Moments of Motherhood

There are moments when I can hold my son and his screaming and crying doesn’t faze me because I know that he doesn’t have the ability, training, or understanding yet to use words to express his needs.

There are moments when his cries tear at my ears like a caged animal desperate to get out and all I want to do is drown out his wailing with headphones in and music blasting.

There are moments when I love to hold him in my arms while I feed him and watch his tiny alien eyes watch me with curiosity.

There are moments when I desperately wish I wasn’t his source of food and the very thought of having to feel the pain of him sucking on me, pulling on me, scratching me or grabbing me with his sharp fingers is almost too much too bear.

There are moments when snuggling him and holding him close brings peace.

There are moments when I’ve held him non-stop and I crave nothing more than being as far away from him as humanly possible.

There are moments when I can talk to him about anything and everything, because he’s a wonderful listener.

There are moments when I’m so alone with my thoughts and emotions that I can’t find the motivation to leave the bed, the couch, the house.

I knew long before I ever got married, ever was intimate, ever was an adult, that parenting was going to be hard. When friends and acquaintances talked about having children as if it was like going to Disneyland, I laughed. Oh how I played devil’s advocate and brought up the flip side of having children and they in turn laughed at my so called pessimism.

It’s not that I never wanted children. It’s that I knew that when you had children you’d get the whole thing- the good, the bad, and the smelly.

This thought was interrupted by feeding my son- this time a moment of necessity because my chest hurt too much not to feed him. I would have fed him anyway but the motivation is not always the same.

I don’t know if I want to be a mom… I don’t know if I want to pull through another week of a son who won’t nap and I end up holding all day, and whose needs I put far before my own because the guilt of not taking care of him is powerful motivation. 

I find it hard to do anything other than the necessities for him and me. The mom blogs talk about the despair of wearing pajamas- I find it hard to get dressed at all. My pinterest feed has everything from tips to get my son to sleep at night to recipes for increasing my milk supply- yet I can’t find the motivation to eat one real meal a day.

I know I need help, but the idea of someone seeing my dirty dishes, my un-vacuumed floor, and my piles of laundry and thinking that I’m a terrible wife and mom because I should have figured it out by now. I should have figured out how to use my free time during his naps to get those things done. I should have figured out how to make dinner, do homework, and do simple cleaning around my house by now. But I haven’t. I see the mess I live in and want to hide and not care, but the guilt of it not being done and the shame that I haven’t done better haunt me.

I crave company and at the same time am grateful that I no-one visits because then nobody has to see me in my mess.

I’m barely coping as a married parent who has a spouse who is supportive and does his fair share of the parental responsibilities. I don’t know how a single parent does this.

Oh how I wish there was sleep I could hide in, a song I could drown in, a show I could escape in… but I spent 40 weeks and 5 days carrying that boy inside me with the heartburn, morning sickness, and pain followed by the five hours I spent pushing to bring him into this world. I can’t escape that need to at least make sure that he’s alive and breathing even when he lets go during a feeding and we both get sprayed with milk, or he pees through his clothes and mine after I just got him dressed, or he falls asleep only to wake up ten minutes later because I coughed. The darkness I’d love to surrender to is held back by my sheer guilt and anxiety of not being a mom- even if I feel like the worst mom ever.

So why type this? Why share this with the world when my biggest fear is that the world will see me in my darkness and judge?

Because this is how I ask for help and use my words when the darkness tells me that a phone call or a text message isn’t worth the effort.