A couple of weeks ago, my wife Carrie and I were in the living room, trying to calm down twenty-seven-month Julia who wakes up like a demon-possessed Linda Blair for close to an hour after her afternoon naps. During the fracas, Carrie was on the phone with her sister, Jenny, a woman who loves mothering and parenting, a woman who believes in these things at the core of her being. Carrie managed a conversation over Julia’s howls and gurgles and when she got off the phone she said to me that her sister asked, “What’s that noise?”
“Oh, that’s Julia. She just woke up from her nap. She does that every day.”
“Oh my God! If one of my children did that, I’d want someone to blow my brains out!”
“That’s what my husband has felt like for the last twenty-seven months,” my wife said.
Jenny, you are my hero. You, a believer in motherhood and parenting (I’m still agnostic on the matter but hope to grow in the faith of parenting), sharing my agony and my hyperbolic reactions to adversity.
So I’m not a freak after all. Or at least not in this instance.
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