The Hardest Year of My Life Posted on December 3, 2007 Despite society's surprise, "playing mommy" was rewarding for Gary S. Sachs (bio).

I was doing that back in the early 1980s, and it definitely wasn’t acceptable. But only in the most subtle ways would you get feedback that perhaps you were doing something wrong. I remember taking my son in this sort of ritual. I’d have him in the stroller. We’d go up to the mall. And I did that at least five days a week most weeks, because you just don’t know how hard it is to have a kid and have your spouse on call every third night.

That has to have been the hardest year of my life, but I developed this ritual. I was out. I was very glad to have even a shopkeeper who I could exchange adult conversation with. And interestingly enough, people who saw me do that week after week nearly every day, would almost always say, “Oh, you’re playing mommy today,” as if they hadn’t seen me the week before, or even the day before do it, that it just struck people as somehow odd that I was doing that. That stopped being amusing after about the first month, and you’d say, “What is going on here?”

That was a wonderful experience because I would say I know that first child like the back of my hand. What I would also say is that I probably overestimated what that would mean when he got to adolescence. I thought, “As well as I know him, and being a psychiatrist, we’re not going to have all those bumps in the road that happen to other people.” That turned out completely wrong. Not the case at all. We went through all the same things, and I’ve gone through those with my other two children, so I know now that that experience was valuable for other reasons.

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