Lessons from an Expletive-Laced Picture Book

Four months before its October 2011 publication date, Adam Mansbach's for-adults-only picture book, Go the [Expletive] to Sleep, is already a bestseller and viral hit on Amazon. Looking through the preview pages online, I immediately understood the book's appeal. With soothing rhymes and colorful illustrations at odds with its explicit language, the book captures the short-tempered weariness of parents desperate for their little ones to depart for dreamland, but thwarted by night-magnified fears and repeated requests for water, hugs, or a favorite toy.

I have friends who cherish bedtime as a chance to reconnect with their kids over a good book. Me? I just want to get it over with. I'm tired. I'm cranky. I want to climb into my own bed with my own good book. As Adam S. McHugh explored on his Introverted Church blog last week, the constant interaction of parenting can be particularly exhausting for introverts like me. God, in his infinite humor, blessed me with three extroverted children who process everything through talk (and talk and talk and talk, often while draping their bodies all over mine). By bedtime, I crave space and quiet as fiercely as a thirsty person craves water.

To state the obvious, being a parent is both a great gift and really, really hard. The sacrifices of parenthood take a measurable toll on parents' happiness and health. A study in the journal Pediatrics found that young mothers, so focused on their children's incessant needs, get less exercise, eat less-healthy diets, and have higher body mass indexes than childless peers. And last year a popular New York magazine article summarized research revealing that parents tend to be less happy than adults without children.

We worship a God who sacrificed himself to the point of death. Should I embrace the sublimation of my own needs as a life-giving form of sacrificial love? Is it Christlike to grit my teeth and read that second chapter of Little House on the Prairie when every bone in my body yearns for rest and solitude? Or might acknowledging my fatigue be better for both me and my kids, who need a rested mom and to learn that sometimes others' needs come before theirs?

Jesus said, "Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 10:39). Offering ourselves to God (which so often involves offering ourselves to others) leads us to a more abundant life. For Christians, the goal of self-denial and sacrifice is the cultivation of a more whole, healthy, and authentic self, not an empty shell giving off toxic fumes of exhaustion and resentment. When I contemplate my 11 years of motherhood, I see that the sacrificial love my children require has nudged me closer to being the person God made me to be.

While I'll always be an introvert, motherhood has made me more hospitable. Not only must I welcome my children just as they are (endless yammering and all), I also have to be in relationship with their friends, enemies, friends' parents, and teachers, even those I struggle with.

I am a better writer since becoming a mother. I've always been able to string words together nicely, but motherhood has given me a tighter focus and a more compelling voice.

While prayer is my perennial struggle, spontaneous prayers of thanksgiving have become second nature. Gratitude is the only possible response to the heart-squeezing sight of my children erupting into a joyful skip just to get from one ordinary place to another, the sound of their laughter floating in through the kitchen window, or the salty-earthy taste of their skin as I kiss them goodnight (finally!) after a long day.

My body, affected by a lifelong physical disability, has taken some knocks from the rigor of bearing and caring for children. But motherhood has also allowed me to see my body as a worthy thing capable of nurturing three children, rather than a broken thing. I'm also inspired to treat my body well so I can be available to my kids for many years.

Overall, the self-loss required by motherhood has led me to a healthier, more authentic self. Yet in the thick of day-to-day demands, I sometimes put the brakes on self-sacrifice so that there will be a self there left to give. When the slightest bedtime delay (e.g., one of my kids tells me a knock-knock joke instead of putting toothpaste on the brush) has me shaking with barely suppressed fury, I know I'm done. More self-giving won't make anyone's life more abundant. It will just leave me fuming and a kid in tears when I inevitably raise my voice. At those times, I will say "no" to even the most reasonable requests.

It has taken me years to concede that, for young children, what parents give is rarely enough. No matter how much time and attention children receive throughout the day, they yearn for more. It's okay to admit that I'm spent, my own bed and book await, and yes, I want them to just go the … um … just go to sleep.

Readers, what about you? If you don't find bedtime particularly taxing, what parenting task leaves you with gritted teeth or expletives on the tip of your tongue? How do you embrace the self-sacrifice that is necessary for being a loving parent in a way that leads to abundant life rather than debilitating emptiness?