another Way that doesn't pay

Childcare is so little valued in our culture--or really any culture that comes easily to mind. The people best-equipped to provide childcare, parents and grandparents, are paid the least (if at all) for a terribly important and challenging undertaking. Of course, they are also the ones willing to sacrifice whatever they possibly can for their kids. Economics doesn't recognize final value, only how much workers can afford to demand for their work.

And so, for free, I am a mom. It is magnificent, devastating, poetic. Really, all of life is just as beautiful and relentless, but in others areas it is easier to cheat. With a child, there is no fooling, there is no getting-away-with-it. You know, and they know, if their needs are not met. A moment's peace does not ensure the next moment's calm. Challenges constantly arise, and then it's time to eat, or nap, NOW.

Parenting is an undertaking that can only arise from the heart. Do it mechanically, and everything falls flat. You are required to care for the tiny human from your own human core. The baby unlocks your store of love, and when it cries out it unlocks your own lost suffering. Hearing the baby's cries, your own bawling self arises; what this brings up can be excruciating.

Passengers on a bus will tolerate the sounds of screeching brakes or loud music, but when a baby fusses, people start to complain. A few will really come unhinged. The wail draws our own inner infant to the surface. If you can't handle your own infantile pain, you're going to have a hard time tolerating the baby's.

And when the baby smiles, few are immune. Its chortles are sweeter than any music.

As a parent, you endure the wails not by withstanding them and hardening your heart, but by allowing them to tear you open. Each new cry rends you apart. Because of that opening, you can feel the pain, and you can feel the joy and wonder of your baby's journey of discovery with equal measures of awe.

Our task is not to tolerate our little ones, but to understand them. And we understand them because we allow their experience of the world to affect our own.

After a day spent prying my creeping son our of dusty corners, after extracting countless suspicious bits of godknowswhat from his mouth, after rescuing him time and again from teetering teacups and lurking power cords, I realized: he is not "naughty"-- that's my name for his being a baby and my being inconvenienced. He is acutally darn curious, and he's making the most of a wonderful space full of tantalizing objects just begging to be explored.

This realization didn't cause me to abandon my judgments about the value of eating carpet lint or scraps of paper. But it helped me understand that my baby is right on track in terms of his inquisitiveness and his brimming physical energy.

Seeing it that way, our busy day became a good day, and our adventures became a helpful lesson in baby-proofing. All these happenings both priceless, free of charge, and unsullied by any hope of monetary compensation.