People always tell you that nothing can truly prepare you to become a parent and the longer I’m a mom the more I know that to be completely true. Becoming a mother has been the greatest blessing in my life. To watch my two children grow and learn everyday is what I live for. My children have taught me more life lessons in their few short years than I had ever learned before becoming their mother. Just the other day I was thinking how completely boring and lonely my life would be without kids. With the daily ups and downs that come along with parenting, I have also learned that motherhood is not always glamorous. I’m sure every mom will agree that are a few truths about motherhood that make our lives interesting and at times entertaining. So, if you’re a mom, you can’t deny these truths and if you’re like me you find humor in them regularly.
1) Your privacy is gone. Remember the days of soaking in a hot bubble bath for hours? Or spending an hour trying on all the clothes in your closet to find the perfect outfit for date night? Or going to the bathroom….with the door closed??? Not anymore! On the upside, you will never be lonely EVER again since you will have a constant parade of little visitors in and out of the bathroom asking for snacks, stealing makeup or needing to use the potty themselves (and when they are not there you actually miss the company).
2) The food on your plate no longer belongs to you. All you have to do to get your children to eat is prepare a plate of food for yourself. I can almost guarantee they will want a bite of whatever is on your plate (even if it’s something they usually refuse to eat). What a great way to get your kids to eat their veggies! 🙂 I seriously believe this is why so many moms enjoy sacred “grown-up drinks”, they are all yours!
3) Laundry is NEVER done. If you ever do manage to wash, dry, fold and pick-up all of the laundry in your house, you’d better enjoy it because it is a short-lived phenomena. You only have about five minutes until one (or more) of your precious children changes clothes, spits up on you or wets their pants creating a constant flow of dirty laundry. Moms are so accustomed to the sound of the washer and dryer running, ALL THE TIME, that your house is eerily quite if they aren’t on. As an added bonus, if your laundry room is near your kids rooms, the constant swishing of the washing machine doubles as white noise to help your children sleep.
4) Sleeping late…HAHA, Really, you can just throw your alarm clock in the trash can. When you have young children, you have your own personal wake up call, that tends to come especially early on weekends and holidays. The perk is that you are always up early enough to get the fresh, hot, doughnuts that give your children the added energy from a sugar rush they need for you to cart them around accomplishing all the errands you need to get done in one day.
5) There will always be a mess that needs to be cleaned. I consider myself to be a pretty neat person and most would agree that my house is not really dirty but with kids something ALWAYS needs to be cleaned. Let’s start with the constant assortment of toys that lie scattered across the floor in EVERY room of the house, no matter where the toys came from or where they belong. You can also look forward to the adorable sticky handprints that adorn any and every shiny or upholstered surface in your home. Then when you have all that cleaned up someone spills something (adding to the previously mentioned laundry pile) and here you go mopping just to have little wet foot prints everywhere. Kind of sounds like a scene from Cinderella, Right??? But, as a mom you are a princess and at night when your littles give you that last hug and kiss and tell you “I love you” it makes the constant cleaning all seem worthwhile.
Sometimes, I have to remind myself to stop and “smell the roses” and to find the humor and optimism in my life as a mom. And, even though I’m REALLY tired and would eventually love a moment all to myself, I know that when my children are grown and out on their own I will miss being needed so much and loved unconditionally.
