Imagine this: you’re just about to fall asleep when your child wakes up crying. Insert sigh of exasperation here. Now I am laying in bed, hoping if I sit still enough my child won’t realize that they just woke up. Did this kid really have to wake up right as I was falling into a blissful state of much-needed sleep??
Moments like this can be so frustrating to me. I’m a certified sleepy gal so when I finally get to go to sleep at night, I’m usually pretty excited about it. So when our sweet baby would wake up crying, my internal reactions would range from a mild…
“lol really”
to a…
“are you freaking kidding me”
but if our kiddo did this multiple times, or woke up every time I tried to transfer her back into her crib? That would bring a full on internal…
“can this kid just not freaking sleep???”
My external reaction? It never really changed much from just picking up our daughter and comforting her until she fell back asleep, with the occasional frustrated plea to my husband to take a turn so I wouldn’t get too worked up with our child.
However, one night, the Lord gave me a sweet gift, in the form of a question. As I picked up our daughter after she had woken up crying late one night, I was struck with this thought:
“What if every time she woke up crying, you thanked God she was alive?”
Now I’m sure some people may view that as being morbid, or maybe as just weird or overly spiritual. But let’s be real with ourselves: every moment with our children, even the frustrating ones, is a gift. If we lost our daughter tomorrow, I would give anything to have just one more moment of her waking up in the middle of the night, needing me to comfort her. And so I’ve tried to implement this practice when I remember it (although there are certainly times that I’m just in auto-pilot, let’s get this little human back to sleep mode). This has really shifted my attitude about her nighttime wake ups. I’m less frustrated. I’m less discouraged. I am probably not less tired, but the tired maybe seems less bothersome now. What a difference a grateful heart and mind makes on our experience.
If you inevitably find yourself in similar shoes, I would encourage you to practice thanking God for these “inconvenient” interruptions from your child(ren)- perhaps it isn’t during sleep, but maybe they’re rejecting food they used to like, or they’re throwing tantrums in the store, or whatever it might be. I wonder what kind of parents we might become if instead of internally (or externally) grumbling about the things our kids are or aren’t doing, we thanked God, whether internally or otherwise, for the fact that our kid was ALIVE to even do those things. Far too many of my loved ones probably ache with desire to be woken up by their child that they have lost. I do not want to take my child for granted because she diminishes my comfort from time to time.
Don’t get me wrong: parenting can be really hard. I’m not implying we need to pretend a lack of sleep doesn’t impact us, because it certainly does. I’m not implying we can never be frustrated, upset, or angry as parents. But I hope we all (myself included) can hold our frustrations and disappoints in parenthood with an understanding that even those difficult moments are a gift. Those moments are also growing our character, they’re training us to exercise patience and self control, and they’re the normal result of our child growing and learning how to be a little human- which is the goal. I have no doubt I’ll look back in 20 years, maybe seeing my child walk down the aisle just like I did at 20, and wish so desperately that I could experience one more night of her 8 month old self crying for her mama to snuggle her. So for now, I will do my best to soak in and be grateful for every wonderful, frustrating, heartbreaking, hilarious, and totally confusing moment of being a mom.
Thank God for our crying babies.
