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20 Elul 5759 - September 1, 1999 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Home and Family
A Challenge That Is Its Own Reward
by Tamar Wisemon, Tsefas

Shira, aged eighteen months, had just come out of her bedtime bath and was standing, shivering, waiting for me to diaper and dress her. Then Rachel, aged two months, started to whimper in the other room -- she was hungry. "She'll just have to wait," I thought, as I dried my elder daughter. Rachel's whimpering turned into mournful cries and then rapidly catapulted into screams of despair. Shira, now diapered, was becoming unnerved by the baby's howling and began to fidget. This made her more difficult to dress and I began to snap. "Sit still, stop wriggling!" Meanwhile, Rachel had become so hysterical that she had begun to gasp for breath. "Don't move!" I ordered, as I rushed off to grab the baby and place her beside me, in the hope of calming her down. Rachel simply screamed louder and turned purple. Shira started to cry too. And I was about to join them.

Both of my daughters had simple, basic needs, one to be clothed and one to be fed, but when two such needs conflict with one another, a mother has no choice but to decide which takes precedence. When she has two children who are both essentially helpless infants, who can't be expected to perform many of the most basic tasks, then even daily routines such as getting dressed or negotiating the stairs, can become a nightmare.

We all appreciate the immeasurable blessing of having children. But sometimes the days ahead can look a little daunting, with two or even three babies still in diapers and each one waking a few times during the night. Despite the confident claims of friends that none of their kids had ever woken the others up, I spent many nights dashing between rooms, trying to quiet one daughter before she woke the other up, only to hear a distraught wailing as the first was on the verge of dropping back to sleep. I distinctly remember an exhausting visit to my parents, with the kids sharing our room. Shira awoke with hysterical screams, minutes after Rachel had finally succumbed, following three hours of constant feeding and patting. I just couldn't calm her and the baby started to move restlessly in her crib. My husband finally calmed Shira down, but the damage had been done and I had another two hours of rocking Rachel to go before the sun rose and this daughter fell asleep.

I know that I am not the only one who sometimes wondered if I was even capable of attending to a double set of needs. A friend of mine confided that when she was in the hospital recovering from the birth of her second child, her heart sank as she watched her firstborn, 16 months old and still crawling, coming through the doorway on all fours, to her bed. It was only then that she realized what a baby he still was.

We both found that our biggest inspiration during this stage came from speaking with other mothers. When Rachel was born and I was feeling overwhelmed, an aunt who was visiting from England reminded me that my two cousins, both older than I, are eleven months apart. She told me that although it might be hard at first to juggle responsibility of two little ones, soon they would be old enough to keep one another entertained. Since she herself had survived this stage, I could trust her encouraging words.

Indeed, just a few months later, around the time Shira turned two, she suddenly developed a wonderful new trait - the ability to wait just long enough for me to see to Rachel's needs first. Then Rachel, too, became more patient. Finaly, last week, I was frenziedly preparing for Shabbos when I realized that for two whole hours, my daughters had been quietly playing with their dolls. For one hundred and twenty precious minutes, not only had they not demanded my attention, but they had also kept one another happily occupied, leaving me free to do my work.

Hashem gives us many challenges that are ultimately their own reward. One of these is the blessing of having children closely spaced together. We just need to weigh the year or two of their babyhood over the time span of the rest of their lives, and the initial sacrifice of time and energy seems negligible compared to the close sibling bonds that can result.

 

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