As I type this, three little boys are actively tearing my house apart. Pizza crusts and empty Capri Sun pouches are scattered through nearly every room. A Twister board is draped across the top of my couch, a fully operational science kit has taken over the living room floor, and on the back deck, an ambitious volcano is being carefully—and loudly—constructed.
There is screaming and yelling and laughing and arguing and racing and battling, and an impressive amount of little-boy smell filling my house from top to bottom.
It’s a sensory overload, to put it mildly.
During a rare moment of unexpected quiet, my mind drifts back to a time long, long ago—okay, not that long ago—when I was parenting just one child. Life was so much quieter then. More structured. More predictable. Less constantly dialed up to a ten. But despite all of that, it was also so much harder. As a new mom to one baby, you feel everything all at once—joy, of course—but also exhaustion, anxiety, and a strange combination of being secretly farty and not-so-secretly farty. And even though you’ve created a tiny human who is attached to you for most of the day, the loneliness can be overwhelming.
I remember trying to fill the long afternoons until my husband came home from work in ten-minute increments. “Okay, we can look in the mirror until 4:17, then we’ll walk down to get the mail. That should get us to about 4:30. When we get back, we can read books until 4:45, then I’ll preheat the oven and get all the ingredients out for dinner. At 5, I can put him in his swing and start cooking.”
It wasn’t exactly the most stimulating season of my life.
At the same time, I was constantly on high alert. I fixated on every detail of my son’s life to an unhealthy degree, completely convinced that I personally held the keys to his language development, sleep habits, growth curve, gross motor milestones, and ear infections. On any given day, I swung wildly between extreme boredom and sheer panic at least ten times. It was super fun and incredibly relaxing. I was enjoying every minute.
Back then, I would see other moms at the grocery store or at church, wrangling four or five kids, and I’d think, “If I feel like this with one, how on earth would I survive with more?” How would I ever have enough of myself to pour into perfecting another child?
I wouldn’t.
Around the time I was feeling completely overwhelmed by the idea of having another baby, I read a blog post written by a mom of nine. She shared that some of her hardest parenting days were during the season when she had just one baby—because of the fear, the loneliness, and the intensity of being one mother responsible for one tiny life. I remember thinking she must be one of those ultra-casual moms who was simply built for a big family, and that I would never feel that same sense of relief as our family grew.
But I was wrong.
We only have three kids right now, but the difference is immeasurable. Yes, there are still moments of utter panic, but they are softened by far more moments of laughter, happiness, and a kind of chaos so consuming that there’s barely room to feel anything else. Somewhere along the way, I learned that I cannot perfect my children. I am not solely responsible for their reading levels, eating habits, baseball skills, fine motor milestones, or strep throats. And honestly, that realization kind of sucks—but it’s also incredibly freeing. It has allowed me to spend more time enjoying my kids as they play, and far less time taking temperatures or worrying about reading groups at school.
So back to my original point. To the moms out there who feel like they’re drowning under the weight of parenting one child, please know this: you are doing the hardest job there is. You are the mother, doctor, entertainer, baker, schedule keeper, laundry doer, screen-time monitor, singer, reader, silly-face maker, and rocker. You are everything. And you are exhausted. There is no harder parenting job than the one you have right now.
These days, when I walk through the grocery store, my heart doesn’t automatically go out to the mom with four kids climbing all over her—though of course it does. Her job is hard too. Solidarity, sisters. But my heart especially aches for the mom with a single toddler in her cart, pointing out objects as they move down the aisles, picking up items knocked off shelves by curious little hands, and popping grapes into her own mouth to clean them and bite them in half so her child can safely snack while they shop.
Your work can be difficult and boring and lonely, but it is also heartbreakingly beautiful. You are doing something extraordinary. And one day, when your house is covered in squashed juice boxes and dirt clods from shoes never removed at the door, you’ll sit in a living room chair as the madness swirls around you and smile—because you’re no longer wishing the day away in ten-minute increments. You’re living it as it unfolds, finding the joy hidden in the noise.
And of course, friends, please don’t hear me saying that you should have another child if that isn’t what your family wants. But please do hear this: in my experience, the number of children you have is not directly tied to stress or parenting difficulty. Parenting one child was incredibly hard for me—but it didn’t get exponentially harder with each additional child. For our family, the opposite has been true.
