The other day, I sat plopped at my mother-in-law’s kitchen island, my head in my hands as I complained about how exhausted I was. It had been a long couple of weeks, with my husband working days and nights to help with the family farm’s harvest, big projects due at my job, and viruses galore running rampant through all four of my young children.
With four kids under the age of eight, sometimes I feel like I am sprinting through every second of every day, constantly worried that if I let my guard down for one second, I will be never be able to catch up again. Even slacking on the laundry for one day feels like it puts me back about a week, so all of those articles and posts about “excuse the mess, we’re making memories” just stress me out even more because it seems like every mother is able to balance actually having fun and enjoying her kids with the responsibilities of managing a household, while I’m drowning in an actual pile of laundry, dishes, and toilets that need scrubbing.
My mother-in-law, who happened to have four children herself too, shook her in head in sympathy at me. “I remember those days,” she said. “It really is so hard.”
As I sat there throwing myself a pity party, I let out a giant sigh. “I don’t know,” I replied. “Sometimes I think it’s not that hard…but that I’m just really, really bad at it.”
She laughed and looked at me with almost pity. “No,” she said firmly. “It’s not you and you’re not bad at it. And trust me – if you can get through this stage in your life, you can get through anything.”
Her words that day really struck a chord with me. Because honestly, sometimes I really do wonder if life with young kids really is not that hard for other people. Sometimes it feels like it shouldn’t really be this hard for me! But it is, it really is. Each and every day feels like a miraculous feat of survival, with 10 million balls of work and kids and cleaning and bills and schedules and pick-ups and marriage and life and friends being juggled in the air all at the same time and if I drop one ball, the other ones will come crashing down.
Hearing her say that life with young kids really is that hard, however, stuck with me and has continued to stick with me, even on the really, really hard days. (Which seem to be pretty frequent right now!) Here is a woman, well on the other side, with grown children and a business and all kinds of things she has gone through in her life, telling me that the time with little kids was really one of the most challenging, is incredibly eye-opening for all of us in this stage right now.
We may feel completely insane right now.
We may wonder if anyone else is feeling the same way right now.
We may genuinely not be able to manage everything at home and at work and with our kids 100% perfectly.
We may feel like giving up on some days (OK, almost every day).
We may doubt that it’s ever truly gong to get easier…
But on the days that I feel like just running away forever, or on the days that I just want to spend crying because I feel like I can’t do it anymore, I know exactly what I have to tell myself to keep going.
I have to remind myself that a very wise woman once said, that if we can make it through these times with your kids, we can do anything.
So let’s keep our heads up, my fellow exhausted, tired, drowning-in-laundry moms. And remember that if the mothers who made it through know that raising their kids in the trenches stages made them stronger, better women now, that we can do it too – and that’s it’s all so very worth it.