Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, - Exodus 20:9 (ESV)
In my experience, new parents rarely have a realistic expectation of how their lives will change upon the arrival of their child. Of course, most parents recognize that things will be different, but there is often a failure to recognize just how radical the shift in their lives will be.
Accepting Limits
This article is about the limits that parents need to recognize and accept. The fourth commandment, part of which is cited above, reflects these limits. Part of the point of remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy is that people need to rest. God made earth and everything in it in six days and rested on the seventh day. Obviously, God did not need the rest. It is not as though God got to the end of the creation week and had a lie in on Sunday morning. There was no collapse of a tired body on a heavenly throne with a sigh and droopy eyelids. God is not limited in His energy like we are. Nevertheless, God rested on the seventh day, which means that He ceased the work of creation. He stopped making new things, stopped adding, stopped building. He ceased work and reflected that what He had made was very good. Part of what He made was people. And people, like everything else in creation, have limits.
What do I mean by limits? I mean that parents occupy a finite amount of space and that they have finite energy and time. All three of these aspects, space, energy, and time, impose restrictions on what a parent is able to do.
Parents cannot be in multiple places at once. Much of parenting in the early years is being with their children. If children are home, then parents are home too. If the parent goes into a grocery store, then they take their child with them inside. It is common to pick out parents of young children simply by seeing them together. It is more than an expectation; it is a need. It is a need because babies and toddlers cannot fend for themselves. They cannot keep themselves fed or clean and they cannot take themselves to where they need to go. This means that parents must be with them. And when parents are not with them, someone else must be, such as a babysitter.
Parents have limited energy. Parenting requires a lot of energy. New parents are frequently underslept. They must spend a lot of energy keeping their children safe, healthy, and fed. It is ironic that such small people can involve such big tasks. Children make messes that must be cleaned up, and that takes energy. I recently heard a father comment how surprised he was at how much more of his own laundry he had to do. He had not anticipate being spat up on by his new (and first) baby. Of course, he said it with a smile on his face. But the point is that he was surprised by the work, a specific type of work that he had not expected. For my part, I answered that my two-year-old had recently done the same thing to my shirt, but his experience of spit up on his shirt by his infant child was, shall we say, quite different from my experience with my two-year-old.
Parents also have limited time. There are jokes about how you don’t really lose friends when they get married so much as you lose them when they have babies. When a baby is born, the entire schedule changes. The calendar is suddenly full. There is less time for travel, less time for leisure, and less time for hobbies. A large proportion of time is devoted to or caused to revolve around the child. A baby needs much attention in terms of diaper changes, feedings, playing, and putting to sleep.
Limiting Expectations
Why is it so important for parents to accept their limits? It makes sense if we consider how some parents seem to anticipate parenting will go. Some parents labor under the assumption that parenting will be predictable. It simply isn’t. There are too many variables in terms of the baby’s health, the mother’s health, and particular needs for either or both. It is good for parents to recognize the responsibility that comes with the great honor and gift that it is to raise children. There can be no doubt that children are a great gift from the Lord. Some gifts we receive and don’t think much about them. But children are people made in God’s image; it is a high privilege to steward one of them as your very own.
As parents consider the constraints on them placed by their children, it is good to take into account their limits. Limits are not bad things; they are just the edges of the good things God has given us. My encouragement to parents is to lean into your limits; accept them. Limits are part of the experience of being made in God’s image. We can understand that God is not limited like we are, but we cannot become unlimited like God is.
Parents, then, should respect their limits. Yahweh built rest into creation week. It was not because He needed the rest, but because He wanted to build a pattern into creation by His own example before any humans were even there to witness it and appreciate it. Now, however, we can look back and say that a rhythm of work and rest has always been a part of creation. There never was a time when work was unlimited. The constraints of time, space, and energy have always been present. This command helps us to understand that it is not just that this is true by default since we are created creatures. It is true by design because God chose to bake a particular rhythm into creation itself. Parents re right to respect their limits, and to be glad to spend an inordinately large amount of time to their children compared to what they might have expected. This is not a bad thing; it is part and parcel of the gift of having children.