Being a mom is undoubtedly one of the hardest jobs….ever. We constantly second guess ourselves, compare our momming techniques and offspring to others, and many of us struggle to balance our mom job with careers, marriages, divorces, and just life. And it is hard. We find ourselves defending our parenting, especially when it comes to controversial topics like co-sleeping, vaccinations, terrible two’s or the teen age day years…And just as we have survived one stage of development with our children, we are on to the next.
As I watch my two youngest boys grow into young men, I am finding the hardest part of momming is the nostalgia for days past…the days I will never get back, but that will live forevermore in my memory. No matter what challenges we have faced through our momming experience, I think all moms will relate: we miss the stages that our children have passed, even when they were hard days.
Last week, I was sitting at football watching my boys, and commiserating with my mom friends about the mom challenges we face as moms of high school boys. As we were talking, we did so over the rumble of little feet on aluminum bleachers pounding away, up and down, for the sheer joy of making noise. I have seen these little kids running and playing while their moms attempt to watch the game. I have watched them master foot over foot going up the steep bleachers. I have watched them sing songs of exhaustion in their mother’s laps. I have watched laughter and tears, messes and accidents….and I have said so many times how much I miss those days.
How I wish I could tell that mom, who smiles at us apologetically when her kids are noisy, to enjoy these times and apologize for nothing. She sighs in frustration when her toddler runs off yet again, and her attention is diverted from the game. She wipes the crumbs from her pants where he has used her legs to wipe the mushy graham cracker off his face, and exhaustion is written all over her face. And in my mind I would give anything to have those days again.
And this mom made me think back to all the ages and stages I wish I could preserve forever:
The excitement and (at least the first time) terror at the two blue lines on the pee stick. The fantasies in my head about cute outfits, happy smiles, snuggles and baby smells. Being four months into the pregnancy and exaggerating my bump that could have just as easily been a cheeseburger. Approaching my due date and just wishing I could get comfortable, and longing for birth to come.
How about that first week when everything hurts? Everything south of the equator is a war zone….stretched and sore, and I personally never liked ugly panties….but in that week they were the best. North of the equator wasn’t faring much better. My eye lids felt like sandpaper from lack of sleep, my nipples were chapped and blistered, and emotionally I was a disaster…pregnancy hormones have nothing on postpartum hormones and I wanted to wear my own clothes again.
The months of interrupted sleep, unsolicited advice, and feeling like I was forever trying to catch up on laundry, dishes, and housework, while dealing with the mom guilt of childcare and using my prep period to pump. I remember thinking to myself, ‘This will get easier when he starts walking’, ‘This will get easier when he can talk’ ‘This will get easier when….’. Only the thing is, it doesn’t get easier, we get more resilient, and we learn more strategies, and we learn to prioritize…and we stop caring if we haven’t put on mascara in weeks.
And yet, our babies grow into toddlers, and we dive in again….because we want our children to have siblings close in age so they can be BFFs. The joke is on us.
We go through the start of school stage, the going to play dates unattended stage, the ‘too cool for you’ stage, the stage where you as the parent know absolutely nothing, the teen aged angst stage and the ‘I’m going to tolerate you because I want to borrow your car’ stage. The getting ready to graduate stage and planning for post graduation stage. The stage where you get the phone call saying they have the sniffles and need to make a doctor’s appointment, but it’s so complicated….and adulting is hard. How about the FaceTiming with grandbabies stage? Nobody tells you how bittersweet that stage is.
When my three oldest children were in high school, I still had my two littles so for me many of these stages were overlapping. In someways I didn’t get to fully embrace the end of the teenage years with my older kids because my younger kids were in their first play dates stage. I didn’t realize the end of that era was going to slap me in the face until it did exactly that. Boom. One minute we were a family of seven, and with in 6 months, the two oldest moved out onto their own…and they took all their friends with them. The house was quiet. Then not long after my middle one ventured out into he great unknown…literally on her cross country road trips.
And it was just us and the littles…who are now bigs. I find myself holding onto these days with both fists. I find myself needing to balance carefully the needs of my ever more independent young men with my want to hold them close and hug them tight. I find myself wistful for the last first day of freshman year that I will experience with my kids. And I watch that mom wither toddler, and want to tell her to relish every blessed moment, especially the ones that don’t feel so blessed. We never get these moments back, and this my friends is the hardest part of momming.
