| > it's not like it's a mystery that childbirth is painful and that raising children is a mostly miserable affair As someone with toddlers I'll take a stab at an explanation: we thought we went in with eyes open, but it turns out we (I?) _massively_ under-estimated how hard this level of sustained effort would be in the long run because there's no real analog for it in your pre-parenting experience. Everyone says raising toddlers is hard work. You go into it accepting "sure, it's super hard work, I know what that's like, I can do it!". We thought of hard work by drawing from experience, thinking back to difficult degree programs, or working for a fledgling startup, etc. But in all of that experience, after crunch time, you always get to take an afternoon off once in a while, a couple hours here and there, even if it's just an evening of doing nothing every few weeks. Nobody had "Well, what if there's a pandemic and you just can't drop off your toddlers at a sitter/parent to get a few hours break? For an entire year?" on their threat radar. We simply didn't know what that child-rearing work looked like if it went on for months without a break. While you're sleep deprived. While your relationships with a co-parent might be frayed by stress, exhaustion, and cabin fever. It's become very tiresome to use the word "unprecedented" in 2020, but it's still the word that fits. |