Parenting isn’t for Sissies. Or for Sisyphus.

The rock I've been pushing uphill lately.

I’m going to be honest here: I haven’t been having the greatest time lately, as a parent. As a friend of mine has said more than once (and she may have borrowed it from someone else): Parenting isn’t for sissies.

My boys are going through tough stages. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I have heard that first grade and third grade (and the odd grades in general) are harder to get through. But they seem stressed out about school even though they’re both doing well. The little one’s mood is on its usual hair-trigger: the same things I can do, songs I can sing, or jokes I can make that send him into gales of laughter one day (“do it again! do it again!”) cause him to roll his eyes and tell me to leave him alone the next (“you’re ruining my whole day.”) The big guy, while he’s always existed on his own plane of special (since the day he was born we’ve wondered what could possibly be going on in that giant head of his, and what that perplexed forehead-wrinkle he’s always had indicates), is, lately, experiencing some combination of an emotional-growth spurt and a clash with feelings he has no idea how to identify, much less deal with.

So it’s been hard.

I feel like Sisyphus (or Sisyphus’ mother) every day, pushing my rock uphill with no hope of reaching the top before it all tumbles down again and I have to start over.

There are more details with which I won’t bore you — we all have our burdens, our crosses to bear. I try to think of that when the urge burbles up to grab a kitchen chair and hurl it through the glass doors to the backyard. You know that kind of day. I try to think that I’m not alone in any of this. Literally not alone, as I have a husband who tries his best to understand (and has his own heavy rock to shoulder uphill, not to mention a wife who’s as apt to throw kitchen chairs through the window as not). I have friends. I have health, my own and my children’s (who, if I can crow for a second, have not missed a day of school since September and we’re already halfway through April), and an interesting if bewildering career that I can manage (poorly sometimes, but manage) from home.

There are bright spots:

• I have recently discovered Zumba, which is all sorts of amazing and fun, and I’ve fit it into a week during which I work out most days. This is no small thing; I’ve always exercised, but I’ve made a decision recently to get more serious and up my fitness level even more — with middle age looming, I’d kind of like to peak before I decline, you know?

• I’m writing a book — I’m halfway through and I find that it’s going faster and feeling smoother the more I write. It’s not earning me money, and who knows if it’ll ever earn me acclaim, but in another year or so I’ll have an actual product gathering dust on my shelf. I long ago got over the thrill of my byline in a magazine, but on a book cover? Whoa. Cool.

• I’m anticipating a trip to Washington DC to visit my brother, sister-in-law and nephew for Easter, and joining us in their small house will be my parents, my sister, and two of my sisters’ children, and we are very rarely all together in one place at one time (plus there’s a distinct possibility that there will be a Bunny Cake, homemade by my brother — which I threw in here in case he’s reading…)

• Plus right now, awesomely, I have a bag of organic kettlecorn, my new snack-food obsession (crunch, salt, and sweet). And yes, I do realize that the kettlecorn works against my first point, but it can’t all be sweat and lean protein.

I have all these things and more, but I still have that rock to push and push and push, and again, it never feels fun. Not lately, anyway. Sometimes I feel like a sponge that’s being soaked in unpleasant stuff — my own stuff, my family’s stuff, financial issues, worries about my kids — and I can’t wring it out. I just keep soaking and soaking, and growing heavier and heavier.

But a couple things happened just in the last week.

Last Sunday, I was as usual at my older son’s soccer game. I think I’ve mentioned before that my big boy is not a natural athlete. But he enjoys participating and he has been blessed with a terrific coach this year, for which I’m eternally grateful. But there are times, watching him sort of skip toward the action — rather than hustling with the urge to score a goal or defend one — that I cringe and end up glad I’m wearing giant glasses so the other parents don’t see the tears welling up. But last Sunday, something else happened. I was standing with another set of parents, whom I quite like, and I noticed that they were making fun of their own son! They were pointing out how he sort of loped, lazy-gazelle like, rather than running, like the other boys. I put this in italics to underscore what a revelation this was to me. Other parents noticed their children’s (inconsequential) shortcomings, and found them funny. Because you know, they are funny. Plus normal. Plus no big deal.

Then I really started watching the rest of the boys on the team, which I guess I don’t usually do, and I realized that my perception that all the players were good in comparison to my barely-attentive-to-the-action kid (“what’s the score again, Mom?” “Coach, can I sit out this quarter?”) was just plain wrong. A few kids were nascent athletes; at age 8 or 9 had that fire in their belly, not to mention their legs. The rest of them may not have been writing in script in the air like my boy, but like him they were letting balls roll past them, missing obvious blocks, only half-heartedly making a run for the action.

Suddenly, I wasn’t alone.

Second thing that happened, I got an email from one of the members of the freelance-writer-support-group I belong to. This amazing group of women, scattered around the country, some mothers, some not, are seriously the fourth leg of my table (if that’s even a metaphor, but you know what I mean). We rely on each other in all kinds of ways that are not always strictly related to our professional lives. This one writer is going through A Time. And as we all emailed, offering advice on lifting the fog and seeing past the bad days, we all shared that we had major, scary, low-point depressed and anxious moments, as mothers and as writers. Times we wondered why we had this kid who derailed our careers and where did we go from here? Times we felt we’d scraped the last drop of inspiration from the bottom of the barrel, and couldn’t think past that, much less pay looming bills. Times we looked at our husbands and thought, really? That’s it?

I mean, duh. I should have known that, right? I realize now that the reason yesterday’s email chain shifted my focus. The very act of reading and responding to my friends’ familiar tales made me feel different because I’ve been living, lately, so deep in this glass-half-empty country that I simply forgot I wasn’t there alone.

It sometimes feels like I’m the only one who wants but can’t afford a shiny new kitchen, the only one whose kid is grumpy at school, or bad at soccer, or goofs off during piano lessons, or doesn’t listen, or whatever.

I’ve been parenting in a vacuum. And when I get into that loop, I start feeling jealous of things I can’t necessarily name, and petty. And angry.

Understanding this doesn’t solve my issues, of course, and I still have to figure my own way out of the fog, to find the value or even the humor in pushing that rock up the hill (maybe I could just say fuck it and let it roll down for a day while I play Wii “Just Dance” with the kids). Like my six-year-old’s, my moods are mercurial, my smile not fixed on my face. This is me.

But I don’t have to be me, by myself. Looking inward is good for many things, but not for parenting, which is a lesson I have to keep learning, over and over, day after day. That should be my rock.