Chances are that if you’re a mom or a dad you’ve been in the trenches before.
It may have been when illness popped into your house for a visit, but then seemed to put in an application for permanent residence. You know the kind, it circles around to make sure that it introduces itself to everyone in your house, until one day you wake up from the cycle of re-infection and realise it’s been few weeks of being quite miserable and housebound.
It feels as if you’re emerging from a cocoon, the scales fall off your eyes, the sun feels warm on your skin, and you feel happy again. Not just the kind of happy that your kid’s nose has stopped running, or that your other kid has their appetite back again either…the real kind of happy. The kind of happy that makes you want to go and smash a piece of cake into your face, or high-five a stranger to say you survived.
But only one will know, only one will truly understand what you have endured and what you have survived. And that will be your partner in the trenches, for me it’s my husband. The person who stayed up all night with you to monitor your child’s fever, who helped you to battle the onslaught of vomit attacks with bowls and towels, waited with you at night for your child to be seen at the emergency room at the hospital, travelled far and wide to find a chemist open after-hours, held down crying children to administer medicine, reassured them together that it would help them feel better, slept perched on the edge of your daughter’s bed to help her sleep, fell out of said bed, debated whether you were doing the right thing, and then debated it some more.
In the trenches of this parenting war together. Fighting bravely against tantrums for triangle toast, meltdowns for brushing knotty hair, misunderstandings about new favourite foods, and outfit malfunctions. Fighting for patience over shoes and socks, vegetables being tasty, sharing with siblings, stronger immune systems, a lower volume level. The small things, and the big things, all rolled up into one. This is life in the trenches.
Thanks partner, I got your back.
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