After Elle was born, a friend asked me what the most
surprising thing about parenthood has been.
It didn’t take me long to answer her question: anxiety. I didn’t realize the amount of stress/anxiety
that comes with parenthood. The extent
of my surprise at the amount of stress/anxiety isn’t ubiquitous – I have some
friends who imagined life as parents as life-ending and have been pleasantly
surprised. But for most of my friends, I
think that the opposite is true. They,
like me, imagined the bliss of parenthood (of course with some bumps and sleep
deprivation) but we didn’t realize that reality is much more stressful for at
least two reasons: anxiety about keeping your child safe and stress about
the time that child raising takes.
One illustration of safety stress/anxiety is that we had
planned on camping at a wedding weekend when Elle is four months old before she
was born. But now that Elle is here,
the idea of camping with her in hot, buggy Maryland weather seems
terrible. Although sweating and
mosquito bites aren’t really child endangerment, they don’t feel like the safest course of
action for a four month old.
Compounding the issues of bugs and heat, the only tent that we have is a
backpacking tent that won’t fit her port-a-crib and we aren’t ready to commit
to 2 full nights of co-sleeping with her in a hot tent. With SIDS, co-sleeping feels like a very
dangerous activity, even though humanity has been doing it for its
existence. But the danger is there and
we respect it now that we have a little one.
This idea of “danger”
has become so much more real to me than before I had a child. Before having a child, I took on a lot of
unwise activities, such as wandering dicey neighborhoods and hitchhiking. And maybe some of this increased aversion to
danger is just the fact that I am now getting older. For example, hitchhiking alone. As a 20 year old, I hitchhiked all over
Alaska by myself. As a thirty-something, I will no longer hitchhike by myself, especially not in Alaska.
That said, Wilson and I still hitchhiked on our “babymoon” on the island
of St. Kitts. But now with Elle, I doubt
that hitchhiking will be on the agenda for our family vacations.
The stress of little Elle is not just this sense of
heightened danger. It is also time
stress- making every moment count because you have far fewer moments to yourself. This is sort of what this overall blog is
about-- balancing the conflicting time needs of excelling in
career, while taking care of fitness, and still continuing to explore the
world. This childcare stuff is
stressful stuff as documented by Pew Research and a recent economic study that found that the stress on parents especially moms is
worth a significant amount of money. In
this economic study, researchers looked at how much money you would need to
give parents (a decrease in financial stress) to offset the increased time
stress that a new child brings. In
Australia, a mother’s salary would need to increase by $66,000
and in Germany $48,000. I would
posit that the US mothers may need even more money. I bet US parents have even more time stress
because of our underwhelming maternity/paternity leave laws.
But as many like to say, all this stress is worth it when
your child is giggling at you pulling her leg.
Or cuddling onto you as she falls asleep. All of things that Elle is currently doing as
she continues to get better and better at grabbing and holding things. Her newest joy is the remodeled changing station. We previously had the changing station in our
room but we have now switched the changing table to her nursery where she has a
finger puppet animal alphabet wall hanging.
She loves that thing and coos and waves her arms and legs in
excitement even before we start playing with the puppets. Her dad is an especially big hit as he jokes and plays with Wilson the Whale, Mu the Monkey and Elle the Elephant...
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