ColoradoBennett

Meags, I love your last post. You explain very well the joys of motherhood, the happiness that comes from just watching children grow and develop. On Sunday a girl came up to me and said, 'So Mindi, is having kids really worth it?' She is probably early thirties, been married a little over a year and her husband is a few years older than her. I know what brought on the question. That day a family showed up in the ward and put the primary in shock. The parents look like they are 24 or younger, they have six kids the oldest being about 7 or 8 and the youngest is two weeks. The mom looks exhausted, the dad seems a little distant from his problems, and the kids were everywhere. I assured my friend that having kids is definitely worth it. She said things like, "well, it just seems like you don't get a lot of sleep and that kids just take over your life, etc." All of that is true, but everything worth having requires a lot of work. I know of another mom, just had her first baby, is getting very little sleep, and is finding motherhood very difficult. My first reaction is, "gimme a break! just wait until you have two or more then you can start complaining." But that first adjustment to #1 is pretty difficult, I guess I've just forgotten. Really, I'm convinced that your attitude is 98% of it all. If you are happy about having that wonderful baby in your life, the baby will be happy to be with you. I have these birthing affirmations that I listen to when I'm pregnant. One time I had them playing in the car when Gram got in. The tape calmly said, "Your birth will be easy because you are so relaxed." My grandma just rolled her eyes and said, 'Yeah, right.' But her old fashioned attitutude about birth being the essence of misery doesn't effect me. I love it. I'm trying to come up with the perfect thing to say to this friend about why having kids is totally worth it, why it is such a huge part of Heavenly Father's plan of happiness, but it isn't easy to put into words. Jeffery R. Holland puts it really well: "Yours is the grand tradition of Eve, the mother of all the human family, the one who understood that she and Adam had to fall in order that men [and women] might be and that there would be joy. Yours is the grand tradition of Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel, without whom there could not have been those magnificent patriarchal promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob which bless us all. Yours is the grand tradition of the mothers of the 2,000 stripling warriors. Yours is the grand tradition of Mary, chosen and foreordained from before this world was, to conceive, carry, and bear the Son of God Himself. We thank all of you, including our own mothers, and tell you there is nothing more important in this world than participating so directly in the work and glory of God, in bringing to pass the mortality and earthly life of His daughters and sons, so that immortality and eternal life can come in those celestial realms on high." So there it is, we have kids because it is the most important thing we can do. And husbands sure come in handy, when we collapse from exhaustion they just take over in their own way (Adam had to do so for me last night).