“Here We Are”: Simcha Fisher on the sacrifices you DIDN’T expect

this is great:

These things are all sacrifices, and worthy ones.  But then my kids got older, and started to reveal that they were actual people, and not blank slates for me to write on, or duplicates of myself.  And I found myself face to face with a whole new kind of sacrifice:  sacrificing your idea of what kind of mother I was — my idea of what it means to be a mother.

This one is hard, hard, hard.  Everyone knows what a struggle it is to give up something bad in favor of something good.  But how about giving up something good in favor of what is actually needed?  That brings along a whole worldful of uncomfortable truths with it.  And yet it must be done.  You have to look at a wonderful package full of all sorts of magnificent things, and acknowledge that it has someone else’s name on the label, and not yours.