Someone asked me this question yesterday:
Is motherhood everything you expected it to be?
Which made me realize that either I didn't know what I expected it to be, or I forget what my expectations were.
I know I didn't expect to be a full time stay at home mom. With all my education and work toward getting a job, I thought I'd be working at least part time. But now that I'm in the midst of it, I'm incredibly grateful that I do not have to work and get to spend my days with my children, at least while they are small.
I don't know what I expected, but I never knew that my house would be so messy so much of the time. With kids this small, the clutter and the laundry simply never ends.
I couldn't have imagined how tired I'd be much of the time because staying up late to have fun with friends and roommates, or even to finish an assignment, doesn't even begin to introduce a body to the kind of exhaustion that comes with being woken up at night to take care of a baby.
I also couldn't imagine the intensity of my love for my children, or the amount of worrying I would do.
Motherhood is more exhausting, joyous, stressful, and amazing than I ever could have expected. You simply can't know until you do it.
What did you expect motherhood to be?
Hmm. Not necessarily. NO, not even to the tenth degree, with the hard stuff. RSV, asthma, mean kids, working full time at the hospital, no sleep, switching sleep schedules back and fourth so I could work opposite of Matt so we didn't need a babysitter. 24 + hour stretches of no sleep. (There's a lot about sleep in there :) Everything you named off. Making big life changing decisions for other people. Finance and what's good and not good for them to have or eat or buy or play with. Sheesh! LOL.
ReplyDeleteAnd I want to be one of those Moms who cooks great meals every night and has a clean house. HA. Its a work in progress.
But the good stuff is even more fun than I imagined because you're right! Its far better than I ever could have expected. My kids are hilarious and they make me happy, constantly. We laugh and have fun a lot of the day. I have little comedians following me around doing crazy stuff for me to blog about. I dress them up so they look like gentlemen and make them pose in cheesy pictures. I can dress my 2 yr old as Mickey Mouse so I can dress up as Minnie Mouse for Halloween. I buy toys I want and say its for them. (We collect Scooby Doo figures because I want to. Ha ha!) We sometimes have lunch under the table instead of on it.
I love my life. But yeah, not quite what I expected in the Mothering Department. ;)