There's no sense in rewriting the wheel, so go read 10 Dark Parenting Truths and then come back. I'll wait.
They're true. All true. Not all the time. The moments of screaming babies and lost friends pass relatively quickly to make way for babies who talk back with sass, and hopefully new friends who do the same. But as I'm reading through them nodding quietly to myself, I'm momentarily struck dumb with tears at #10. Your heart might break, every day, forever.
When Squidge was born he shattered my heart and the pieces have never quite fit together again. A thousand small moments that he isn't aware of or won't ever remember ensure the jagged edges never fully mend, points of weakness put under continual stress. The time he stopped breathing while he slept. The first time I lost him in a park. The nights when he woke up with a nightmare and I just held him and promised not to let go. My own nightmares that wake me up sweating and shaking, terrified that something has happened to him, unable to sleep until I've crept into his room and made sure he's still okay. The countless hours I've lain awake long after everyone else is fast asleep and worried and wondered and second guessed. Each moment is a tiny scar on my soul that he won't remember but I will.
It's mind boggling that anyone chooses to parent, to willingly give up ever feeling whole again. The truth is, those shattered pieces of you that children leave strewn in their wake won't ever fit together again. You'll shoehorn them into a new pattern, fitting the edges together in new ways, but there'll always be a piece missing that never completes the puzzle. They take that one with them. And you'd never ask for it back.
