Stop Telling Young Parents to Enjoy Every Minute

The good moments will linger. It's okay to forget the bad ones.

A toddler is melting down in the middle of a grocery aisle. The toddler’s mother is taking deep breaths, staying as calm as she can, wrestling her screaming child back into the cart while silently praying that no one will notice.

But of course someone does notice, and it’s a middle-aged woman with grown children of her own, and she chooses that exact moment to offer relevant, timely and helpful words of advice to the struggling mom before proceeding on her merry way: “You’re going to miss all this someday, you know.”

In this instance, the young mother isn’t necessarily me. I mean, she could be me. She has been me. But she’s also every mom — and dad — who has taken a child out in public and smiled through a stranger’s unsolicited admonishment.

“I miss those days. You’re going to miss these days. Enjoy it. It won’t last. Just wait.”

It’s not reassuring. It’s a guilt trip.

One night, when my first son was not quite four months old, it echoed in my brain like a haunting earworm. For a full week, he had gone peacefully to sleep in his bassinet at 7:00 or 7:30 pm. The ideal baby bedtime! My unicorn child! Unlike his peers, who fought and struggled against sleep, my baby would not need to be helped into the process of self-soothing. Sleep training would be unnecessary for my perfect offspring. Even at a tender age, he already knew the merits of a good refreshing rest —

— but not this night, apparently.

Or maybe it was a judgment on me for my smugness. Who can tell?

At any rate, he was screaming his head off not two minutes after I’d laid him gently in his little bed, so I abandoned the dishes I had just begun to wash — for the first time in that busy day — and up the stairs I ran.

“Shhh, shhh, shhhh,” I told my baby, holding him snug against my shoulder, gently bouncing and swaying as I had been taught to do in the hospital. “Shhh, shhh, shhhh. Mommy loves you. Go to sleep.”

If he had been able to talk, which of course he could not do yet, he would have shrieked, “YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!” As it was, he shrieked wordlessly and flailed about in my arms.

One diaper check, pacifier replacement, and lullaby later, I had made no headway.

“Please go to sleep,” I begged, softly and lovingly.

Appeased for a few seconds, my son conceded to snuggle a little more quietly in my arms. A hope flared within me, and I hastily twinkle, twinkle’d a little star. As the last note faded, I laid him, breath held, into the bassinet.

Silence.

I tiptoed from the room.

As I shut the door, the wail burst forth again.

Back I ran. More rocking. More shushing. I even offered to nurse him again, but of course he was not hungry. He just wanted to yell.

“Enjoy every moment!” I said sarcastically to the dinosaur stuffies on the floor. “You’re gonna miss this!” (They did not respond, for they are not sentient.)

The baby continued to wail, and to add injury to insult, he decided this would be a good time to sharpen his wee fingernails on the skin of my forearm.

“NO,” I said to him, and immediately regretted even slightly raising my voice to my poor innocent child. “Here we go,” I told the dinosaur stuffies. “I’m on the road to terrible motherhood. He’s going to resent me and my anger issues for the next thirty years.”

We began to weep together, me slumped in the rocking chair wishing my husband would come home from work, the baby clutched on my lap and fighting hard against sleep, the dinosaur stuffies still lying on the floor and contributing no assistance to the situation.

“I hate this moment,” I thought. “I do not enjoy it. I will not miss it. I’m an incompetent mother, my baby hates me, I’m never going to sleep again, and I’m a failure.”

Crying about it was at least a little bit of a relief.

Downstairs, dishes were still piled in the sink. I was exhausted after a day of solo parenting on little sleep since my husband had left for a 12-hour work shift. I had cleaned up cat vomit from the carpet and crooned Six Little Ducks at least six times and sent baby photos to my grandmother, who, due to a cute little experience known as a Pandemic, hadn’t yet met my son and wouldn’t for months.

Gloom settled over me, but as it pressed down, the wailing began to subside. Ever so slowly, my son began to fall asleep.

I curled the crook of my elbow a little more tightly under his downy head. As his breathing slowed, he turned toward me and nestled against my chest, affectionate and forgiving of my prior impatience.

This was a moment I could enjoy. This was one I wanted to hold onto, and which I remember with fondness and even nostalgia. My baby was smaller then. Less independent. Weaker and tinier and needier.

These nights, he goes to sleep mostly on his own. And, in spite of myself, I kind of miss those cuddles and that feeling of contentment as my baby slid into dreamland in my arms.

I will hold those happy snatches of peace in my memory. I’m okay with letting go of the patches of screaming and tiny tantrums. I’ll keep those long enough to write something funny about them, if I can, and then consign them to oblivion. I don’t need to miss the hard parts. Life holds enough hard parts.

But I will let myself miss the snuggles. The soft little hugs. The good parts.

Now I have two children. The hard parts come faster and more frequently now. But they won’t last forever. Someday I’ll be the older mom at the grocery store. Someday I’ll look a younger woman in the eye as her child dissolves in frustrated tears, and I won’t say, “You’re going to miss this.” She won’t need to hear that.

I’ll think to myself that that younger mom will miss the peaceful falling-asleep, the chubby cheeks breathing rhythmically, the increasingly heavy snuggles.

But I won’t say that either, because she doesn’t need to hear about that, in the middle of a tantrum, from a random lady at the grocery store. She’ll figure it out for herself.

Instead, I’ll smile. And I’ll say “you’re doing great.”

Because she doesn’t need to be told what she’ll figure out on her own. But she might need to be reminded that she’s doing her best and that she is a good mom.

Just like I am.

An earlier version of this story appeared in the now-retired publication P.S. I Love You.

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