Pregnancy sucks. You have to get ginormous, you can't drink, you're constantly being stared at, and you have to face you're impending doom: a life-changing time bomb that you have 8 short months to try to prepare for.
The first way to prepare is to get your finances together. You need to get as much money as you can possibly get your hands on, because that's just how much kids cost. Doesn't matter how much you make, you're still going to need more. You need a bigger, nicer, safer place to live. You need a TON of shit. Furniture, car seats, strollers, diapers, formula, clothes, diaper genies, baby Bjorn's, hats, blankets, swaddle blankets, swings, high chairs, bottles, breast pumps, nursing tops.... and this list does not end, ever. Once you think you have everything, you need one more thing. A boppy pillow. A thermometer. A snot sucker. You also need health insurance and money to cover medical bills. Then you need money to pay your bills for several months while you're home with a newborn. Then you need to buy life insurance to protect your family if something should happen to you. Then you need to open a college fund to start saving for squirts' education.
This is not why being a parent is hard.
Is this getting redundant? Let's say you have plenty of money and can handle all these things. You'll still need more. Because then you will be pressured into buying cord blood banking in case you're precious little one ever needs stem cells if they get sick, and man do they lay this one on you. I felt guilty for months for not spending thousands on this and I still feel a little guilty. I even contemplated freezing my son's umbilical cord in my own freezer- what the hell's the difference? Once this is paid for, you start reading the parenting magazines and decide that you're child should only wear organic cotton onesies, and needs Dreft laundry detergent, and it just never ends.
This is not why being a parent is hard.
Ok, so the kid shows up and rips you a new one. Then you're dealing with a helpless, crying, screaming newborn who won't sleep more than 90 minutes at a time when you are the most exhausted you have ever been in your entire life. For me, the hospital stay was the first time I had ever been in a hospital, the first time I ever had an IV, and obviously the first time I ever had an epidural. The whole weekend I probably got ten hours of sleep. Then I was sent off on my own to raise this kid until he's thirty, when I still needed raising myself. I was on painkillers, wearing pads, taking sitz baths, changing diapers, doing laundry, and breastfeeding a baby who was hungry every two hours and took 45 minutes to feed-- all while living my life in a zombie-like catatonic state that was only broken during the hour I spent crying every day.
This is not why being a parent is so hard. It was hard, but mostly because I was tired. And I knew it would pass. I knew things would get easier. I switched him to formula, he started sleeping longer, he started pooping less, my body healed, and I got some help with the laundry...
As they get a little older, they get easier, but they also get harder. Once they can grasp things, there are choking hazards. Once they can crawl, there are falling hazards. One they can walk and climb, EVERYTHING is a hazard. You can never let your guard down. As a parent, you have to be alert and ready. It doesn't matter how tired you are, you have to be paying attention and you have to be ready to jump up and save you're kid from getting a boo-boo, or save your cell phone from being flushed down the toilet. Once you go back to work, it is a tight-rope walk trying to balance your lives. Daycare, doctors appointments, work, bills, friends (where did they go?).. Every day is a challenge and no matter how hard you try to work out a schedule, you'll never stick to it, because there will always be something unexpected.
But this is just part of life, everyone gets busy, whether they have kids or not. Everyone has to balance personal obligations with work, so this is not why being a parent is so hard.
Being a parent is do damn hard because you need to make decisions quickly, and sometimes blindly, that will affect someone else for the rest of their life. It never occurred to me how easy it is to make decisions about my own life until I had to make decisions for someone else. I have had to make all of my son's medical decisions, and he has absolutely no say in them. He can't speak, and even if he could, he wouldn't know what to do. It was my decision to get him vaccinated, but I question it all the time. I am torturing my child by injecting viruses into him so he can form an antibody to diseases that he would probably never get anyway. Getting these vaccines just MIGHT cause autism and change his personality and cause him to struggle for the rest of his life. They also just might cause a stroke. And he will most definitely get a fever and feel crummy for a day or two. But I did it anyways- I trusted the medical professionals who recommend it. I figured they must be right that the benefits outweigh the risks. I trusted them because I didn't know what else to do- I didn't have the time or money to go to medical school and study the effects of the vaccine and decide for myself it it was worth it.
For me, this responsibility and vulnerability is the hardest part of being a parent. Being responsible for someone else is easy when it comes to feeding and bathing them, but hard when you look at the big picture and realize that a decision you make today is going to still affect them long after you're gone. Should I continue his vaccines? Should I move to a better town? Should I work longer hours to make more money or should I work less hours to make more time? Which is more important? Should I involve certain people in his life? There are no way to answer these questions, and there is even less time. You just have to do it and hope that you do it right.
