This morning, as I was driving our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Jessie, to her nursery school, she was screaming and fussing in her car seat behind me. I weaved through traffic, trying to stay calm. Finally, I said something sharp to her, then added, gratuitously, under my breath, “Please stop being a psychopath.”

I’m embarrassed to say that she heard me.

“Mama!” she screamed. “Don’t call me a Sleepy Path! I am not a Sleepy Path!”

Oops.

I know I have so much to be thankful for, most of all the two healthy, well-adjusted kids that my husband and I wished into the world. I know: I am lucky beyond measure.

But sometimes, no matter how good everything seems, being a parent is just hard. I’m not even talking about the big stuff—the illnesses and moves and deaths of much loved pets and dear relatives. More often it’s the day-to-day nitty-gritty of raising small children that gets you down.

We’d been in a pretty sweet spot with the kids until about a week ago, when Jessie morphed from being a jolly little dumpling of a two-year-old into a raging, pissed-off, defiant two-and-a-half. If I tried to help her put on her clothes, for example, she would tear them from me, scream, and throw her body on the floor, where she’d writhe like Linda Blair as I stared slack-jawed and wondering: Who stole my baby?

I try the usual measures: I take deep breaths. I tell myself this is all happening for some big, spiritual reason that I will understand later. I hide in the bathroom. I give time-outs. I yell. I apologize. I hug.

And I try to remember that this too shall pass.

Some day Michael and I and our wide community of exhausted, stressed-out parent-friends will look back on this time and be stunned by how hard and simultaneously wonderful it all was. One day, our house will be quiet again, maybe even clean, and Michael and I will have uninterrupted conversations that have nothing to do with our children.

Our sweet, little Sleepy Path will be all grown up and on her own, and Sanctimonious Man will be putting the argument skills he learned in our house to good use out in the big world.

I hope they’ll forget that I sometimes yelled at them, and that Papa was perhaps too quick to give a time-out. I hope they’ll forget the darker of our moments together, those times when the days got shorter and so did our tempers.

And if they do remember them, I hope they’ll also know this: That their parents woke up each day (sometimes ridiculously early) and, buoyed by fierce, unconditional love, gave it their best shot.

Katherine Ozment is a Glam Family contributing editor and a freelance writer working on her first book. Her essays about motherhood have been widely published and can be found at www.katherineozment.com. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two kids.