They drive you nuts. They make so much noise…and so many messes. They hate doing their homework. They curse like sailors. They demand an endless amount of treats and toys and attention…and rides and pocket money and patience.

It’s totally reasonable that sometimes you would get frustrated with your kids. It’s reasonable that you would sometimes even resent them…that you might doubt not just your own parenting but suspect you may have raised legit monsters.

But of course you haven’t. Beneath the ingratitude, beneath the clinging and the whining and the wide swath of destruction they carve through every room they enter, there is sweetness and kindness and wonderful goodness. And we have to look out for the signs of this, recognize and praise and celebrate it.

There’s a beautiful passage in Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These (grab at The Painted Porch), where Bill Furlong, a father of five growing girls, captures exactly the feeling every parent knows. “Sometimes,” Keegan writes, “Furlong seeing the girls going through the small things which needed to be done—genuflecting in the chapel or thanking a shopkeeper for the change—felt a deep, private joy that these children were his own.” As we wrote in another email about this scene, he was then struck with a thought that we ought to verbalize more often in our own lives: “Aren’t we the lucky ones?”

Yeah, these kids are crazy. Yeah, they are a lot…and take a lot out of us. But aren’t they also the best? Aren’t we so lucky to have them in our lives? So lucky to get to watch them grow up? So lucky to see them learn and change and, slowly, steadily, come into their own as decent, thoughtful members of society?

Yes. Yes we are.