Tag Archives: SAHM

But First …

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You guys. Please don’t give up on me.

I used to blog almost DAILY. Now I’m down to like one post a week. What the hell has she been doing?! I bet that’s what you’re wondering. If you’ve even noticed … and I’m pretending that you have.

What the hell have I been doing?!

What the hell have I been doing?!

I don’t know what the hell I’ve been doing. I guess I’ve been busy being a mom and a mediocre member of the PTA.

I was sick for awhile. I looked like this for so many days in a row …

I don't know why I watermarked this photo ... is anyone really going to want to steal it? No.

I don’t know why I watermarked this photo … is anyone really going to want to steal it? No.

… That my three-year-old drew a picture of me. There’s an uncanny resemblance.

This is what I look like, apparently.

This is what I look like, apparently.

It’s Friday, bitches! And that means that tonight I get to check out of my usual duties, have a big glass of wine, and have Virtual Happy Hour with YOU!

But first … I have to go get a vaginal ultrasound.

It’s gonna be a great day.

(If you liked this post, then you will LOVE I Still Just Want To Pee Alone! Click here to find out more!)

My 12-Year-Old Self

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Recently I had the pleasure of talking to Allison Tate, a widely respected editor and writer who, at 40, seems wise beyond her years. Her writing has gone viral over and over again not only because it’s beautifully written, but also because she knows things.

I soak up everything she says like a big nerdy sponge.

We were talking about goals and being happy with where you are in life. She suggested thinking about how your 12-year-old self would feel about where you are right now. Would she be happy with what you’ve achieved? Would she be proud?

I have spent the past week reflecting on this. If someone threw out the question “Are you happy?” I would say yes without thinking. Of course I’m happy! I’ve always been happy. It would be weird to have a name like Harmony and be a sullen bitch.

But in the day-to-day grind, I’m not sure that I am happy, not really. I feel frustrated and dissatisfied for reasons I’m unable to pinpoint. I’m tired of being broke. I’m tired of cleaning up puddles of pee. I’m anxious to get all of my kids in school so I can devote more time to freelancing, which will hopefully translate into money. Or maybe I need to find a real job where I can do real things without little people following behind me, immediately undoing them.

One afternoon this week, my three-year-old accidentally peed all over the bathroom floor. Thankful he at least made it to the bathroom, I mopped it all up while he changed into clean clothes.  Approximately 20 minutes later, he asked for some lemonade.

By this point in the day, I was desperate for peace and I didn’t care that the baby was playing with plastic sandwich bags in the kitchen; I stepped over them and poured him a cup full of lemonade.

I was just turning around to remind him to be careful when he stepped in the pile of bags and slipped, slinging lemonade into the air and landing on his arm, which I was sure was broken. Blood poured out of his mouth as he screamed. Lemonade dripped into my cabinets and drawers.

His little sister ignored it all and kept playing.

20150430_170626The arm was not broken, and the blood was coming from his tongue. He was fine. Approximately 20 minutes later, he had another accident in the bathroom. This time, he carefully covered the enormous puddle with thin layers of toilet paper.

“I trying to clean it up, Mommy,” he explained when I walked in. A valiant effort, which I thanked him for as I gathered wads of pee-soaked tissue off the floor.

Maybe the real issue is that I am done with childbearing and now I just want to move on to the next phase of my life, where afternoons like the one I just described don’t happen anymore. Don’t say it — I know these challenges will be replaced with bigger ones. I like to believe that I am better-equipped to cope with older kid problems than potty training problems. I am so over potty training problems.

So why can’t I just settle into to life as it is, right now, and be satisfied with it?

I did what Allison suggested, and thought about what my 12-year-old self would think. I can barely remember being 12, so I pulled out some pictures to jog my memory.

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In all my 12-year-old glory.

I had a perm and glasses that covered my whole face. I was embarrassed of my changing body and wore the biggest clothes I could find to cover it up. I was awkward, smart, and a voracious reader. I still played with dolls and I didn’t want my friends to know. I loved music. I looked to be about 40 years old.

So basically, not a lot has changed.

Then I found this picture of me opening a typewriter. I had forgotten that my parents gave me a typewriter the Christmas that I was 12.

20150502_085202~2I was a writer then and I am a writer now. Also, try not to be jealous of my air-brushed sweatshirt.

My 12-year-old self would not only be happy with where I am, she would be in AWE OF IT. I am happily married with three beautiful children, I sometimes write things that get published, and I have discovered contact lenses.

My 12-year-old self would eye roll me for being dissatisfied with where I am. I deserve to be eye rolled.

Amy Poehler wrote in her memoir Yes Please, “Success is filled with MSG,” meaning that no matter how much of it you get, you’re left wanting more. This is the root of my dissatisfaction, in addition to the fact that no matter how many times I clean up pee, more seems to appear.

Maybe my 12-year-old self wouldn’t have minded cleaning up pee. Her knees certainly weren’t as creaky.

(If you liked this post, then you will LOVE I Still Just Want To Pee Alone! Click here to find out more!)

It’s Okay To Just Be Okay.

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Sometimes people call me a “mommy blogger,” a term that makes my skin crawl ONLY because I get lumped together with women who claim to lead perfectly well-mannered lives with their perfectly well-mannered children.

You know, the very same women who shudder to be categorized with women like me.

It’s cool. I get it. “Mommy blogger” can mean a lot of things, which is why I prefer to simply think of myself as a writer who enjoys irreverent humor and the PBS show Peg + Cat because they do math at my (very basic) level.

Mom dating ad

It was interesting to note the people who sidled up to our table at the library on Saturday to get to know the “mommy bloggers,” presumably so we could partner together to repair this broken world.

I could see their wheels turning: Look at those sweet-faced mommy bloggers over there. I bet they would love nothing more than to pimp out my book and counseling services. Together, we can make a difference.

I hope they weren’t too disappointed when they got close enough to hear our riotous discussion of anal sex.

The thing is, I’m totally excited about making a difference in the world. I want to make it okay for moms to just be OKAY.

I have an obscene amount of trash in my van.

THAT IS OKAY.

I wear makeup even when I’m not going anywhere.

THAT IS OKAY.

I have an obsession with making sure my children have trimmed fingernails, but I refuse to clean baseboards.

THAT IS OKAY.

I love my husband and kids but not my thighs.

THAT IS OKAY.

I don’t want anyone to help or change me. I am fine just the way I am, and so are you. Sometimes the simple acknowledgement of needing nothing but acceptance is enough.

I mean … let’s not get carried away.

(If you liked this post, then you should follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!)

Making Bitterness My Bitch.

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Today I took my 3-year-old and my 1-year-old into a public bathroom, not because I wanted to, but because I weighed the options and public bathroom won out over let’s roll the dice and see if we can make it home.

Ironically, because I was so valiant in my effort to keep them from touching every surface within reach, my little girl tripped over my foot and belly-flopped onto the floor of the bathroom stall. Her face may have actually made contact with the tile … it’s unclear because I have already stricken the details from memory.

While I worked to lift her upright and mentally checked into my safe place, my son busied himself with touching every single part of the toilet. Apparently he saw the opportunity to send me over the edge and ran with it.

20150315_161351 20150315_161331

After almost four years of being a full-time stay-at-home-mom, I’m tired. My nerves are raw. I feel frayed, just like the green blanket that my child has rubbed and loved on until there is nothing left but a mangled, nubby wad of material. A friend told me when I first quit working that there would be a honeymoon period, followed by an adjustment period and settling in. And then, I would either love it or I would hate it.

I feel like maybe I’m in a transitional time where I’m not sure how I feel about it. I do know that I need to do a better job of being grateful for the privilege of being home. At the beginning of all this, I told Robbie on a daily basis how grateful I was to him for working so hard and allowing me to focus solely on raising our children. Somehow, over time, that has shifted to bitterness. Four years of cooking, shopping, and cleaning — all things that I used to enjoy — changed me.

What happened?

I have allowed myself to get bogged down in responsibilities, and I have lost sight of the reasons why I wanted to do this job in the first place. And remembering WHY I AM DOING THIS is where I find my peace and my joy.

So, you know what? Screw bitterness. I’m going to make bitterness my bitch.

I am grateful that I am the one who gets to wrangle my children in bathrooms outside of our home … because no one else could scrub their little hands as thoroughly, and with as much love.

I am grateful that I am the one who wipes their noses a million times a day, because someone else might not notice, or worse — let it run freely (shudder).

I am grateful that I oversee everything that happens in this house, because while that may be an exhausting endeavor, I know things are done well here. No one will get Salmonella on my watch.

I am grateful. I am grateful. I am grateful.

When I take the time to think those words, roll them over in my mind, and write them, I realize they are true. I really am grateful. I just don’t take the time to say it enough.

(If you liked this post, then you should follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!)

Joy.

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Daddies, daughters, and pigtails. These are a few of my favorite things.

10615468_10155562442005508_85748497890528073_nNot pictured, but also my favorite:

1. When my 3-year-old quietly listens to me read “Llama Llama Mad At Mama” and then says Mommy, I’m happy at you. It makes me happy when you read to me.

2. When my oldest and I go for a long walk and we have time just to chat about whatever, without interruption.

3. When my children are sleeping.

4. Boxed wine.

I’ve struggled lately to find the joy in my life. I’ve found that happens when I get super busy and overwhelmed with things that do not pertain directly to motherhood, and then my kids are all, “WTF, Mother — pay attention to us,” and so they go lick a bunch of toys at the gym nursery and get sick so I will have no choice but to focus on them.

Yeah.

I don’t have a specific answer to the question of “how can mothers find their joy?” But I know that after a good night’s sleep, a strong cup of coffee — okay, maybe two cups — and a close to this hellish week of sick children, seeing their dimpled faces smiling sure did help.

A lot.

It also helped to feed them 4 meals in a row that required zero effort or preparation on my part, the last of which was a trip to our local Burger King, where we allowed them to mash their faces on every possible surface as I prayed for deliverance from whatever germs resided there.

And wine. Always wine.

Where Are My Earplugs?

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Yesterday, I made the grave mistake of looking at the school calendar. The realization of how quickly the school year will end and Summer Break will begin threatened to choke off my air supply.

I wish I could be one of those moms who gleefully await summertime. Those are likely the same moms who do fun activities with their (calm, obedient) children while I frantically try to keep my (energetic, experimental) kids from setting the house on fire. I wish I could be more optimistic and just have fun, but the truth is that I am always on pins and needles waiting for one of them to get seriously injured.

I love my children, but they exhaust me. Does that mean that I’m not cut out for motherhood? I chose to be a stay-at-home-mom. WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! Am I too uptight? Am I doing it all wrong?

I’m admitting out loud, right now, that motherhood is ass hard. That does not mean it’s as hard as my ass, which isn’t hard at all. This is not a literal statement. I mean to say that IT IS SO HARD THAT THERE ISN’T AN ADEQUATE WORD, SO I ADDED “ASS” IN FRONT OF IT. If you can’t get on board with that, then I don’t know what to do with you.

I make this proclamation after a long stretch of parenting issues that individually aren’t that bad, but added all together at once are just a lot. I’m exhausted. I feel like I have nothing else to give, and yet — there it is, another snot bubble on the horizon. There’s another person who can’t figure out how to get his underwear right side in and needs help because he cannot possibly put his underwear on if they are inside out.

At night, when all of the children are tucked in bed asleep, after the middle child has been taken to the bathroom to pee so he doesn’t have an accident in his bed, and I have spent an adequate amount of time with that strange man who lives in the house with me, I insert my ear plugs and pray that whatever rest I get will be enough to get me through the next day.

Today, when I sunk to a low point and looked at the clock for the umpteenth time to see that it was still not 5 p.m., something snapped me out of it. I got a moment of beauty.

Our baby, the same one who tries to stick her head in the oven on an almost-daily basis, learned how to stack blocks.

And I was there to see it.

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So yes, I would be lying if all I did was talk about the beauty of motherhood. It’s not mostly beautiful. It’s mostly painful and frustrating and uncomfortable and scary and tiring, with moments of beauty sprinkled in — just enough to make it worth it, but not so much that it’s easy.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The best part about being a mom is that those sprinkles are all you really need to push you to the next level. My little block-stacker spends most of her time undoing everything I’ve done: she puts important mail in the trash, pulls clothes out of baskets and contents out of cabinets, and tries to systemically empty every box and bin in the house. But damnit, SHE CAN STACK.

I’m a proud, exhausted mama. Now … where are my earplugs?

Diagnosis: Mother.

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Today I realized that my 3-year-old isn’t as attached to his special blanket anymore. I realized that I have never rocked my 21-month-old to sleep, because she is the third child and in this house, the third child gets a bedtime kiss and dumped into her crib without ceremony.

Now that my oldest eschews rocking and my middle only lets me do it sometimes, I WANT TO ROCK SOMEONE BEFORE BED, DAMN IT.

Motherhood makes me feel like a crazy person. In fact, I am a crazy person.

To prove my point, I have created a visual aid using a family picture of us from October 2012, two months after The Great Negotiation.

10-14-2012 2

Because everything about this picture screams “WE NEED MORE CHILDREN!”

What’s The Great Negotiation? That was the time I spent months trying to convince my poor husband that I wasn’t done having children and we needed more, despite the fact that we were struggling on one income and had two very challenging boys — one of whom was not quite a year old. I felt like we totally needed to throw one more baby into the mix. That made sense to me.

This is how I know that mothers have something deeply, psychologically wrong with them.

The Great Negotiation took place during date night at Outback Steakhouse. My husband eventually wore down and said “FINE. But I have to get a vasectomy before the baby is born.” And I said, “FINE. I’m ordering a beer.”

Less than a year later, our daughter was born.

Less than a year after that, I regretted allowing the vasectomy. Because I have a mental illness.

It’s called Mother.

Doctor’s Orders.

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It’s Friday night, which means it’s time for Virtual Happy Hour! My children are glued to glowing screens and my husband just ran to the store because I have PMS and want to drink chocolate syrup directly from the bottle.

DON’T YOU DARE JUDGE ME.

This thing holds 25 OUNCES. Thank you for my favorite glass, Kate!

This thing holds 25 OUNCES. Thank you for my favorite glass, Kate!

If I was a true professional with professional-grade tools, I would have edited out my facial blemishes. But I’m not a professional, nor am I a responsible adult, so I’m just going to sit here with my enormous glass of wine and zitty face and chill.

Today I downed two cups of coffee, went to Zumba, came home, logged onto Facebook … and saw my napping body plastered all over social media. That was jolting. Modern Mommy Madness made the Today.com list AGAIN! Now the whole nation will know the miracle of Napilates.

To all of the tired women everywhere: just lie down. As long as you have your workout wear on, it’s all good. You’re totally working out, it just looks like you’re not. If someone wakes you, tell them to HUSH. You’re EXERCISING.

In other news, Robbie has high blood pressure. This comes as no surprise, as I have witnessed him consume more vegetables in the past 6 months than he consumed in our entire 12-year relationship. Even still, it’s upsetting. I married a man two years younger than me. I didn’t sign up for hypertension.

I called and made him a doctor’s appointment, because what I may lack in bedside manner I make up for in pragmatism. I nervously waited for him to come home, to hear the awful truth of his situation. He walked in with a very serious look on his face.

“Well?? What did the doctor say?” I asked nervously.

He took a deep breath. I waited.

“She told me the only thing that will make me better is to get more blow jobs from my wife.”

I immediately said it was time for Napilates.