My Mom Identity

Prepare for things to get a little sappy. If needed, barf bags are located in the seat pocket in front of you, along with what’s left of your soul.

Having a baby is the closest thing to magic that exists here on Earth. For every frustrating and why are you crying you are not hungry, tired, or wet so I’m out of ideas moments, there are about a million more beautiful ones that feel too warm and fuzzy to be real. But they are. My heart literally exists outside my body and just crawls around every day as a tiny clone of myself and my husband. It is the most vulnerable you can feel. Parenthood reduces us all to (silly) putty on the floor. And I was a touchy-feely person to begin with. While thankfully, I have still managed to maintain my wit and sarcastic edge, I just love feelings! Are you gagging yet? Good.

There are so many fears that run through a woman’s head when she pees on that stick and the second line appears. Or maybe you were one of those fancy people where it actually said PREGNANT, because Geometry and parallel lines just weren’t ever your thing. Do you become a mother and completely change your identity? Do I need to start only wearing Winnie the Pooh sweatshirts and dance non-ironically to Raffi? Absolutely not, I’m not cut out to be a kindergarten teacher. My 21 year old cousin laughed at me the other day because my name on Instagram is Charlotte_Graces_Mom. Your identity does evolve, just like it does when you get married.  Your conversations change, you buy fragrance and dye free laundry detergent, and you start carrying around so many bags of stuff people may confuse you with being homeless. But if you are truly lucky and dare I say doing it right, Mommyhood brings out your best self. I’ve found my happiest self in becoming a mother. My greatest moments with Charlotte are when I completely let go all control, smile, laugh and live with her right then in that moment. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Her childhood will flash before my eyes and one day we'll blink and she will be a beautiful angsty teenager, horrified that I shared her pooping schedule with perfect strangers on the internet; so we’ll be in the right here and now if you need us.

My best mom self (in professional hair and make-up)

No Judgment

Before I became a mom I would sit up on my high horse thinking of all the ways I would do it better. Those hypercritical thoughts like: Why are they having a meltdown in the supermarket? I would never leave the house without pants and then there’s the list of the stuff you would never let your children do. It is just so easy to pass judgment on other moms, until you have walked a mile in her yoga pants.

She won’t get into that.

We have an entire playroom and nursery for our one child. I baby proof both of them and our house in some for daily. I remember watching other moms constantly tell their babies, "No, don’t do that, don’t get into that." Why don’t they just put them in a place that is safe and baby proof? Charlotte, God love her, wants to be wherever I am. I naively thought I could look on while she entertains herself quietly in the playroom so I cook could dinner. It took less than one month for that bubble to burst and for me to realize motherhood was not a Lifetime TV movie of the week. She cries at every baby gate because she just wants to be near me. Isn’t that adorable?

 Patience is a virtue.

I was a special education teacher for 5 years and I thought I had patience. I once had a student run off campus and climb a tree only to be rescued by the fire department, while a parent confused our parent-teacher conference as a private therapy session, and I finished out the day with a 2 hour staff development meeting about how to better manage our time (seriously); and I kept it together. Turns out we all have our limits and I reach mine roughly once a week. I thought my patience would overflowth for my own child. Ha. It’s a good thing there are no trees strong enough in our back yard for me to climb.

PJs in public.

Dressing Charlotte is like a boxing match. It happens in rounds and ding, ding, ding it always goes to her. While I was pregnant, I’d rub my belly and lovingly hang up all her outfits by color and imagine dressing her while we sang nursery songs. The reality, I will not change Charlotte more times than I have to. On mornings when we leave the house early, you better believe I’m not wasting an outfit on being in public, when her morning load is guaranteed to explode through and I only have the physical energy in me for 3 rounds a day.

Is that food on her face?

I worked at a restaurant in college. I’d see moms with children in footed onesies and what I could only hope was peas or broccoli on their face and I'd wonder how hard it was to take a wet wipe to their face? Uh, and why is she changing her kid on the ground? Personal hygiene for babies is about as much fun as personal hygiene for teenage boys and I would know, I taught Junior High. We would call the health teacher daily, begging her to mandate deodorant usage in the Spring. Face wiping and changing should be as purposeful and distraction filled as possible, with none of this I think she may be wet, so I’ll just change her any ways nonsense. For sanity purposes, I attempt to limit the waterworks to the necessary evils, like: shots, bedtime, and I’m sorry you cannot put the dog’s tail in your mouth.

Let’s go easy on each other and more importantly go easy on ourselves. Motherhood is tricky enough as it is. So the next time you pass a fellow mom with a half-naked toddler tantruming because it turns out the Hokie-Pokie is not what it’s all about,  give her a sincere thumbs up or knowing smile and she’ll probably look at you like you’ve lost your mind and wonder why your yoga pants are not Lululemon. 

Baby gates are good for one thing: guilt. 

Mommyhood Amnesia

April 15, 2014

 I wrote this in the thick of it. I offer no advice for fellow mom's going through "witching hour" woes. But I offer my support and solidarity. It gets better as they get older, sort of. 

My daughter cries every night from roughly 6:30pm until about 9:30pm. This was known to everyone but me as the “witching hour”. Technically this is 3 hours, plural, Charlotte; always the over-achiever (like her mom). She will pause, slip in a smile every 10 minutes or so and then go right back into grunts, wails, and full blown screaming-tandem-festivals (I refer to them as festivals because it sounds better than her scream crying for 10 minutes and then me scream crying in the guest room for 10 minutes and so on and so forth).  In case you didn’t do the math this is about 170 minutes worth of the rough stuff.

The doctor said and I quote, “I am tempted to give her a colic diagnosis” but then based on the gas she was able to emit during her 2 month appointment the results are still inconclusive. It all seems highly scientific, until we asked the doctor how to help her pass gas, and she showed us by pressing lightly on her stomach. Our daughter finds farting quite enjoyable and hilarious, which gives my husband and I the peace of mind of knowing that she is in fact our child. As her mom, I somehow took personal offense to the idea that I could have a “colicky baby” and quickly dismissed this as a possibility. To me “colicky baby” coming from the doctor sounds like you are a bad mother and CPS has been notified. I especially reject this diagnosis because doctors seriously have no idea how to treat colic and it appears that many of the “treatments” should be called "basic parenting 101". When "treatment #1” is to “hold your baby” you begin to wonder if perhaps it’s coming from the same genius MD who suggested getting plenty of rest when you have a cold. "Treatment #2" is to "gently pat your baby on the back". Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. 

6:30pm is about when my husband gets home from work. Being an engineer he did the math and realized that about 90% of his time with her is when she is crying. I remember when she was about a month old he asked me how in the world I could stay home with her every day. The truth is, Charlotte is the perfect baby during the day. She is wonderfully predictable. I have never seen a happier child. But I witness her transform just as my husband is pulling into the driveway; it looks something similar to a gremlin when it gets wet. I have had people without kids ask me how my husband and I survive this night after night and I am reminded of the fact that moms still decide to get pregnant again even after nine months of morning sickness or 39 hours of labor. There is some sort of motherhood amnesia that we undergo because every morning I wake up and Charlotte smiles at me, while we do the big diaper reveal, and I cross my fingers that I won’t uncover what my husband has coined “a poo-pocalypse”, and all the events of the past evening are forgiven and quite literally wiped clean.

Epic pouty face