I Promise It Will Get Easier

It takes us thirty minutes to walk three blocks. But we walked them.

It is a frosty witching-hour in late December, the kind of cold stillness in the air you can almost see: clear hard outlines of trees and streets in the fading light, shapes and shadows defined stiff and frozen. My children are alternately plodding and skipping up the steep sidewalk ahead of me. Cabin fever was infecting us all, and so I dragged both my boys out to the little neighborhood park three blocks south, despite my weather app sternly displaying an unforgiving 27. Bundled, we trudged down to a rickety bridge over the half-frozen creek, tossing branches and rocks down to skitter across the ice. Thoroughly chilled now, we march home for crock-pot meatballs, and as I watch my sons scramble up a grassy embankment I marvel at how easy and light this walk feels, how I never thought I would get here.

My boys are five and two. A year ago they were four and one– only a year and yet a lifetime. A year ago, a quick pre-dinner walk in frigid temperatures would have been a massive undertaking with the baby in the stroller and my older son begging to be carried. We might not have made it as far as the creek before a meltdown ensued over someone’s cold hands (despite my desperate injunctions to keep mittens on.) When I had a baby and a toddler, everything was hard. Now I have a toddler and a preschooler, and the hard has begun to shrink– or perhaps I have grown.

In many ways, circumstances have eased. We no longer need a stroller for a quick jaunt to the park (but on the flip side, I now need to keep two eager ninjas from darting into the street). Everyone more or less understands the importance of actually wearing their winter outer-things (except when my toddler insists that a beanie is not as en vogue as a plastic fireman’s helmet). I don’t have to carry anyone– they are racing each other across uneven pavement (still just as prone to falling down and screaming bloody murder, though). It isn’t the cold exercise sending a surge of warmth to my heart as I watch them; it’s pride and love and marveling. They are magical. They are two little people, learning how to be, and I get to watch them.

And as they are learning how to be children, so am I learning to be their mother. I am a stronger person with greater endurance than I was a year ago. I am more patient with the eternal hat and mitten struggle because I know I cannot reason with a child who doesn’t know frostbite is a thing. I am calmer when someone inevitably takes a spill, firmer when giving commands to STOP at the corner, better at timing our pace to the park and back so that we return before dinner-time has passed and the kids become hangry (no matter how long you think it will take, add fifteen minutes). I am feeling more secure, more confident in doing things as a family, and I cannot point to one moment when that began to happen. I wish I could. It would make for a more memorable essay, but isn’t that what so much of parenting is? You just keep doing the same thing over and over, like an idiot, hoping for a different result, and then one day you realize the result has been there for a week and you’re finally aware enough to see it.

As I write this, my two-year-old is doing puzzles nearby. He just came over and yanked on my arm. “I’s tut on wawmer tocks,” he told me solemnly. He held up a fuzzy-reindeer-clad foot.

“Good job,” I said. “Do your feet feel better now that you put on warmer socks?”

“Uh-HUH,” he said emphatically, and returned to his puzzles. The moment was almost too on-the-nose; as I pondered the steady growing-up of my children and their increasing abilities alongside my own, my toddler came to show me he had discerned a problem and solved it with no input from me. His feet were cold! He found a pair of (his brother’s, but no matter) fuzzy socks! He applied them to his cold feet! Now he feels good and he came to tell me about it! I WASN’T INVOLVED!

A year ago, he would have cried without words because his feet were cold, and I wouldn’t have known why (because he did have socks on before, they just weren’t warm enough). I never would have named “putting warmer socks on my children” as something that makes constant caring for little people difficult, but when it suddenly was lifted from my list of responsibilities, the resulting lightness was sudden and intense.

I know it won’t always be that easy. Some responsibilities do not fade or lessen as children get older. Sometimes, life gets harder. Parents of children with disabilities have attested to this over and over again; what a typically developing child might “grow out of,” a child with a disability might continue for life. I don’t want to gloss over these difficulties, to assume I’ll never face them myself, or to imply that when things get harder, the parent or the child is somehow doing something wrong. As the parent of a high-needs, emotionally explosive kid, I’m familiar with the feeling of “this should be easier by now; what’s the matter with us? Everyone else can do ____.”

And yet, the more I parent, the easier the hard things become. The circumstances haven’t always changed, but I have.

On our little hike to the bridge at the park, my kids squabble over a handful of sticks. Silly as it sounds now, a year ago this could have sent me into a spiral and ended our outing when it had hardly begun. “Look!” I say, pivoting their attention to the grating on the bridge. “I can drop a stone right through this hole here. Who can do it faster than I can?” Distract, deflect, overcome. Don’t despair. The boys drop the sticks and change gears, searching for stones that will fit through the small gaps. A point for Mommy, and no one lost an eye to a sharp branch.

I don’t pretend to have it all figured out. I likely never will. If I make it to ninety I hope I’ll be wise and experienced in many areas of life, but car seat regulations will have changed so much by then that I wouldn’t dream of advising younger mothers in that regard. Even just in the next few years, I know I have a big storm coming. My oldest isn’t even in kindergarten yet– the teenage years are a faraway impossibility. But at this point, perhaps the first summit of a long journey full of peaks and valleys, I am taking a cold breath at the top of the hill and looking back and saying, “I got through that.” Lockdowns, quarantine, postpartum, nursing, medical scares, emergency room visits, healing from stitches and from hormone-induced depression, finally getting help for lifelong anxiety, learning how to change a diaper standing up in a filthy public restroom stall– I got through all of that. Grief has touched me deeply in the last five years of my life, intermingled with the joy of getting to know my two most precious little people, and somehow I have still emerged in one piece.

I’m not saying that if I could have a baby in a pandemic, I can do anything. But these first few years of motherhood have taught me I’m capable of more than I could have dreamed. Like Michael Scott, somehow I manage, and that gives me hope that I’ll be able to teach and nurture in my children the resilience to do the same.

We are at our house now, running the downward slope of the sidewalk. My five-year-old hammers the doorbell and my two-year-old screams because he wanted to do it. With numb fingers, I turn the key in the lock, promising my two-year-old he can push the button next, stumbling over the cat who leaps to greet us as we cascade in a pile of cold noses and shrugged-off winter coats, into our warm and fragrant home.

It goes so fast, the older parents say. You’ll miss it. Looking back at some of the hardest moments of early parenting, I’m not so sure I will. But I think I’ll be forever grateful that they shaped me into the person I am continuing to become. It is easier to be now than it once was, and I hope I never take that for granted.

I also hope I remember to pack my own earwarmer next time, because a solitary coat hood is clearly not cutting it in 27 degrees.

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