May Day! May Day!!

Sometimes the joy of parenting can seem a bit out of focus, cloudy at best.

It is a sentiment I have felt and one that I hear from mommy friends all the time. Our idea of what having and rearing children would be like rarely matches with reality of life in the trenches.

When it is worse, it is often much worse. Thankfully, there are enough times when it is better than we could have imagined as well. The hope is that, on balance, we come out ahead.

At the end of one of my murkier days, I happened to be in a doctor's office and picked up a copy of Newsweek. I always start magazines from the back page (always have). What I found was This piece by Anna Quindlan. It is well worth the quick read. The money quote:

"Parenting is a much more separate, solitary activity than it used to be," says Harold S. Koplewicz, the director of the NYU Child Study Center, where Brotman also works. It used to take a village to raise a child, but there isn't a village anymore. Instead of extended family, there's a playground where everyone pretends everything's fine, and a computer screen behind which women can say, under cover of mommy blogs, "How come this is so hard for me?"

I guess that explains the plethora of said "mommy blogs", some of which seem to find fame and fortune in complaints about the drudgery of life with a toddler.

Honesty, it seems is the first step into finding and experiencing the joy that we know is there.

And, I would add that recognizing how often WE feel like helpless children ourselves can remind us of an even greater truth. We are all on a journey and we are not on it a lone.

There is the wisdom of all who have parented before us; the strength and guidance of the one who Parents us still.