Motherhood: Life in the Trenches

You don’t think you will have to tell your 4 year old, “Do not dump sand out of your shoe on to your baby brother’s head.” or argue with him about the importance of washing his hands after going poop in the toilet and dipping his hands in the toilet water. (they were clean – it was water) You don’t think you are gonna make so many mistakes, and yell at your sweet boys when they don’t deserve it but you’re just impatient. You don’t think the dog is gonna poop on the living room floor and your baby is gonna find it before you do. These are not the things you imagine as a newly pregnant mom watching other people push around baby strollers.

But somehow it happens, just like banana shmangle on your clean black shirt, it’s inevitable. You are no longer the master of your universe. Oh you thought you were. You had it together once. You could get some stuff done and be pretty sweet and go for days without yelling at a soul or having to repent. Then come the children. I don’t know about you but I’ve been reduced to a frazzled, emotionally tender lump of hormonal ticking time bomb than can go off at any moment without warning. Now mind you, I can’t blame the children completely for this, but I’de say a good 98 percent it is their fault.

Before I had children I thought that moms were people who wore jeans with waistbands that were too high and spent all their time shuffling around the kitchen. Well, it turns out I wasn’t too far off on those points, but what I never realized is that moms are superheros in disguise. They may wear out of style jeans (only because they have no time or money for shopping anymore, or because they change shape every two months and have given up in favor of wearing a stretchy mumu) instead of a cape, but they are superheros none the less. They cure illness, bring peace, make a set of four walls into something intangibly wonderful – a home. They are on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the foreseeable future. And they are irreplaceable.

I think being a mom is the toughest job on earth. (Granted I haven’t tried many other real tough jobs such as emergency room physician or president of the United States, but even the ER doc gets a few nights a week off to sleep and the president has a staff of over 400 to take care of his needs.)

Sometimes when we think about being a mom we feel like it’s an under appreciated and thankless job that is of little lasting value. We might not say this, but we can feel it. It’s true what they say, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. When you look around our society so many of the problems are due to a breakdown of the family unit. So much of the societal decline I’ve seen in my lifetime seems to be in direct relationship to the “me generation” of people who pursued their own interests instead of their family. If so much can be done to hurt families in just one generation, then it stands to reason that one generation that is committed to sacrifice and lay down their lives for the future can bring just as much positive change to the next generation. That is why I feel that being a wife and mother is such a high and holy calling. It may look like changing poopy diapers, breaking up fights and dealing with whiny people all day, but it is so much more. It is a nation altering business, and if you are called to it count it an honor.

Just because it is an honor to be stationed on the home front doesn’t make it easy. That is why in the future, I hope to post on here words of encouragement for moms. It can get messy in the trenches and we need to remember that we are not alone. We need to be reminded not to grow weary in doing good and not to be surprised when trials come. If nothing else we need to know that someone else’s child ate dog poop and they survived.