When you are a young whippersnapper (and by young I mean totally and completely ignorant) you have soooo many goals and aspirations. You know exactly what you want out of life and you mean to have it! That's great. I'm really proud. Call me when you meet my friend newborn.
Now before you try to disagree with me, let me explain. I was once in your shoes. I just knew that when I became a parent, my life would maintain its straight-and-narrow course to success. I would continue on my march to adulthood with my sweet, chubby-cheeked, clean-as-a-whistle, polite children in tow. Wrong. Little did I know that there were sooooooo many life lessons to learn after I became a mother.
Let's hit a few of the highlights:
The Plan - Before children, you have a plan. And it's a dang good one. You will excel at your job and receive promotion after promotion. You will travel across the world (with your sexy husband) and sleep in expensive hotels in downtown New York, London and Paris. You will make so much money from your latest promotion that you will pay extra on your mortgage principal each month. Right.
When you become a parent, you will be praying to sweet holy Jesus that your boss gives you a decent review despite your tendencies to come squealing into work five minutes late, or the fact that you were out of work the entire month of January due to three cases of strep throat. You will hope that she can dig down deep into her heart of hearts and overlook the fact that you video conferenced in to your last brainstorm session from home with a toddler sitting in your lap playing trains on your laptop. You will still get to stay in expensive hotels, only it will be at Downtown Disney and you and your (still sexy) husband will have two children in the bed with you. And forget that extra principal. You'll be happy to achieve the existing payment each month thanks to the cost of diapers.
Now. Let's discuss the Time Warp Continuum that happens when you become a parent. Everyone will tell you that your children will be grown before you know it. Or maybe in "the blink of an eye." And they're right. For the most part. What they don't tell you is that despite how fast your babies turn into toddlers, preschoolers and then teenagers, there will be days (and maybe WEEKS) that drag on so slowly that you'll swear you have entered some sort of strange time warp zone.
Take, for instance, the the first time your child gets up sick in the middle of the night. Go ahead and buckle down for the LONGEST NIGHT OF YOUR LIFE. You will probably hold vigil on the couch with your sweet baby in your arms, calling your own mother every five minutes to discuss the child's progress and praying to Jesus like you've never prayed before. When the sun finally comes up, your baby will probably be sound asleep in your arms, with a reduced fever and on the road to recovery. You and your husband will rock-paper-scissors for who stays home with the baby and who drags themselves to work to keep from having to use that last sick day.
You will enter the time warp zone again when that first tooth begins to make its entrance. This is when the long days turn into long weeks. They will cry, slobber, and chew on every single thing you own. You will swear that that tooth will never actually show itself, and when it finally does you will be so relieved that you forgive the child when he bites you time after time. The time zone reappears at every major milestone such as potty training and the first day of preschool.
Okay. Moving on to Humility. Please don't make the mistake of staring down that exasperated mother of the screaming toddler next time you're at dinner. Because believe me, despite your best efforts in child-rearing 101, that will be your child one day. I don't care who you are, or how you discipline your children, your child will inevitably at some point act like a wild baboon who has never been in a public setting before. And it will make you want to cry (and order a bigger margarita) at the same time. It happens people. Trust me.
The good news in all of this is that the resulting lesson is flexibility. You will learn to roll with the punches like never before. You will learn to improvise and make do with what you have. After you've made a few diapers out of scotch tape and paper towels, your boss' 15 minute deadline on that fresh project is a cinch. It's in the bag (just not the diaper bag because you accidentally left that at grandma's last weekend).
(For the record, I love my boys - even if they're teaching me all the important life lessons these days)
No comments:
Post a Comment