miserable but rewarding?

“Deciding to have children is like service selecting submarines,

you just know it is going to be miserable, but rewarding”

 -my husband, the submariner

“Miserable but rewarding” has become our parenting mantra since before Q was even born. Well, I don’t know anything about the rewarding part, but it sure is miserable!

Last night we were at dinner at Chili’s and the same night that it takes Chili’s 20 minutes to even take our drink orders and another 45 minutes to produce our chicken strips and salad, Quinn decides that it is a good night for a meltdown. About 10 minutes into a battle of the wills over not letting him have my iced tea or husband’s margarita (instead of his own drink) I was ready to give in based on the embarrassment of having an uncontrollable shrieking child in a restaurant. But I know better than to allow him to win a power struggle. So instead, we spent the next two hours trading off which one of us would walk him out of the restaurant to have a “talk” with him and dodging the annoyed glances of the other customers lucky enough to be seated within earshot of our table. Miserable.

We got home and put the little terror to bed. Husband went straight to bed as well, exhausted from the whole ordeal. I collapsed in a crying heap on the couch reflecting on the “fruits of my labor” (i.e. my child’s persistent misbehavior).

Parenting is by far the hardest job I can imagine, if only because it seems impossible to succeed. We are loving and consistent as parents.  We try to establish consistent boundaries for Quinn to keep him safe and to help him grow into a responsible child.  Within those boundaries he has lots of freedom, but you wouldn’t know it because he is always testing the boundaries and constantly reacting inappropriately when we don’t allow him to cross the boundaries. I am quite confident in his ability to learn and I know for a fact that he knows what the boundaries are, and it is so frustrating that he still continually misbehaves and throws a tantrum when corrected.  It is like absolutely nothing I do makes a difference. And when my job is to be a stay-at-home-mom (SAHM) and nothing I try to teach my child is effective, it makes parenting the least fulfilling and least rewarding thing I have ever done in my entire life. Every single day I feel like I am failing. Miserable.

It does not help that every other mother I know loves being a mom.  Furthermore, every mother I know either loves being a SAHM or wishes she could stay home with her children. So I basically feel like a terrible person when I admit to myself during my personal meltdown after everyone else went to bed that I hate being a SAHM and somedays I really don't even like being a mother, period.  I of course love my child very much, and I do not regret our decision to have children because I really can’t imagine life without him. But right now, I really don't like being a mother.  It is like banging my head against a brick wall and expecting to be able to break through that wall. Miserable.

In my former life (before kids) I was a high school math teacher.  I loved my job. It was sometimes miserable, but very rewarding.  I chose to teach math because it was objective; right or wrong. Math is predictable. You apply a certain formula and you can expect your result to work out correctly (so basically, pretty much the opposite of parenting where there are no magic formulas). I went to work not so much because I was getting paid, but because I felt like I was doing something important and that my efforts made a difference. I was good at my job and it was fulfilling and rewarding.

I use to feel that way about parenting.  Probably for the first year or so of Quinn’s life I felt like I was putting in the hard work so that once he got a little older and understood a little more, he would be a happy, relatively well-behaved (of course I don’t expect any toddler to be perfectly behaved) child. Then it became apparent that he did understand what we expected of him and he would willfully choose to do something else. At first I took this in stride thinking, “okay, now is when we really need to be consistent with him and he will learn.” Now, months have gone by and he is only getting worse, not better. And I can’t blame him, he is only a toddler, so it must be me that is the failure. Miserable.

And this is why I currently dislike motherhood.  I work hard 24/7. I don’t know what I am doing wrong. But somehow I am still failing my child and myself. I am just not cut out for this.

I am pondering all of this as I fall asleep last night when I feel the first little kicks and punches in my belly of baby #2 (the one conceived before I decided I am not cut out for this). Each little movement in my belly sends a new wave of dread through me.

So tell me dear husband, when does this start to get rewarding? (I actually asked him that a few days ago and do you know what he said? “When he is like, in his 20’s, or something.”  What!?!?)