Shhh… I have a secret to tell you. So let me break it down for you. Let me tell you a story. Lean in… a little closer, yup that’s right.
Motherhood is weird.
It’s a puzzle. It’s a quandary. It’s the riddle of riddles.
It feels like it was just yesterday that my dental besties were throwing me a baby shower and I was all round and glowy. One year later, I am still round, and kind of glowy. Well, sweaty. Milk stainy? Sexy.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like 27% of my momma time is spent ooo-ing and awe-ing over my puddle of squish (the baby, not my stomach pooch) but the rest of the time is pretty normal, pretty ordinary. Just the good ol’ day-to-day ordinary times in the life of an accountant, a dental student, and a circus performer.
There are highs. There are lows. But mostly there are the in-betweens, the middles, the meat in the motherhood sandwich.
Hence, the motherhood conundrum.
(I promise I won’t say hence anymore.)
Maybe all you mommies, daddies, grandpappies, aunties, and lookers-on know what I’m talking ‘bout.
Emma took her first steps last week and now I’m dead. Well not really, but it did floor me and it got me a thinkin’ about this conundrum. You know the one. The one where I want time to simultaneously slow down, speed up, do back flips, go backwards, jump forward, skip to my loo, and slide to the left.
She is always doing these new and amazing things which result in my screeching:
“LIKE, OMG she’s a genius, we better get her ready for Harvard, she’s the next star athlete, she’s going to be president!”
But then, we switch back to ordinary time and I go:
“LIKE, OMG she’s just sitting there chewing on her foot and looking at her hands!”
Same reaction.
Before this girl popped out, I always thought motherhood would be full of these high-highs and low-lows. I thought that a baby would either be screaming like a howler monkey or bounding through her milestones like a mini-Einstein. But the truth is, there is all that middle in the day-to-day, the good stuff sandwiched between the highs and lows.
Motherhood. It’s beautiful, it’s messy, it’s crazy, it’s perfect, it’s stinky, it’s whiny, it’s cry-y, it’s snuggly, it’s gross, it’s incredible, it’s difficult, and it’s nothing like you’d expect yet everything more.
Because you love her so deeply that it nearly kills you. Because she’s yours and you are hers. Her momma, her mommy, her mother.