Motherhood is rewarding.
Motherhood is best thing that ever happened to me.
These are the sentiments that we all read about when we open parenting magazines. These are the quotes that you read when a celebrity is gushing about their new bundle of joy. This is the very thing your girlfriends tell you when you ask how their lives are going.
Motherhood is also very exhausting.
Maybe I don't get eight hours of sleep each night, and that's the problem. But I'm willing to bet that even with ten, I'd still be run down an hour after my morning coffee.
Working mothers, I salute you. I am one of you, but somehow I feel like an imposter trying to join the ranks of the elite 'career moms'. I say this because although I work, I work six hours a day, five days a week. Hardly full time. And I still can't manage to get my house cleaned. My laundry isn't done. My dishes are stacked and there's little tiny pieces of last weeks dinner on the dining room floor. Not that I actually cooked dinner last week, or any night for that matter. (Unless Kid Cuisine's count) No matter what I do, I can not get my ducks in line. I am by no means lazy when it comes to running a house. I would actually border OCD, if anything. But I feel like I'm drowning in battery operated toys and sippy cups.
Let me introduce you to my kids. We'll call them "Duke" and "Baby Chole". (Or ¡Cholé!, if you're feeling festive)
Duke is 5 1/2 and he is non-stop. He's smart as a whip, but man, he never stops talking! He's a complete extrovert and he needs attention constantly. He's got a mop of curly hair and people always want to say something about it when I take him out. Thank God no one's tried to touch it yet.
Baby Chole is the sweetest little girl I've ever met, but she's got this little temper lately that she totally got from yours truly. She certainly didn't get it from her dad. That guy knows how to let the yellow mellow. But hey, she's almost 1 1/2. And seeing how girls mature just so much faster than boys, she's already hit her terrible two's! She's so advanced.
So a very attention hungry 5 year old and a toddler is a recipe for chaos in any home. No worse here than there, but it gets so loud I can't even hear myself think. I try to get up at 5 a.m. just to ensure that I can get in and out of the shower before the
So this morning, I hit a new low. I woke up at 6 a.m. Not to my alarm, but to Chole singing in her crib.
Shhhhh! Go back to sleep! Maybe if I ignore her, she'll fall right back asleep.
6:10 a.m. Silence. It worked.
6:20 a.m. More singing. Followed by crying. So much for that idea.
Get up, make a cup of milk for her, make coffee for me. She's sure to fall back asleep.
6:35 a.m. Duke interrupts my blissful coffee and cigarette on the patio.
"I'm hungry." Of course you are.
I make him cereal, Chole starts singing again. I pick her up, bring her out, let her play and I come to the realization that I will most definitely not be showering today. So I get them cleaned up and dressed, miraculously get my own teeth brushed, and it's now 8:00 a.m. Shit, I gotta go!
Then I proceed to get myself ready by adding make-up over yesterday's make-up, grab a couple of baby wipes and give myself what I call a whore's bath, grab a sweater and jeans from off of the floor and get dressed. Why did I grab clothes from off of the floor, you ask? Because I have no clean clothes that appropriate for work. Why did I grab a sweater in June when I live in the desert, you ask? Because I'm so time strapped and frazzled half of the time that I forget to shave my amazonian armpits. That's why.
You know that kinda stale funk that your clothes get when you need to wash them, but they don't outright stink yet? Well, that was about to be my scent for the day. In my moment of desperation, I open the cabinet in the bathroom and grab the Febreze. And I spray myself down. Now I smell like AppleMangoTango. (By 10 a.m., it turned into stale AppleMangoTango funk)
So all of you working moms, or any type of moms, that have their shit together: I salute you! Because I sure don't.
Motherhood is challenging.
Motherhood is all-consuming.
Motherhood is kinda smelly.
