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Being A Mom Sucks

Mothering Wild Blog has another great post about this!
No one ever tells you this before you are a mom. Or maybe they do and we don't hear it. I honestly cannot remember. What I do remember is being pregnant with my first and being so excited. And then as my due date got closer, I was terrified about absolutely everything - giving birth, sleeping, living, functioning. Add in the absolutely horrifying feelings I had about taking care of another human and the list was infinitesimal. Of course I figured things out but life with a newborn was so hard! And the worst part was it seemed like every other mom but me had it figured out. The picture-perfect vision of moms with their newborns not crying was all I had in my head and that was not my reality. My highlight real was my baby crying, me frazzled, poopy diapers, spit up, my hair pulled back, ten extra pounds, nothing glamorous.

So when my eldest was a few months old, I went to visit my family in WI and got one of the greatest baby gifts ever. My cousin and I were talking, and she had a son who was three and another on the way. Her three year old was irritated and throwing a fit about something and my baby was crying. She looked at me and said, "This just sucks. This is not fun - it's just not." And I smiled with tears welling up in my eyes and slowly streaming down my face, so relieved that someone else voiced out loud what I was feeling. I literally thought that I was the only mom who thought motherhood was hard, that I was the only mom who could not handle the motherhood thing, that as much as I always knew I wanted children, that maybe, just maybe, I was not cut out to be a mom and was going to ruin my child's life.

So armed with this new knowledge that I was not alone, I embraced the suck. And truthfully this made being a mom much easier and fun. There are so many days when being a mom is beyond hard. Toddlers who all want the only red cup that exists because that literally is a life and death situation. Preschoolers who will fling themselves on the floor screaming when you have to leave the house to arrive on time to the one appointment you have that week. School-aged children who are perfect at school and you wait for them at the bus stop and they come home and throw fits for hours because they are exhausted. Tweens who retreat to their rooms and don't reemerge for years. And we all go through it because embracing the suck is so worth the cuddles, the love, the hugs, the laugh, the giggles, the sticky finger mommy kisses.

So find your tribe, share your pain, your challenges, your wins and your struggles. Know that you are not alone, it's not just you. And ultimately, this, too, shall pass.
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