When Parenting Feels Hard: Learning to Love the Child Who Challenges You Most

You have all your children — and then there is that one. The one with whom there was never love at first sight.

This is the child you have been trying for years to love with your whole heart, or at least in the same effortless way you love the others. But the love does not seem to fill every corner equally. There is always some corner left occupied by resentment, exhaustion, despair, or even shame. A quiet voice that asks, Why are you like this? Why does everything with you have to be so complicated?

Sometimes it is, You are so different from the child I was.

Sometimes it is, You are so much like the child I once was, and yet you do everything the opposite way.

Sometimes it is, You remind me of parts of myself I wanted to forget.

Or, You are doing exactly what your father does, and I cannot bear it.

Walking on Eggshells

When this child comes home from school, you take a deep breath. You prepare yourself for the intense hours that are about to begin. You walk around them as if on eggshells, hoping that somehow they will finally emerge from the shell they seem trapped inside.

You cry when you pray for them to have a good life.

And yet when they are beside you, part of you is simply waiting for evening to come so you can finally be alone.

And this child loves you too — with a love that has no end.

But there is a wall in it. Again and again, the two of you crash into that wall. It is a wall you cannot break. It is a wall you can only melt.

But how do you melt a wall when coldness has already begun to freeze your own heart?

When the Wall Begins to Melt

And yet, perhaps your heart already knows what research has also shown.

These children who require so much mothering work, so much constant tuning in, so much walking on unfamiliar ground, are often the very children around whom your heart eventually wraps itself most deeply.

When their wall begins to melt and fall, when your own wall slowly crumbles through effort and both of your hearts begin to open, there is no one in the world who knows the hidden pathways of their soul better than you.

No one can come closer to them than you.

Love at Second Sight

Because with this child — the one for whom you bit your lip, swallowed the question why, and built an entirely new maternal space within your heart — this is not love at first sight.

This is love at second sight. And third. And fourth.

A love built through returning, through staying, through seeing again and again, until the seeing itself becomes love.

This space is a safe and containing place to explore everything that troubles you in parenting and in your relationship with your children: the hard moments, the exhaustion, and even the parts of yourself that emerge when you are simply too tired.

In this space, even the most difficult moments can become extraordinary moments of connection and growth.