For me, it was completing basic training with a severe case of shin-splints, flat-feet and homesickness. Every step I took toward the end was with excruitiating pain and I made promise to myself never to let anyone know, except for my mother, afterward. I had gone to a doctor in my second week and he told me what it was and that it wasn’t permanent, but it’d hurt a lot. He urged me to be discharged and I refused. He told me I likely wasn’t going to make it due to the pain. Every day I wanted to quit… but I just couldn’t.
Looking backwards, it seems like I’ve had a pretty easy life. But there were things that were very hard to overcome at the time.
When I was 21 I was abruptly dumped by the girl I thought I was going to marry. I was depressed besides, and all too well-aware that my life was going NOWHERE (which obviously, in retrospect, played a huge part in why she dumped me.) I was so broken up about that I-- I don’t know if you’d say contemplated suicide but I definitely fantasized about it a lot. I thought my life was pretty much over. I wanted to curl up into a ball and just die. Mind you, this wasn’t all about the girl. That was more like a catalyst or the straw that broke the camel’s back. I felt pretty awful about myself besides that, and had none of the tools needed to deal with the adult life that was being thrust on me as the birthdays flew by at an alarming rate. It took a long time- months- just to get over the initial pain and be able to eat, sleep, hold food down, etc. But I picked myself up by the bootstraps and moved across the country to start a new life. I got an awesome job within 2 months, and within about 7 months I met the girl I married. We had our 4th wedding anniversary this summer. She is a 10,000x better match for me than the girl who dumped me. My life now is even better than I thought it would ever be before I got dumped.
Quitting cigarettes was a big struggle. It took me at least 8 or 9 years from when I decided I wanted to quit until I actually pulled it off.
Parenting hasn’t been too hard so far, since my only child is only 6 months old. What will be hard in the coming years is raising 2 little ones while doing post-graduate school. If this thread comes up again at that time, that will probably be my answer :).
Holy. shit.
Mine are mostly work-related, since I don’t have much of a social or personal life. Also so many people died as I was growing up, by the time young people started dying I was numb and didn’t feel that much.
So, at work, it’s mostly been public speaking, and the initial job interviews themselves.
The worst it yet to come, I guess. My mom dying scares me when I think about it.
I’ve written about this before, but surviving the winter of 2007-2008 was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I was living in Bulgaria, which is actually not a terrifically cold place - it’s certainly nowhere near as cold as it gets here in Michigan - but I lived in an old, ramshackle house in a village. I had no modern heat and my house had no insulation. I heated my house with a wood burning stove (I had a pile of logs, but routinely wandered around my village looking for kindling, like twigs and pinecones). The best part was that my pipes froze and I had no running water for a month and a half. I had to go out to collect water from the town well, sometimes multiple times a day, to wash my clothes, dishes, and self. The streets were covered in ice, because Bulgarians don’t salt the roads, and I fell down. A lot.
I usually slept with three or four layers of clothing. Sometimes even wearing my heavy wool coat.
At one point, there was a thaw, and all of the pipes in my bathroom, which were on the outside of the wall, burst, spraying water all over the place. Which promptly froze that night. For the rest of the winter, there was a layer of ice on everything. I tried everything to get it to melt, but no matter what, it would always refreeze and I had more ice. My bathroom floor had a layer of ice about an inch thick on the floor; I was really, really afraid I was going to slip and hit my head and die. I literally chapped my ass from sitting on the ice on my toilet seat. (It was night and I was half-asleep and I didn’t realize that the toilet seat wasn’t just cold, it was actually COVERED IN ICE.)
I was seriously counting down the days til spring. It was seriously hellish. A very cold, miserable hell. And last winter - which I only read about in the news - was apparently even worse, because the Russians cut off the gas pipeline to Ukraine, and everyone farther down the line (including Bulgaria) suffered right along with Ukraine. It wouldn’t have made a difference to me, because I didn’t heat my house with gas anyway, but I actually had my stove and my logs. The people who lived in apartments and would have normally had gas heat don’t have that the facilities for a wood-burning stove.
3 marathons and 1 ~ 5000 ft mountain climb/hike later, I’d say the hardest thing I’ve ever done is spend a day at work with a raging cold and not cough the entire day. With my entire instincts yelling at me to let go with one the whole day, I didn’t want to be seen as coming to work sick. I even felt the fluid building up in my lungs, but outwardly I was completely calm and normal. No, I don’t think it was safe, but I did it.
Thank you for your support, it means a lot even though we don’t really know one another. All of us that have lost a loved one through death know the horror of it. Ellen, you summed it up very well. Snickers and Stuff, what you went through is incredibly tough. IMHO, we don’t get over those things, and I even question if we work through them. To me, it’s more that the pain becomes less sharp (cite: Compassionate Friends). If I had to boil down what so many of you have written about it would be this: each person’s version of hell is unique to them.
I think I’m bracing for it. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m sorry to be cryptic but there seem to be some legal wranglings in my not too distant future. Once I’m through it I imagine I’ll be venting endlessly.
Overall my experience as a parent hasn’t been too difficult. This year seems to be a convergence of everything bad that could happen is happening. The legal mess, unemployment, failing business, family member with helath issues (and no insurance). Yestrerday was a particulalry dark day for me when I was feeling the full weight of all of these things. My son, who started 7th grade last week, asked if he could try walking home.*
I new that my objection wasn’t rational. I recalled that at his age I’d take the public bus to a bigger badder city than ours to go to the mall. I knew that he wasn’t in any real danger. I just felt like “really? today you want to cut the apron strings?” It was a tough moment for me but it was fleeting and doesn’t come close to the difficulties some of you describe. (I’m reminded of a thread we had about “what’s the meanest thing you ever did to a sibling?” I threw a ball of mud at mine and hit her in the eye. I was aghast recalling it and people were posting aobut “I had a quickie with her husband at their wedding reception” and “I loosened all his lug nuts.”)
*After school he comes to my shop which is about 1/3 of a mile from the school. Our home is a little over 2 miles from here.
Dealing with a schizophrenic mother from ages 1-13.
Watching her die of cancer.
Being in foster care.
Dealing with a schizophrenic father.
Moving away for college at age 17 with no friends and no financial support.
This.
I sure as hell hope the worst is behind me.
I realize that post didn’t really make sense. I had to walk away from it before finishing.
I babbled about letting him walk home because I had spent the day mourning so many things that when he wanted to do this thing which is really more independent than anything he’d done before it felt like letting him go. I know I need to. It was just a bad day for it. I did let him go though and noone bothered him, and nothing happened and he’ll do it again.
I think how difficult parenting is depends on the child or children. I have watched friends raise kids who sailed through school with the biggest challenge being a period of unfortunate hairstyle choices and bad music played loudly. I also have a friend whose son became addicted in hichschool to oassorted drugs. He’s been to rehab and relapsed twice - say goodbye to his college fund AND his brother’s. It’s caused strained relationships with other relatives and friends because the son has stolen from them, or they think the parents should handle it differently.
Marrying someone with a terminal illness and trying to survive his death is the toughest thing I’ve ever tried to do. The survival thing is still iffy some days.
When people whine about how hard parenting is, I admit to rolling my eyes just a little and wanting to strangle them quite a bit. Raising my daughter hasn’t been a tenth as hard as coping with five years of unexpected secondary infertility. Coping what has essentially been menopause ten years too early has been incredibly, devastatingly difficult.
Well, we’re not all like you. I doubt that the people saying that parenting is their toughest challenge are bad at it–I think it’s a sign that people really think about the power they have as parents and the responsibility they have to their kids. This is a good thing (and not seen enough). Some people are more adept at coping with infant’s crying or toddler’s whining or teen angst. My husband was fantastic with babies, but can’t handle teens. I loved toddlers on up. Everybody is different. You may well have found your task more difficult if you had had several children close in age.
My “most difficult thing” varies with age, as it does for eveyrone. At 14, it was facing my father and telling him I didn’t want to go east for prep school. Of course, that is what I remember and identify. Really, it was most likely surviving a hugely bitter and nasty separation divorce (my parent’s) throughout my childhood and adolescence.
Later on, the deaths of two of my sisters. Followed shortly by almost complete financial ruin.
Today I’d say it was juggling 2 jobs, 3 kids and a husband out of work.
jsgoddess–hang in there. One day at a time (or even one hour…)
I am happy that we managed to get this far into the thread without someone complaining that other people’s problems are crappy and insignificant when compared with THEIR problems.
I am genuinely sorry for your troubles. I have friends who have suffered with infertility, and I know what a nightmare it is. One particular couple almost had their marriage destroyed over it. But what you have done is essentially equivalent to someone suffering from primary infertility coming and telling you, “Pfft, at least you have ONE child. What are you complaining about?” Or, to put it another way, meeting the man who lost an arm doesn’t make me feel that much better about the loss of my hand. Or, hell, even my finger.
and lavender seems to completely overlook that managing one small child is essentially child’s play (depending on the child–there are no doubt many parents of an only child with disabilities or chronic illness etc who would vehemently disagree with me), but managing two or more or twins or multiples is another thing entirely.
But I agree re the infertility. Like any life challenge, it is heartbreaking, secondary infertility (IMS, the most common kind) must be especially so.
I have to second that.
I’m a step-dad. Their real dad is a douchebag who has done everything he can to fuck up their lives. He drove my stepson to drugs and has made my stepdaughter feel like a miserable sack of shit. I caught the backlash from it, because I became the male authority figure. Trying to balance that with the genuine love I feel for them is hard.
Well, parenting varies according to the parent and according to the kid(s) involved. With one kid with autism, and another with an assortment of emotional / attentional issues that are hard to pin down and can’t be “cured”, every day is a challenge and it never goes away. We haven’t had some of the challenges such as your fertility issues, others’ having to watch their children die, family members with several mental issues etc. - and any single day with my kids is usually tolerable (now - there was a time when only exhaustion prevented me from running screaming out of the house) - when you add up the non-ending days of “never let your guard down”, yeah, it’s pretty damn tough.
And at that, I consider myself lucky. We haven’t had the other issues you and others have described. And I can see my brother’s family (similar issues to my own, but magnified about 5 times in severity) and recognize that my parenting issues aren’t nearly as bad.
But I worry about their future, even more so than many parents have to - every single day. Will my son ever be self-supporting? Will we be able to put aside enough to supplement his income for the next 70 years? Will he be able to get health insurance? Will he die alone and unloved because he’s driven away or outlived everyone who might want to care?
I think parenting also varies with the amount of help/support that a parent has. We have no family in the area and we both work and it is really hard. Each day is no problem but it just never ends. It was a LOT easier with one child, it got a bit harder with two kids going to the same daycare but it is really, really hard with two children going in two different directions/schedules etc.
But yeah kid’s vary tremendously. My older child is intense; she wouldn’t eat or sleep as a baby and she would scream and scream. I’m talking at two days old that she screamed (red and rigid) for over 45 minutes! Several other parents would question my parenting and what I was doing/not doing and that I should try something else. I tried EVERYTHING but it’s just her personality. My second child is much “easier”. She eats and sleeps like a champ. I’ve never, ever heard her scream the way that my older child did for no reason. Even our pediatrician told us that our older child was unusually high strung (VERY intelligent though).
I won’t comment on what I think about your struggles.
Surviving my childhood and getting Middlebro out of his alive. I don’t want to bore you with the details, plus thinking about it brings up too much old shit which I prefer to keep buried.
Many of the stories here make mine sound like a fairy tale, mind you.
I haven’t lived a lot of life yet and can’t match most of these, but mine would have to be participating in an unprestigious national high school team competition in a school subject I despised (but was good at). Our teacher/coach pushed us to our limits; for months, we slept, ate, and breathed this subject and had to juggle it with our social (and dating) lives and finishing our senior year.
It was exhausting, but we won.