Parenting is terrible. We're tired and stressed (but it doesn't mean we don't still love our kids.)

• Parenting doesn't allow us the same spontaneity and freedom we once had, and it's OK to lament that.
• I can love my kids and also dislike parenting.

When my wife and I got married 10 years ago, we were both teachers. Because we lived together for almost three years before our wedding, there was the sheen of a newly minted married couple, but what we were doing wasn't necessarily new.

We spent our honeymoon in St. Lucia, but as the work-free summer dragged on, we looked at the surplus of money we had from our wedding gifts and said, "Let's do another vacation." So we drove to coastal Delaware, rented a room for a week, and continued the party.

This type of spontaneity seems foreign these days to a couple who has three kids under the age of 9. Spontaneity means pizza at the restaurant instead of at the kitchen table. A real crowd-pleaser is the impromptu summer night visits to the ice cream stand. We're a really wild bunch these days.

Parenting is stressful

Millions of parents across the country know what we're dealing with at this stage in our children's lives. Mom hops in one car, Dad in the other. We whisk our kids to whatever event or activity is happening — often concurrently — that day: Swim practice, baseball games, speech therapy, CCD, art shows, school functions, and so on. We shovel down meals separately. Our days begin at 6 a.m. — even on weekends — and the kids typically hit their pillows about 8 p.m.

Sometimes by the time you even see the person with whom you chose to spend the rest of your life, you're too tired — or frustrated or mad or exasperated — to talk over that heavy pour of pinot noir. It's alternating sips between mindless scrolling or passing out in front of one streaming service or another. Then we wake up to do it again.

We understand there's a luxury in this chaos. If the hardest thing we're doing on a given Tuesday night is balancing who is going to the soccer game versus who is doing drop-off at swimming, then we truly are the lucky ones. We have three able-bodied, healthy children who necessitate just the standard amount of love, care, and attention. We can afford their activities. They come home to a heated house with food in the fridge and a dog wagging her tail.

It still doesn't make it easier on the days when sleep is more abstract than reality, ends are just being met, or just the regular stressors of life — family, money, work — are beating you down. Some days you feel more like a volunteer Uber driver/chef/housecleaner who has never heard a thank you before. And the one person with whom you're "in it" with — a spouse, a partner — is just as overworked, underslept, and on the receiving end of a similarly empty degree of appreciation.

It feels like we can't say how hard parenting is

It's become taboo to say that parenting is anything other than the greatest thing you've ever chosen to do. To admit that parenting isn't your very favorite thing in the world is met with incredulity and some serious side-eye. Often it's hard to recognize if everyone is on the opposite team, and, if they agree with you, are too frightened to speak their truth.

Everyone is #2Blessed2BStressed on social media. It is almost unfathomable to express a dislike of any element of parenting. To talk badly about it is to talk insensitively or ignorantly about all those who can't have children, all those who have lost a child, or anyone who wishes for nothing more than a child of their own. We're supposed to, even on the worst days, champion how much of a blessing kids are.

For what it's worth, it's true. Kids are a blessing. There's nothing in which I take greater joy than watching my daughter stand poised in front of her classmates addressing the school or my middle child ripping a line drive right back at the pitcher or my youngest son starting to put his sentences together. Those are wonderful, singular moments that I embrace wholly and ones that I'd never want to fast forward through. But those moments are also surrounded by little disasters and tantrums and this dreaded sense of, "This. Is. Neverending."

And it's okay to admit that. It's okay to admit that sometimes I wish I could go back in time to hop in the car overnight with my wife, hit up a beach seven hours away, and enjoy a rum drink without a care in the world.