In the trenches

Sometimes motherhood is not pretty. It’s not all toothless grins, squishy hugs and silly giggles. Sometimes it’s diarrhea explosions onto your favorite jeans, your iPhone dunked into your husband’s coffee cup or new bottom teeth biting into your finger (or nipple… whatever). Sometimes kids drive you nuts. Sometimes you feel like you’re losing that last bit of sanity that you have left because you’ve already lost the majority of it to lack of sleep and pure nervous energy.

Sometimes your three year old sticks a bulb syringe into an outlet and makes a lovely burning smell he tries to replicate by sticking other things into other outlets. Sometimes you feel like it may be easier to wear roller skates in the house so you can move fast enough between the one that is climbing up the stairs at the speed of light and the one that’s trying to pick the door lock with the tail of his dinosaur. Sometimes, you think that to be able to poop by yourself would be the greatest luxury ever known to man. Because seriously, who can go to the bathroom with one kid climbing on your lap and the other pulling out all of the toilet paper onto the floor? Sometimes you wonder if physics apply to children because there is seriously NO WAY that they can move so fast from pulling a barstool on top of their heads to pulling all of the shoes out of the hall closet. How is that even possible?

Sometimes you question how a one year old managed to pull your coffee cup onto the floor and shove all of his toys into it without you even noticing… when you are sitting right next to him. Why is it that one doesn’t want his own pancakes, but screams in fury when you don’t let him steal his brother’s identical breakfast? Why is it that no one tells us this stuff before we have kids? Not that it would have changed our minds, of course, but at least we may have been more prepared for it. I think I would have liked some warning that some days I would feel like I was literally turning into a crazy person that dreams of sitting alone in a closet for five minutes, just to be able to hear nothing. It would have been nice to know that motherhood sometimes feels like warfare, and right now, we are in the trenches. These early years can be the very sweetest, but sometimes, a toddler goes from making your heart swell with joy to making your ears bleed with their shrill shrieks of fury… in about two minutes.

It’s okay to feel on top of the world one second and like you’re being crushed beneath the weight of it the next, because that is what it is to be a mother. It’s the good, the bad, the calm, the stress, the joy, the fear, the anticipation, the worry, the chaos and the sweet, all rolled up together into a great big glorious mess. Sometimes you love the mess and sometimes you hate it, but regardless of how you feel from moment to moment, you wouldn’t clean up that mess for anything. Because the beauty is in the mess… even when you’re sometimes wishing it came in a neater package. If we weren’t so deep in these trenches, the great moments wouldn’t be nearly as great, and the sweet wouldn’t be nearly as sweet. Sometimes to enjoy the spoils of war, we have to fight a few battles along the way. But it’s always worth it.

Even as you wipe snot off of your computer and pull paper towels out of your toddler’s mouth. Again. Grab your helmets, ladies, duck and cover… sometimes motherhood is a beautiful mess.

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Tagged as: in the trenches, motherhood, motherhood is awesome, motherhood is tough, postpartum anxiety, snotty kids