Last week I shared a post about Ash describing this year as ‘the hardest year of our life.’ I wrote that I agreed with him. I also wrote that by saying it out loud, we realised how incredibly lucky we are. Absolutely just beyond lucky. We are blessed with the most hilarious, healthy, beautifully rambunctious boys, who make us burst with love and pride every single day.
Since writing that post I have been really hit with ‘the guilts’. I knew I would. How can I describe parenthood as hard when there are people going through actual bad things? Really bad things. There are people who would give anything to start a family. There are people who are aching with grief. There are people who live their whole lives in a state of fear. People living in chronic pain, people struggling to put food on the table, people who are lonely.
The thought of diminishing their circumstances makes me feel sick.
Parenthood is hard, but it’s a hardship that we would choose a million times over. It’s the most agonising, beautiful, addictive kind of hard – one that makes your heart yoyo a constant path between your chest and your throat. It’s heavenly and hilariously hard.
I’ve been going over it and over it in my head. Feeling guilty for sharing it, then reasoning with myself that it was honest and that’s what this blog is all about, sharing our honest, normal, everyday journey of parenthood. Taking the rose coloured glasses off and depicting life as a mother for what it really is: incredible, all-consuming, and, heart-expandingly hard.
If Ash and I didn’t share that with each other, and then with you, we’d still be thinking it, only we’d be thinking it silently and alone, and there’s not much good about that.
It doesn’t help the mum who’s running on three hours sleep and just wants to leave the house without having to pack six bags and wear a headband over her unwashed-for-eight-days hair. She doesn’t need me to write about how together I am. Sometimes I am, a lot of the time I’m not.
It doesn’t help the dad who’s been in a separate bed for weeks just so he can get some sleep and isn’t sure if he’ll walk through the door to a crying baby or a crying wife (we’ve been there don’t worry!).
So if you are finding parenthood hard, whether you are a mother or a father, that is because it is. You are totally normal. You are probably tired. You are also achingly aware of how precious this time is. You know that in years to come you will miss their chubby little hands and sweet baby voices like your heart has been ripped clean out of your chest. You can already feel it. You can already feel yourself reaching for the memories.
You feel guilty for wishing those torturous meltdown moments away, or wishing they’d grow up past this ‘no sleep’ phase so you can resume some sort of normality. Then you nearly gasp with despair that you won’t get those moments back, that the baby you held yesterday is already a day older.
The hardness is real. But it’s intermitted with so many sacred, unbelievable moments that it can’t really be compared to any other sort of hard. It’s a sweet hardness all of its own.
Being a parent means giving over every bit of yourself, and doing it willingly forever. It means opening your heart to a love you never thought possible…and having it never close over again, you wouldn’t want it to.
It’s hard because you are doing it right. And these are the ‘hard’ days you want forever.
Eliza xx
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