NinetyWtremarked here that raising children is far from the most difficult thing s/he has done.
I always feel a little defensive when people say that kind of thing, because motherhood is definitely the most difficult thing I’ve undertaken.
I’m trying to think of other things that have come close - being laid off when I was the breadwinner, moving hundreds of miles a couple of times, changing jobs many times, dealing with my parents’ divorce and my mother’s suicide attempts and hospitalizations, my dad’s mental and physical illnesses. None of them compare.
Having my mentally ill mother-in-law live with us for several months (twice, because I’m THAT stupid) is the second most difficult thing I’ve done, and it was nowhere near as rewarding.
The only times I can remember being REALLY afraid were driving in a blizzard in the mountains of Pennsylvania (when I realized the yellow line was on the wrong side of my car) and when were moving to Pennsylvania and our big U-Haul truck would stall if my husband drove under 50 mph (just like in Speed). And there was the time our townhouse was broken into, in broad daylight, also while we lived there. We got the hell outta Pennsylvania.
None of those compare, though, to the way I shook when my 15-mo-old daughter had a febrile seizure and I called 911. That was four years ago and I can still taste that metallic fear.
And no job has ever worn me out the way my twins do after a day of “52 Random Questions” punctuated by miscellaneous mischief and toilet-paper creativity.
What about you? What have you done that was really, really difficult?
I surrendered a child for adoption, when I was 16 yrs old. (I knew then, if I lived to be 100 yrs, I’d never be as old again, as the year I was 16!) Definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And, no, it didn’t really help to know it was the ‘right’ thing to do.
Became the primary caregiver to my paralyzed, bedridden mother-in-law. She weighed twice what I did, took 17 pills a day, and required an enormous amount of care. While it was extremely challenging, (there were days I thought I might go mad!), when she passed in our home, 6 yrs later, surviving her passing and moving on with life, was even more so.
Coming into reunion, 28 yrs later, with the daughter I surrendered, was definitely the most frightened I’ve ever been. It’s been a spectacular time since, I have no complaints, believe me. But it was indescribably scary.
Physically, the most challenging things I’ve done is hike the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu. We didn’t put enough time into acclimatizing and hit the trail too early. I felt like a couldn’t breath a lot of the time. The highest pass nearly proved too much. But I made it. It didn’t hurt that I could look back at the other trials I had survived, and know that in me was a deep well of strength.
Parenting is by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. There have been things that have been much, much more frightening or painful, but having that fear, pain and all the rest of it rolled into one far outstrips everything else.
No kids, so I can’t comment on how hard that’d be.
It may sounds lame, but the hardest thing I’ve ever done was Peace Corps training in Cameroon. And others agree- despite pretty rigorous screening, 7 out of 30 of us went home during training, including some people who had dreamed of joining Peace Corps all their lives.
It was ten long hot weeks in a very strange and often quite uncomfortable foreign country where you cannot talk to people. We lived with host families, who offered us no privacy in exchange for awkward (an unfortunately sometimes unappetizing- monkey, yuk!) dinners and sweltering bedrooms. We spent six days a week intensely studying language and teaching techniques from early morning until late evening. Other days we were thrown into classrooms, with no teaching experience besides our scant few weeks of training- and I had to teach in French, which I didn’t even know! We were in an odd social hothouse, with only an hour or two of free time a day. It was more like boot camp than anything else. All of this in addition to many us having our first experiences with things like squat toilets, motorcycle taxis, malaria, robbery-by-machete, porcupine for lunch, being constantly openly stared at and near constant diarrhea.
It was a huge number of adjustments all at once, and the worst part is that we didn’t even have a clear idea of what our lives would be like afterwards. We didn’t know where we’d be in the country until training was almost over. It’s hard for an American to walk into a random African country and truly believe that after just ten weeks she is going to be able to live, travel, and work independently. It was all just a huge unknown.
For those that stuck it through, Peace Corps does a kick ass job of making sure you actually are ready after those ten weeks, and most of us went on to have very rewarding services.
even sven neat. Though the monkey part - ew! I traveled around Europe for 6 weeks when I was 20, just me and a friend, and it was hard. Constant strangeness (though not as strange as Cameroon). Got boring after a while, too, we weren’t serving any purpose. Your travels have clearly been rewarding to you :).
Omega Glory and elbows, I hear you about parent caretaking. It’s already happening some, in that my parents are not the people they used to be. I’m finding that so sad, it’s like they’re dying in small increments. My Mom’s actually started buying crap off the Internet, those $80 laxatives. She knows better. I don’t know what to do about it.
overlyverbose and Mama Zappa :). That’s what I was trying to get at, thanks for saying it. It’s the aggregate. For me, anyway.
I sure didn’t intend to cause friction with my remark. Everyone is different; I respect that.
I kicked a drug habit back in the 80’s. That was defiinitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
I survived an abusive relationship. That was difficult. I am very grateful to have lived to tell about it.
Parenting hasn’t been a bed of roses, but I’ll take the late-night calls, the wrecked cars, the bad relationships … I’ll take all of that over fighting addiction or fighting for my life.
One of the most physically painful things I ever went through was an enema for a CT scan. My word, that hurt. Worse than childbirth. Thank Og it didn’t last long.
Call me a wuss, slacker, whatever, but my answer is working a traditional 40-hour-a-week 9-to-5 job. Every fiber of my being is hardwired to not do it, from my physicality (incurable night owl, massive energy spikes and crashes) to my mental and emotional makeup (always juggling a million interests, passsions, and endeavors, get burnt out with rote work easily, need constantly variety and need to work on my schedule and at my own pace, etc.). But I want to provide for my wife and to exist in mainstream society, so I choose to do it and make it happen. If you’re not wired this way, you won’t understand, but if you are…then you’ll truly get what a herculean effort being a working stiff is for people like us.
Everything to do with a murdered child.
Kicking an addiction.
Ending an 23 yr marriage.
Reffing three adult 90 minute soccer games in one day and doing it well.
Military physical & mental stuff and living through it.
Flying in hard IFR as a new IFR rated pilot with a sever case of vertigo for hours on end.
Having a child tell you that they don’t love you, don’t like you and will not communicate with you nor let you ever see your grandchildren.
Having to put down a 15 year pet companion with your own hand.
Going out in storms after having been hit by lightning twice already.
I have not come to the hardest yet as so far I have be able to do and survive all of them so far.
Parenting as a whole, yes. And within that general area, having my infant son almost die of pneumonia, and shepherding an ADHD child through early schooling, diagnosis, and getting appropriate help, were specifically pretty tough.
Outside parenting, completing the Couch to 5K running program was pretty tough for me.
Moving across the country with my husband and 18-month-old son, while pregnant with my second baby, while neither of us had jobs (husband’s layoff was the reason for the move) and subsequently living in my mom’s basement for five months was also quite difficult. I often think that if my marriage could survive THAT, it could survive anything.
Maybe I haven’t gotten to the really difficult part of parenting yet (kids are 6 and 8) but while it can be extremely challenging, I don’t look at it as a particularly difficult thing. ‘Difficult’ to me implies something that beat me down but I got through it. Parenting doesn’t beat me down- it presents me with circumstances that I have to creatively and authoritatively get through, but the positive outcomes drastically outweigh the negative ones. Sometimes those circumstances are more delicate than others, and make me really dig deep to come up with the right reaction or response. And it’s not something I think of as ‘having done’- it’s a constant state. I won’t be done parenting until I breathe my last.
The most difficult thing I’ve done is graduate from law school and pass the NY bar. A close second is finishing my first marathon.
ETA: I’m not trying to ‘neener neener’ anyone here, and I apologize if that’s how my comment comes across.
My first thought was my 2 years in the Peace Corps. Going to a totally different country without knowing the language or culture or even any people was hard.
But I think parenting 4 kids is harder because it is so CONSTANT. Every day there are squabbles to sort out, crying children to sooth, furious adolescents to tame, etc. Not one part of it is so hard, but the all of it all the time aspect will drive you nutty.
It’s interesting to read these (and I didn’t think you sounded “neener-neener” corkboard ;)) – I’ve been wondering HOW I could make my parenting more joyful and less of a chore. I often feel ill-equipped to deal with the challenges at hand (and I sure as hell don’t wanna blow it!), so I think that’s part of why I call it difficult.
Interesting, too, to read about the challenges others have faced. Inspiring.
Living for two years with a severely depressed and verbally/emotionally abusive partner. He was constantly negative, told vicious lies about me to all his friends (including the one whose MIL was my boss, thus getting me fired) and even succeeded in training my friends and family to contact me only through him.
Did I mention I was pregnant on bed rest with a slipped disc in my back for the first seven months of this? And that the only feedback I got from any of my friends/ family was how wonderful and charming he was, and how I really should treat him better? How even after I freed myself many of them refused to listen to what was really happening?
Parenting was the joy that got me through, protecting her from the dysfunction the rock that gave me strength, providing her with a loving consistent environment the goal that got me out.
And yes, parenting is unbelievably hard. The unrelenting nature of it is truly indescribable. It is more work than I ever imagined, and there’s no Federal Law guaranteeing me the occasional 15 minute break.
But the most difficult thing was also completely without reward. There are daily moments of joy and love that give me the strength I need to care for Celtling. Living with her Dad was only draining and depressing.
Timescale matters. Short term, I batted a housefly out of the air with a pencil. Long term, I stopped drinking and stayed sober 23 years.
Painful? Holding pets during euthanasia. A divorce - that lasts longer. Over 40 kidney stones.
Challenging? Wrote an argument for the Japanese patent office that succeeded when the lawyers told me success was very unlikely. Solved just one goddam homework problem, which was to treat the Earth as an oblate spheroid of uniform density, and then treat it as a sphere of uniform density with the same mass, but having an infinitely thin shell with positive and negative mass depending on latitude, totaling zero mass, to match the latitudinal distribution of the oblate spheroid; and then to calculate the difference in gravitational field between these twomodels, as measured on the moon. Jesus.
But there are so many different flavors of “difficult”!
For me, the death of my youngest son Daniel when he was only 23 years old. Next month it will be two years. Another one was the loss of a baby via an ectopic pregnancy as I lost a tremendous amount of blood and almost died. The deaths of my both my father and my maternal grandmother were tough too. I was a divorced mom of three and in college at the same time, that was rough. The worst of all though was the death of Daniel.
