What I'd Tell That Woman

Ten years ago, I was still deeply in the trenches of being momma to two very young kids.

Every evening after putting them to bed - at the time, they were 3 years old and about 18 months old - I performed a sweep of the downstairs. I gathered together the detritus of the day which small people are so good at spreading around, put things with like things so they could be found and scattered again the next day, and put each item in its place for the night like I was tucking it into bed, too.

Little People sound-effects farm and five figures stored in the silo, check. Little People tractor and two figures chucked in the wagon, check. Ten rainbow colored stacking cups, each smaller than the last, check. Ten mini board books in a handled carry box, check. Ten washable Crayola markers in the box, check.

But one night, while my husband was out of town for union business and I was barely holding it together for the three of us who were all cranky, overstimulated, and exhausted, one marker cap went missing. 

Art

I looked all over the morning room off the kitchen where we ate our meals, including the honey oak table both kids sometimes climbed on top of despite being told not to.

I looked inside and beneath the green and gray Pack-n-Play with the built-in bassinet changing table where I so often stood wiping a tiny bottom.

I peered into the dark and Cheerio-scattered abyss underneath both living room couches. I tore apart cushions that I had just neatly placed, finding a plastic set of keys, a toy remote control, and an alarming amount of stale, sticky apple puffs. I began to get irritated. 

I got on my knees in the living room so I'd be eye-level with any place the kids could have set a marker cap and forgotten about it - coffee table, bookcase, glass TV table, window sill, tot-sized rocking chair - all of which needed a good wipe-down. Irritation blossomed into anger.

I searched the dusty floors of the hallway, in the bathroom, and the formal dining room. The kitchen counters, the kitchen drawers, the floor of the pantry stuffed with unused plastic bags and errant kibbles of dog food I had to tell the baby not to eat. Anger grew into rage. 

These markers were brand new. They had been purchased less than 12 hours earlier, used exactly once to scribble violently on a handful of Thomas the Train pages, then discarded with disinterest. And somehow the cap of a single brown marker had evaporated into thin air. 

This meant the just-purchased set was no longer complete, which made me feel like a failure who had wasted $3 and 20 minutes in Target. It meant the brown marker would quickly dry out, which meant that my son would soon no longer be able to color half of the Paw Patrol dogs in his brand new coloring book, which felt like everything I did was temporary and unappreciated and ineffectual.

It wasn't just a cap. It was a symbol of the struggle of motherhood shaped into a brown plastic cylinder. 

In the dimmed light of the living room, I sat down on the edge of the couch and burst into hot, frustrated tears. I sobbed as silently as I could, so I didn't wake either child who had just fallen asleep and was likely to wake up on his or her own within a few hours anyhow.

I was exhausted. I was alone. And I was having a breakdown over a stupid marker cap. 

I can clearly see that woman in my memory, her hands covering her wet face, her shoulders drooped and shaking with each repressed sob. There are a few things I wish I could tell her.   

1. This is hard.
Being the world to two tiny humans is some of the hardest work you'll ever do. The tasks are never complete, you're sleep deprived, and you're making up everything as you go. You will never be certain of anything except tiredness. On top of that, there are no sick days or vacation days. This is not the parenthood of sit coms or movies, and it's definitely not the parenthood you believe your mom experienced. Let me confirm for you: It's hard in ways you didn't even imagine because no one can know until they're there. 
  

2. You will someday understand what the older women mean when they tell you it goes by so quickly. But not right now.
Tonight, this week, right now, the days are so very long. Each hour has to be filled with enrichment, entertainment, hugs, diaper changes, questions, answers, tears, guidance, and a hundred thousand minutes that each feel like the longest trip you've ever taken. You will look at the clock and count down the time until your husband gets home, or until bath and bed time, or until the next 15 minutes has passed. This is survival. But the survival stage, despite all appearances, does end. It does get easier than this. Except easier is subjective, because the challenges become much different with bigger stakes. Nevertheless, someday, ten years from now when you're inexplicably watching your toddler blow out a candle under a banner that says "Happy 13th Birthday," you'll finally understand why experienced mothers want to tell you that it passes so quickly. 


3. You'll still have mixed feelings about enjoying every minute. 
And you will look at pictures of this suddenly half-grown adult when he was a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, a kindergartner, and feel such a strange mixture of wistfulness, relief, nostalgia, sadness, love, and gladness that you'll wish you had enjoyed every minute. You'll wish you hadn't been drowning then, that you had been more capable of enjoyment, that you could remember more of the way his warmth felt in your arms and less of laying on the floor in his room with your numb arm thread through the crib slats to stroke his unsleeping head. You'd never go back in time to do it all again - you might not survive it twice - but maybe just a minute or two. This will be a tangle of knotted feelings you'll pick at over and over. 


4. You're not as alone as you feel.
Despite what you see on social media and soft-lit diaper commercials, there are other women who feel the same as you. Who love their children but don't love how hard it is to be a mother. You will find those people, and find little bits of yourself to hold on to like talismans, as the years go on. This aloneness and separateness and inferiority you feel are heavy and difficult to move through, but the burden will ease when you find other women to share with. Look for those women. Look in motherhood blogs and female writers and yoga classes and parents standing in kids' classrooms or birthday parties. Look hard. Because they're probably looking for you, too.  


5. Someday you'll get your life back. 
I don't know this from experience, but I have it on good authority that kids move out and move on someday. That they won't always need you, and it will come as a shock. That one day, you'll rediscover your own name and become yourself again, but not exactly the person you were before motherhood because that person no longer exists. When this happens, repeat numbers 1 through 4 above, over and over, until you make it through. If there's anything you're good at, it's survival.