All Women Will Miss Their Babies

I have a question - I've been chewing it over for a while. Is it really helpful to say to mothers of young children, "It's hard but these are the 'golden years' and you'll miss them later?"

I'm wondering for two reasons:

1. It makes it more difficult when you should be enjoying something that is hard (with good bits), and so you end up feeling guilty over something that is not actually bad. That is, it's OK to say 'this is hard' and hate it and find contentment anyway. There is nothing wrong with that. You don't need feel guilty over not enjoying it as much as your future self may miss it.

2. It feels like it is never OK to say 'This is just hard'. There's no silver lining. This is incredibly unrealistic. Some days are bad days. Yes, if we trust Jesus, we are engaged in a struggle to be thankful even there, but that can be thankfulness for tiny things in the context of knowing that we are safe in Jesus. It doesn't have to be, 'This is awful, but it's actually good', which is what this whole thing feels like.
Maybe it'll be something you look back on sentimentally, but you just don't know. You might spend the rest of your life saying, 'Thank goodness that's over'. 

And so what if you miss it? You can't add the pressure of 'making the most of it' onto everything else without diminishing everything else. We can't live in the future. Unless we have absolutely awful lives every single day, then we will miss things as we grow up. People will die. We'll miss them. We move and miss that tree or seasons or something. It doesn't mean we should always enjoy what we love or the people we love in some seriously dysfunctional fear based future focused way. Which we can't sustain anyway.

You and I may miss our babies. We probably will. But the package of having a baby means being sleep deprived, irrational, not completely in control and overwhelmed at times. Not to mention bodily fluids. I doubt anyone looks back and misses the smell of vomit. Yet that is part of what it means to be a full time carer of most little children.

Being a Christian means being able to be realistic about the sharp edges of life being interwoven with great joy. This is a fallen world. Our apples have worms. But we still like apples. We say 'thank you' to God for the apples. And we pray that we'll cope with the worms.

Christian women, of all people, shouldn't be adding guilt into the already heated world of mothers of small children.

So, there is the answer to my question. Thank you. Thank you very much.