I was talking with a young mother recently. She told me that before she met her partner she thought one option open to her was to be a single mother. Knowing what she knows now though, having a much better idea of how much work a baby is, she said she’s glad she hadn’t made those life choices. Her partner is an incredibly active, and pro-active, father, yet still this young mother has been shocked by how much hard work is involved in caring for a baby.
It got me thinking about when my son was born 22 years ago. We were living in a foreign country without the usual support system provided by family and friends. The morning after I gave birth, Ian, my husband, left for a four-day business trip. He was then away four nights a week every week for the next nine months.
This was one of the most difficult periods of my life. I was severely sleep deprived, lonely and becoming increasingly depressed as a result of the mammoth task of looking after a newborn and a toddler without help. When I look back now, I wonder why I ever felt I should do it all on my own.
But I was working from ignorance. It seemed to me that everything I was ever told about life, the path to a happiness lay in being a ‘good’ girl so that I could find a nice boy with whom I could make beautiful babies, to study hard to get good grades so that I could get accepted into the university course of my choice to get a good and interesting job.
When I had ticked all of the above boxes, I sat in our comfortable house, with my two beautiful babies and my handsome and successful husband wondering why I still felt unfulfilled. Complete happiness still eluded me, and I had no idea why.
In a way I was angry. I thought total happiness was not only possible, but my right. I’d done everything I was told I had to do and now the universe didn’t seem to be keeping its end of the bargain.
One day a neighbor popped in unexpectedly when I was in a deep slump. We started to talk and I just burst into tears. A couple of days later she gave me a copy of the internationally bestselling book, A Road Less Traveled *by psychotherapist M. Scott Peck which opened with this line: “Life is difficult*.”
This immediately got my attention. I read the next paragraph, which was a balm to my troubled mind:
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
This was a profound insight that changed me forever. I learned, for the first time, that we will always have problems; that is the nature of life.
I felt so relieved. My first thought was that if that is the case then I was happy to have my particular set of problems. It was always that I thought I was choosing between my problems and no problems. Once my choice became between my problems and somebody else’s, I was happy. I could deal with this.
Raising children, largely on my own for most of my children’s lives, has been the second greatest challenge of my life (I’m still working through the greatest - I’ll come back to you on that one when I’m through to the other side!). It took every ounce of patience, strength, wisdom, and then more patience, to get through it and still be the parent I always wanted to be. But it all got instantaneously easier once I knew the rules. **
