I’m fairly fresh into my motherhood and parenting journey but the other day this question popped into my head and I have been pondering it since.

Is parenting ‘work’ or an opportunity for wonder and delight?

It came to my mind while I was walking back up the stairs to take care of Wesley who had rolled over for the 5th time in 10 minutes and was screaming because he couldn’t fix it and wanted to sleep.

Mainstream parenting would have told me to not respond until [X] number of minutes had passed and if that’s the method and strategy you used — I get it — it’s just not what we chose. Instead, I responded to him every time he cried. Which meant I was walking up and down those stairs a lot. It was a lot of work and I could feel myself getting frustrated and then I stopped and asked myself why.

Why was I frustrated that my 5 month old son was alarmed when he unexpectedly rolled himself over while sleeping and didn’t know how to roll himself back? He’s literally a baby. He didn’t have the body control and coordination to fix himself and it was a new skill that he hadn’t mastered — of course he was freaking out.

And then as I calmed him down and rocked him I realized that it’s seems like it’s fairly common for parents to view parenting as this incredibly hard work that we do and often times bemoan it when instead it can be this incredible opportunity for wonder, a chance to delight in the magic of a human being growing and developing.

When kids go through developmental milestones and their sleep habits change we call them “regressions” instead of “progressions” viewing their changing brain and body as a disruption to our life and schedule when there is usually a reason for their interrupted sleep — and it’s usually pretty amazing.

The dreaded “four month regression” exists because babies are developing different sleep stages that are more similar to the sleep stages of an adult and it’s a new skill to learn — how amazing is that?!

Wesley had trouble at five months because he was learning how to roll and was teething — he was in mild pain and he’d progressed from being an adorable uncoordinated blob to moving his body and working towards crawling and walking — it is incredible!

Yes, parenting is hard work. It’s never-ending care for a tiny human and it’s an intense crash course in being less selfish — because you literally give yourself to this child who needs you to survive.

I don’t mean to romanticize it and not acknowledge that it is hard. It’s hard. But I think we can also work to reframe it slightly — not that reframing takes the challenge away — but it gives it purpose and it makes it fun.

Working out is hard. It pushes you physically and mentally but for most people it’s purposeful and fun. Just because it’s something you want to do doesn’t make it less hard — but it shifts your mindset to view working out as something worthwhile even though it is hard.

For me, I needed this question to ruminate on and change the narrative of parenting in my head. It wasn’t that I was feeling like motherhood was work and was getting frustrated. I’ve actually been loving it. But I needed it to combat the noise about parenthood I was hearing from the world around me. I needed to hear the Holy Spirit prompt me to actively view parenting with wonder and delight because otherwise I was just living on edge “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” I kept waiting for parenthood to get impossibly hard or for it to feel like a mundane chore. But it wasn’t. But instead of living in the joy, I was living in this weird state of trepidation.

A similar thing happened when I got married. People talked on and on about how hard it was and how much you fight in the first year and that really didn’t happen for us. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, we really struggled with integrating with our families of origin — and we still do. But we didn’t fight over toilet seats or underwear on the ground and instead of enjoying it for the blessing it was — I was kind of waiting for the nightmare first year to come and it didn’t. And it hasn’t.

And I think it’s because life isn’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be, nor is it sun-shiningly perfect as some people pretend it is. I think in an effort to “tell the truth” and fight against inaccurate romanticism we overemphasize the bad parts so people are prepared for “reality” when in reality — it’s not that bad. Or rather, it doesn’t have to be that bad. We can change our perspective and reframe our mind.

I’ve read a lot of books about Scandinavian living and they all usually include this common phrase that has defined that culture, “There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” Aka, life isn’t as bad as it seems, we just need to prepare ourselves appropriately.

If it’s raining, we don a rain jacket.

If we’re new parents, we reframe our mind to view our child as what they are, a brand new human being who is learning so much in such a short period of time and growing and changing so rapidly that even though we’re exhausted, we can respond in grace and compassion because while we may not remember being a baby, we all know the struggle of learning something new or being in an unfamiliar environment.

I do not do this perfectly. At all. I am a human being. And I don’t think the goal is to be a “perfect parent” — I think the goal for me is to take these fleeting moments and months and view them with the same wonder I would have over a caterpillar changing into a butterfly or watching a tiny seed bud into a beautiful grey poppy.

What is happening in front of my eyes is a miracle and a wonderful display of our creator’s incredible design. It’s a daily opportunity to stand in awe of a brilliant God who perfectly created us and calls us good.

And perhaps some day it will get impossibly hard but instead of anticipating that or expecting it — I’m going to continue practicing the art of reframing. I’m going to continue to find ways to delight and wonder at God’s incredible creation that He gifted me to raise.