You Load Sixteen Tons and What Do You Get...

See, that thar title is apt, APT I say, because I have two nuggets of info to share that relate. Firstly, I head back to work next week.

Urgh.

Not "urgh" because I don't like my job. I do, actually. Plus, I'm a boss, so it helps that I can delegate work upon my return. "Urgh" because I will actually need to be washed, dressed, brushed, and out the door by an actual time. I cannot begin to explain how unfathomable that is to me right now. It's 11:08 a.m., and I am STILL in my pajamas and unshowered. Lump in the fact that the rhythm of my household management will be totally disrupted, and you can see the source of the "urgh."

But I am returning to work. I like that people think Super Ninja and I are rolling in dough enough to ask if I'm planning on staying at home. Yeah, not so much. We had enough dubloons for me to stay at home without pay for half of my leave, but I prefer to live life off of our income, not off of our savings.

Part the second of this missive is the glorious announcement that I have shed my baby weight. NOW all I need to do is work off the "I stayed at home for three months and ate waaaaaaaaay more brownies than I should have" weight.

Something I Didn't Understand Before I Became a Mother

Know what I didn't fully comprehend before I had children? Just how fully these tiny people PWN you. And I don't mean in the Ron Howardy, "Gee, the kids are constantly asking me for juice/grapes/stories/books" kind of way. Chock-full-of-corn as it sounds, these babies of mine thoroughly own my heart.

Oh my God, you have NO IDEA how hard that was to write. I feel like I'm turning into a Hummel figurine. I have squishy feelings, OKAY?

From the moment the Older Boy was born, my family has invaded my past, present, and future. In doing so, I've been forced to live there a little. Not because I'm the Terminator. Although that would be intriguing. Let me explain what I mean...

Regarding the present: almost every decision my husband and I make is done with respect to what's best for the kids: where we live, how we spend money, what car to buy, what to have for lunch (seriously -- if the Older Boy needs a sandwich and we have two slices of bread, Super Ninja's packing leftovers). That's one way the kids sit on my brain. The other way is just enjoying raising them and the things they do. Like when my kindergartner decides to wear rain boots to school because they are part of his superhero costume and they will make him feel awesome all day...or when my three-year-old daughter says "whobody put this here?" (there's somebody, anybody, nobody, so why not whobody?)...or when my two-month-old wakes up and beams a smile at me... All of that fills me with joy.

(Wow, I am just losing ALL of my hipster cred. Oh well, guess there wasn't that much to lose. I mean, I do Beyonce's "Single Ladies" dance with the Girl. One of us is usually wearing a tutu when this happens. It's not like we're swaying to Kings of Leon around here.)

Losing my focus...

The point is, everyone understands this part of parenthood. It's not hard to wrap your head around the fact that you are responsible for your kids' well-being, that they will do some cute stuff (and some not so cute stuff), that all of it is a lot of work, that you'll be tired, but mostly happy.

But my brain does this weird multi-time-and-place thing. I"m surprised I haven't given myself an aneurysm. I flash to the past to compare my childhood to the one I am giving my children, trying to replicate what was good, trying to change what was not so good. Ultimately, I feel like I understand my parents much, much, much better than I did back then. And I forgive them for a lot more.

Then I flash to the future, and imagine all the possibilities for joy and pain that await my children. Swimming and movies and graduations and college and dating and marriage or holy orders or neither and maybe possibly children of their own and ultimately adventure, lots of adventure... I don't let my mind dwell there too often, because I don't want to force them on a certain path (or invite a fight with me about what they will and won't do with their lives). But I'll hang out with them and my mind will snap to twenty years from now and envision what it'll be like to talk about a movie or politics or whatever with them...

I'm not naive; I know that they will drive me up a wall almost as much as they delight me. My five-year-old already thinks he has the world pretty well figured out, so that'll be fun when he's a teenager.

This forecasting, though...I think this is where fear starts. Worry, in it's milder form. That's the dark side of having a family: the possibility that it would be fractured or lost. See, I have expectations that these children, and my husband, will be a part of my life until my life is done. And if that did not happen, my heart would simply break.

Don't worry, I'm not going all post-partum depression on you. I am like, 98% in the happy. However, I think it's normal to spend some time wondering about how you would react to devastation, like your kid or your husband getting hurt, or sick, or dying. I'm not saying I've gotten funeral planning brochures or anything creepy like that. It's more like a role-playing exercise. Like fire drills. If you imagined that say, your kid fell down a flight of stairs, you might react to it actually happening more quickly.

If you find that you imagine a situation in which you cause these things, though, or sort of wish they would happen so that you can get some sympathy, please go here.

So, there it is: these children, by virtue of being born, have already left their sticky hand prints all over every part of my life. No matter what happens, they are inextricably entwined with who I am. I am still me, the goober who loves Scrabble, staying up late, movies, and being slightly left-of-center. But I'm braided together with these lives, first my husband's, then my children's. Maybe we're programmed this way as humans to ensure survival, but man, it's a doozy when you feel the power of it.

Mother Moment

For better or for worse, I don't define myself as a mother first. If someone asked me what I do, that wouldn't be the first thing that I mentioned. Even if I were a stay-at-home mother, I don't think I'd answer, "Well, I have two kids..."

There are some who would be horrified by that, and they would assume (a) that I am incredibly selfish, (b) that I don't love my children properly, (c) that I take the Boy's and the Girl's wonderful presence in my life for granted, or (d) all of the above. None of those things are true about me, but go ahead and be all judgy.

Anyway, I know there are scores of people who define themselves as parent first and foremost. Just take a look around Facebook and see how many profile pictures of your friends feature their progeny. Cripes, some of my friends' profile pics don't even include themselves. It's like they can't even wait for people to look at their bios or stats or whatever to see that they have children -- that bit of news is FRONT AND CENTER, baby.

Truth is, my children's welfare is always, always, always the first thing I consider in big decisions. For instance: Super Ninja and I are looking to move so that we can be in a really good school district as opposed to the dicey one that we're in now. Oh, and sidewalks. My kingdom for a network of sidewalks.

Perhaps my low-key-itude is overcompensation for my own mother's attitude toward motherhood? Ask her anything, ANYTHING, about herself, and the fact that she has seven children will come up within 30 seconds.

Let's analyze that later.

The whole reason I started writing this post is because I had one of those didn't-think-it-was-weird-'til-later moments over the weekend. Let me set the scene: the Girl seems to have a bit of an allergy to something floating in the air 'round our manse, so she's been a bit stuffy. But two-year-olds aren't proficient at the whole nose-blowing thing, and the air has been a bit dry despite prodigious use of humidifiers, so the end result was a crusty glob of yuck plugging up her nostrils. It was particularly bad yesterday morning. From several feet away, I could hear her exhalations whistling around the chunks in her nose.

So, I did what any mother would do.

I bribed her with M&Ms. Why the bribe? To allow me to pick her nose, of course. That's right. No tissue was going to get the job done. These things required extraction. But when the yuck gets that big, the removal is a little painful, even it it is softened up a little with some of this stuff. The M&Ms were to tempt her to stay still for a nano-second so that I didn't accidentally pierce her nose or anything like that. Four M&Ms later, we were done.

Victory.

The thing is, I wasn't grossed out by it. I wanted to do it. I was compelled to do it. And, when all was said and done, I felt a sense of accomplishment. I scrubbed my hands thoroughly afterward, to be sure. But I didn't dry heave or anything like that.

And that's the kind of quiet moment that defines motherhood to me. It's not proclaiming from a mountaintop that I am a mother. It's just being one. Showering my kids with affection, and truly being eager to roll up my sleeves and do the grunt work that helps them, be it teaching them to read, explaining social interactions, or pinning them down and picking their noses so that they breathe more easily.

So, suck on that, ye doubters.

I'm Trying Not to Define Myself Exclusively as "Mommy"...

...but that's a tall order when you get e-mails with headers like this:

I knew when I elected to join the ranks of motherhood that I would be responsible for the health and welfare of a small person. But the realities of it -- like making sure your kid has the proper cloacal evacuative capabilities -- are fresh every day, courtesy of bulletins from BabyCenter.com, among others.

Working vs. Stay-at-Home

Oh dear. The Mommy Wars are flaring up again. Articles like this have sparked books like this. Maybe it's my Democratic soul, but every woman needs to come to her own conclusions about how to combine (or not combine) work and children. It's not a decision based solely on finances, emotional fulfillment, obligation, independence, ambition, etc. It's a rich and complicated tapestry of all of these things, and then some. So can we please just say every woman, every parent, needs to make this choice for herself, and that we will respect that choice, whatever it might be? Sheesh.

Ya just gotta do what makes the most sense for your family, and only you know what that is. And these articles and books that prescribe the choice? I think they undergird the insecurities of the authors, and assume that mothers that make a different choice would see their point if they just thought about it a little more. Yeah, that's right, 'cause my decision was capricious.