The impossibility of parenting

on beach trips and glimpses of another shore

We got back from our yearly beach trip with my family this past week, and I feel a spaciousness in me I haven’t touched in a long time.

It was a week of sharing meals, taking turns with my daughter in the water, and cleaning dishes in shifts. A week of all of us working together, laughing together, making sure each other were fed, happy, and well rested.

By the third night of our trip my insomnia—forged by the terrible inconsistency of my daughter sleep recently—evaporated.

Suddenly I was falling asleep with ease every night and stayed that way, curled next to the warm curve of my daughter’s body, until the morning.

I felt happy, free, at peace.

And it didn’t take long to realize why…this is the village so few of us ever get.

This is what our nervous systems were designed for. When we have it, when we glimpse it, we can feel it with every fiber of our body.

And when we don’t have it…we feel that too.

Sometimes I’m shocked by how hard my days feel. As someone who used to be proud of her capacity, starting her own business at 24 while juggling several jobs and dealing with chronic pain and illness, I thought I’d be at least a little bit prepared for the nonstop rigors of being a parent in our modern world.

I wasn’t.

Most days my brain spins like a samara leaving a tree limb when I try to understand why this all feels so hard. Why I struggle when it seems other people are handling this, and even more, just fine. Why it feels like there’s a fire rippling under my skin when I’m laying in bed at night.

I’ve gone so far as to wonder if I’m honestly just not cut out for this. If there’s something big I’m missing. Some profound fault within me. Something I’m doing innately wrong.

Then I have a week of living in a village, and it all makes sense again.

It’s not that I wasn’t built to be a mother. It’s not that I’m doing anything wrong. It’s not even that parenting a toddler is as hard as it feels most days.

It’s that being a parent and having to do everything else is impossible.

It’s impossible to both parent and work full time. To parent and have all the dishes be clean. To parent, even when you have a partner, and have food on the table every single day. And then to clean it all up again.

And yet most of us are doing it, every day.

Every day we request our bodies and psyches to keep holding the impossible, and it’s slowly grinding away our ability to see possibility.

For weeks leading up to this trip I was struggling. My daughter wasn’t sleeping, each of us fell sick one after another, and everything but the making and eating of soup fell completely by the wayside.

I felt my life shrink as small and dark as a pinhole.

But living among a group of trusted people for a week, all of us moving like planets around the sun of my daughter’s radiance and needs…suddenly it all seemed do-able. All the things that felt impossible before—getting enough sleep, having time to decompress, accessing the space to dream—was possible once more.

I laughed more, felt lighter, and yet was as solid as a standing stone during the upsets and tantrums.

When she woke up in the middle of the night one night and was up for four hours, her grandmother came in to take over so I could go back to bed at 3 am. Then, her aunt and grandpa watched over her in the morning as I caught up on sleep.

It felt like a miracle. And yet everything in my body said—yes, this is how it’s meant to be.

Anthropologists hypothesize that our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely only needed four hours a day to take care of their basic needs for food and shelter. The rest was likely spent in leisure, in art, in expression, in connection, fun, and rest. I feel like I got a glimpse of that on this vacation. A glimpse of the life my nervous system was actually designed for.

And even though I can’t linger here forever. Even though I must go back to life as it’s lived (though I try in the ways that I can to bring the village with me), it’s still a comfort.

We may have to go back to the dishes. To the endless meal prep. To the insomnia and stress and overwork. But we don’t have to go back to thinking that there is something wrong with us….

Because there isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with me.

And there’s nothing wrong with you.

We are simply parents, people who are over and over again doing the impossible.

Parents making a home out of an uninhabitable culture.

Parents creating and sustaining life in a world that has forgotten how to cherish life.

Parents who are learning how to put down the impossible expectations, so we can find the possibility of our own joy once more. Seen in glimpses, like the bright glint of happy fish in moving waters.

Because every time you do the impossible task of forgiving yourself, you experience the Caribbean blue of peace that is remembering that you are enough.

You can see, if only briefly, that embracing your wholeness is ultimately so much more healing for your child and their childhood than trying to do the impossible over and over again.

That you are making a new way possible for the entire world by letting go of all those impossible standards you hold for yourself.

These glimpses don’t last forever. Even the most spectacular sunsets end eventually. But as I move back into the warm, tropical night of my life, the never-ending summer that is parenting, I can remember…another shore is possible.