Becoming Mother

On February 15th, NPR’s Morning Edition ran a segment on “Singles Awareness Day,” focusing on how single people shouldn’t feel so alone because everyone else, apparently, had such an amazing Valentine’s Day.

Psshhh…

Here’s how Valentine’s Day went down in this house, where two kids and a marriage of 13 years reside.

Valentine’s Day Prelude

Wednesday, February 13th: Spent the day at home with the toddler because of a diarrhea bug, which was mercifully mostly over by Wednesday. Lost time for grading and planning.

The Big V-Day

• 4:15 a.m. – 5:10 a.m.: Glorious morning run under the stars

(Calm down: This is the extent of the day’s romance.)

• 5:12 a.m: Voicemail from public schools. Daughter’s kindergarten class is cancelled because of a water boil advisory due to a major pipe breakage. No problem. She’ll just spend the day at daycare, right?
• 5:30 a.m.: Bathe the toddler whose poop has turned into sludge and has mercifully remained contained in his footed pajamas.
• 7:00 a.m.: Daycare decides to also close because of the water advisory. Reverses course 15 minutes later. Children finally dropped off and settled by 7:40 a.m. Daughter forgets all classmates’ valentines in the car.
• 8:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.: Teaching all morning, lunch for five minutes, grading/planning, public student poster presentations
• 3:30-4:30: Drive home, make dinner for the kids
• 4:30-4:45: Eat a leisurely 15-minute dinner alone before getting the kids (salad, hard-boiled egg, peanut butter pretzels)
• 4:45-5:30: Retrieve children from daycare
• 5:30-6:30: Feed children/ wash dishes/ sort through bags of valentines, crafts, and candy/ do laundry/ give baths/ dress kids for bed
• 6:30: Husband arrives home
• 6:32: Husband says, “Go, you’ve done enough. I’ve got the kids.”
• 6:35: Daughter says to me, “My panties have poop in them. Can you help me?”
• 7:00: Go to bed alone.

The Day’s Redemption: I achieved not one, not two, but THREE full sleep cycles.

High. Five.

So, let’s dispel all those myths that married people / people in relationships are having amazing Valentine’s Days.

Because at the end of the day, what married couples of so many years with young kids really want is SLEEP.

#truth

***

Oh friends…

This is going to be quite the year.

That has been the feeling for at least the past 12 months, since the youngest child started becoming mobile. In the back of my mind (as I’m transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer or moving dry dishes to the cabinets or dirty dishes to the dishwasher), I’ve had this nagging feeling that…

Perhaps, it’s all over.

“It” being my ability to reclaim any empty moment for myself.

If, by some miracle, an empty moment finds me during the day, and I choose to use it for myself, I’m overwhelmed with the feeling of Oh my God, you should be doing something else right now! You are so far behind!

But then, the thought: Behind who? Behind what?

Who am I comparing myself to?

My pre-child self? Because she’s been dead for quite a while. And the hope of her resurrection is pretty much gone.

But then there’s the realization that, There is no end to this.

At least not for the foreseeable future.

This is my life now.

Moving from task to task to task to task until the day is done.

My life has become an endless treadmill of tasks that begin at 4:00 a.m. and pull me along, chug, chug, chug, until I throw in the towel at 6:45 p.m.

***

I don’t mind being busy. Sometimes, I even revel in being busy. Instead, what pulls me down is when I feel like I’m not growing or changing for the better. If I’m not pushing myself to learn more or grow, boredom soon sinks in. And that makes it harder to find joy and purpose in what I do.

So with that in mind, here are a few things that I’m trying out this year, as a way to grow and change.

Relearning algebra, geometry, and trigonometry via Khan Academy

The rationale here is…

I’m afraid of math. And I’m tired of being afraid of math.

So I wondered, What it would be like to learn math without being afraid of failing? What if I could go at my own pace and see how far my limits take me?

It’s also great preparation for taking the GRE (I may or may not be thinking about a Ph.D. program in the future).

Learning how to write computer code

Again, this is something that I’ve been afraid of. Maybe because it’s mostly a male-dominated field? But it seems like learning how to code is becoming not only useful, but necessary as computing power doubles, triples, quintuples.

Reading the Wheel of Time series

This is unabashed escapism. I’m okay with that.

Some mothers have daytime TV.

Some have romance novels (I never could get into those. Too formulaic. Too many one-dimensional characters.)

I’ve got fantasy fiction.

So, Fellow Parents, gather your provisions and your fortitude, and breathe deeply.

It’s going to be a Long. Long. Journey.