When Did Parenting Start to Turn a Corner For You?
I am starting to feel the slightest bit of spaciousness from the unrelenting demands of parenting small children.
Despite plenty of paid and unpaid caregiving support, I would say my husband and I spent a lot of the last few years in parenting survival mode. To those of you who are new to my personal story, our twins were born in February of 2020, (pretty sure you remember what happened next) and we already had a four-and-half-year-old at the time. I would say a lot of our “family leisure time” has been about playing zone defense and just desperately trying to make it to the next nap-time or bedtime. We spent years refusing restaurants, family trips, and many kinds of outings because they were just too hard.
I would not say my parenting life is now “easy” but I do feel like we are starting to turn a corner. Our oldest is almost 9 and is basically a charming piece of cake (as long as we aren’t fighting about screen time.) While the twins still have their fair share of bedtime meltdowns, or sometimes come into our room pantsless at 6:30 am with a litany of demands for elaborate construction of cardboard items, things are definitely as easy as they’ve ever been. I am starting to feel the slightest bit of spaciousness from the unrelenting demands of parenting small children. They can be in another room of the house without us! I can go to a playground and have a conversation with another parent without my eyes going in 12 directions to keep track of both twins every second! They occasionally entertain themselves by playing cute games together for tens of minutes without asking for an adult to intervene! We’ve now gone on two short family trips that weren’t total disasters! While turning 4 hasn’t been some kind of night and day difference, it has felt like turning a modest corner. I also feel like another big corner is coming this fall, when all three kids are going to the same school directly across the street.
But I’d love to hear from you all: when did things start to feel like they “turned a corner” in your life as a parent?