Loving Your Littlest Slave Drivers

Having kids brings about new challenges in our lives, nobody would argue that.   The extent of the challenges are not possible to understand until you actually HAVE children (if we understood it - I'm pretty sure the human race would become extinct fairly quickly).   It can be exhausting at times but you continue to function long after you imagined you'd fall over.  This is true for all parents at one time or another but for the "thinkers" among us its particularly challenging to have little attention grabbers doing just that for so much of the time when we would normally be "thinking".   I have a definite emotional response to being deprived of the quantities of quiet time I need to think.  I don't just want it, I need it to stay sane.   Needless to say I am temporarily insane.  But lets not dwell on that.   Its funny once you become parents, you wonder how you so grossly underestimated the requirements for the job, yet you would never go back to the life of relative liesure in a million years.   There's no rational explanation for this - just a realization that God obviously built something very powerful into us creating an unbreakable bond with our little slave drivers, to love them and sacrifice everything for them, even our most prized posession, freedom.   Some people take offense to talking openly about the challenges of parenthood.  I agree its not good to dwell on them without proper focus on all there is to be greatful for in parenthood.   There are some harsh realities though and I think if admitted a little more often, fewer people would feel that they are alone in their struggle with parenthood.   When I first became a mom it was a serious struggle.   My close friends with new or young babies rarely talked about difficulties so I naturally assumed the problem was me - I thought I just wasn't good at being a mom and had made a mistake thinking I could be a stay at home mom.   There are many factors that make one new parent struggle harder than another so I believe its in all of our best interest to be compassionate and try to be supportive despite our natural tendency to think someone is just complaining.  A fussy or clingy baby can wear you down tremendously - add to that any health problems of your own and you're in a black hole. 

The way I see it, the degree of difficulty in any challenge directly corresponds to the richness of the reward, especially if you are depending on God to help you through.    Yes I aspire to find more time to think but we're still sleep deprived at our house and until we are past that phase there's just no chance I'm going to get up an hour before I have to in order to have quiet (though I have done this and the peacefulness is wonderful!).   So until then I will just have to embrace my insanity.