2021 marks my 5th Mother’s Day and I have to say it felt more….not more important…but… more impactful. It felt like I finally understood the value of motherhood as an experience – the selflessness that it entails – but also the value of the experiences that my mom has given me. Being a Mother. Having a Mother. It’s important. It shapes who we become and who we want to be for our own children. It shapes the kind of experiences I choose to create for my daughters. It’s not the easy choice, but I choose to bake homemade cookies late at night after the girls have gone to bed, so that they can bring homemade cookies to share with their class for Valentine’s Day. I choose to spend their nap time figuring out how to draw a giant cornucopia so that when they wake up they have a giant coloring picture taped to the window at Thanksgiving. I choose to use my hand as a child headrest on the airplane for much longer than is comfortable, so that Lucy’s head is supported and doesn’t bob around as she sleeps (and I also have chosen to buy a travel neck pillow for the flight home!)
On the flight to Hawaii (our 1st night flight), I sat in between the girls as they slept for almost 4 hours. Before you wind up for that high five….it took a lot of rearranging of limbs on my part, and so, I clocked about 30 minutes of sleep around 1am. I divided my time between keeping Brooklyn from stretching her legs out into the middle of the aisle and trying to rearrange a ‘too long to fit comfortably in the seat’ Lucy who is a classic ‘Head Bobber’. But as I sat in the dark, with my daughters’ heads in my lap, I thought to myself, THIS is what it is all about. This is where the love and the selflessness shines through.
On Mother’s Day, I came across an old blog post that I had written up on my phone, that I never got around to post. It was from when the girls were just over a year old and even though it was more than 3 years ago – it still resonates with me, and it felt very relevant to how reflective I was feeling that day. And so I share it now:
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You spend so much time building up to the 1 year mark. It is an incredibly emotional time and you think that time should stop at the One Year mark and let you take it all in and adjust to having 1 year olds. But time marches on and just like that, they’re 13 months old!
It took me a while to adjust to having babies, it didn’t sink in to me that I was a Mother until I said it out loud…’I have 2 daughters!’ (and that was a couple of months in). And now, my mind is grappling with the idea that I no longer have babies, but toddlers.
In the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People it talks about how adjusting your title adjusts your perspective on the world, the way you interact with others and your actions. I don’t think there is a bigger title adjustment than ‘Mom’ that adjusts your every thought and action more – at least it hasn’t for me.
I feel like I hit a Motherhood milestone very recently. The first time one of my girls was feeling like crap (turned out she had Hand Foot and Mouth 😦 We were out of town and all of a sudden at 10pm, Brooklyn was crying in her crib and could not be consoled. For babies that were sleeping through the night and able to soothe themselves at 5.5 months old…this was unexpected at the 12 month mark.
Between not feeling well and a strange environment, the result was Mom getting maybe 1.5 hours of sleep and spending the majority of the night soothing a sad baby. In the past (and even in the present), if something prevented me from getting sleep (my husband, my cat, my own insomnia, etc), I would be so angry in the morning. Frustrated, definitely bitchy, and wanting to take it out on others.
But, after my 1.5 hours of sleep and a night of baby snuggles, I emerged with so much energy, and a mindset of ‘we will just make the best of the day’…. and also, that it would be a caffeine day.
There was no frustration or anger, it was a feeling of acceptance and understanding, that I was there for my baby when she needed me, and I was happy to be there for her.
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Now, don’t think that this is all about motherhood bliss, because, man oh man, do I get frustrated, and tired and stressed. But I am trying to feel more of the bliss than the frustration, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But I am definitely trying to make it MY choice instead of being swept up into the vortex of Motherhood.
Adventures On the Road 