20 Fascinating Facts About My Life as a Mother

1.) I have a Dora the Explorer toothbrush. It is not one that I bought thinking that Baby Girl would use it. I bought it for myself. 2.) I am big into reading books to kids and a huge victory for me is seeing my child sitting for long whiles "reading" her picture books.

3.) I do not feel even one iota of relief when I drop my daughter off at daycare. It has been 3 weeks and I am still weighted with guilt, plagued with fear, and it is all I can do not to keep myself from rushing back in I'LL SAVE YOU, BABY GIRL!!! COME TEACH ENGLISH COMP WITH ME!!!

4.) I do find myself reacting to certain of Baby Girl's behaviors in the same way my mother reacted to mine. It is frightening, but inevitable I feel.

5.) When I put my daughter in "The Naughty Spot" which is the bottom step of a staircase in the hallway, I tell her sternly why she is sitting there. She thinks the whole concept and particularly my face and tone of voice are absolutely hilarious.

6.) I have grown to like Tubby Time. It used to be punishment, but my mother-in-law caused Baby Girl to appreciate her tubbies, and I cannot thank her enough. My child is not only happier, but cleaner, too.

7.) I don't mind changing diapers, getting up in the middle of the night, quieting Baby Girl in public, or countermanding tantrums. What I really do not like, though, is putting her to bed. She is a talented stall artist and I have no patience for it. On the nights when my husband works, I am mock-praying for Nanny 9-1-1 to come and take over.

8.) I became a less obsessive person as a mother. I think one has no choice. You can either choose to think about whether or not the girl at the gym was sneering at you because your yoga pants were circa 1992 or if she thinks you didn't wipe down the treadmill after your work-out YOU TOTALLY DID, or you can go about your work-out because it is the most important 45 minutes of of your day.

9.) I make popcorn on the stove for dinner probably 5-6 nights/month. Sometimes it's the only thing I have my wits about me to make after I put the Stall Artist to bed. I used to think it was sad, but now I think I like popcorn dinner.

10.) When I see extremely obese children that I presume are under the age of 6 or 7, my blood begins to boil and I think wildly about prosecuting the parents for child abuse. I understand why it happens, but it absolutely incenses me.

11.) Thoughts of adoption frequently gnaw at me.

12.) My kid occasionally eats candy. She can find and unwrap a Reese cup in a way that amazes.

13.) The best material gift my husband gave me as a mother is the toddler seat for my bike. It has been one of the most liberating and fun new toys ever, a gift that keeps on giving.

14.) I totally have a mom booty now and I try not to think about it or else I get depressed.

15.) I feel that becoming a mother has leveled the playing field with my husband a bit. Not that we compete against one another, but I think he respects my authority in the home more now and I can appreciate the success he has had in his career without feeling envious.

16.) I am not a gear parent. I am not into acquiring gear, toys, clothes, etc. I find it burdensome and overwhelming.

17.) I would like 4 children as long as they would be guaranteed to believe their mother is perfect and potty train themselves. Since those are not guarantees, I think 2 is more likely.

18.) I hope to live internationally when my children are school-aged.

19.) I believe the call of Proverbs to train up a child in the way that he should go so that he may not depart from it later in life. But again, I want a guarantee that all those sabbath school classes are going to make an imprint!! This is a huge struggle for my faith.

20.) Standing over my daughter's crib at night when she is sleeping is one of the most profoundly awe-inspiring experiences that I cannot believe I get to behold it every day. I imagine it is like owning oceanfront property or being married to a massage therapist. The benefits of proximity are just mind-blowing, and one feels unspeakably fortunate to be able to experience this blessing every single day.

Confessions of a SAHM

My time as a full-time SAHM is coming to a close. An opportunity to help edit a community newspaper, as well as a teaching position at a local college have presented themselves, and I have seized them. As I transition into this new lifestyle, one with income potential and a dress code other than yoga pants before noon, I want to reflect on the experience of being a full-time caretaker of my daughter for the last eighteen months. The following is a pretty complete list of what I have learned as a Stay at Home Mother. I cannot speak to anyone else's experience, but I can confidently say that this has been the most surprising experience of my life.

- I was a SAHM 6 days a week and most nights for 18 months. My husband works 6 days a week and 1-2 overnights/week. This is just to offer a framework for how much facetime I have had with my daughter. - There is nothing that can prepare a person to go into work on a Tuesday, work a full day, come home that evening and have one's water break at 2 a.m. and to know that one would never go back to that same desk, to that same work, to that same life ever again.

- There is nothing that can prepare a person to usher in her role WHICH BEGAN FOR ME 44 HOURS LATER as a full-time caretaker of a person I had never met, one that doesn't speak or make eye contact, one that, in fact, needs everything done for her. There is nothing that can prepare a person for that radical transition that can literally happen overnight, but support, love, and a stocked freezer helped immensely.

- Breastfeeding was easy and enjoyable for me. I did it for 10 months and can only say that, for me, it was one of my favorite parts of being a SAHM.

- That said, during the first few months when I was feeding constantly, my body felt like it was going through some kind of cruel boot camp. It was cold outside, my boobs were leaking inside, and I had to rinse out cloth diapers all day. I don't miss that.

- There were many weeks in the first six months when I felt like I should be doing more.  I never knew what *more* looked like, but talking to other stay-at-home parents helped me get through those weeks of feeling sort of anonymous and unpurposeful.

- People will always find a way of unintentionally denigrating the role of SAHM. Usually they will ask you, "So, you just stay at home with her?" They usually mean, So, caring for your daughter is your full-time gig, right? But they usually put it in a way that is condescending. It doesn't bother me because I don't let it, especially as I am sure I asked the same questions once upon a time ago.

- As a SAHM, I became a library tramp. I can also tell you where there is a public restroom in every neighborhood of every city in our county.

- I also became a coffee addict. I was never much into coffee, but sometimes it seems like the only lovely little ministration that I offer myself on a daily basis, and that's probably kind of sad.

- Most of my disagreements with my husband revolve around Where He Puts Things. The most stressful moments of my day are not when Baby Girl falls and hurts herself or when she screams in her car seat when I am lost. The most distressing times are when the clutter content in our home is at a premium and I cannot find things, e.g. car keys, eyeglasses. I can exercise the patience of the saints all day, but it is that last Lego that I step on that makes me say, WHO WANTS TO DIE????

- I have never resented my child. I have resented the fact that her naps have not been long enough for me to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish.

- I was never a phone person until I became a mother. I used to stress that I had nothing to tell my parents when they called for our weekly phone chat, and now I am the one who is prolonging the conversation.

- Even since my daughter was very young, I have treated my job as SAHM very seriously, almost to the point of delusion. I have acted as if I was running a pre-school for one. When she was only a few months old and not very interactive, I kept us on a weekly schedule, with "field trips" planned for each day. I would tell myself that this was my job and I honestly think it helped to get through the monotony of those early infant months.

- Life is about choices, and yet this doesn't mean I don't need to be reminded of the choices I have made. Whenever I resented my husband because he got to leave the home to go to work, I have had to remind myself that this was a choice that we made and one that is not subject to reexamination right now.

- I now understand why people who stay at home all day can still have messy homes. You are not only "using" your house and all of its equipment all day, but in my case, I seriously feel punished, like some Cinderella whipping girl, whenever I have to do the dishes more than twice/day. I oftentimes have a sink full of dishes or a floor full of clutter because I have already cleaned it twice that day and there is no one to help me. I refuse to clean more because I feel that I am being punished unjustly. It's delusional, but it's how I feel.

- I have become a more deliberate money spender as a SAHM. I don't think it's hard to save money if you don't go to places where you will be tempted to spend money.

- Even though I haven't had an income, I feel very informed on our finances and make a point to see where our spending is for the month.

- Being a SAHM has been easy to the end that my husband has been incredibly supportive of me and has few expectations of when things get done in terms of cooking and housework. I do still feel guilty that he comes home and has to help with some cleaning, but he is awesome like that.

- The worst day of my life as a SAHM was during a snowstorm when both the baby and I were sick (could not keep an ounce of water down, throwing up, etc.) and my husband had to HAD to go to work. I called every person in town that I knew to come and assist me, but because of the snow storm, no one could come. It was a dark, desperate day and I really longed for family close by.

- Otherwise, I have enjoyed raising our little family on our own. I enjoy family visits on our turf or theirs, but I am not a person that takes assistance or advice very readily. I think as our daughter gets older, I will long to have family closer, but for now, it works for us.

- I do, however, have a group of friends in my neighborhood whose generosity is fierce and overwhelming at times. I could not have finished grad school nor be as capable as I am without them. They are such a blessing to me.

- Because I am with my daughter 6 days a week, I try to sit back on Saturdays when my husband is home, and let him take care of watching her at church. I've received some flack for this, as our church friends only see us once a week and think, based on that, that I am an uninvolved mother. This experience has taught me that we generally only see people through a very small portal, and we should remember this before we judge.

- My favorite things about being a SAHM have been: going to the pool in the early afternoons, taking countless stroller walks, mom n' tot yoga class at the YMCA, Friday morning pancakes at our neighborhood cafe with my mama friends, being able to take off for weeks at a time to visit family, freelance reporting from home, reading books with my daughter, being the first to hear her try out new words and phrases, getting to snuggle her whenever I want, working out at the gym and grocery shopping during non-peak hours.

- My least favorite parts about being a SAHM have been: the constant feeling of not being able to complete something, the constant feeling of not being more proactive in nurturing my daughter's development, missing that adult interaction, living with clutter.

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Gonna miss seeing these kats as much as I do now...

Review: It Sucked and Then I Cried

I've been a fan of dooce for a long time, and the irony is, I probably became a fan around the time that she began gathering fodder for her book which I am giving a semi-mediocre rating herein. You see, I guess the fault was all mine. In buying her book, I thought it would just be more of the Heather that we love, telling a story that we all know. That crazed yet eloquent recovering Mormon out in Utah land going all hyperbolic about childbirth and post-partum with a few other anecdotes thrown in to make me feel as though we are BFFs and I'm (by reading her book) the only one to whom she's intimating these things.

But what I got was a story that I more or less already knew, with a somewhat diluted version of early motherhood that did make me laugh but more made me a little bit unimpressed. And the truth is that I am often impressed by Heather's writing and her original insights. I just found the voice here a bit unlikable, a lot full of vitriol (and not even in a funny way, kind of in the way that sometimes Rush Limbaugh and the QVC salespeople are scary). There were parts that I was full-on LOLing, but having been through my own pregnancy and birth and post-partum funk, I found the tone of the book super whiney at times, with very little perspective and sometimes the humor was just, as Boston youth are wont to say, "fawcin' it."

So my final words on this book review are Should Have Waited for Paperback. Anyone want to buy my hardcover?