Picket Fence Post

Oh joy. Another story about how having kids can make you miserable because parenthood is: a) Hard b) Requires sacrifices c) Is oftentimes maddening and d) Is so tiring that it sucks the life out of you and renders you useless for other things, like happiness, romance and discussions about adult topics, like politics, books and good television programming.

The new issue of Newsweek contains a feature story questioning whether having kids makes you happier or miserable (their answer: miserable).

An excerpt:

“Parents may openly lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child-rearing. ‘If you admit that kids and parenthood aren’t making you happy, it’s basically blasphemy,’ says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. ‘From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you’re supposed to feel like a kid because you’re there with your kids, we’ve made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it’s disappointing when you find out it’s not.’”

But then, you already knew that parenting is a series of trade-offs. Nothing good comes without sacrifice, at least that’s what I keep telling myself. If you’re married, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine either, but the moments when it’s good make up for the irritations and frustrations. That’s the way parenting is. If it’s not that way for you, there’s always sleep-away camp and boarding school and colleges really far away.

Image credit: Zohar Lazar/Newsweek.

Item #1: Cindy McCain’s Strength

While some in the media portray her harshly — depict her as talking Barbie doll — Cindy McCain has an inspiring life story. Profiled in a cover story in Newsweek, she addresses how difficult it has been to be married to someone who spent a large chunk of their marriage either deployed with the Navy someplace or serving in Washington, D.C. while she was home with four kids in Arizona, working at her father’s beer distributorship and running her charity for children.

An excerpt:

“Cindy has sometimes likened herself to a single mother; now 54, she has often been far away from her husband during difficult moments, including two of three miscarriages she suffered in the 1980s. Years later, her husband did not notice when she became addicted to painkillers, a habit, she says, brought on in part by the stress of politics. In 2004, he was on the other side of the country when she suffered a stroke that left her partly debilitated. On her own, she learned to walk again. Cindy says she doesn’t resent the time she spent without her husband. It was her choice to stay in Arizona while he rose in Washington, and she says she knew when she married him that he was always going to ‘put country first.’”

She also said she tries not to discuss that she had a son serving in Iraq during the presidential primaries because she was afraid it would put him in danger, while her husband’s statements on the Iraq war were being parsed by the media. Newsweeksaid that when her son was in Iraq (he’s back now and it’s unclear if he could be redeployed), McCain slept with her BlackBerry in her hand so she wouldn’t miss his call if he phoned.

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