It's 8:28. A year ago today I was sitting in a labor and delivery recovery room in Denver, Colorado holding a 7lb 6oz bundle of blue. The end of the train ... the fourth blue bundle to come to our family. To say I was exhausted after the marathon 20+ hours to his delivery would be an understatement. To say I was grateful would be ignorant. Gratitude does no even encompass the feelings I felt this day a year ago as I stared into the blue eyes of this little person I knew I would die for but I had only met moments ago. Maternal instinct is real ... if it could be bottled, there would be world peace, I'm sure of it. Everyone had/has a mom, and if the sheer realization in a bottle of maternal instinct being unleashed on another was part of the equation we'd all get along ... because at the end of the day do you really want to face down the snarling gnarl of a mom who's kissed the tears away from her kid who YOU put into said hysterics? I rest my case.
I walked into the nursery this morning and stared at my bundle ... now a grinning toddler. He rolled in his crib, put his butt in the air, rubbed his eyes, and shot me a toothy little grin. This moment .... is heaven. I spent the day wishing each moment would continue and my kids would stop growing and life would stop running. There are days I wish would come to a close the moment they begin. The days you wake up to a kid saying they don't ... and before they finish the sentence you are cleaning up puke sort of days. Today was not one of those days. Today was a day for savoring life and the moment I was in and for being grateful.
I see my children, from ages 14 down to now 1, and I wonder where the time goes. My grandmother asked me today if I thought I was more relaxed with this last child than my others? I told her I think everyone gets more relaxed with successive children ... but that is sort of a sad commentary on life if you think about it? There are many different kinds of moms, but there isn't a single mom that sets out thinking they want to be a bad mom. So where do we get that we aren't the best mom?
I'm getting older ... my siblings have been asking me for years if I am 40 now so it's just become an accepted family fact that I am and have been 40 since I turned 33. I'm at the "people are talking about the 20 year high school reunion this summer" age. I have a sister in the "people talking about the 10 year high school reunion" age. She and I had a conversation a few weeks ago about being a mom. Despite the age difference, my uterus apparently can't tell time so we share children the same age. She has the luxury of youth and can still pull off wearing trendy clothes. I have the luxury of questioning if a person my age wears THAT if they look like they are just trying to hard or if they wear THAT they look like they are victims to a salesperson who told them the dress looked, "super cute!".
So, in my questionably trendy apparel she and I chatted over meatballs at Ikea about motherhood. As I sat there juggling my two kids, and she juggled her two kids, I realized the ease with which I shrugged off things. So my 4 year-old wanted a giant slab of chocolate cake for lunch? Yep, guess that's what he was having for lunch. 10 years ago, my now 14 year old, no way. I would be shoving chicken nuggets down his gullet battling for the prize of mommy knows best as he kicked and screamed. Why?! It has finally come to me ... it's not that I stopped caring about my kids, I love them dearly, I stopped caring about what other people thought about me as a mom and more about what my boys thought of me as THEIR mom. These little creatures are my jury on motherhood and hopefully we will have a relationship that endures from toddlerhood through puberty to still liking each other.
I shared my sage wisdom with my sister. We, the sisterhood of motherhood, screw each other over (sorry, there really isn't another analogy befitting here) repeatedly trying to best one another at motherhood. We set the bar at a completely unreachable level and dare one another to try and ascend. We don't verbalize we're doing this, but we do it every day. For whatever reason we take our children and put them out as our badges of merit as women. We forgot that we are supposed to help each other because we got lost in outdoing each other. And for whatever reason ... God and I will chat about this one day ... we as women don't start to "get it" until our kids are having kids and we tell them to not make the same mistakes we did. I'm cracking this code early and refusing to wait until I am begging for grandchildren.
Moms ... ladies ... relax. We should give one another time and space to let our kids eat chocolate cake for lunch and not judge their parenting skills. We should go to the store in our cookie monster pajama pants with our kids faces still wearing the leftover peanut butter and jelly from breakfast because that's what they wanted even when eggs and toast are the normal choice and we were to tired to fight that battle or the one after breakfast about wiping their chubby face. We should high five each other in the aisles that we even had the good sense to put on a baseball hat with our cookie monster pajama pants that was at least in the same color family so we look like we tried!
We should not stare and leer at the mom trying to get her screaming toddler to get off the ground at the store ... we should step in and say, "sister, no worries, all of mine had a complete meltdown at this very store and have rolled on the ground at this very spot on more than one occasion!" I had a friend who told me she actually packed a wooden spoon in her purse that her kids KNEW about as a form of sheer anti terrorist prevention from them acting up at the store. The existence of that spoon meant they kept it together. Do you think this friend was a 20 something mom? Hell no she wasn't! She was a late 30 something mom who was so tired she resorted to the spoon and threat technique and then TOLD people about it. Sister, give it a high five. They should hand out spoons at the door of every walmart to every mother.
I live in a county, in a state, that happens to have the nation's highest prescription drug abuse problem. I don't live in a ghetto, or an economically deprived area. I live in an upscale fervently religious suburb, nobody wears cookie monster pajama pants to the grocery store, people go to church every sunday, and children are shined and sparkle like new pennies before they leave the house every day. Of course, when the door closes, the nationally reported data is screaming out the reality that mommy puts on her size 2 jeans and does a snort of meth because it keeps her thin and peppy and able to accomplish the unsurmountable task of simply keeping up appearances. Prescription drug abuse? Check. Drug of choice? Meth. Check. Users? Housewives. Check. Sadly, it's a fact, it's written down, it's reported, people know, words out, and the spiral continues because there is no way to keep up with unrealistic fantasies of perfection.
For whatever reason, speaking about today, I saw things different. Maybe it was the realization that I was never going to be bringing a newborn home again and that I needed to take each moment of every day with each of my boys and cherish it as time was fleeting. Maybe I am just a little older, maybe all that talk about 20 year high school reunions has me thinking about the past and the future. I ended today with some sobering news. My friend has cancer. She is a mother but has never had children of her own. She may live to 50, she may not see 40. Cancer doesn't really care about your expectations of life.
Speaking of today ... we can't slow down time, the world will continue to spin at an eternally dizzying rate. Technology will force us to bow down to it's excess and expectations of immediate reward. But maybe, just maybe, that maternal instinct can be bottled just a little bit at a time and offered out to one another ... mommies united. I have to believe that God in His wisdom granted women the maternal instinct to nurture not only our young but one another. It is only a mother who can change the current of a roaring tide to shield her young from the stormy sea. Women need not have children biologically thrust from their loins to be called mother, we are all mothers, and we all need one another to justify our efforts in meeting what we know our creator has in mind for each of our individual paths.
We cannot slow time, but we can enjoy the time we are given and the lives to which we are entrusted ... and we as women can allow this time to be one of amazing joy rather than guilty nonsense of not being enough. We are enough. We are flawed, but a power greater than we will ever understand continues to send flawed creatures perfect miracles. I have to believe that means womanhood, sisterhood, whatever we may want to call it, worthy of a high five in the cookie monster pajama pants. Amen.
