Lily: Sometimes I wish I wasn't a mom. Sometimes I want to pack my bags and leave in the middle of the night and never come back.
Ted: Are you serious?
Lily: I don't know. I mean, I love being a mom. I love Marvin so much. But you remember when I wanted to be an artist? Art was my whole life and now it's been months since I've picked up a brush. I spend the whole day taking care of kids at my job and when I come home, it's more of the same. It never lets up. It's just really, really hard.
Wow, that honesty just blew me away because I don't think mothers (or fathers, for that matter) are allowed to be honest with how they truly feel about being a parent. Even I get scared sometimes to talk about how I feel about motherhood, especially with the advent of all these mommy blogs professing how perfect their mommy lives are. Seriously, sometimes I read all these blogs and all I can sense is a defensiveness: "Yes, my life revolves around my children and I love it!!! There's no other life like this! Mothers are the best human beings! I make the perfect soufflé and have little decor vignettes scattered around my tastefully decorated home and I throw fabulous tea parties with matching monogrammed napkins!!! And what's your life like? Oh. You have a career. No kids? How interesting."
Then here I am, also a happy mother but just also an extremely overwhelmed one. I feel this huge pressure to be perfect, too, to whip up that soufflé and decorate my home and have monogrammed napkins and do all of that in high heels with a child balanced on my hip, and sometimes I succeed (mostly at the balancing the kid on my hip with heels on because I really find cooking and decorating boring) but mostly I'm just busy watching my kids and making sure they're fed and safe and alive to even care about my house. I mean, really, at the end of the day, isn't it enough my kids are fed and happy and tucked in bed??? Do I have to make sure they're fed with organic food that I cooked myself and that they have to be tucked into beds with crisp sheets with a thousand thread count?
But I'm scared to talk about it because all I'm supposed to feel is blessed and grateful. And I am blessed and I am grateful but I also am human, and birthing a child didn't magically make me a superhuman. I'm still woefully weak. I get tired, I get cranky, I get sad, I get mad, I get selfish, I get lazy.
It never lets up. It really never does. Sigh.
I always get asked what is it about motherhood that I find difficult and I always say, "The constant vigilance." You really can't rest because it's always that one time you looked away, that one time you were stressed out, that one time you got distracted, that's the one time your child gets into an accident. Constant vigilance!
And then I also get asked what surprised me the most about motherhood. I always say, "The love. I never thought I'd be capable of so much love." And that, my friends, is what makes the constant vigilance bearable, even okay. After all, what could be so bad about watching your kid? Love makes it a privilege.
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| I'm blessed and I'm grateful. How can I be otherwise? |
That's love for you. Love really truly does make everything okay.
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