The Most Painful Secret Nobody Tells You About Being A Mom
How can I be so lucky and feel so deprived?
Lopolo / Shutterstock This mom cage I live in is terrifying. Beautiful, maddening, breathtaking, disastrous, hilarious, chaotic ... terrifying.
How can I be so lucky and feel so deprived? Am I spoiled? Do I just not understand how good I've got it?
When you can't go into the bookstore with your children — not only because you don't have the energy, but just knowing what a task it will be — it takes all the fun out of the idea.
When the people in a fast food drive-thru start to recognize you because your only escape is strapping the kids in their seats and driving until everyone either passes out or claims they're starving.
When a room is finally clean after an hour of hard work and distractive play for a whole five seconds, only to be destroyed when you turn around to tackle the next task.
When you look upon your husband's job — the long hours, the co-workers, the inclimate weather, the problem solving, the danger — with envy, and you resent him the 30 to 45 minutes he gets alone in the bathroom to wash off the day before facing a pregnant wife and three children who NEED his attention. Because he was outside. He got to interact with others.
He feeds me tiny morsels of what life is like in the real world on a daily basis because he's THERE. He's IN IT.
When you feel guilty for making plans out of the house two nights in a row.
When a doctor's appointment and parenting class elicit such feelings of bliss that it shakes you to your core.
"Please, let the doctor be running behind so I have an extra 10 minutes to stare out this window with nothing but my thoughts."
Oh Mother, is this what I sound like now?
When you've become so sucked into the lives of these tiny people that need everything from you that you lose yourself...
You're a cup and they take gulp after gulp after gulp out of you, never able to quench their thirst, rarely — and sometimes never — giving you time to refill. After a time you begin to stop offering yourself as a cup. An empty vessel isn't useful if it doesn't have something to carry within it.
What can I fill my cup with? What do I like to do? What music do I like? Is there a new book I could read? When did I stop knowing everything about myself? Is this really who I've become?
I came across this today and it's what sparked these musings:
Which begs the questions: How do you choose? And once you have chosen, how do you go about spending more time with these idyllic people without scaring them away?
I would certainly be wary of a woman saying, "Hi, I admire you and want to share qualities X, Y, and Z of yours. Here's my cell, Facebook page, e-mail address, and Twitter handle. Can we start spending every Wednesday afternoon together?!"
Yes, I have become like a child. A toddler, even. Socially awkward. Demanding. Prone to fits and tantrums.
Clueless and lost and just hoping someone will come along that's willing to entertain me, spend time with me, understand me for just a minute. Wait, please, one more? Where are you going?
Am I the only one?
Jessica Cobb is a writer who's writing has been featured on Scary Mommy, xoJane, Mamalode, Sammiches and Psych Meds, Mamapedia Voices, BLUNTmoms, and BlogHer, and she is working on publishing her first children’s book.