Does it get easier?

For a long time, I was that mom who always looked disheveled and overwhelmed, schlepping around three very young kiddos who all demanded non-stop parenting around the clock. For nearly a year, all three were in cloth diapers, and I spent six full years either pregnant or nursing. For a long time I could not imagine my life without a baby, or little ones, in it.

Now that my youngest is five, I'm sometimes asked if it has gotten easier-- usually by mothers who are still in the trenches of baby and toddlerhood. Often my knee jerk reaction is to say, "No! It's still hard! The problems are different, but no less exhausting and mind-blowing."  Yet further reflection could offer a more nuanced response.

Last night, not long after the kids had gone to bed, Mike and I were sitting together on the couch. Having just started a t.v. show, I was ready to relax and feel like an adult for awhile, unheeded by others' needs and demands. About fifteen minutes into the show, we heard some bumping around upstairs, and the scraping of a piece of furniture across the floor. I muted the television so that we could listen, and asked Mike, "what's that??"  He answered that it sounded like a bathroom stool being moved across the floor. We concluded that someone (I still don't know who) had gotten up to use the bathroom, and we stayed firmly in our seats. Ten minutes later we heard the sound of water flushing down the pipes, and the sink being turned on. Never did we get up to check the situation, nor did anyone come down the stairs.

What is extraordinary for me about this simple story is that neither Mike nor I felt we had to jump up and run up the stairs because we heard movement in the bedrooms, signifying a child was a awake. No one cried or yelled for assistance. A child needed to use the bathroom, and got up (in their dark room), found the bathroom, did their business, wiped their own behind, washed their hands, and returned to bed. After years of having to be alert and at the ready to assist (and police) every move these three kiddos made, to rock or lure them back asleep, to help them through the simplest of daily tasks, this event was nothing short of a miracle.

So YES, it has gotten easier. In many ways. New issues present themselves every day, from peer pressure, to schoolwork, to bullying, to having to field questions about what it meant when someone called another student "gay" when he missed the shot in basketball, and what "9/11" was and why it happened. These issues do more than give me pause; they terrify me. I feel unprepared for the bigger questions and problems that will confront my children as they grow, and sometimes I miss the days when my toughest challenge in parenting was slipping out of the baby's room without waking him up, or getting more than two subsequent hours of sleep. But the fact that my kids can tie their own shoes and zip their own jackets, buckle their own seat belts and clear their own dishes, leaves me feeling less overburdened and more ready to consider the bigger issues they face. I am thankful for a new phase in parenting.