Impressionism

Part of my vision in starting this blog two years ago was to reclaim the joy of motherhood. I was reading so many articles on how hard it is to be a mom that I was starting to question whether we were tricking ourselves into believing, and accepting, that motherhood is a form of misery. Parenting is both joyous and hard. Hard doesn’t have to mean that something is wrong. Especially for those of us living in ridiculous amounts of privilege, it can be difficult to let ourselves admit when things feel hard. 

The daily grind with very young kiddos is sometimes the toughest, even when everything in your life seems to be going “fine.” I struggled to publish this post. I feared I rambled, never got to a point, and complained too much. For better or worse, these vulnerable words are in honor of all the mothers who are right in the thick of it.   

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Every single thing you do as a mom of young children comes at the cost of sacrificing something else. There is no way around it. You cannot be an engaged, interactive playmate for hours on end AND cook healthy meals from scratch at the same time. You cannot routinely save your work tasks until midnight in order to be present with your kids AND wake up each morning as your best, energized mom-self. You cannot spend the whole day outside AND do the reading/writing practice for kindergarten. Something has to give. Everything comes at a price. You deep clean the kitchen at the cost of an added hour of screen time. You pay for badly needed baths in the currency of miserable tantrums. Or, you bypass the tantrum as your mind imagines the 2-day old layer of sunscreen seeping deeper into their pores and entering the bloodstream as tiny particles of cancer. 

During these unbearably precious and unbearably unbalanced years with tiny children, we must learn to see life as a whole, like an impressionist painting. We cannot judge our days individually to measure our success as mothers or determine the well-being of our children. Every day falls short. Each week is a blur, a smudge on the canvas that doesn’t quite create a full image. There is no possible ordinary day as a mother in which we can do it all or have it all. 

Nor should we be trying to assess our personal fulfillment in these early years. At the kitchen sink, surrounded by dirty dishes, screaming babies and a background melody of “Baby Shark” is not the moment to ponder if you are living up to your life’s potential. Trust me, you are already a superhero.

Take a step back. Are your children loved? Are you able to find at least a couple moments of joy each day – those fleeting flashes that stir up butterflies in your stomach? Rather than trying to do every area of life perfectly, refocus on your core values. Identify your top priorities to work towards as a family. Is it excellent nutrition, being in nature and staying physically active? Quality time together? Resist using a single day or single challenging moment as a representation of your family’s whole existence.  Ask instead, how are we doing overall? You may find the picture is coming into focus, the colors are slowly swirling into identifiable shapes. 

If you are truly dissatisfied in a core area you have determined is important for your family, remember that motherhood is about course-correcting. We are course-correcting all the time. First, question – is the identified value really a critical goal for your family in this stage of life, given all your current, particular circumstances? If yes, then try to be analytical vs. emotional in order to look for some practical adjustments. Can I run the dishwasher on a different schedule, freeing up some time in the mornings to get my kids outside for a walk? Contrast this to how our inner critic usually responds to problematic situations as moms: “We haven’t been outside the house for two days! My kids are going to get depressed because they don’t spend enough time in nature! I can’t believe how disorganized I am.” Our brains are smart and creative; they will find pragmatic solutions if we allow them a bit of space and optimism. 

Nowadays much attention is being drawn to the challenges of motherhood, such as in the Netflix shows Workin’ Moms and Sex/Life. The balance and imbalance of juggling career/motherhood. The identity crisis we face as we give up parts of who we were and are in order to love and care for another human being. There is all of that, yes. But let’s not forget at the most basic, banal level, the challenge of the daily grind. When we think about raising kids or stay-at-home moms, we picture the never-ending laundry, the constant messes. But it’s not just that. It’s not really an issue of workload. It’s more insidious. 

It’s the fact that as we go about our day trying to do the most basic of life’s tasks, said tasks are made impossible to do at every turn, for 12 hours straight, 7 days a week. When I cook, my toddler sticks her head between my legs and pushes my body away from the stove as I try to stir the air. Every desperate, one-minute conversation with my spouse to make critical decisions is interrupted 14 times by my son screaming, “LOOK AT MY SHOW!” as if he were being murdered. Our toddler refuses to wear any clothes except her 2 souvenir shirts from Reno, NV and Silverwood theme park. Our 5-year-old is crushed every night at bedtime and tells me repeatedly that he wishes it could be day forever. Like every mother in the history of time, I have not been to the bathroom alone in many, many years. If I lock the door, they will pound it down. In the 15 seconds it takes me to get pants pulled up and flip open the lock, my daughter is in a full blown screaming attack. 

On a good day, after a decent night’s sleep, all of this just feels normal. Routine. Sometimes amusing. On a harder day, you feel it all in the more literal sense. There are small creatures who live in your home, making every single necessary task of daily life impossible, at every turn! They do this through arguments, mind games, physical and mental ineptitude, constant messes and poor impulse control. They eat 25 times a day and speak every moment that they are awake.

It is a normal human emotion to feel frustrated. Yet you cannot (or should not) unleash your frustration, because the source of it is tiny, precious children who are acting exactly as they are supposed to be acting. They are discovering how objects work, learning to reason, moving their brand-new bodies, asserting their opinions and joyfully playing their way through every moment.

What gets us through the grind of these early years? Love. Those little creatures in your home are so damn cute.

Strength, endurance, our maternal survival instinct. We endure 82 pounds of kids balanced on our kneecaps. We wait out another 15 minutes of sobbing through silent hugs, lips sealed shut, when we really want to shout: “PLEASE stop crying now, there’s no way your arm still hurts!!”  We play one more round of Pick up Sticks as the oatmeal further cements itself onto the breakfast bowls. We valiantly take another accidental punch to the eye from a toddler. 

The humor gets us through. So much humor. Everything they do is hilarious. I want to capture every sentence all day long, not just the words but their voice, their tone and cadence. The way they say “Old McDonald’s” instead of “McDonald’s” or “dark-in-the-glow” for “glow-in-the-dark.” I once smashed a spider with a tissue and on the way to the bathroom my son asked me in the most earnest little voice, “Are you taking it to the trash so it can find its family?” Yes, yes I am.

We survive through constant course correction. Modifying routines. Adjusting how we talk to our kids so they actually listen. Changing how we respond to their pain so they process their emotions and move on. As long as we maintain a humble, open mind to making these course corrections, we will all be just fine. The blurs will mold into real shapes over time. The colors will start to mix into beautiful combinations. The picture will come into focus. We might even reappear in the portrait, in our full humanness, emerging from our haggard mom shells. Our masterpiece will still be messy and fuzzy and hard to glean the meaning from certain angles. The canvas will change over time. It may be misunderstood by some, and we ourselves may want to destroy it on our darkest days. Our job as mothers is not to create a perfect life for our children, though there is no way to ever truly believe this very real truth. Our job is to paint with them and try to create something beautiful.