Hang In There, Baby!

Okay, you may be too young to remember this poster, but it was everywhere in the 70s, which is when my family moved to America from Jamaica. I love that it pretty much sums up how my husband and I feel at the end of a week like this one -- wrung out and barely hanging on! You may have had more than a few days like that since becoming parents, especially if you're a mom. No matter how well-prepared, mature and ready you were (like I thought I was), being responsible 24/7 for the care and feeding of a helpless little creature was a bit like being sucker punched.

But at least babies need us, right? Then they become toddlers and seem to spend all their waking hours either arguing with us ("Me do it!") or attempting to cause themselves bodily harm. Don't they get that throwing themselves into traffic, say, is just proving Darwin's case? Keeping them alive becomes even more physically exhausting than taking care of a newborn, which you hardly thought possible at the time. That whole sleep-deprivation thing wasn't even approved of without the presence of a doctor at Gitmo, and there you are, alone with a wailing mass of protoplasm who you have the responsibility of nursing every two hours throughout the night, without so much as a thank you, much less a watchful nurse with a clipboard who'll put a stop to the whole thing before you start hallucinating.

But I digress. I was trying to make you feel better. More to the point, I was trying to make myself feel better. Here's the money shot: if you have kids that aren't at full-time-school age, you are under siege. Not like in a real war, of course, but as real as it gets in LA's San Fernando Valley. So cut yourself some slack. Get off your own back. Realize that, although you may be out of the baby years, the light doesn't break into the murky shadows of the tunnel until they're safely in kindergarten. By then, of course, you may have done what we did, which is to re-up for another tour (man, this is a lot of battle imagery for a city girl. It was clearly a mad week!). We've had babies and/or toddlers in the house for almost twelve straight years. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but it is different on the other side. At least, that's what I hear. :)

Go snuggle with your honey and hug your kiddies. Work, stardom, fortune -- all those can wait. But once kindergarten starts, watch out, world!!