“Moms, how come you never told us?”
Back when I was high on whatever cocktail Mother Nature serves new mothers to enable us to survive the stress of being responsible for another human life, I wrote an open letter to the Baby Boomer moms.
Sweetly self righteous, I thanked them for teaching us to take on the world, but I took this generation of women to task for holding back an essential piece of information.
“How come?” I asked like some daft hen staggering about under the influence of yummy postpartum hormones.
“How come you never told us that motherhood was this incredible? You never mentioned the spell that was cast when you first looked into our infant eyes. You never described it as the greatest love story never told.”
The mommies who came before us didn’t get around to waxing poetic about every magic sparkle moment of motherhood because… motherhood.
Finally, I know that that word really means. Incredible is defined as “difficult or impossible to believe.”
All of the joy and rage and numbness and passion that get mixed into the mother-child bond… it really is incredible.
Yes, parenting is difficult and impossible to believe. I cannot fathom how I - and all the rest of the moms I know - can be a kind, smart, creative individual who practices any level of self control when forced to live with this kind of sleep deprivation and these draconian limits on personal and professional time.
And yes, to balance this all out and to show that I am mother that I purport to be on Facebook, the tremendous love I feel for these girls is incredible too. But tonight, the new mommy glow has long since worn off and just wish everyone would figure out to sleep through the night and wake up pleasantly in the morning.