4.12.2022

It’s not a secret but no one tells you that the hardest part about being a mom has little to do with your child[ren] at all. It’s the other aspects of your title. Balancing your work, maintaining your relationships, navigating your hormones, battling with your anxieties, working through your guilt, agonizing over parenting decisions or misteps. Not to mention the isolation that tends to creep in when you least expect it. Those are the hard parts. It’s not your kid. It’s you. Managing yourself—that is the part that takes the work. I’m learning and evolving every day. I have days when I kill it and days when it nearly kills me. When I say motherhood is hard, it is. Loving my baby and being his mom is not. That’s the easy part.

—@thenerdyboho

I recently started listening to a popular podcast called Crime Junkie; the two hosts feel like friends I comfortably know in the private pockets of my imagination, and their voices are a welcoming distraction that make anything mundane (like vacuuming or blow drying my hair) a little less of a drag.

The creator just gave birth to her first baby, and at 39 weeks, she posted on social media, writing how she missed who she was before she got pregnant, and asked her followers when they began to feel like themselves again, post-baby.

And thousands of women wrote things like:

Not until they become more self-sufficient. Maybe around 6-7? I know that doesn't sound optimistic.

Ummm can't say I have yet. Promoted to mom 13 years ago.

Never. I miss the old me.

Still waiting...10 months later.

Scrolling through these comments, I shook my head in disbelief. Ten months later still waiting? Who is going to tell that woman she can never return to the "before her?"

And then a gem of a mother/author named Jill Krause wrote this in the comments:

Motherhood is a continual metamorphosis. Just like life. Don't look back; grow in the the next version of you. She's waiting and she's awesome.

I smiled, feeling thankful to understand this, while wishing more women did.

But until the newborn dust of Forrest settled, I didn't fully comprehend just how continual that metamorphosis is; the way you perpetually transform with each child. You're already a mother—that's the difficult, initiating change. But you somehow become more, even when you thought you couldn't.

It just seems that somehow, maybe even within the past month, life has gotten bigger. We've outgrown my car. Our spare bedroom is now signed and sold to our fifth member. The basement is waiting to be finished. It all keeps coming, and as much as I always promised myself I wouldn't be onto the next thing, the way you always were, I've slipped right into your prior place, as if into a hollow pair of upright pants.

And they're a tailor fit.

Ever since I was a teenager, I've blamed you for how stressed you always were. But I can finally understand (while putting into perspective you had four children), and simply try to handle it all a little differently, no matter how easily your ways come to me by default.

In Forrest's first six months of life, my mind's capacity has grown to the very edge of gently threaded seams. There are some days when just one more task feels as if the stuffing that keeps me in vertical positioning will burst and puff out onto the floor. And other days I feel proud of the way I take care of myself and the kids and my animals and manage to remain best friends with the partner I'm around all day because of his work from home job.

My baby boy is a load. He's at the top of the charts for both weight and height and carrying him is no easy feat. He's still not completely sitting up without help, so like a game of musical chairs, he switches from his swing, to the jumper, to the exersaucer, lasting about ten or fifteen minutes in each varying constraint. And in those windowed morning minutes, I pick out Everett's school clothes, make the upstairs beds, quickly fold a load of laundry, eat some toast, or maybe even sit on the toilet for four minutes, scrolling through Pinterest at spring decor ideas I'll never get around to.

He is jolly and sleep trained and watches his brother and sister play in mesmerizing stares. You can see in his eyes, the way they innocently sparkle like deep, glimmering periwinkles, that he knows Everett and Marion are his built-in best friends for life.

Everett loves being a kindergartner. However, I miss him—his littleness. Kindergarten has seemingly taken my oldest baby and turned him into a young boy—one who has independently decided he wants to buy lunch like his friends and somehow steps off that big yellow bus each afternoon, having experienced an entire day whose details are unknown to me.

He's exhausted when he gets home at 4 p.m. I get whatever 2% is left within him. His spirit seems drained and he cannot listen or remember to do simple things, like pick-up his book bag. After washing his hands and some quick hellos, he goes straight up to his room and closes the door, a signal to Marion that he wants left alone. This independent time seems to somewhat re-set him; he plays with trucks or sometimes even reads in bed, without a shirt, like he's an old man taking a much needed break.

After the chaos of dinner has settled, he and Marion play for an hour, disappearing to the upstairs until it's time for a bath. And later, once he's clean and cuddled in his covers, he is calm and returns to himself. This is when I lay in his bed and he tells me all about his day—like who he ate lunch with, what games were played in gym class. And sometimes, with seriousness in his eyes, he'll ask me questions, wanting to know what it means to be married or if he was in my belly the was baby Forrest was.

Sometimes I think I prefer my six-month-old to the almost six-year-old that has become Everett—this school-age terrain is unwelcoming to me and I'm fighting it, like its his fault he’s growing and changing and saying strange things to me like, “Get it girl, get it,” a phrase I assume he learned from friends. I must surrender and remember what Aunt Sara used to tell when I’d call her during his newborn months, crying as a new and young overwhelmed mom: babies don't keep.

Marion is fun and beautiful and she and I are true companions. When we go into our two favorite stores, Target or Home Goods, she's dramatic in every aisle, pointing out pretty hair accessories or the discounted candles she insists on smelling. I know I've said it before when it comes to her, but if I could keep her at this age forever, I would. She's independent enough to take care of herself while I put Forrest down for a nap, but still needs me to buckle her in the stroller and fix her hair—little things that I've seen disappear with Everett, so I know to be both aware and thankful, even though buckles are the vain of my existence.

She speaks clearly but still has words that are unique to her. "Mommy, did you change my sheeps (sheets)?" she asked me the other day. And she loves to go out and feed the deer a scoop of corn each afternoon. She'll put on dress-up shoes and scuffle over the gravel driveway to the edge of the woods, scattering what she calls "unicorn" for her woodland friends. An hour later, a doe and her two fawns lightly prance down our driveway as if they're members of the family, coming home to feast on Marion's provided dinner.

And each morning, while I utilize my "self-care" time slot during Forrest's first nap (meditating, journaling, doing my makeup, etc), Marion likes to watch the classic Disney movies, like Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella. She calls Sleeping Beauty, "Sleeping Scooty," and Chris and I laugh every time she requests it, because Scooty is Forrest's nickname.

I recently pulled Marion out of pre-school because drop-off and pick-up was disrupting Forrest's schedule. Last month I think all my post-birth hormones officially wore off—the proof was the shedding of my hair, which even the third time through, left me horrified each morning when I showered and saw what looked like a small rodent resting on the drain.

As you remember, the week that Forrest came home, Everett had just started kindergarten and Marion began school. And I scooped the weight of these demands right into my hands, and dealt the cards and got it done. And then I slowly started to become overwhelmed. I could feel it in my body each morning, especially on the days Marion had school. I assumed this was just life with three kids, unable to figure out where to "cut the fat," so to speak.

When I initially signed her up for the 2's program, I inteded a break; two and half hours that I could be home alone, with "just" a baby. But that's not how it works, between getting her ready, packing up the car, waiting in the drop-off line, coming home and getting Forrest down. Then an hour and a half later, waking Forrest up, getting into the car, walking into the school with him in-tow, waiting in a room with other mothers who love small-talk (which I find uncomfortable), retrieving Marion, buckling carseats, and sprinting home to make her lunch and spoon-feed Forrest before the next round of naps.

It was too much. And it felt unnecessary because she still has two remaining years of pre-school.

I know I'll be facing this all again in September, but I switched schools, registering her for the program Everett attended, because the drop-off/pick-up process is much easier. And Forrest will be older.

So as the weather has been slowly turning, we've been taking walks with the double stroller more, and honestly she loves it, asking each day if we can go. And we'll swing on swings and eat snacks and it's just fun and easy and I'm proud I drew a line where one could be drawn, claiming my peace over "pretty school" (Marion's pronunciation).

Any opportunity I get to lighten my routine, I need to take it, even if I feared the pre-school director would think I was weak and selfish for pulling her out, apparently incapable to handle three kids. I know that's a made-up assumption in my head, but I thought it.

I feel like you would've "pushed through" this major inconvenience, but I also recognized the need to tell myself it's okay to not do everything right now. That's what I meant at the beginning of this entry when I said I can try to handle it all a little differently than you. I can try to brush the excess instead of getting satisfaction from accomplishing it. Because that was your high—that was your thrill, doing it all. And sometimes I believe cancer came into your vibrant young body because you did it all.

Or maybe I'm just delaying the inevitable. Maybe life with plural kids is unbound in chaos and I'm kidding myself if I think I can ever be different from you.

While life is naturally getting fuller, each day I am consciously choosing how I can remain resistant-free, meaning not go against myself. To remain in the flow, and happy and appreciative. And aside from keeping my kids alive, that is my goal each day.

I owe it to you; to be more calm and to live just a little bit more gently than you did. And if "dropping out" of her pre-school makes me feel like I'm doing just that, then so be it.

Finding calm has gotten more difficult since adding Forrest to our family and I'll never perfect it but the beautiful thing is, every morning, I get to try again. I get to try to be happier and kinder and more here with my kids and enjoy these days that will surely pass and never repeat. With Everett and even Marion, I thought those baby phases would never end. And instead of fully understanding how fleeting it all was, during a particularly challenging week I'd just think, I have to do this again? Because I knew I wanted more children.

Well here I am, doing it again, as Forrest irritably whines from the tiny teeth that are stubbornly popping up in his mouth like dandelions in spring. But this time is different, because I very well know these days are fruitfully fleeting, and two years from now, I'll be looking at pictures of when he was this little, and feel my arms ache for his bundle of weight.

Because babies don't keep.

And it's different because I think he's my last.

Maybe more on that next time.