From a young age, you just knew you wanted a house full of children. You could imagine your spouse, playing ball with the kids in the yard and the black lab that would be chasing tennis balls in the midst of everything. You and your spouse would be cooking meals together, taste testing the soup, snuggling in bed on Sundays morning and listening for the pitter-patter of little feet to rush in your room. You had it all figured out. Then you spent the next few years changing your dating habits hoping to find the perfect spouse. He now likes the girls who can cook a mean ham, and she is in love with any guy that is the perfect uncle to his nieces and nephews. You bought the ring and now….you are here. Happily ever after.

Let’s move forward a few years now. You are both exhausted, stressed about money and the kids, still cute – are often annoying and bothersome. Your entire life has been turned topsy turvy and is little more than a platform designed to make the little lives in your life happier than your own. Sex declines, you barely speak to your spouse, and you live on the constant brink of something that feels like irritation. As if at any moment, you could explode. Of course, you don’t because you have become well equipped to handle stress and the constant changing of plans and dreams. For most however, the picture perfect life that they imagined is lost in a sea of constant doing.

Raising kids is difficult. At some point, you have to wonder why people don’t truly prepare you for it. Why no one stood up at your wedding and said, “Don’t do it!” You have to wonder why when you had kid one, kid two and then kid three there wasn’t some well meaning soul there to tell you that you were ruining your life. Not really of course. Kids do add a lot of things to your life and it is the natural progression of humanity to have children. But it definitely isn’t a happily ever after affair like it is depicted. And then, as further insult you, just like every other mom and dad propagate this ‘ideal’ by posting posed pictures on Facebook, writing Christmas cards that talk about your kids as if you don’t exist anymore. You know, painting the perfect picture of family life. All smiles, when the reality is that inside your home a secret war is taking place. The war of being who you want to be and being the perfect parent and spouse.

While all of this may seem a bit pessimistic, it is fairly spot on. Married couples everywhere are so used to adjusting their dreams and rolling with the punches that they effectively have whiplash. And once the cute phases of babyhood and toddlers are replaced by hormonal tweens and ungrateful teens, you too will wonder how you got sucked into this life for yourself. You spend every moment of raising kids waiting for the next and trying to prepare yourself for something that is impossible to predict. You hope like hell that your spouse is still there somewhere waiting in the wings and then you begin planning your life together, with the empty nest – praying that your kids will visit you and not be too demented from your inexperienced parenting skills.

You have regrets, you have mistakes, you feel like you missed out on a lot of important things because you were constantly busy and then you start thinking about grand children. Ah-hah! Now you get it. You realize in that epiphany moment that no one warned you, no one told you about how hard it was to raise children because they, just like you do now, wanted grandchildren to right all the wrongs they felt they made as parents. They wanted to take all their living experiences, erase all their mistakes, and throw it into enjoying something so beautiful, so innocent, and so precious that no one under 45 could truly appreciate. Children! Your children. And there you go….the truth about raising children.