The Critic in Me

Mornings are my favorite time with Macie. Whether it's 4:30am or 10:30am, she is typically happiest in these morning moments, smiling and cooing and wooing me into a state of extreme, mushy in-love mommy-hood. Often, I lie in bed and watch her sleep and I wonder if, when she is older, she will believe that I love her so much that I can't stop staring at her. These moments make everything--the costs, the lack of sleep, the change of schedule, the poopiness and spit-up worth the effort.

However, in my emotional gushing, I don't want to downplay the difficulty of parenting. Tim and I are now glad that God gave us six years together before inserting a baby into the mix. One of the recent struggles came with being criticized-for the first time (to our faces at least) about balancing a baby with other commitments. Our friend's statement to Tim referenced, "how hard things are now with the baby." A seemingly innocent and obvious remark, but once I spoke with him and delved deeper, I found that the remark wasn't so much the fact that he noticed how hard parenting is but rather that he noticed how hard our parenting has been on fulfilling our previous commitments. I appreciated his forthrightness, but I didn't feel that he appreciated the utter exhaustion (and hormones on my part) that leads to forgetfulness, irritability, lack of logical thought processes, etc... But perhaps I didn't appreciate these either until I experienced them for myself.

How many times have I criticized someone in a circumstance completely unlike my own? How many times have I spoken unkind words because someone let me down, and I didn't feel the reason was justified? May this criticism serve to remind me to be patient and thus quell the critic in me.