Yesterday, I was walking my son home when we passed another mom and kids on the sidewalk.

She was beckoning her school-age child to wait and not zoom ahead on his bike because she was busy putting a helmet on her toddler.

Her toddler didn't need a helmet. He was riding in one of those big plastic cars that it would be pretty near impossible to have a life-threatening crash in, but he was insisting on wearing it to be like his older brother. Squirming in his seat, she was struggling to clip the helmet on his sweaty little head.

“Sorry,” she said to me, because she was partially blocking the sidewalk.

“No problem,” I said.

But what I wanted to say was, “No, I'm sorry. I hope this is not the millionth little thing that is about to send you over the edge, fellow mother.”

There are so many big things when you're a parent: how you're going to discipline your kid, what you're going to feed them, where and how and when they sleep, where they'll go to school, if you'll raise them to believe in God or Buddha or the great spaghetti monster. There are tons of big decisions that you can struggle with for years, read dozens books about, and still wonder if you've made the right choice.

But those things are rarely the things that exhaust me. It's all the little stuff.

A leaky sippy cup.

The seemingly millions of buckles, straps, ties and the like on every apparatus—car seat, stroller, bike seat, carrier.

The crumbs. The endless amount of crumbs that are everywhere—sticking to your floor, your feet, in your bed, on your clothes.

Finding that damn pacifier that keeps rolling under the furniture.

Taking a swimsuit off a wet toddler.

Folding and unfolding the stroller.

Sticky hands.

Putting shoes on a little person. Putting pants on a little person. Putting shoes on a little person again because they took them off right after you put them on. Putting a hat and sunscreen and sunglasses on a little person. Doing it all over again 20 minutes later when they get those clothes wet or dirty or otherwise unwearable.

These little things, how they grate on my nerves. There are so many little inconveniences. Some little thing that has to be done before anything else can be done, except that when you do it, there is another and another and another to complete. And God help you if the pool is closed or they don't have the right kind of cookie or it rains when you're supposed to go to the park. Or your washing machine breaks, or you lock yourself out of the house, or you lose your cellphone. These things exist before you are a parent. Everyone has little inconveniences. But when you have a kid, they multiply by 1,000 and they eat at your sanity like hungry termites.

No one warns you about this. And how could they? If you were pregnant and someone told you that the thing you were really going to lose your mind about was buckling your kid in his bike seat you would say, “Well, it's just buckling a bike seat. How hard can that be?”

But it's buckling your kid in his bike seat while balancing the bike, while carrying a purse, a diaper bag, and three bags of groceries while your child cries for a drink, and for the fortieth time you explain to him that he drank all his water and we'll be home in five minutes if he would just hold still so you could put his helmet on.

I think this is what troubles me about the public scorn that constantly befalls parents. People who sneer at your stroller or get angry that you are taking so long to get through a door. I want to yell at them, “I am working so hard. SO HARD! Can't you see it?” It's why I want to die when my childless friends ask me what I did this weekend and seem puzzled when I reply that I took care of Teddy the whole time. But what did you do? Their eyes seem to ask.

This. I bucked and unbuckled. I filled and emptied cups. I cleaned up spills. I wiped a nose three thousand times. I cut up my kid's dinner into little tiny bites and patiently picked up the pieces he dropped afterwards. This minutia is tiring, exhausting even, and mostly invisible.

But it is very hard work. It's important work, even. Any little thing might not be important on its own, but it's what it adds up to. That you got to the park safely. That your floor is not littered with six months of food scraps. That your child is (at least for a moment) wearing clean, dry clothes.

So if the little things exhaust you, as they do me, I salute you, just as I wish I had saluted that mother on the sidewalk. I see all your millions of little things and I nod my head in affirmation. You are doing it. It really is as hard as you think it is. Thank you.

Maybe someday, your floor will not be covered in crumbs. We can only hope, right?