Night Sacrifice

By the time I met Louise 20 years ago, her children were grown and gone, but I got to know her pretty well toward the end of her life. We agreed that it was tough to grow vegetables in the rocky soil of our neighborhood. We agreed that folks drove too fast down our suburban street. We disagreed about politics so the subject never came up. She wasn't going to change my mind and I wasn't going to shake her convictions. Religion is another topic we judiciously avoided.

Our neighborly conversations about yard work, hurricane preparedness, and mystery novels gave way over the years to biography. My stage of life was clear: car pool, camping trips, getting kids to help with the dishes. Louise, it turned out, had been a stay at home mom for the first few years of her marriage after the war. But her husband got sick, so she went back to school and got a degree in nutrition. She raised three kids, worked at the hospital, and cared for her failing husband for nine years before he died.

I couldn't help but think that her devotion and hard work were extraordinary and I mentioned my impression of the difficult path she had walked. "You made the lunches, got all the kids to school, cleaned the house, worked full time, cared for your ailing husband? That's really something. Nowadays, people LEAVE their families when their spouse gets sick. They walk away to 'find themselves' rather than make sacrifices, go back to school, and get jobs."Well," she reflected. "He would have done the same for me."As much as I admired Louise and as much as I miss our "back yard fence" conversations, these columns are about parenting, not marriage. I would not presume to guess what allowed this heroic woman to put the needs of her family above any thought for herself. That said, the subject of sacrifice does come up in my musings about parenting.Babies cry in the middle of the night. That's what babies do. It's their job. As I am not the first to observe, some babies turn crying in the middle of the night into a career.Change, cuddle, feed, burp. Change, cuddle, feed, burp. That pretty much covers it. If a bottle doesn't work, try burping. If burping doesn't calm the baby, go back to cuddling. Rinse and repeat.

No one would argue that a newborn needs to "suck it up," "figure it out," or "learn to soothe herself." The smart money is "err on the side of nurture." A child whose physical and emotional needs are met is more likely to grow up to be a content adult. Yet if we listen to some current parents, the needs of the kids don't even make the top ten list. The priorities are inverted: "I need to go out to the clubs every night;" "I have to work weekends so I can make payments on our second home."

I wish you every success at the club and I hope you'll invite me to your place in the mountains, but you can't have it both ways. When babies cry in the middle of the night, when toddlers need to be reassured that the world is a safe place, when children need someone to read them a story, when adolescents needs someone to sit on the couch with them and talk about nothing, when teenagers need someone to be in the house so they know they can't get away with bringing home idiot friends, parents need to be there.If you can't make the sacrifice and sign on to do what's right for your kids, then you may need to rethink your expectations about what your kids are going to do for you. You wouldn't listen to advice from a stranger; neither will your children.It's just that simple--as simple as Louise taking care of her dying husband for nine years.