Baby Making

Making children is the easy part, the challenge is in the raising.  Written and spoken, advice is plentiful, but until you hold one of these babies in your arms, you never fully understand the journey you are about to embark upon.  It is the uniqueness of this ultimate human experience that makes it so difficult.  True there are valuable books, accurate suggestions, and well-meaning advice; but when you spend an entire evening trying to get your newborn to sleep; you realize that the books are really just adventure stories told by someone else.  Your adventure story is a new experience because it is you who are experiencing it.  My first-born daughter at 6 months had developed a high fever that would not weaken, when the doctor suggested I put her in a lukewarm bath to cool her tiny body down it sure sounded like a good idea until I actually did it.  No amount of reading or training would prepare you for the physical and emotional trauma that that small event caused on parent and child.  Every event requires so much thought and it is impossible to understand the ramifications of your mistakes until you start paying for “the shrink”.  It is amazing how well our mistakes are remembered but, hey what about the time I did the right thing?   

What is driving me to this line of thinking is the manner with which pandemic-caused problems for families are reported.  Perhaps it can be said about anything that is reported in the headline-sound-bite-shortest-half-life news story cycle, but it resonates with me that the reporting on mothers and children is so far off the mark.  There is nothing about raising children that can be replicated in the business or the governing world.  Unless the parent chooses to neglect, issues with children cannot be put off until next week, or when you get back from vacation.  A child’s needs are immediate.  Whether it is hunger, injury, illness, emotional, or just a hug.  The demands on parents are extreme.  It is especially hard on mothers.  No matter how we might try to equalize the pressure, it is always pounding in the woman’s ears.  When it is reported that women have left the workforce in record numbers or they are huddled with their children in a refugee camp or they are bullied by their colleagues at home, at work, on the floor of the senate; remember these women are facing the most relentlessly demanding job at home.  Don’t get me wrong fathers play a role and an important role.  However, for most families, they are the relief pitcher who comes in the 8th inning to try to clean things up.

I have five children and no book ever truly prepared me for the visit to the emergency room, the emotional breakdown, or the accurate guidance when faced with one of your children in need.  As a society, we underestimate at every turn the challenge parents face when raising children.  We really cannot do enough to empower parents and especially women.  All schools have sex education but that is the easy part as no one needs a degree to produce a child, but where are the child-raising classes.  Where is the advanced education to help mothers in the workplace after their children have left the protective cover of the home?

So, the next time you have a bad day think of the mother of three who clothed, fed, dressed, settled disagreements, cleaned up after, did laundry, taught three different school grades to three different types of learning abilities, and it is only noon and there are 9 more hours of the same before she might be able to brush her teeth.  Then think about the pompous hyperbole stricken elected representative who says we are doing enough.   Is the baby-making still stuck in our heads????