Raising Kids the Tough Part

The Boston Herald

Beth calls with another you're-not-going-to-believe-what-happened-to-the-kids-this-time horror story. She has five children. She never runs out of horror stories. One day last week she dressed the three youngest, sent them off to school and headed for work. At 11 a.m. she left work to pick up the twins at kindergarten.

By noon she was back at her desk just in time to get the call that the elementary schools were closing early because it was snowing. So it was make a dozen calls to other moms (Beth's also room mother), drive back to school for the second grader, designate her 23-year-old son to ride herd over the troops at home and then back to the office to finish a project that had to be done the next day.

The phone rings again.'Don't panic, Mom. But you have to come home right now. We have a problem.’

The problem was he'd dropped a half-gallon glass bottle of milk on his bare foot. The glass had shattered all over the floor, he'd cut his toe down to the bone, and it wouldn't stop bleeding. The little kids were screaming at the top of their lungs because of all the blood and because he had ordered them to sit on the kitchen counter and stay there, for they were barefoot, too. So there they were, marooned, surrounded by a moat of milk and glass. Beth sped home, through a snowstorm, waded into her kitchen in boots and came face to face with disaster. The 23-year- old's toe was nearly severed, and the younger kids were hysterical. She called her husband, who left work and did the hospital run, while she stayed home, wiped tears, cleaned up the milk and glass and made cocoa.

Later, when everything was back to normal, or as normal as life with kids ever is,  when the kitchen was clean, the children quiet, the 23-year-old back from the hospital, bandaged and on crutches, she went back to work. It was just another day.

That's the thing about having kids. The bizarre is typical because it's always something. Broken glass, broken hearts, broken bones. The problems change but they never end.

You think they will. You think that when your kids grow up, life will be easier, that you won't worry about them as much, that you'll be able to sleep through the night, that you won't be called home from work because someone is bleeding. Wrong. Someone is always bleeding.

A friend from the West Coast married off her two youngest children three years ago. She turned one bedroom into a closet, the other into an office. Six months later her son was back home. Six months after that, her daughter knocked on the door.

Another friend hasn't slept more than three hours a night since her 10-month-old was born because he has had chronic ear infections. A few weeks ago, tubes were put in his ears. He's better now, during the day. But at night he's still awake and crying.

When he sleeps through the night I know things will be better, she says. And they will be. For a while. But then there will be something else, a cold, a virus, a problem at school, a strike-out at bat, rejection from a girl, poor grades, a bad marriage. Something. There will always be something, some crisis.

Young people, still children themselves, believe that having a baby can't be all that difficult, that too much fuss is made about the responsibility of parenting. Having a baby isn't difficult. It's raising a human being that is.

'I never imagined I'd be racing home from work because the 23-year-old cut his foot with a milk bottle,' Beth said. You never imagine half the things that happen with kids. Even when they're adults, you worry about them. You never stop worrying because even when they're grown, they're still your children.