When I was a newly married, nineteen year old, looking at the prospect of having a family I am sure I had imagined what my life as a Mother would be. I am sure that I considered that there would be hard days but I think the overarching theme was the shear excitement of possibility. Thoughts like, "What would my daughter or son look like?" "What kinds of talents would they possess?" "Would he/she favor me or my husband?" I imagined soccer games and playing dress-up, braiding hair, and singing lullaby's. It was all very dreamy. I longed for it more than I had longed for anything in my life.
As I have fallen into the roll of a Mother ever so gracefully (hah!), I have thought a lot about the realities of parenthood that just cannot be conveyed. I have thought many times, "Why didn't someone tell me ______" fill in the blank. Parenthood is HARD. It is beautiful and raw and trying and unlike anything else in the world. I have never been pushed so far passed my own capacity to do, to think, to feel, to understand. Furthermore, I have seen those that I love handle the unimaginable; losing children, watching children suffer, bearing children with disabilities, and simply managing everyday illness and struggle. I have seen friends battle with infertility, mental illness, depression, anxiety, and unforeseen trials.
What I have seen is life, raw and unfiltered, felt in the depths of one's soul, unedited, and unrelenting. It has brought me to tears and knocked me to my knees. But, what I have found is strength of spirit. The human spirit is unmatched and its very height of strength is found in parenting.
I have never felt so much love, so much fear, or so much hope. The unwritten potential being harnessed in these four little bodies I am to cultivate and protect is ever on my mind. It is far more than peanut butter and jelly, sandboxes, and dance practice.
I can identify with the following quote:
“I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbor's children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someones garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived.” -Marjorie Pay Hinckley
"Really living." It is in the good the bad and the truly painful. We cannot shelter ourselves from heartache and pain and "really live." There is beauty in it all.
Each and every person on this earth will experience defeat, suffering, struggle, loss, and the like, but a parent feels them times four! (Or however many children they have).
Making the decision to have a child is momentous.
It is to decide forever to
have your heart go walking around outside your body.” -Elizabeth Stone
Therein lies the essence of for what I was not prepared. But alas, there is opposition is all things and on the other side of pain is immense pleasure, on the other side of sadness is everlasting joy, on the other side of disappointment is immeasurable satisfaction, and on the other side of loss is incomprehensible gain.
Of the many things I may have said to that 19 year old girl, I'd say, do it. Do it again and again and again and don't look back.
