They’re noisy. They’re messy. They do not listen.
You love them, of course, but secretly you sometimes look forward to it all being over. When they stop calling for you in the middle of the night, when they stop asking you to drive them everywhere, when they move out and you get your house back. This is why it’s such a relief when they go and visit their grandparents, when summer ends, when they’re playing down the street.
“Truthfully, they exhausted me,” Phyllida says of her kids in Meg Mason’s wonderful novel, You Be Mother. “I spent years wishing they’d go and slam someone else’s door.” Like all parents, seeking a way to cope, she talks about how she made the choice to send them to school in the city instead of close by, in part for the better education but also because it meant they’d be gone for more time during the day.
But, like all of us, one day she gets all the quiet she ever wanted and more. She buries one of her boys. The rest of the children grow up and move out. “Ha!” she tells her neighbor with a young baby. “What I’d give for a slamming door now.”
Someday—perhaps very soon—we would give anything for today. It will be too late then though, to appreciate what we had. We can only do it now. No matter how loud, how messy, how onerous it may seem. We have it now, as loud and messy and exhausting as it is. Enjoy it. Love it. Appreciate it.
You Be Mother is frustratingly only published in Australia but Meg Mason’s other great book Sorrow and Bliss (which has some parenting lessons we have talked about many times here in emails) is one we carry at The Painted Porch. It’s a must read! You can also listen to her interview on the Daily Stoic podcast here.
