It’s SCIENCE.
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Tag Archives: SAHM
Another Reality Check.
Truth Or Dare.
My oldest child is in 2nd grade. Here’s one of our typical dinnertime conversations.
Maverick: “Truth or dare?”
Me: “Truth.”
Maverick: “Aw, man! Everyone picks truth! I always pick dare when we play it at school.”
Me: “That’s because people are too chicken to do the dares. Like me. I’m chicken.”
Maverick: “They dared me to eat grass and I ate it. I ate it a few different times.”
Me: (silence)
Maverick: “Well … grass AND leaves. I ate them both.”
Me: (silence)
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I’ve Never Been As Happy As I Am At 35
I’m 35 years old.
People around me are using terms like “advanced maternal age” and “yearly mammogram.” I know I’m getting older because all of my friends are, but you know what? FUCK THAT NOISE.
I’m not old. I’m loving my mid-thirties, and here are a few reasons why.
Enjoying the rooftop view in New York City.
When I go shopping, I know exactly what will fit my body. I no longer waste my time trying to jam these hips into “boyfriend jeans.” It ain’t happening. Ever. It’s liberating to breeze past that bullshit and head directly for the “curvy” cut. Those suckers will slide right on and I won’t even break a sweat. Boom. Done.
I spend less time in hell, otherwise known as the fitting room. I remember a time, back when I was fresh-faced and only had two bills to pay, when I went shopping every single Friday. Apparently, I had nothing better to do with my time or my money than to peruse the sale racks at Gap and try on things just for fun. I know, I hate me too. That silly, rested BITCH.
I am a better person. I used to lie awake in bed at night and dream up my outfits for the week. Outfit planning. That’s what kept me up at night. I’m not gonna lie, it was grand — but also self-absorbed, shallow, and unimportant. I like my 35-year-old self a lot better. My current nighttime train of thought is significantly weightier: I forgot to sign the permission slips AGAIN. I have to remember to do it before school tomorrow. What is our escape route if there is a fire? Is the mole on my husband’s back cancerous? I better Google it in the morning. Right after I sign those permission slips. But not until I have my coffee. Are we out of creamer? OH MY GOD, WE ARE.
See? Much better.
I know who matters. The people who matter now are stuck with me for LIFE: through sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer. And I’m not just talking about my husband. My true friends — the same ones who loved me even when I was a silly, rested bitch — still love me now as a tired, frazzled one, and they’re like family. What life lessons and terrible breakups have joined together, let no man put asunder.
I have more fight in me at 35 than ever before. I don’t know if it’s age, experience, a buildup of hormonal rage, or what, but if something riles me, God help whoever stands in my way. As the years tick by, I have begun to grasp the weight of things that are weighty and the infinite value of things that are precious to me. The things that are important are worth fighting for, and at halfway to 70 years old, I better make the most of the time I have left.
I have finally learned how to use profanity in a way that suits me. That takes time and practice. 35 years of practice, to be exact.
Being 35 is awesome. You should totally try it.
© 2015 Harmony Hobbs, as first published on Scary Mommy.
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Why God Made Wine.
Have you ever felt like your life is so intense that you never have time to process anything that happens?
Crazy things go on here all day, every day. I’ll find myself thinking, okay … my child just got bleach in his mouth. I need to process that. But before I have a chance to work through it, someone is digging around in the can of garbage containing raw chicken, and then someone is standing precariously on a tall surface, and then someone else is eerily quiet. Which is never a good sign.
My marriage and my kids and my career and my extended family and MYSELF. That’s a lot to juggle without having adequate time to process things. It feels like I have been hurtling through life for the past few years. Maybe this is what they mean when they say “it goes so fast.”
It does go fast.
Too fast.
Me and my big girl.
I want to tell my kids to stop for just one day — just ONE! — to let me collect my thoughts. I’ve had a lot of weird things, both good and bad, happen recently and am struggling to gain my footing. But they can’t stop, because they’re children and their job is to spend their days learning how to dismantle kitchen appliances to see what’s inside, and my job as their mother often gets in the way of me dealing with my shit.
I can’t deal with my shit when I’m cleaning up literal shit.
Mothers have a deeper need for emotional and physical space than anyone else, and yet we are the ones who are least likely to manage to make that happen for ourselves.
Personally, I like to process things. I enjoy actively working through the stages of elation and grief and change and emotion because I want to feel every step. To me, that’s LIVING — because life, with all of its heartache and anger and happiness and love, is rich. I relish it.
My current processing methods are ineffective and outdated. I can no longer spend hours on a running trail walking and thinking. I can’t be alone anytime I wish. I’m a mom now. Sometimes I have to put my own needs on hold in order to deal with someone else.
Life is happening faster than I expected. Faster than I have time to process. And it doesn’t stop, not even when I say “WAIT!” I don’t know if there is a solution for that, but I do know that the Good Lord gave us wine.
And I am going to drink it.
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Be Who You Are.
Maverick, my 7-year-old, recently walked up to me and said, “You are who you are, Mommy. And you’re just right. That’s what you always say to me.”
I stared at him, speechless.
“Don’t let anyone judge you.”
And then he walked away.
I have poured my heart and soul into my children, and there have been times when I felt like my spirit was breaking. Or maybe it was already broken. It can be hard to tell the difference.
I fuck up all the time. Daily. Multiple times per day.
I’m probably not supposed to admit that, right? I’m probably not supposed to say that I screamed like a lunatic this morning when the kids wouldn’t stop fighting. I’m so calm, until that one thing — like milk boiling over on the stove, or poop that gets smeared all over the toilet seat — sends me over the edge.
I don’t give myself enough grace.
When you’re doing the impossible, you should give yourself some grace. My kids, who see the best and worst of me, give me grace. They somehow absorb what they see and hear, assimilate it, and regurgitate it in their charming kid way.
Pepper will say “Maybe way-ter, okay? WAYTER,” when I ask her if she’s ready to take a bath.
Maybe later.
I say that a lot.
My middle child uses big words in an attempt to sound important. “Actually, Mommy …” He says “actually” all the time. I guess I do too, but it’s a lot cuter when he says it.
But what my oldest said — you are who you are, and you’re just right — struck me. I’ve said that to him, many times. I believe that for my children, but do I believe it for myself?
I have to model what I want my children to value. And even though I feel like a dismal failure most days because I haven’t done enough or said enough to make me feel like I truly nailed this parenting thing … these moments drop out of nowhere that remind me that I’m doing a damn good job.
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Extraordinary Things.
Motherhood is getting hit over the head with a plastic bin full of toys, because your child doesn’t know how to ask you to open it like a civilized person.
Motherhood is multiple, over-sized, unapologetic glasses of wine.
It’s earplugs, noise machines, and tiptoeing down the hall; it’s double shots of espresso ordered through a drive-thru because you haven’t had time to buy groceries this week and you are desperate for caffeine, SO STOP YOUR YAMMERING AND GIMME MY COFFEE.
Motherhood is self-sacrifice. Your heart and your mind, your body, your money, your energy and your breath. You pour it all out, everything you have, because you are a mother.
Motherhood is Vicks Vaporub, saline spray, and Kleenex bought in bulk. It’s the feeling of excitement when you see diapers on sale, the joy of finally throwing out an almost-7-year-old Diaper Genie, and the sheer anguish of potty training.
Potty training is a low point.
Motherhood is when you get news that makes your mouth go dry and your chest feel compressed, but you still have to go through the motions and be a mom anyway.
Motherhood can be a real bitch.
Motherhood is painful and uncomfortable from the very start. It is a bloaty, crampy, I’m-fat-and-my-heart-is-outside-of-my-body feeling that never ends. It’s overwhelming, always. It forces you to stretch in ways you never thought possible.
Motherhood makes you grow because you have to.
Motherhood is every joy and pain, the deepest love, the greatest source of hope. It brings us to our knees — in prayer, in suffering, in gratitude, in wonder — because it is worth every ounce of energy that we invest.
Motherhood is extraordinary, because all extraordinary things are hard.
And glorious.
But mostly hard.
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Reality Isn’t So Bad.
Somehow I made it through another summer.
I know this because Maverick starts school tomorrow. And I know that because I filled out a bunch of forms today while a toddler pulled on my arm.
2nd grade! How did that happen? And also, isn’t it time for college? They’re all so big and so small and they need so much from me but not quite as much as they used to. So it’s just weird right now. We are all transitioning, I’m sleeping through the night, but there’s still poop all over the toilet seat. So clearly we aren’t out of the woods just yet.
I used to write about everything that happened, and now it all happens so fast that I don’t have time to write it down, because before I have a chance to form the words on paper another thing happens, followed by another. Days and weeks of hard things and hilarity and the monotonous joy of being a mother to three tiny humans who all know the words to Walk The Moon’s Shut Up And Dance have blended together into a chapter that I’ll just call 2015.
Today I was looking at each of my children, thinking about what makes them special and how I don’t have enough time to dwell on their good qualities because I’m too busy keeping them from blowing up the house, and I realized that my job isn’t to document everything for them to review at a later date. My job is to keep them alive.
Keeping them alive is a full time job.
I wish I had more time to soak up the good things, and I wish the bad things would just stop happening, but that’s what they call denial. I live in reality.
So today, after a very long day of the last day of summer, after I split the boys up because they wouldn’t stop fighting, as I was half-heartedly stirring a pot of Tuna Mac with toddler wedged firmly underneath me, Robbie walked into the house and gave me the kind of kiss where you get dipped backwards.
Right there in the kitchen.
Reality isn’t so bad, you guys.
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Resist Urge To Scream.
This blog post is based on a series of real-life events.
6:30 a.m. Stumble to coffee maker. Mumble good morning to spouse. Wonder how this is happening again already.
7:00 a.m. Breakfast.
7:30 a.m. Tell Robbie goodbye. Hold screaming child back as he tries to run after the car. Brew another cup of coffee.
9:15 a.m. Look out of the kitchen window to see Asher standing naked in the driveway and Maverick on the roof of our vehicle with the water hose. Both are screaming.
9:16 a.m. Choose to ignore staring neighbors.
9:30 a.m. Boys come inside because they both have to poop and we don’t allow them to poop in the yard.
9:45 a.m. Pepper touches my unshaven legs while trying to climb into my lap and gets very upset because they “ouched” her.
9:46 a.m. Took a picture of her subsequent screaming because she wouldn’t stop and I didn’t know what else to do.
This is an actual photo of my child crying because she touched my hairy legs.
10:00 a.m. Take stock of my day.
10:10 a.m. Brew another cup of coffee.
10:15 a.m. Realize that the only method of survival is pool time.
10:45 a.m. Head to the pool.
Asher would wear his goggles 24/7 if we let him.
11:00 a.m. Check Pepper into the nursery.
11:05 a.m. Arrive at pool with the boys and look for a lounge chair. The first two I sit in are broken. Resist urge to scream.
11:07 a.m. Move to chair number three. Notice that the lifeguard is looking at me from behind his smug hipster sunglasses.
Resist urge to scream.
11:09 a.m. OH MY GOD THIS CHAIR IS FUCKING BROKEN TOO.
12:00 p.m. Head home.
12:30 p.m. Prepare lunch that no one is excited about, including me.
1:30 p.m. Decide that the world will not end if Asher wears his Darth Vader costume to the grocery store.
This photo pretty much sums up my entire Summer. A whole lotta Darth.
1:45 p.m. Load kids into the van. Go inside to pee in peace.
1:48 p.m. Return to van and discover emergency brake was pulled while I was inside. No one will own up to it. Both boys are now buckled into their car seats. Realize I have never used the emergency brake in this vehicle. Unable to locate it because three children are yelling.
Resist urge to scream.
1:50 p.m. Call Robbie at work and ask him to tell me where the emergency brake is. FORBID HIM TO JUDGE ME.
2:00 p.m. Arrive at grocery store. Plunk Pepper into a shopping cart and find that the seat belt is broken. Select another cart. The seat belt is broken on that one, too.
Resist urge to scream.
2:25 p.m. Buy potatoes. Open “share size” bag of M&M’s in the checkout line and cram them furiously into my mouth.
Refuse to share.
3:00 p.m. Make potato salad from scratch. Wonder who fucking makes potato salad from scratch anymore because it’s a lot of fucking work.
3:10 p.m. Spend the next 30 minutes making sure my toddler doesn’t get burned by the pot of boiling water.
4:10 p.m. Verify Asher’s arm is not broken.
4:11 p.m. Remind Maverick that no one wants to see his private parts.
4:15 p.m. Get band-aid and ice pack for injured child. Scream at boys to stop trying to put toys up their behinds. Finish potato salad.
4:20 p.m. Locate a large glass bowl and dump it in. Notice that the bowl is broken and there are shards of glass now mixed into the potato salad.
4:21 p.m. Walk outside to throw broken dish and the potato salad away.
Scream.
No caption needed.
4:25 p.m. Count the days until school starts.
5:00 p.m. Start cooking dinner.
6:00 p.m. Wine.
7:00 p.m. Count the days until school starts again.
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Modern Mommy Madness 