Parenting is Hard

Really Fucking Hard

I thought a weekend away might give me a break from the constant pull of parenting. It turns out that even when you leave, the truth of it comes with you.

This weekend, my husband gave me a gift I didn’t realize I needed. He sent me away with two of my closest friends.

We’re all clinical psychologists, and every year we meet up for a psychotherapy conference. This year, our schedules didn’t line up, so we decided to do something better. We rented a hotel room and gave ourselves a weekend with no agenda, no panels, no notes, and no expectations. Just time together, capped off with a Saturday night comedy show.

Because I was the only one coming from out of town, I was the last to arrive. When I walked into the room, my friends were already deep in conversation. They paused just long enough to hug me, then slipped right back into it as if I’d been there all along.

“Parenting is hard,” one of them said.

“Really fucking hard,” the other replied.

It wasn’t a difficult conversation to join.

I’ve been a parent for almost twenty years, and it’s the most difficult work I’ve ever done. Even in the lighter moments, that truth shows up. My middle son, now a senior in high school, told me recently that watching my husband and me parent our youngest over the past seven years has convinced him that he definitely doesn’t want children. Not a soft maybe or a distant someday, but a firm, fully informed no. Which is objectively hilarious, given that the child he’s referring to is, in many ways, pure joy. He’s funny and affectionate and deeply lovable. He’s also seven, which means he’s loud, relentless, emotionally expressive, and entirely uninterested in the concept of personal space. Apparently, that combination is enough to function as a long-term birth control strategy.

We laughed about it, because what else can you do? Underneath the humor, though, was something true: even when parenting looks joyful from the outside, it’s still demanding in ways that are hard to explain.

And sometimes, the hard parts of parenting move beyond the ordinary into something far more uncertain and consuming. I’ve lived through stretches of parenting that brought me to my knees.

I’ve parented through diagnoses I didn’t understand, through months of uncertainty when something was clearly wrong but no one could tell us what. I’ve made decisions on behalf of my children that felt impossible at the time, including sending a child away to wilderness therapy and hoping, with everything I had, that it was the right call. There have been seasons that felt less like guiding and more like barely holding on.

By most objective measures, though, things are good right now. My children are doing well. So are the children of my friends. There are no major crises unfolding at the moment. And yet, the job continues to be undeniably hard.

Loving a child, even one who is healthy and thriving, means your heart is no longer contained entirely within your own body. It’s out there in the world, unprotected. You care deeply about what they feel and experience, but you don’t get to control what happens to them or how they respond. Their disappointments affect you, their stress registers in your body, and even in the calm periods, your nervous system never fully powers down. Maybe that’s why the weekend away felt so necessary.

Still, we didn’t spend the weekend just dissecting our hardest parenting moments. That wasn’t the point. We were there to rest, to laugh, and to remember ourselves outside of the constant pull of responsibility. We slept, we laughed, we ate, we drank, and while we talked about our children, we also talked about everything else.

And still, somewhere in the middle of all that ease, I could feel the pull back toward home. Because as hard as parenting is, as relentless and consuming and at times overwhelming as it can be, it’s also the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done. There is no one I have learned more from, no one who has stretched me further, no relationship that has asked more of me or given more in return. It’s a daily practice of loving deeply without being able to control the outcome, of showing up again and again for people who are ultimately living lives that are their own.

My friends were right. Parenting is hard. Really fucking hard. And if I had the chance to do it all over again, knowing everything I know now, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. Not because it ever gets easy, but because somewhere in the chaos, the worry, and the moments that make me question my own sanity, there’s a depth of connection and love that makes everything else fade into the background. I haven’t found anything in this life that feels more worth it than that.