Parenting Doesn't Actually Get Easier

More rewarding, yes. Requiring less effort? No.

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Monday night–Memorial Day– as we were getting ready for bed, my husband sighed and lamented the fact that the long weekend was nearly over. It went so fast, he said. 

So fast? So fast? The only part of that statement I agreed with was that the weekend was long. 

Counterpoint: thank goodness it’s Tuesday. 

In my husband’s defense, he works a more traditional schedule than I do. I am a freelance writer with a podcast who stays at home part-time with a toddler in order to save money on child care, which means I work when I can, which means I work at weird times, which means that my work is the thing that gets elbowed out of the way first. Which means that, to me, the biggest difference between the week days and the weekends is that on weekends, she’s just kind of around all the time, like a Craigslist roommate.

Ah, Tuesday. Tuesday means that tomorrow is Wednesday, and Wednesday is the day that I get to put on decent clothes, get in my car, and drive to the recording studio, like a real human adult whose schedule isn’t completely dictated by the whims of a toddler. Wednesday, we have child care. This Wednesday will be the first day since the beginning of the long holiday weekend that I’m not on the clock for motherhood, my other job that 1- doesn’t pay me 2- If I don’t do it, I go to jail. 

It’s not that having a small child has made me dislike weekends; it’s simply that there comes a point when I’ve had enough. Before, I could enjoy loafing indefinitely. Now, she decides when and if we loaf.

Over the long holiday weekend, we went on a couple of hikes and nice long walks, played games, made precious memories, etc etc, but my daughter is also growing molars and fighting off the latest iteration of Bacterial Toddleritis, which means that on a day when we’d typically go to a friends’ house for a barbecue, we had to assess whether she was in the right place, physically and emotionally, to leave the house. She wasn’t. The barbecue in question was at the home of one of Josh’s friends, and so I was the one who elected to stay home. What’s the point of both of us being trapped in the house together wiping baby snot off of everything while the baby yells indecipherable critique directly into her caregiver’s face when, really, that’s a one-person job? 

I’ve been learning how to hand embroider. It is perfect for me. Embroidery fulfills my need to look at something else while the TV is on, distracts me from doomscrolling on my phone, and allows me to fidget, productively. What I really wanted to do over the weekend was work on this lettering practice piece containing a quote from Succession during the series finale of Succession. What I got to do instead was spend hours and hours trying to figure out why Juniper was crying, by asking her things like, “Do you want crackers?” “Is it time to sit on the potty?” “Do you have an owie?” “Should we take a walk?” “Did you poop?” My stitch ripper gathers dust.

I’ve only been a parent for a year and a half, but I can confidently say that parenting doesn’t get easier. I don’t care how many people say that it does. They’re wrong.

I define “easier” as “less energy required to complete a task.” Parenting does get more rewarding, but the amount of energy it requires has stayed pretty much consistent throughout the last 18 months.  

Here’s a bad chart I made about it: 

As you can see, the amount of anxiety energy parenting requires has fallen. About a month after birth is when things felt darkest; I was the most sleep deprived, sad, hormonal, and all my baby did was cry, eat, and poop and sleep. There been spikes in anxiety around milestones like crawling, walking, and eating solid foods, becuase there’s always going to be a renewed “wait what the fuck do I do now?” when she develops a new ability to hurt herself. But overall, generally, the bad energy parenting requires has trended downward.

Meanwhile, the “fun” energy Juniper requires– taking her down the slide 10 times in a row at the park, trying to interpret her made up language, cleaning up the living room after she’s spent the afternoon reveling in her joyful chaos– increases the more grown up she gets.  

The sum of both “anxiety energy” and “fun energy” has remained relatively stable over time, even as the fun increases and anxiety decreases. I can only extrapolate that this will remain true until my daughter reaches what I’m calling the “age of sass,” after which point, I’ll probably have to make a new chart. I do not know at what age this will hit. I’ve been told that I should prepare for it to hit around age 3. As you can see, right now, I’m expending about as much energy worrying about not knowing what I’m doing as I am having fun. 

I tell friends who are about to have new babies that the hardest bit for us was the first few weeks, but I’m realizing now that when I said “hard,” I didn’t mean “technically difficult”; I meant “unpleasant.” In those early days, the baby demands everything and gives you very little, and has no regard for the human need to sleep, eat, or shower. The baby is basically an organ that must be taught to live on its own, and unless you have a lot of help or a miracle unicorn baby that doesn’t regurgitate your human milk into your hair and sleeps for hours on end without waking and crying that awful angry-cat-like newborn cry, having a newborn baby around can hollow a person out. 

Newborns are all-consuming, but they’re also pretty fucking boring. At best.

Once a baby starts smiling and babbling, parenting doesn’t get easier but it starts to feel more rewarding. It’s like working in a demanding job in a horrible workplace and then one day you come to work and they’ve installed a coffee machine and ping pong table in the break room. And then maybe a week or two later, your desk gets moved so it’s next to a window. Maybe a few months later, you get a new computer that doesn’t constantly crash. A well-maintained large plant. A weekly catered lunch from a place that’s actually good. Your boss starts remembering your name and using it during meetings.  

But you’re still expected to be available and on call all day, every day on weekends. And you certainly don’t get holidays off— in fact, your work gets harder then. It’s no wonder that it doesn’t take long for Tuesdays to start to feel like Fridays.