"They're Only Little Once" Is Holding Me Hostage

Everyone told me parenting would be hard--but they didn't tell me I'd be sad all the time.

There’s one statement I see often repeated in parenting circles: nobody ever tells you how hard parenting is.

I feel like this is just something people say, but it’s not actually true. I’m sure it’s been true for a couple people throughout history, and I’m sure those people will magically materialize in my comments section. But for the most part, if you talk to parents or watch content by parents, you see lots of stuff about how incredibly hard parenting is. You’ll never sleep again. You’ll never have sex again. You’ll be overstimulated and start throwing Fisher Price Little People around like a gorilla in captivity flinging romaine lettuce.

And it’s not just parenting—pregnancy too! Before I ever got pregnant, all I saw was reminders of all the reasons pregnancy would be awful. In a best case scenario, I’d be nauseous for months on end, gain fifty pounds that I’d never be able to lose, I’d have a permanently skin-skirt of loose flesh, all my hair would fall out, and my vagina would look like one of those 2005 Olsen twins oversize slouchy handbags. In a worst case scenario, my epidural would paralyze me for life, or I’d simply die. And don’t forget the “unspoken secret” that I would poop in labor, which I was told repeatedly by people who said that “nobody ever tells you” about the poop. Everyone told me about the poop.

Despite wanting children desperately, I assumed that I’d have to sacrifice basically everything about my body, my marriage, and my free time to get there. When I saw my coworker return from maternity leave, I blurted out that I couldn’t believe how amazing she looked—not because she was a knockout, but because she had evaded the apparently inevitable outcome of looking like the final Substance monster.

And yet—despite the fact that parenthood, pregnancy and childbirth are presented in about as grotesque and unappealing a way as possible (by people who claim nobody ever tells you these things) I found that almost all of it was overblown, at least for me and for most of the parents I know. In some ways, the difficulty of parenthood has humbled me (I’m currently in a three-way standoff with my son and his pre-K teacher about his designation of his school backpack as a permanent home for his Aladdin genie lamp collection, long story.) But for the most part, I felt like a lot of the “overstimulated shell of a mom who’s barely surviving” stuff was overblown for me. I still sleep, I have sex, and I don’t feel like I need that many breaks from my kids.

But there’s one thing that I actually wasn’t warned about. It’s nothing that would prevent me from having children if I had been told earlier, but it’s something that would have been a lot more useful for me to know than “you might poop during delivery.”

I had no idea that despite loving parenthood, I’d feel so guilty and so sad basically all the time.