The other day I was picking up my kids from day care and started talking with some of the other parents. Naturally we were complaining about the previous four-day weekend that daycare had taken (of course they deserve time off, but four straight days with my kids is a LOT). Inevitably conversations like this go the same way.
Parent 1: Aw man it was so hard, by the end I was so ready for my kid to go back to day care.
Me: It is really difficult
P1: OH! But you have three that must be so much worse. I don't know how you do it.
This sounds so nice right? The acknowledgment of how difficult my life must be. And in a way it is really nice. But at the same time it feels like a diminishment of the difficulty of parenthood in general. Like you have to hit a threshold of a certain number of children before you're allowed to complain about the difficulty.
That's not only not fair, it's not even true.
Having kids is hard in general whether it be one or 17 (although if you're one of those people with 17 children, let's talk, I NEED to understand). I think it's all a different kind of difficult. Each child has their own unique set of issues that have to be dealt with. When you add more kids to the mix there are some things that are harder and some things that are easier.
I remember when we just had our oldest and she needed our attention CONSTANTLY. There wasn't a moment where she wasn't in my lap or Husband's lap or wanting us to play with her. Yes I realize that sounds lovely but it gets exhausting after about hour 14. She was not interested in playing with her toys by herself or even with one of us just next to her, we had to be actively engaged. That is just not something I can always pull off. The easier part was that one of us could easily get away. I could go to the gym (remember going out and doing things in the outside world? That feels like 100 years ago now), Husband could play some video games, and we could get breaks without feeling as guilty as we do now.
Now we have three and somethings are definitely more difficult and amazingly enough some things are easier. Now our kids play together sometimes and don't need us to do as much except referee. There are fights over toys and us yelling not to hit each other. I have yelled "don't sit on your sister's head" more times than I ever thought I would have to, but I don't have to be actively engaged all the time. Now wrangling children for bedtime, bath time, just trying to get them all into the car to leave daycare so we can JUST GO HOME PLEASE is all more difficult than it was with one.
I don't ever want people to think that they can't complain to me about something because I might have it more difficult than they do. It's all hard, it's just everyone has a different kind of hard. Comparing the two doesn't do anyone any good at all. It actually causes people to suffer in silence and things that their problems aren't worth discussing. Or aren't really problems at all and that there's something wrong with them for thinking that they are having issues.
So while my brood of children is intimidating from the outside, and from the inside most days really, it is my firm belief that no one's life is what looks like. One day during pickup a mom asked why her kid was the only crazy one. It reminded me that we only see into each other's lives for small moments and have no clue what really goes on. So any time someone compares their life or themselves to me or anyone else, it isn't the whole truth. It's just their imagining of what my life is or who I am so it's always going to be better and glossier than the truth. The truth right now is that I'm sitting on my couch, wearing an old Misfits t-shirt and a torn sweatshirt, listening to Taylor Swift combined with the snores of my dog while typing this and praying that pick up time takes as long to get here as possible.