. I can't take the easy route by giving them sugary cereal and hopping back into bed. So, what is a mom to do? You get up, slice some fruit, make a bowl of oatmeal, squeeze some orange juice. There! The munchkins have a healthy start to their day. The entire process of waking up and making this breakfast only took about 30 minutes. If we average waking up at 7am and going to bed at 11pm, then I have 15 hours and 30 minutes left in my day.
If I was smart and made enough breakfast for myself, too, then the next hour is spent eating, getting ready, and taking the boys to school. I get back home around 830am. I now have 14 hours and 30 minutes left.
I no longer have any babies at home, so from 830am until 1100am, my time is my own. I usually sit around on my computer, watch television, make wishlists for items I don't really need, etc. Some days I have meetings and errands during this time, too. Some days I don't. Eleven o'clock finally rolls around and I head to the school. I now have 12 hours remaining.
Independent of the day of the week, I will be involved is some school-realted activity for the next couple of hours, following which I will go pick up my children. We get home around 345pm. I now have seven hours and fifteen minutes.
Upon getting home, everyone in my house is hungry, so I make them food. Then I send the children downstairs to play for a while so I can tend to whatever yard work needs to be done. They fight over one thing or another the entire time and drive everyone crazy, which in turn, causes my yard work to last twice as long as it should have. I come back inside around 530pm. There are five and a half hours left.
It's now time to start making dinner. There is usually a dinner schedule on the refrigerator, and if I made a shopping list when I went to the grocery store on Saturday, I should have all the ingredients I need. The next hour is spent making dinner, and the following thirty minutes is spent eating it. It is now about seven o'clock, and I have four hours left in my day.
This is the perfect time to start giving relaxing lavender baths and massages before the boys go to bed. Danny gets his bath first while I watch Phillip play a video game. Phillip goes next while Danny and I play angry birds games. Both baths last about 30 minutes each, so let's say we finish at eight o'clock. It is time to put the boys in bed, and I have three hours left.
Danny goes to bed first. He gets a little chat about his day, a story, and a song. Phillip then gets the same routine. This doesn't take long. Thirty minutes at the most. It is now eight-thirty, and I have two and a half hours left.
The remainder of my time is spent with massage appointments, cleaning, and studying. Sometimes I make it into bed at eleven. Sometimes I don't. We then go to sleep and start the day all over again in the morning.
Now, a typical day doesn't sound all that hard. When everything goes according to what I expect, parenting is actually quite easy. So, to my non-mother friends, this is the part where I tell you that yes, it isn't that hard. Not all the time. Most days are quite lovely. It's the non-typical days that challenge us. It's when we already have our 16 hours per day scheduled, and somehow have to find a way to fit in a two hour trip to the doctor. It's the responsibility of maintaining a non-biased opinion when your seven-year-old child asks you out-of-the-blue questions about religion and politics. It's consoling your child after he has been picked on either at school or in public, and using the experience to further develop his confidence instead of destroying it. It's all the little things that go along with producing an intelligent, capable, independent, productive human being that will one day become a credit to society.
So, no, being a parent isn't hard. Most people are more than capable of producing viable offspring and keeping them alive. But being a mother who teaches her children to see the potential in every situation, plays silly made-up games with them, helps them overcome challenges that seem impossible, and who can create time within a day when every minute has already been allocated is indeed a challenge.
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