no joke

This Mothering Business is no joke. I always thought my life's ambition would be to be a mother, and now I'm not so sure I'm cut out for it. I simply think I am too lazy.

K and R recently spent the better part of a week in Florida on a work trip (heavy on the trip, light on the work) and I had the boys for 3 days. I typically do spend many, many hours at the B house to help out with the boys, but somehow when you have long, endless stretches of days ahead of you, it is quite overwhelming. And maybe I'm not giving myself a fair chance, because I haven't birthed these children myself, and I'm just a casual comer-and-goer, but this is hard stuff.

One of my favorite quotes I like to use on my sister comes from Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music. He says, "Activity suggests a life filled with purpose." It was always laughable to me that K would plan out her day. That she would "schedule time" to go to the gym. Then I realized, she wasn't necessarily going to the gym because she liked working out, she went to the gym because it was an hour away from the kids. And it took at least 20 minutes to get them loaded in the car and to drive to the gym, and another 20 do to the same on the way back. That's a solid chunk of time when the children are strapped down, and semi entertained. I probably would get a gym membership just to sit in the locker room while I dropped the kids off at the $2 an hour daycare. Genius!

I have a new found respect of single parents. I'm not sure how they do it.

The boys are both at extremely difficult ages. M is too big for many things, and C is too small for many things. M doesn't really understand that his little buddy can't do many of the things he likes to, and thus is frustrated. M is also incredibly three right now. He screams because he doesn't want to get in the bath tub; he screams because he doesn't want to get out of the bath tub; he screams because he doesn't want to get his clothes changed; he screams because he doesn't want his diaper change. No joke, he ran around the house Sunday morning with a diaper so filled with pee that it sagged to his knees because I simply didn't have the fight in me. CPS should have been called. He looked like we lived in squalor, not in a McMansion in a McSubdivision in a McSuburb. The prisoner was running the asylum.

But what comes with this are the incredibly sweet moments. When M incessantly sings little ditties. When he looks at you with giant eyes and asks you if he can "hab some" of whatever it is that you're eating or drinking that he probably shouldn't be eating or drinking, but you simply can't say no. When he reads you books before bed. When he wants to watch a "yiddle show," or old episodes of "Gongold Guck" on my iPhone. I love having little conversations with him snuggled in his bed before he goes to sleep where he tells me about his day -- which will always involve going school, even if it wasn't a school day. Or how he loves the bear that we picked out together on our date a few months ago, even though I thought it was the ugliest one in the store.

C, on the other hand is in to everything. He's a busy little crawler. He's pulling things off shelfs, and getting himself caught in corners. He wants to be a big boy and do big boy things, but he's just too little. He has a temper on him and is easily offended and upset, sometimes just because the wind blew the wrong way.

But then, he looks at you with his chubby cheeks and bright violet eyes and the world is better. He's still in a cuddling phase where (sometimes) he will let you hold him. The other day he woke up from his nap screaming as though someone were kidnapping him, and I picked him up and nuzzled him back to sleep. I love those moments.

Even though this stuff is hard business, and mothering is sometimes for the birds, just as with everything, you have to have the bad to appreciate the good.

I will never pass up the opportunity to hold a little baby, and tonight I held my friend's baby. Even though I've held hundreds of babies in my life, I didn't quite know what to do. Even though D is incredibly cute, he wasn't one of my babies. He didn't have the familiar feel of my boys. He didn't have the smell of my boys. And then I realized that even though I didn't carry these babies or push them out, M and C are my boys.