In the mornings, once the kids are fed, I let the older ones watch cartoons for a little while, the little one usually goes back to sleep for a while, and I go upstairs and check my email. I'm not a morning person, at all, so a little coffee and a chance to start the day with some grown up connection is how I like to start my day.
This morning, I had an email from a dear friend I met at my last job. It was just your typical "hi, how ya doin' " email and I mentioned I needed a topic for today's posting. She said she'd think about it and get back to me. My friend has 3 children at home and works full-time. She's incredibly patient and loving with her children, great at her job and I'm always amazed how she gets it all done. Her house is clean, her kids are happy, and she's just doing her thing. Sure, she's got hard days, and lately they're crazier than usual (works is crazy busy, she's had to do some traveling for work and her youngest child is just 4 months), but to the outside observer, she's doing a bang up job as a working mom.
Anyways, she said pumping and breastfeeding were really the only things on her mind these days. And then, as an aside, she said the other thing that is always on her mind these days is how her mom did it. She also questioned whether she was "selfish" because if she doesn't get any "me" time, she goes nuts. Now, I'll be perfectly honest here...I've never seen the girl go nuts. She says she does, but I don't believe her. And I certainly don't think she goes nearly as nuts as I do.
But I digress.
So, how did our mom's do it? My friend's mom had 6 kids and apparently never snarked at her husband and provided every single drop of attention her children needed/wanted. And she never got any "me" time. And I remember very similar things about my mom...My mom only had 2 kids, but the woman did freaking everything. She stayed home with my sister and I when we were little and then went back to work once we were old enough to handle being on our own for a couple hours after school. My mom cooked, she cleaned, she did laundry, she gave us our baths, she cut our hair. She did all the stuff that moms do. I once asked her when she cleaned the house and she told me she did it after my sister and I went to bed. You know what I do when my kids go to bed? I sit on the couch. I don't clean anything. You know why? Because I'm tired. And I could care less that there are crumbs on the floor or dirt in the tub. I'm tired people. I just want to sit down.
So, what's the deal? Why were our moms so perfect and we feel like we're being selfish if we want to get out of the house and away from our kids for a while?
I have a theory on this:
The Code of Silence
There was this sort of code of silence among our grandmothers' generation that got passed along to our mothers. And our mothers picked that up. Our mothers didn't complain or get "me" time because they didn't even know such a thing was an option. I think our mothers were fully aware that certain parts of motherhood sucked, but they didn't talk about it...because their mothers didn't talk about it. Motherhood was flowers and rainbows and sweet smells and all that gushy stuff - not crabby toddlers, poopy diapers and extensive amounts of caffeine, followed by the more than occasional glass of wine.
Well, somewhere along the line, mostly when we started having babies, our mothers started opening up a little more. They started acknowledging that it's hard to be a mom, that we always love our children but we don't always like them, that we may not love our children upon first sight, that there are days when all we want to do is hide under the covers and get away from all the noise.
And our mothers help us more than their mothers helped them. My friend's mom watches her kids for her while she and her husband are at work. My mom will pretty much drop anything to watch my kids for me when I ask her.
And I expect we will, in turn, do the same for our kids when the time comes. Until then, I think we have to be real with ourselves and break that code of silence. We need to be able to talk to each other, about the fantastic stuff and the fantastically horrific stuff. If we need to leave a room because our kids are being naughtier than we ever though possible, then it needs to be ok to leave that room and we need to be ok with that decision. If we need to take a weekend to ourselves, to refocus our efforts, then we should take that weekend and appreciate it for what it is - a chance to get recentered so we can be that mythical "perfect" mother that our children will remember.
Amen.
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