The best preparation for motherhood is military training

I enlisted in motherhood with only the Lamaze training offered by the hospital where I delivered. I remember they had a chart with these cartoon faces that ranged from smiling to contorted with the pain of childbirth. While the epidural helped a great deal with the very painful “transition” portion of the birthing process, I've worn that contorted expression often since then. A friend of mine – a former soldier and current stay-at-home mom -- clued me in on what prepared her for the mind twisting challenges of parenthood: survival training. When she was in the military, her superiors would take a group of them into the wilderness and leave them there with nothing but a pack of provisions. They had to figure out how to survive for a week. In preparation for the unfortunate chance they might someday be captured by the enemy, her superiors would expose her to the kind of endurance tests her captors might employ. They'd play foreign music endlessly in an attempt to break her will. She said she trained herself to embrace the unfamiliar sounds, to love them. She said the same approached worked after her son was born. He'd cry endlessly and she wouldn't know how to make him stop. So she embraced the sound before it overcame her. We work out at the gym together. The trainers stop by occasionally and tell us to stop chatting and pick up the pace. She tells them to take a hike. There, with her boys in the gym's nursery, she's in charge of how much punishment she wants to take.