Happy Blog-a-versary!

"No one told me it would be like this..."

It's been five years, dear readers, FIVE, since I wrote that sentence in the dark depths of my basement playroom, in my sweatpants, half-deranged with sleep deprivation.  Yes, I said sweatpants.  I hadn't even discovered yoga pants yet, that's how long ago it was.  Mean Mommy, B.Y.P.

If I were being completely honest with myself back then, other mothers did tell me how it would be.  In fact, the minute you announce your first pregnancy every Tom, Dick and Mommy is ready to unload all the nursing/colic/no sleep horror stories in their arsenal.  But being convinced you will be a much better parent than they are and your baby can't possibly turn out like their shitty baby, you ignore everything they say, even if some of it is useful.  And then you find out you're wrong and wonder why nobody warned you.

Five years later, having made it through my baby years, I still feel completely unprepared for what parenthood throws at me.  I find myself saying even more often now, "No one told me it would be like this".  Although we ignore the stories, baby and toddlerhood is pretty similar for all parents.  We all just want our kids to eat, sleep and hit their developmental milestones.  Once our kids reach school age though, those clear mile-markers are gone, and we are left to navigate parenthood's dangerous highway without a map.  Five years ago, I envisioned my life as the mother of school-aged kids as a nirvana of mid-morning exercise, blown-out hair and copious writing time since all three of my children would be in school for at least half the day.  I thought there might even be the possibility of my going back to work, because how much could they really need me once they were no longer babies but bonafide kids?

I wrote the post The Fourteen Month Itch when Little Man was tiny, expressing the reawakening most women experience once their babies reach toddlerhood.  Your baby's need for you, specifically you, has greatly diminished.  Your baby is usually no longer feeding from your body and really any able bodied person could keep them alive for extended periods of time, often times without your child even realizing you are gone.  You begin to look around and wonder if maybe you couldn't do something outside of the house.  The years between the ages of two and four are the years you feel like you could be accomplishing a lot more.  These years are the calm before the storm.   Once your kids hit elementary school, they will need you almost as much as when they were babies.

I hear you laughing at my perceived helicopter parenting, but overly-orchestrated playdates are not what I'm talking about.  I am talking about the millions of little interactions and teachable moments that help shape your child into the person they will become.  School pick-up, for example.  There's a reason I have to drink a large cup of coffee at three o'clock.  That's because at three eighteen I am hit, full-force, with a days' worth of success and despair from three small people, all whom need my full attention equally.  "Lisa didn't sit with me at lunch"..."I lost at Coconut Island in gym, again"..."I won Student of the Month!"  Each of these events needs to be addressed and have their attendant lessons discussed and it begins from the moment I meet my kids at the school doors, continues into the van, as we walk through the front door and right to the kitchen table for snack.  By the time I am doling out the pretzels, we have covered how to deal with it when a friend hurts your feelings, how to be a good sport and how hard work does pay off.

The kids settle in for homework and then it's time for me to harass #1 about her handwriting and check #2's math since she notoriously does not fully explain her answers.  She also needs to find an article for current events and we spend twenty minutes discussing the bear hunt issue in New Jersey once we've found one.  Litte Man needs to work on his fine motor skills so I'm trying to convince him to chop up a Toys R Us catalogue to make his list for Santa.  Now #1 needs a thesaurus because we both agree she has used the word "rocky" too many times in her report on Maine. As this all winds down and it's time to start dinner,  I am dizzy, but I feel so so grateful I am here for all of this madness.

Please, please, do not take this as an anti-working rant, because it is decidedly not.  I give so much credit to the women who work all day then come home and do all the things I just described, just much later and, probably, feeling much more tired.  My point is, that while the physical care of my children has greatly decreased, I feel, in some ways, they have never need me more and I am still surprised by it at times.  I can only imagine what I'll be hit with as my kids approach their teen years.  Again, I imagine a life of ease, may be even joining a gym.  But seeing how accurate my last five year prediction was I'm not getting my hopes up.

I suppose, with the title of that first post five years ago, I unknowingly described parenting - everyday brings the unexpected. No one told me it would be like this.

But could they have?