How to Tell If Kids Are Difficult
Are My Kids "Difficult" or Is This Normal?
Recently, I was talking to a trusted older friend (OK, it was my therapist) — a bright woman in her 50s who's survived raising five kids of her own — who, at that moment, was not accepting my "but kids are hard" excuse for problems in my life and my marriage. "I hear you saying you don't have enough time as a couple or for yourself because of your demanding kids, but I just don't believe that kids are that difficult," she scolded me. "Unless yours are exceptionally tough."
"Maybe mine are exceptionally tough," I thought to myself, flashing back to their sleepless infant years, the massive toddler tantrums, how even now that they're 3 and 6, I can't sit down for more than 30 seconds without one of them making some kind of demand from me or some kind of mess that demands my attention. "Goddammit," I said to myself, "why did I get saddled with not one, but two of the 'difficult' ones?"
But then I remembered all my close mom friends and their kids, and you know what? Those kids are f*cking difficult, too. They're always whining and crying about nothing and fighting with each other and getting sick at inconvenient times and asking for snacks their moms don't want to make and making messes their moms don't want to clean. Did everyone I know hit the antijackpot in terms of their children? And who were these lucky parents with the "normal" offspring who sat quietly and slept all night, every night and were potty-trained by 18 months and picked up their own toys and said "please" and "thank you" after every easy-to-execute request? Why hadn't I ever met one of those kids?
Later, I told my husband about what my therapist had said and how it made me realize that maybe our kids weren't as normal as we'd previously thought. "She said we shouldn't think that parenting them is hard," I whined, breaking my own no-whining-in-our-house rule. "But it is hard, isn't it? So either something is wrong with us or with them, and I'm voting them."
"Does she even have kids?" he asked me, then looked surprised when I answered back that yes, she did . . . and not just one, but FIVE! "How old are they?" he countered. I told him they were adults, and he immediately started laughing. "She doesn't remember anymore how it was when they were little. We all block that sh*t out once our kids are grown."
I suddenly flashed to my own mother, who seems to have conveniently forgotten almost all of my and my brother's worst childhood and adolescent moments. "Remember that time I was 14 and sneaked out of the house to go to my boyfriend's?" I'll ask. "Nope," she'll reply. And she's dead serious. She literally doesn't remember. It's become a family joke, but now I totally get it. It's not that she has a bad memory; her forgetfulness is the motherhood version of self-preservation, and I hope to adopt that same level of memory-blockage when I get to be her age.
Because, truthfully, I believe that being difficult is what's normal when it comes to small children. There is no distinction between the two. Of course, there are extremes, but even the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted children are no cakewalk to parent. And the next time that older friend (cough, therapist) tells me to stop acting like raising my children is hard, I'll just smile and agree, knowing her kids were difficult, too, whether she remembers it or not.
