I’ve been reflecting a bit lately on whether or not parenting is hard. People don’t really ask me about it anymore like they used to… well, to be honest, it’s not as though people used to ask me whether it was hard, or what it was like at all. They used to just assume that it was impossible and exasperating for me, if they took one look at me with my three young children. No matter how well-put-together I might have appeared, it was assumed, I suppose, that it was just beyond me to manage all of it and I somehow elicited instant pity from total strangers.
I remember, for instance, one winter morning in 2000 when I was attending a toddler gym class with my two older children in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. At the time Paolo was maybe seven months old and Council had just turned two. I was in my first trimester of a third pregnancy. Toddlers were frolicking around the room and I was kneeling on the floor with my very large baby in a sling, as he often was in those days, near another mom I chatted with frequently at the class. I mentioned to her that a third was on the way and she just looked at me incredulously, and asked, ‘How are you going to do that?”
Rude as it was, the question was asked of me often during the third pregnancy. The fact that Paolo was a large baby actually made it seem a little more plausible to have second and third kids who were only 14 months apart in age. What I mean is, Paolo looked older than he is. That’s still the case. And his younger brother actually looks younger than he is. We get away with looking like we had them maybe two or more years apart instead of just one. But during the pregnancy it was obvious that Paolo was just a wee babe, not yet crawling, and before long my belly started to show again, and our oldest was still working her way around communicating verbally through the usual series of temper tantrums and such, and it looked like we were going to hell in a handbasket because it was just too much to handle.
When people would ask me this kind of question—”How are you going to do that?”—there was a part of me that would want to respond by breaking down in tears and just openly sobbing, for a long, long time. Another part of me wanted to get angry and shake fists at the idiocy of such a question.
The better part of me would come up with this response: “One day at a time.”
And that’s exactly how it’s been. Only now, people don’t look at me incredulously anymore. Instead they look at my children. They are beautiful, well-behaved, bright little children. I don’t have to cart them around with me, attached to the breast, asleep in the sling, or clinging to my hand through the parking lot anymore. (When you go shopping with three children, one in the sling, one in the cart, and one holding your hand, it does attract some attention and hubub, in part because three young children make a lot of noise and cry a lot, and one must constantly correct their behavior and prevent life-threatening accidents, so it’s a real scene that I do not miss, particularly.) Without the kids nearby as much to attract attention… it’s kind of dull… and people don’t really know what my home life might be like, or how insane it has become. All the same, when I am out with all the kids, it’s the kids they look at, and not me.
I have to admit that I do my own share of staring at other people, now, too, because my hands aren’t as full anymore and I have the spare time and energy to look. Now I understand a little better why I would get weird comments and stares. People do funny stuff with their children. We moms get all worked up sometimes about how we appear in public. We get exasperated at the way our kids act and then embarrassed if someone so much as even glances at us. I’ve seen it happen from the other side now, with an understanding of what is going on. It’s hard even to give a smile and encouraging word to a mom standing in the supermarket with a wailing toddler and a crying newborn. What do you say? “How are you going to do that?”