Why 3 kids are easier than 1
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0 to 1
It felt so hard when we only had our son six years ago. That leap from zero to one is a big one. Up until that point, you have basically spent your life being selfish. In your quiet, organized, little apartment where nothing is moved unless you move it, where no one screams for no reason, and where you actually have time to relax, life is very easy. So that leap with your first is big, and the chaos feels like a lot.
But now? This brief return to life as a family of three feels like a vacation. There are no messes unless my wife or I make them. I don’t have to admonish someone every 10 minutes for not doing what they should be doing. I can get so much done, we have so much extra time, and everything is so quiet.
It’s funny how easy that thing that seemed so hard feels now. As we have more kids, we adapt to more chaotic circumstances. We are able to take on more stuff. We are able to manage more people. Our love expands, and so does our bandwidth.
The thing is, we don’t feel it happening when it’s happening. The stress keeps right up, following a straight line so we don’t realize we are becoming more competent, and it isn’t until we are able to visit ourselves in our prior situation for a few days that we are able to really see how far we have come.
Sink or swim
This phenomenon doesn’t only apply to raising a family. It applies to our work, our adventures, and all of everything we do. We adapt to our environment, rise to the occasion, and our capacities expand when needed. If we stop, look back at our lives, and really think about how we have grown, we see that often we’ve grown the most when we have been forced to.
We grow when we take on things we don’t think we can handle. We don’t know how we are going to do it — whatever it is — but we jump in, do it, and two years later, it’s just what we consider to be normal, and we are ready again for a new challenge. There is something vital in us that seeks out friction and new horizons, physical and mental. And so we keep doing that over and over again throughout our lives, and we keep getting stronger and more capable as the years pass, even if we still feel kind of like we don’t know anything at all.
It’s possible to try to avoid struggle and the growth that comes with it. It’s possible to try to take the easy way out. But life finds a way of demanding more of us. Whether we like it or not, we are thrown overboard and told to swim, and more often than not, we find that we can swim quite well.
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