Learning the Lesson of Sacrifice

"How many children do you have?" the mother in my preschool music class asks me."Four."

"So you are an expert," the mother says.

I try not to burst out in hysterical laughter.

I have personally found you can raise children by the book, only if you use a different book for each child and only if you realize there are still lots of blank pages.

"Most of my parenting years with young children are a blur," I say.

A blur of sleep-shortened nights and peanut butter kisses and ice cream cones dripping out the bottom and wondering if my kitchen floor would ever be clean more than 3 minutes and endless piles of laundry and scrambling to fix one more meal and reruns of Barney and Sesame Street and stepping on Barbie shoes or Legos in the middle of the night and waking up from a dead sleep when I heard a child gag and beating every Olympic record of racing into a bedroom in hopes of catching puke before it hit the floor - but rarely being successful.

"What are you wondering?" I ask the mother.

She goes into a story of an active toddler who needs to be kept busy and attend classes and get out of the house and a one-year-old baby who still needs morning naps and how do you juggle it all as a mother and how do you see to the needs of both children and really....really, how do you cope?

I smile, because I have been there. Sometimes I am still there.

Wanting to do it all and thinking there is a formula for everything and if I just do everything right, then...then...my child (my career, my body, my marriage, my friendships) will be, well...perfect.

It is the thing that drives us as mothers, as fathers, as women, as men, as friends, as co-workers--this belief--that if we give and give and give, and do and do and do, then those around us will be happy.

"Family is about sacrifice," I say to the mother, and her eyes glaze over as she grimaces and wonders, how can she possibly sacrifice more, but I rush to correct her misconception.

"One of our jobs as parents is to teach our children to sacrifice," I say.

A two-year-old brother is not too young to begin to learn that his sister needs a nap and there will be days he gets special attention, but there will be days that his sister needs that extra time, and life is about sacrifice and isn't this the lesson we learn first in families?

The lesson is this:

that sometimes the family sacrifices for the sake of the individual, but sometimes the individual sacrifices for the sake of the family.

The new big brother can learn the importance of sharing, of waiting his turn, that mom is not his sole property, and as a sibling, he is no longer the only child in the center of the universe.

Sacrifice is the lesson all of us must learn.

It should be one of the first lessons taught in families.