Mommyhell

I started this blog years ago and wrote like five posts. Ironically in the years since I've become a professional writer who still cannot spell or self-edit. Please for the love of Jesus and humanity can some kind soul show up to copy edit my life. Lord knows I need it and I am by no stretch of any imagination a religious girl.

In the years since I've started this blog I had a baby (indeed I have), moved cross country, ditched my beleaguering "career" as a social worker and become no closer to any sort of domestic success than I ever was. Frankly, I've given up. I've found a form of acceptance that is delightful and real - I've discovered I don't care if I am good at being at home. Martha no longer fills me with remorse for what I cannot do, but instead intrigues me in a listless way about how much I don't care about arranging flowers or successful dinner parties.

I will always be the girl with mismatched furniture and pots. I will always burn the canned soup after I turn the burner up too high and walk away to read a magazine. I will always forget to drop off the drycleaning, think I have dropped it off, show up to pick it up, freak out and think someone else stole it, only to find it under a hundred things in my trunk. And I would much rather watch Real Housewives of Hell than organize or clean anything. Oh and don't even get me started on the sheer horror that is crafts.

In truth I always wanted to be a writer and I never thought I could be. I still want to write a romance novel, which like many novels has been started and abandoned at least a hundred times. Someday I will knock Danielle Steele off her indomitable throne.

It seems funny to me that I ever considered creating a blog about homemaking and cooking, two things which I have never had an interest. I do have an interest in reading and investigating, eating, doing yoga, and buying clothes I can't afford, but really it's all inconsequential.

Recently I've started thinking about something else I am doing that I never really had an interest in: parenting. Yes, you've read that correctly. I never really thought about becoming a parent. It was a nebulous idea that some day in the future I may procreate, but I never seriously thought about it coming to fruition (much like that romance novel!) Making babies turned out to be a lot easier to accomplish than writing a book.

One night I decided I should get pregnant, I remember drunkenly confessing this to my husband who said "sure" and then three months later with zero planning, I was. Forty-one weeks, one firing, one cross-country move with three plants, four pets, and a trunk full of vintage couture, later we arrived at the hospital where I pushed out a baby and then I was a mother.

I gained 50 lbs when I was pregnant. I hated pretty much every moment of my pregnancy experience and labor was sweet blissful relief compared to the ten months I spent hating my rotundness and wishing more than anything for heels and a cocktail. I never had any glorious dreams of an amazing birth story where I labored drug free until my sweet angel of an infant was placed in my still lucid hands and we cuddled beneath the stars, while my hair still looked great and my cheeks were flushed with joy and successful effort. Fuck, I want four Advils for a splinter and I wail like a baby if I cut myself shaving. Good lord I wasn't going to go no drugs, doulas, massage oils and grunting around like a wild beast shrieking about how empowered I was.

Seriously labor is disgusting, but it's a helluva alot better than lugging around a baby in your uterus while you sob in the grocery store because you can't bend over. Did I mention I insisted on wearing heels to a wedding at 30 weeks - I had pregnancy denial in the hugest way (pun fully intended).

Another thing I was in denial over, was the massive quantities of weight I had gained and the belief that having a child wouldn't change my life all that much but it would fill me with this blissful peace and uwavering patience. Fuck no, that didn't happen.

Well, I didn't change all that much personality wise. I'm still a complete bitch when I haven' had coffee, I still snap at everything (even my child which fills me with shame and guilt too palpable to accurately describe) and lately I have taken to praying to any God willing to listen for sanity and strength to get through the day without yelling at my now sixteen-month old. I feel like a bad mother every moment of every day, because I'm not patient. I hate being a stay at home mom and I really, really, really wish I loved it.

I'm just gonna put it out there: Good lord parenthood is hard. Exhausting, hard, frustrating, and seriously disappointing. Disappointing from a personal perspective because you never realized how much you suck until you feel yourself sucking as a mother to a person who loves you as life itself.

I love my son more than anyone and as much as I love my husband, but in a completely different way. The thought of anything negative or painful befalling him infuriates me and all the myths about parenthood are true. You would kill a person in the blink of the eye if they so much as got near your child. You would rip their arm off and beat them with it. Motherhood makes you visceral and wily and scarily animalistic. In many ways.

The most disappointing thing about being a parent is that I am still essentially my chaotic, moodly, self-involved self who needs a lot of alone time and has had serious difficulty adjusting to the fact that I am relied upon 24/7 by a person I love so much it hurts, but who frustrates the hell out of me.

I realized I had never put in a tampon in front of someone in my whole life - until I had a baby. Now my beautiful son has witnessed that act multiple times and please lord do not let him be scarred and turn into a fetishist because of my improper modesty.

I worry constantly that I am screwing him up and really I probably am, because well I'm me. It's the lack of patience that really upsets me the most.

Here's a true story. Today, I was having a break down. I was exhausted (I am working full-time from home while staying home with my son). all I wanted to do was unwind with some crap TV while he played in the living room. Could he entertain himself? Not for one moment. In the longest day in recorded history he screamed and I screamed back. He intentionally sought negative attention, which I responded to much to my guilt and dismay and then he grabbed my coffee cup scalding me with coffee, after wacking me in the head with a wooden toy. I screamed what the fuck and flung the toy across the room and then sobbed, begging him to leave me alone for five minutes because I was losing my mind.

When I confessed this parental sin to my husband, he was shocked and frankly pretty appalled that I said "fuck" to our one-year old. Am I alone in this terrible lack of patience and insipid lack of desire to nurture all day? Please tell me I am not?

I'm pretty sure my son has already considered contacting the authorities. I have many sobbing meltdowns weekly. Truthfully, I'm just not cut out for any of it. Is anyone?

Do mommy goddesses exist? The beautiful, ethereal women who have five children and relish in the non-stop poop diapers and neediness of children? I've come to realize the only truly blissful mothers are those with nannies.

Every day I promise I will be different - this will be my epiphany. I will not lose my patience or my temper. I will not take out my inability to have time to myself on my son, whom I chose to bring into this world and desperately love. I do not want my son to hate me nor do I want him to resent me. I mean I know he will, but I want to lessen the extent.

And each week I have what I term a dirty reds day. You know the days. You just can't take it. Nothing makes you happy. You hate your life and it's no one's fault. It's the days when you question all your decisions, when you wonder why and what the heck, when you just want to lie down, be alone, and eat junk food while watching Tabatha's Salon Takeover Marathons. Inevitably on those days escapism alludes me, I am still me in my hovel of a house with a half-done kitchen and unfinished floors, with my son running around begging me for attention.

My son is very independent and so am I. Ironically we are very similar in demeanor. When I have a bad day, naturally he wants the most from me. On those dirty red days, like today, I am filled with guilt for my inability to keep my sanity in check while I fling the remote across the room and sob about not being left alone for more than five seconds to eat or use the bathroom. And then I cry for being a bad mother.

Here's the thing, we're taught that motherhood is the greatest thing on earth. It is. That is without a doubt. But it's also the biggest struggle you'll endure and every day is an emotional calamity. I will be so annoyed with my son for breaking the lamp, throwing food on the floor, and pulling my hair after I have asked him countless times not to while demonstrating "gentle pets" and then in the next moment I love him so much I can't take it. This is of course after I am wracked with guilt over yelling at him and begging him to please stop.

Motherhood is not the greatest experience until you get a little distance from it. Hence the importance of nannies. In the daily grind, motherhood is awful. It's all-consuming, exhausting, and devoid of self containment, but when you reflect on it after the fact when your child is asleep and you've had a glass of wine and 30 minutes alone it's the greatest thing on earth. Motherhood is only fun in snippets; most of it is a hot mess of wishful thinking of what you have given up for this savage love and envy at your childless friends, not only for their figures but their ability to go to Vegas untethered for the weekend to drink and shop.

Motherhood is an act of absolute manipulation. It truly is. And the fun and joy you are supposed to experience from parenting comes in retrospect. Motherhood changes you in subtle ways that make it difficult to discern if you've changed at all and it changes you in drastic ones that are readily apparent. The guilt is the biggest one. The worry and anxiety that are always niggling under the surface, threatening to undo things. I get this feeling when I walk alone at night - even in parking lots of malls. What if something happens to me and my child suffers as a result? What if I turn my back and something happens to my child? What if my child doesn't know I love him?

Motherhood affects your every moment of life and that's one of the things that makes it tragically unfun. I know that I must change my approach and learn patience. I know I must stop focusing on the immediate and start remembering my child cannot be a victim of my quest for sanity and a snack. Motherhood is fun when you look on the surface, but when you read between the lines it's a lot of mashed bananas and shit. But it's also glee, amazement, and sheer audacity that sex made this happen. Really, that's insane to think about.

It is my greatest hope that I will redeem myself as a mother and also to accept that like anything else I will have faults. I am not a natural homemaker, and frankly I don't think I'm the maternal type and it's a struggle.

I believe it's a consequence of my generation. A generation of women who went to college, had freedom, independence and careers, who suddenly found themselves at home with a baby that didn't care if you could debate the merits of Faucault vs. Baudrillard. Our generation comes from a place of such independence and free spirit. We are women raised to know we are capable, smart, and interested in that capability and motherhood is not about the conscience action it's about the instinctual and the natural. Perhaps that's the problem - we expect there to be a place to raise up to. In careers you can improve, make more money, climb the latter, or move to a different line of work. There is no mobility or tactile reward (or even affirmation) as a mother.

That's perhaps what I must accept - that motherhood has no affirmatives. There is nothing but the nebulous and trying to over-think it, over-feel it, and expect too much is leaving me bland and unfulfilled. And worse it is doing my child a disservice to heap the responsibility of my happiness and contentment on his adorable little shoulders.

My son loves me because I exist. To him I am the world. I am his mother and for now one half of his everything. What more should I want? Intelligent conversation? The time and space to leisurely browse the web with no one to bother me for hours? The freedom to have an off day where I feel like poop and sit around? The opportunity to go shopping for as long as I want with no deadline and no place to go? to not be needed or relied upon for simply a moment? Well it's not possible. And I need to accept that change.

Parents give up everything and it's the little things that you don't think will be forsaken. And it's interesting because it's very worth it and also nearly impossible to let go of.

Tomorrow is a new day. My son loves me as much tomorrow as he did yesterday, despite my meltdowns, selfishness, and bad attitude (oh and my lack of make-up). But if you continue to take motherhood for granted soon your children will notice and that is a feeling I cannot bear. So tomorrow I resume with my vigilance to be more patient and accepting. And hopefully I will achieve. And soon enough my son will call me out on my shit, tell me to grow up, and let me know that I'm annoying him too. Oh teenagers. :-)