Hard work is never wasted.
If you asked me if I liked to cook, I’d say “maybe” or “sometimes.” I don’t really enjoy forced cooking. So, essentially, the cooking that is required every day/evening. It is a huge mental load to remember what everyone enjoys, dislikes, is eating right now, is allergic to, and how much time (or lack of it) I have to cook it in. My husband always teases me that I don’t really like cooking, but that I like *baking*. In all honesty, he really isn’t wrong.
Since cooking dinner for our family needs to happen every night, I’ve started enlisting my kids’ help with age-appropriate tasks. Now that we have 19, 18, 15, and 13-year-olds, they can pretty much be in charge of an entire meal if they’d like. Before they could do that, however, we would let them cook a side dish or bake something.
One day, my third kid asked if he could bake some baguettes earlier in the day that we could have with our dinner. He spent the morning finding a recipe, attending to it, letting his bread rise, etc. When he finally put it in the oven, he was soexcited and proud of his hard work. He pulled it out of the oven and it looked, and smelled, like perfection!
When he set it on the stove-top and walked away, he forgot one of our household rules- don’t leave food on the counter unsupervised if Ivy, our dog, is out. Unfortunately, the dog did not forget to take advantage of this particular failure in following the family process. She is part hound, and she did what hounds do and followed her nose towards that yummy, fresh bread smell wafting from the kitchen. She nuzzled her snoot up to the stove and had at it. She ate the baguette. THE ENTIRE BAGUETTE.
Our kiddo, of course, was devastated. All of that hard work, and nothing to show except for a sink full of dishes and the faint smell of warm bread.
But, was it really pointless?
As a parent, I’d argue it wasn’t. He learned how to bake something he didn’t know how to bake before. He learned how yeast works. How to let bread rise. He spent the morning with his hands and mind occupied with creating something. He learned to not leave food unattended. (As the saying goes, sometimes lessons are best learned in blood.) All worthy and good lessons to learn for life.
Many clients who are planning to give birth without an epidural who then end up utilizing one can feel like the work they did was pointless, or that they “failed”. (Whether that work was prenatally or during labor.)
Ultimately, hard work is never wasted. Every breath, every contraction, every moment spent preparing for birth—even if the plan changes—serves a purpose. (And that isn’t even getting into the physical benefits!) Just like my son learned from baking that baguette, we learn from every stage of our experiences. We learn resilience. We learn strength. We learn to pivot and adapt when things don’t go according to plan. We gain life lessons, perspective, and maybe even a clearer understanding of ourselves.
And in the end, whether the ‘baguette’ turns out exactly how you hoped or not, the process itself is deeply valuable. The effort, the preparation, and the love poured into those moments matter.
Hard work, whether in the kitchen or the birth space, isn’t about a perfect outcome. Hard work is never wasted. It’s about the transformation and the growth from the process of just being IN IT. And that’s worth everything—every. single. time.
