A Difficult Confession

A friend recently posted this on Facebook: "People keep saying 'aren't you loving being a mom?' I'm tempted to say 'No', hand them baby & walk away ... but I may be the only one amused by that." One of the responses talked about all the cultural stereotypes and expectations we have of mothers, inferring that loving every moment is what a mother is supposed to do. 

One of my biggest struggles with this motherhood business has been coming to terms with admitting that this is hard. I mean, really hard. And there are times when doing just what this friend joked about sounds like a fabulous idea. 

Now, don't get me wrong, of course I love this little guy and his full-mouthed toothless grin, expressive face, soft hands that stroke me and grab my fingers, and funny antics. I adore him. He makes me smile and makes my heart melt.

And, sometimes he drives me absolutely batty. It's HARD spending so much of my day fighting with him to get him to sleep. It's HARD having to be at his beck and call, 24 hours a day. It's HARD to get anything else done. It's emotionally draining to deal with his frequent freak-outs during which he doesn't so much cry as he screams like he's being tortured to the point of busting your eardrum if you're close enough. Our upstairs neighbor closed their sliding door today in the midst of one -- I wished I could do the same! I was exhausted!

And it's hard not to be hard on myself for how I respond to him sometimes. Because, in addition to the pressure to love every minute of it, there's also immense pressure on moms to be able to do it all, and to do it perfectly lovingly. So when I'm not constantly developmentally stimulating him, cooking, cleaning, straightening up, running errands, remembering birthdays, working on my list of projects, and whatever else I'm "supposed" to be doing, while also responding to him in ways that promote him growing into an emotionally available male human being, I tend to beat myself up. Which just makes the whole thing worse. Because I should be responding to him with care and compassion, encouraging him to express his feelings and showing him that they are valid -- not getting irritated to the point of anger and sighing and wishing he would stop/listen/do what I want him to do, trying to shut him up and therefore invalidating his feelings. 

Ah, that word -- should. It's amazing the damage that one little six-letter word can do, isn't it? 

And poor little guy -- he knows not what he does; he's just a little baby trying to make sense of this crazy world, and he has very limited means of how to communicate. It's just hard to remember that when in the midst of madness. (But when I do, I thank him for his very clear communication and lack of passive aggressiveness, haha.)

It's a pretty major identify shift, moving into motherhood. And even more so doing it as a stay-at-home-mom. See, I never aspired to stay-at-home-motherhood. Mo and I always said that he would be the one to stay at home with the kid(s). But then I got fed up with my 7-year-run of nightmare bosses and failing organizations and needed a 'break'. And who are we kidding -- workaholic Mo wouldn't last a week without work outside the home.

So here I am, trying to make sense of my days and find a balance between caring for him, getting him to learn how to sleep and tending to his needs, and getting to go do things for my own self-care to make sure that I don't lose my marbles. Eventually, I'll hopefully find time to actually dig in further to my own personal growth and do some soul exploration to discover what my heart's calling is. In the meantime, though, I generally just have the energy to escape and watch TV. Which, again, leads me back to beating myself up further because this certainly isn't the life I envisioned.

This challenge doesn't gel well with my steely Midwestern persona. It's very much internalized within me that things are fine, I can handle this, and no, I don't need any help, but if you need help, I'm here for you! Battling this beast to allow me to succumb to the difficulty of the situation and embrace that it's okay for it to be hard is, like, well, battling Zia to get him to sleep. Or enduring his tortured freak-outs. They are one and the same.

So motherhood is a journey of self-understanding. And it is also generally fraught with challenge in facing oneself as one really is, as opposed to how one perceives oneself to be. Which is a good thing. It's good for me to learn how to be more present and aware and in the moment. It's good for me to face the demons that lurk within me and become more intimately familiar with my shadow. And learn that anger isn't necessarily an enemy; it's just another emotion that we all experience. But it all contributes to the hardness of the situation.

Hard is okay. Hard is good. It's just my personal challenge to learn to embrace that and be okay with it. And to feel okay saying it -- saying that this is hard and that I don't love every moment of it. It doesn't make me less of a person. In fact, maybe it even makes me more whole.

I'm getting there.