Disclaimer: Sophia is a healthy, wanted, planned child. I believe that each of those elements play a large part in determining how you will handle parenthood and your attitude towards it. Obviously, my experiences color what I say – Your Mileage May Vary.
For starters, I agree with Chanteuse – being a parent is one of those things, like Bangladeshian-level poverty, that you really have to experience before you can claim “knowledge” of.
We love Sophie. Adore her. We are blessed to have a person like her in our lives – not “blessed to have such a child” but blessed to have such a person. She is a wonderful child, a joy to be around, easily the greatest thing that has ever entered her mothers or mine lives, by far the best decision we have ever made.
Sophia, at four, is sweet. At karate, she cheers the other kids who succeed and consoles the kids who don’t (giving hug “I’m sorry you didn’t break the board, Carol. You’ll do better next time”). She is, as best as a four year-old can be, considerate – “May I have the last piece of chocolate, Daddy?” She is intelligent – her ability to form complex sentence structures is particularly striking, so is her liking of jokes and wordplay from such an early age. She is well-mannered – “please” and “thank you” comes unbidden, she likes to help (and I try to make it so that Sophie can help, regardless of the task), and she has little problem looking people in the eye and making conversation with them (so many kids won’t look an adult in the eye I wonder if it’s taught behavior). She loves – even now, months after his death, she’ll go out and talk to our dog who is buried in the backyard.
She’s a great person. It’s hard not to love her.
And we tell her this. Daily. Hourly. I will gladly bet next years income that Sophie has heard a variant of “I love you” or “You’re a great child” or “Sophie, you mean the world to your mother and I” at least 20 times a day in the ~1,500 days of her life. She is a very secure, pleasant, well-adapted, healthy child and it is in large part because of the life that we’ve given her that she is that way.
I don’t understand why other parents do nothing but complain about parenthood. To me, while I’ve had a relatively successful (at times) and interesting (most times) career, there has been nothing to match parenthood in terms of being personally rewarded.
(Btw, the link takes you to some pictures of her. Those are her last two Halloween costumes - she went as Athena in 2004 and as “Best Actress” in 2005 (hence the Oscar)).