Parents who wish away childhood stages, then wonder where baby has gone.
Some parents love every minute of parenting, and embrace every milestone with love and pride. Some of us, though, find certain stages of childhood harder to cope with than others. Perhaps some of the following quotes sound familiar:
- “I hated pregnancy. I hated what it did to my body, and couldn’t wait for it to be over.”
- “I couldn’t stand giving birth, and lived in fear of the day that it would happen.”
- “Babies? No thanks. They’re just so helpless, lying around, and they rely on me for EVERYTHING.”
- “I just want to get through this period so I can finally sleep through just one night.”
- “Can’t we just skip the terrible twos? I feel like the worst parent ever.”
- “For an entire year, when my son was four, it seemed like all he did was ask me questions. It drove me NUTS!”
- “Starting school was horrible. All she did was cry whenever we had to drop her off.”
- “It seemed like when he turned ten, he went from Jekyll to Hyde.”
- “Hormones, hormones, hormones. I couldn’t cope with those tweens.”
- “Teens? No thanks. Either give me my baby back, or turn this kid into an adult!”
Of course, as parents, there will always be periods where we feel out of our depth, or have other pressures on our lives which make coping with a challenging time in our child’s life harder to deal with.
What’s also true, though, is that almost every parent, when their child is eighteen, looks back and wonders how the heck their baby managed to grow up so fast.
As hard as it is to find sometimes, there’s always something worth celebrating in our children’s’ lives.
What was your “can’t we skip this?” stage?
By: Scott Dunlop