It has taken me two years to write/admit/post what I am about to type. Two years of trying to be the same person that I was prior to becoming a mother. Two years of frustration and unmet expectations for myself and others. Two years of stress. I had our second child four months ago, and his first three months were far more challenging than anything we experienced with the first child. I have spent a lot of time trying to reduce my stress, frustration, etc... I have prayed for peace and have come to a place of acceptance. I am not ever going to be the same as I was prior to having children. Not mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, or even spiritually. The thing is.... I realize now that I have a choice to make as to whether or not I grow in these areas and learn from this experience or I allow the longing for what used to be to thwart my growth. I have a choice to let God lead or to let society's expectations for my new role lead. I am making a choice to have peace. Much of this is by recognizing that some things are not going to be a part of my life anymore (or play a much reduced role).
- Freedom
- Generally speaking this is the one thing you lose when you enter into a relationship. The type of relationship determines how much freedom you lose though. When you have a child, you just created someone who is in a wholly dependent relationship with you. They rely on you for everything and you have to be there for them (or hire someone to be there). If you aren't there, you have to be prepared for the worst guilt of your life, guilt that makes religious guilt pale in comparison and can cause you to turn the car around and go back home after you have just secured childcare.
- There is never a time when you can just "go workout", "go to the store" or "party all night" without first thinking about where your children will be if you do this. Often times this means that you won't step one foot out of your door and you figure out how to workout and party with your children and send someone else to the store.
- Your money now goes first towards providing what the children need, which is good because much of what they need is also what you need. However, you have to be ready to buy diapers instead of cute boots for winter and forgo the latte so that your child has clothes. This means that you will generally wear the same thing for about 5 years and turn into a brewed coffee drinker, so get the yoga pants and breath mints ready.
- Eventually you won't even get to watch what you want to watch on TV because by the time the children are in bed, you will also want to be in bed. PBS kids and other educational cartoons will be the only pop culture that you take in, which really limits how deep you can go in conversations with people who have older or no kids.
- Much of the person you were before having children
- I used to be so idealistic and I still retain some of that. My
idealism used to include: having a house with battery free toys, cloth
diapers from birth to potty training, homemade baby food pureed by
myself, doing all the mommy and me stuff that the community offered, and
having dinners with other parents. Reality is that you learn to be
efficient and do what you can to preserve your sanity.
- I used
to backpack, do adventure sports, and plan trips abroad. This isn't
happening again until my kids are pre-teens and can carry their own
backpack and understand the history of the places we are going. My
sleeping bag will get used for "camping" in my backyard at some point,
but until then it will remain in it's storage bag in the garage. Ditto
for my really awesome lightweight backpacking tent, which will probably
be considered heavyweight by the time I use it again. A trip to Europe
will probably come when I organize one for the kids in my son's class in
high school.
- I used to be very active in the community. I
coached basketball for 10 years. Last year I volunteered when I had one
child and probably made it to about 70% of the games. This year I have
two children and have been to about 10% of the games and practices.
Forget going to all the local festivals that you used to go to,
especially the more adult-oriented ones. Oktoberfest will happen each
year, but I probably won't attend until the children are teens.
- Free time
- What does this even mean? Every waking minute I am picking up something, cleaning something, changing someone, doing work for my job, thinking about what needs to happen next, cooking something, preparing something for later, and doing laundry. Good lord you have no idea how much laundry four people, two of which are tiny, can make until you experience it firsthand.
- Personal Space
- I no longer own my lap or my boobs. Everyone knows that the bathroom is
no longer a sacred place once you have children, but no one tells you
that even when you have the rare opportunity to take a shower without
any children in the house, you will still think you heard one cry and
turn off the shower for second just to make sure.
- Choice
- There is now only one choice: do whatever is best for your marriage, which will be what is best for your children.
I am sure there are more things that I could add to this list, and some of it is redundant... but I didn't write this for you, I wrote it for me. I need to admit this to myself and accept that I have the best job in the whole world, because when you do a cost benefit analysis using the above as costs, the benefits are overwhelmingly greater. It is my full-time job in addition to my other full-time job, which creates a bit of a competition for my brain... but I will save that for another post.
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| So worth it. |
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