The privilege of parenting

I'm reading a novel in which one of the characters, a young(ish) mother of two in her (mid-to-late) 30s is dying of cancer and has two small children. There are long, lovely descriptions of how she spends her last weeks and days with her children: how she reads to them, sings to them, comforts them, prepares them. Her biggest agony as she faces her losing battle with cancer is that she will miss so much in her children's lives. It's more than she can bear. As a reader, and especially as a mother, reading it was almost more than I could bear. At least once I found myself crying into my hot bath while I immersed myself in this tragic tale.

If I'm honest, that's one of my absolute biggest fears since becoming a parent: that I will die and leave my children motherless. 

My concerns are partly selfish: I want to get to watch my kids grow up and become people. I want to be in their lives and witness their brilliance and their failures, their loves and their struggles. I want to impart them with my wisdom (Aw, shush! I do have some wisdom lurking deep inside me somewhere.). I want to be the one to help them solve their problems and celebrate their every joy.

But my worries are also selfless. Since my children entered my life I shed my self-centered, party-hopping ways and wrapped myself instead in the cloak of motherhood. My strongest and most primal urge now as a human being is to protect and care for my children at all costs. It is an impossibility to imagine being unable to protect them, to teach them, to guide them and cushion them as they bounce their way innocently through life.

But it's amidst these dreary worries of my potential premature departure that day-to-day life with kids interrupts. Raising children is often frustrating, always exhausting, and way more difficult than I ever imagined it could be. Of course it's beautiful and funny and poignant too. Still, it's easy to forget that when your son is throwing scrambled eggs across the room while your daughter shrieks she hates you because she can't have another piece of Halloween candy, the dishes are still dirty, the phone is ringing off the hook, you're about to miss a major work deadline, and you have to pee so badly that you're about to wet yourself. 

It's during those frantic, frenetic, hysterical times, when I want to run screaming out of my house and never look back, that I need to be reminded the most---by books, by life, by my own children and their preciously infuriating ways---that parenting is a privilege, that my time with them is not always guaranteed. So I stop. I imagine how different things could be for them, for me, if we weren't busy making each other crazy. I take three deep breaths (because, really, I just don't have time for five) and I give thanks that I'm still on this wild ride called parenthood. It's good to remember that there is nowhere else I'd rather be.

Comments

[Kami Huyse]

I totally relate to this post.

I can never imagine how some mothers can (and do) just what you said in the last paragraph, "when I want to run screaming out of my house and never look back." I have just watched it happen in my own small circle.

It is so important for Mom's to take time out for themselves and not let it get to a critical point. In the same breath, we also need to make some adjustments since it really isn't all about us.

Thanks for bringing attention to the difficulty of the balancing act.

Now, I have to return to my constant state of panic. LOL.

[Colleen Pence]

I never understood how a mother could want to leave her children...until I became a mother myself. *Ahem* But, seriously, moms have to find constructive, beneficial ways to deal with these feelings and get time to themselves to decompress. For me, it's always good to remind myself of the alternative (i.e. not being their mother) and reminding myself of the great things about being a mother. Getting semi-regular massages (headed to one now, in fact! Gotta love the mid-week $29 special) helps too. ;)