Today’s guest post comes from Lee Ann Setzer, who is a sometime speech-language pathologist and the author of Gathered: A Novel of Ruth and the “Sariah McDuff” chapter book series. At the age of nine, she vowed that if she ever had teenage children, she wouldn’t complain about them. She has three of them now, and usually keeps that vow.
“Oh,” sighed the stranger in the store over my precious bundle, “enjoy him while he’s small. They grow up so fast.”
My wan smile covered all the moods in which I received this advice, from benevolent agreement to irrational rage, depending on how often the precious bundle had woken me up the night before. That lady’s not wrong…but her advice validates only part of the picture.
When I was a grad student in speech-language pathology, I wrote a research paper about how brain cells change when learning occurs. The neurochemistry was beyond anything I’d encountered before, and the paper was eating my lunch. Until then, school had been pretty easy for me; frustrated, I asked my instructor why I couldn’t understand this material.
He gave me a look he probably reserved for clueless smart kids, and said, “Lee Ann, graduate school is supposed to be hard.”
Ohhhhh…
I couldn’t tell you 20 years later how my brain cells changed that day—but learning occurred. If this stuff is supposed to be hard, that means there’s nothing wrong with me for thinking it’s hard, and I can just get on with plowing through it.
A few years later, when I had a toddler and a baby, I looked out my window one day and saw my neighbor’s water heater lying in the yard. Neighborly watchcare is not my gift, but this one was a no-brainer. I even had a pot of soup on the stove. I called up and said, “Hi. It looks like you could use some soup.” “Yes!” she said.
Easy peasy. I just had to put the soup in a jar and run it across the street.
Except I had a toddler and a baby.
You know that puzzle where you have to row a fox, a goose, and some corn across the river, but you can only fit one item in the boat, and if you leave the fox and the goose together, the fox will eat the goose, etc. etc.? I couldn’t carry the baby and the hot soup, and hold the toddler’s hand. I had a wagon, but I couldn’t trust this toddler not pitch the baby onto the asphalt, and I couldn’t put the soup in the wagon with either child. Can’t remember how we did get across the street.
(Also can’t think why I didn’t just ask the neighbor to come get the soup. Brain cell fatigue, probably.)
I arrived home exhausted from crossing the street, with an epiphany: Motherhood is hard—hard enough to change simple tasks into complex, sometimes impossible feats of skill and organization.
Shortly thereafter, I was chasing my little people during a regional conference where President and Sister Hinckley spoke. Sister Hinckley said,
“I love to see you mothers with young children.”
I braced myself for the inevitable advice to enjoy them now. Instead, she said,
“It almost makes me want to trade places with you.”
That almost kept me going for years. The Mother of the Millennium admitted (or at least implied), in front of 20,000 people, that mothering little people is hard.
This talk by Elder Holland encouraged me for the rest of those years:
“I…wish to praise and encourage young mothers. The work of a mother is hard, too often unheralded work. Through these years, mothers go longer on less sleep and give more to others with less personal renewal for themselves than any other group I know at any other time in life.
…may I say to mothers collectively, in the name of the Lord, you are magnificent. You are doing terrifically well…You are doing God’s work. You are doing it wonderfully well. He is blessing you and He will bless you, even—no, especially—when your days and your nights may be the most challenging.”
It’s not easy—it’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard.
I’m past those years now, but I try to remember time my older neighbor insisted she barely noticed my children’s noise in sacrament meeting. The time a friend said she’d felt the Spirit when my four-year-old, who’d practiced bearing his testimony for a month at home, got up and screamed into the microphone. The good friend who plucked baby #3 out of my arms on her first day in church, and spent every sacrament meeting for the next three years holding her and entertaining her. The thirty collective years that Primary teachers spent wrangling my children.
My precious bundle graduated from high school. Now I try to reassure my neighbors that I heard nothing, that I didn’t really need those flowers from my yard, and that they are wonderful parents, trying hard and doing terrifically well. To help them enjoy those years when the children are small.
It’s supposed to be hard. And we’re supposed to do it together.
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