No One Really Talks About Just HOW Kids Change Your Life.
Updated: Dec 28, 2020
And I wish they would.
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Prior to having my two boys, my BFF and I were roaming the streets of New Orleans on a much needed Girls Weekend. As we sipped Mint Juleps, listening to the beautiful sounds of jazz pouring out of those famous NOLA bars, we caught up on our busy lives, sharing stories of what had happened since my wedding, 10 months prior. She was my Maid of Honor and had watched me walk down the aisle to meet my Robot Prince (more on this in another blog post, I'm sure) at the altar. Her speech at my wedding had focused almost entirely on babies. In fact, if my memory serves me right, that's basically all she said during her wedding toast, "Babies, guys. Babies."
Close to a year had passed since my wedding day and another birthday had come and gone - I was already 36, basically ANCIENT in baby-making medical lingo. As we talked, the inevitable conversation about babies came up. I mentioned that I wasn't sure if we were going to have kids and I wasn't even all that positive that I wanted kids. In all honesty, I had begun to tell myself that maybe I didn't want them since I felt my body wasn't responding to our attempts at making a baby. In mentioning to her that I wasn't sure about having children she turned to me and said, "Oh, honey. Kids are wonderful. They completely change your life. They are your legacy. I mean, don't you want to have children who will help to take care of you when you're older?" This whole concept seemed foreign to me back then. The idea of being taken care of by our children was not what struck me since I had already started to do as such for my own mom. But the way in which kids would "completely change (our lives)" - now THAT was something I had very little understanding of back then.
Little did we know that kids would come into our world and introduce us to a different type of 'unconditional love', a different way of managing our time and a very different way in which our regular mundane daily tasks would look and feel. Everything, as we knew it, did change as it does for all new parents.
The constant worry about their safety alone can sabotage your will to leave the house, especially in those very early days. You then quickly realize that that little baby bean you protected with every ounce of your physical body as it grew inside of you is now crawling/walking/running around for the world to spoil, impose its heaviness on and sink its dirty claws into. Quickly you become 100% committed to doing your best in raising a good kid, consumed with the daily work of making sure they're not jerks.
From sun up to sun down, your days revolve around your children. Yes, this is how it should be, and truthfully, there's a beauty in morning hugs and snuggles, teaching them those things we take for granted like holding a fork and brushing their teeth, and laughing with them when they do and say funny things, but it's also difficult and taxing.
There are days when playtime is happy and relatively smooth, days when everything goes amuck and more often than not, most days consist of these two scenarios creating an even flow of your life.
Unfortunately, no one in my life had ever talked to me about how kids would change my life in the way that it has and in talking and sharing with other newer moms, many of them agreed that they too had not been well informed. Let's break that cycle and be good enough to each other to share the realities of motherhood. It's a beautiful, glorious thing to be a mom, but damn, it's hard sometimes.