Between political wars, school shootings, and other ominous news flooding the media, it can be a scary world to raise a child in 2018. When you compound the backdrop of tragedy in today’s society with the hustle and bustle of motherhood and daily life, making it through the week can feel almost impossible.
Such has been the case for blogger Liz Petrone, a mother of 4 who has recently been feeling the heaviness of life.
“Life has been hard lately, you guys,” she wrote in her viral Facebook post. “Things feel heavy. The news is full of tragedy and loss, the mail is full of bills, and my youngest woke me up this morning by peeing on my pillow.”
Sounds like a mighty fine way to start the day right?
As Liz began cooking dinner for a friend who just had a baby with two little ones wrapped around her leg, her oldest daughter said something so profound it stopped her in her tracks.
She may be young, but she was oh-so-right.
Read Liz’s powerful post below about feeling the weight of life, rising above the struggles, soaking up the wisdom of a child, and “raising the revolution”:
“Life has been hard lately, you guys. Things feel heavy. The news is full of tragedy and loss, the mail is full of bills, and my youngest woke me up this morning by peeing on my pillow.
It’s the election. It’s the losses, one after another, public figures we loved and people we know personally, each deeply felt and dearly missed.
Life has been hard lately, you guys. Things feel heavy. The news is full of tragedy and loss, the mail is full of bills, and my youngest woke me up this morning by peeing on my pillow.
And I’ve just been so unbelievably tired. I want to go to bed and pull the covers up over my head and cry until everything has been purged and then sleep until I can wake up and there is something good going on in my head and in my house and in the world.
The other night in the kitchen, I was making some food for a friend who had recently given birth. A small child clung to each of my legs, both wailing to pass the time while their older sister cut them strawberries and cheese for dinner because we have reached the point in life where dinner is more of a mass foraging than a formal event.
When the littles’ wails dulled enough for me to hear her, she said back to me over her shoulder, ‘This woman you are doing this for, this is her first baby?’
I nodded.
‘Should you tell her?’
I looked away from what I was doing, over the mess of dirty children with fingernails that needed to be clipped digging sharply into my calves, and asked her what she meant.
‘Should you tell her about this,’ she explained, gesturing towards us with the knife she was using to cut the fruit. ‘You know, about how hard it’s all going to be?’
This girl. She’s young. And she was so spot-on that I started to cry a little.
But it’s not the pee that I cried for, not the wailing or even the dirt that I would later wash out from the fingernail divots in my legs. These things are the background hum of my mother-life, my normal. I can take these things, I can – usually – even laugh about these things. I can clean, fix, calm these things.
It’s the bigger things, so commonplace that I worry they’re becoming the backdrop of our collective human life. It’s the election. It’s the losses, one after another, public figures we loved and people we know personally, each deeply felt and dearly missed.