Only One Child

Sometimes, when life gets hard or overwhelming, I instantly feel guilty, like I should not feel this way...I only have ONE child.  I think of all the women I know who have two, three, or four children, and wonder how in the world they manage to do anything other than take care of their children.  Somedays, I feel guilty that the house is upside down at 8pm, that dinner is not on the table (or even planned), or that I have no energy to do anything after Cale goes to bed.  I sometimes feel guilty when I get WAY too excited about having a babysitter come to keep Cale, so that I can go to bible study or run errands or just have some me time.  Then, I read this article, by Simcha Fisher, and it made me feel a little less guilty...


(Let me preface this article, by saying that although many of these words ring true to me, I find joy and peace in knowing that being a mom, along with many other things, is the Lord's will for my life.  Even when it is hard and lonely, or doesn't seem like I'll ever feel rested again, I am at peace.  The Lord is good and he gives me all the grace I need to make it through each day.  He is bigger than me and has more strength than I will ever need.  Even on my toughest days, I have a peace and a joy that surpasses all understanding, because my hope is in Christ, and Him alone.)

Dear Mother of Only One Child,

Don’t say it.  Before the words can even pass your lips, let me beg you:  don’t say, “Wow, you have nine kids?  I thought it was hard with just my one!”

My dear, it is hard.  You’re not being a wuss or a whiner when you feel like your life is hard.  I know, because I remember having “only one child.”  You may not even believe how many times I stop and reflect on how much easier my life is, now that I have nine children.

All right, so there is a lot more laundry.  Keeping up with each child’s needs, and making sure they all get enough attention, is a constant worry.  And a stomach bug is pretty much the end of the world, when nine digestive tracts are afflicted.

But I remember having only one child, and it was hard—so very hard.  Some of the difficulties were just practical:  I didn’t know what I was doing, had to learn everything.  People pushed me around because I was young and inexperienced.  But even worse were the emotional struggles of learning to be a mother.

When I had only one child, I truly suffered during those long, long, long days in our little apartment, no one but the two of us, baby and me, dealing with each other all day long.  I invented errands and dawdled and took the long way home, but still had hours and hours to fill before I would hear my husband’s key in the door.

I cared so much what other people thought about her—they had to notice how beautiful she was, they had to be impressed at my natural mothering skills.  I obsessed over childhood development charts, tense with fear that my mothering was lacking—that I hadn’t stimulated her enough,  or maybe had just passed on the wrong kind of genes.  I cringe when I remember how I pushed her—a little baby!—to achieve milestones she wasn’t ready for.

I lived in terror for her physical safety (I once brought her to Urgent Care, where the doctor somewhat irritably diagnosed a case of moderate sniffles) fearing every imaginable disease and injury.  In my sleep-deprived state, I would have sudden insane hallucinations that her head had fallen off, her knees had suddenly broken themselves in the night, and so on.

My husband didn’t know how to help me.  I didn’t know how to ask for help.  My husband had become a father, and I adored him for it.  My husband got to leave the house every day, and sleep every night.  He got to go to the bathroom alone.  I hated him for it.

When I had only one child, I told myself over and over that motherhood was fulfilling and sanctifying and was filling my heart to the brim with peace and satisfaction.  And so I felt horribly guilty for being so bored, so resentful, so exhausted.  This is a joyful time, dammit!  I should enjoy being suddenly transformed into the Doyenne of Anything that Smells Bad.

I loved my baby, I loved pushing her on the swing, watching squirrels at the park together, introducing her to apple sauce, and watching her lips move in joyful dreams of milk.  But it was hard, hard, hard.  All this work:  is this who I am now?  I remember!

So now?  Yes, the practical parts are a thousand times easier:  I’m a virtuoso.  I worry, but then I move along.  Nobody pushes me around, and I have helpers galore.  Someone fetches clean diapers and gets rid of the dirty ones.  When the baby wakes up in the middle of the night for the ten thousandth time, I sigh and roll my eyes, maybe even cry a little bit for sheer tiredness—but I know it will pass, it will pass. 

It’s becoming easier, and it will be easier still.  They are passing me by.

I’m broken in.  There’s no collision of worlds.  We’re so darn busy that it’s a sheer delight to take some time to wash some small child’s small limbs in a quiet bath, or to read The Story of Ferdinand one more time.  Taking care of them is easy.  It’s tiring, it’s frustrating, but when I stop and take a breath, I see that it’s almost like a charade of work.  All these things, the dishes, the diapers, the spills—they must be taken care of, but they don’t matter. They aren’t who I am.

To become a mother, I had to learn how to care about someone more than I did about myself, and that was terrible.  But who I am now is something more terrible:  the protector who can’t always protect; the one with arms that are designed to hold, always having to let go.

Dear mother of only one child, don’t blame yourself for thinking that your life is hard.  You’re suffering now because you’re turning into a new woman, a woman who is never allowed to be alone.  For what?  Only so that you can become strong enough to be a woman who will be left.

When I had only one child, she was so heavy.  Now I can see that children are as light as air.  They float past you, nudging against you like balloons as they ascend.

Dear mother, don’t worry about enjoying your life.  Your life is hard; your life will be hard.  That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong—it means you’re doing it right.

And now, for my own addition to this "letter"...

Enjoy your one child, while it's just you and him.  Enjoy the boredom that you might feel sometimes, and be thankful for time during naps that have to yourself, even if it is spent doing dishes or folding laundry.  Do not take for granted the privilege you have been given of staying at home with him; for there are many moms who would give anything to not have to leave for work each morning.  Before your know it, he will have moved on to a new stage, and you will find yourself in a new season, wishing you relished the previous stage just a little more.  Don't get so caught up in trying to fold the laundry, do the dishes, clean the bathrooms, or make dinner, that you don't spend time playing with your child.  So I hear, there will be a day when he won't want to play with you anymore.  Enjoy this season.  It'll be gone before you know it.