I wonder when I’ll finish the last hardest thing I’ll ever do?
Sometimes I feel like I’m climbing a mountain and I’m thinking
there must be a single clear moment that defines those difficult
tasks we’ve accomplished in life as parables rather than present
day challenges.
I wonder when I’ll finish the last hardest thing I’ll ever do? Sometimes I feel like I’m climbing a mountain and I’m thinking there must be a single clear moment that defines those difficult tasks we’ve accomplished in life as parables rather than present day challenges.
Clearly, I understand that we learn new things every day and I don’t wish to abandon that concept. What I’m talking about are the hard lessons. The ones you never forget. I call them clubs. I’ve joined a few clubs that I didn’t necessarily want to be in and at least two of them equate with gang style initiations, but with a beating of the soul rather than the body. It’s these clubs that represent “the hardest things I’ve ever done”.
I’m in the “been through labor” club, the “divorced” club, the “lived with (and loved) an alcoholic” club, the “daughter’s who lost their dads” club and now the “raising my step-children/blended family” club. This last one is the hardest, but just to clarify, it doesn’t qualify as one I didn’t want to be in.
When I was being initiated into all of these clubs over the years, to me they were each in turn, “the hardest thing I ever did.” Although, I think raising children actually is the toughest one because it’s the longest thing I will ever have committed myself to do. Let’s face it, I was only in labor for a few hours to join that club and kids are a lifetime investment from the moment they arrive.
For me the responsibility of turning children into well adjusted adults is a lot of pressure. There’s a scene in the movie, “Riding in Cars with Boys” where Drew Barrymore is having a difficult conversation with her grown son and in frustration she wails, “When does this job ever end?” How true, how true.
Now please don’t misinterpret my message here. I’m not discontent with raising children, but I’ll be honest with you, they do wear me down from time to time. Having three kids in three totally different places can be exhausting. I have one in 11th grade, one in 7th grade and one in 4th grade. They are in three different schools and have three totally different sets of friends and preferred activities. They also have different sets of parents. That’s part of what makes raising these particular kids so challenging. They all come from a broken family and have specific individual issues with that. Each of them carries extra baggage unfairly weighing on their shoulders like bricks in their backpacks. Extra sensitivity and filtering is needed to cope with this fact of life and as a parent I have to be ready at all times for one of these issues to surface. They are hurt if/when the other parent doesn’t make their Sunday night phone call. They are hurt when school activities are in conflict with visitation schedules. They are hurt that they can’t live with both parents at the same time. These are things that I cannot change and I have to find the right words and say them sweetly.
Naively I thought that when the divorce was “final” everything would just fall into place. I was so wrong. In my case, it goes on and on and on … far beyond that date stamp on a court document. It can be something a simple as a message on the answering machine that a child shouldn’t hear and my reflexes had better be quick. Protecting them from what they don’t need to hear or know at any given moment is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and man I hope nothing in my life will be more difficult than raising well adjusted children against these odds.
You may be raising children and for your own specific reasons find yourself struggling at times with the challenges of child rearing and wondering if this is the hardest thing you will ever do. Let’s be real, when you are raising kids under any circumstances not every day is filled with finger painted rainbows and grilled cheese sandwiches.
When things feel out of hand and I’m weary, I just dig a little deeper for some inner strength and I parent on. Sometimes I get through the moment just by anticipating looking back at the really tough days as a distant memory of the last hardest thing I ever did.
