Though at times I feel like it, I have decided that I am not the worst mother in the world. Not even in the U.S. or maybe not even my hometown. I don’t hit my children, nor do I deprive them of the things that they should have (or at least what Target makes me feel they should have). I love them. I adore them. But let’s face it. Sometimes they do annoy the crap out of me, even my baby boy with his cute little chubby cheeks that look like he is storing nuts for the winter. It is hard for me to imagine my life without them and sometimes hard to remember my life before them, but there are days when my hair is in yesterdays shamefully bad ponytail and I notice the half-peeled polish on my toenails, that I dream of being just me again, not mommy.
Every day we make choices that are natural for a mother, always putting our children’s needs before our own. Choosing a place for a dinner out becomes the choice between Chuck E. Cheese and any other place that doesn’t frown upon dirty diapers, temper tantrums and my four-year olds sugar buzz that usually ends with something broken or spilled. Instead of a night at the Ritz, it’s Ritz crackers and peanut butter. Instead of Victoria’s Secret for sexy underwear, it’s Toys-R-Us for Barbie underwear. And so on.
We love our children so much that sometimes it consumes us. We are no longer Jane or Susie or Kate, we are mom. The biggest three letter word I have ever heard. A name used more than ten times (I actually counted one day) in any given hour, which is mostly screamed from another room over and over and over again. Sometimes to the point I can actually feel the little hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up, like they say happens just before you are going to be struck by lightening.
Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing better than loving and being loved by your children. Being a mom is the most important job you will ever have. At one time I hated it when people referred to having kids as a job, until I had my own. It is in fact a job. You are compensated well in kisses and hugs, smiles and laughs and a daily bonus of “I love you(s)”. Once they are a little older it’s sarcasm and disobedience, mood swings and secrets and a daily bonus of “You can’t make me(s)”. And it is a job that is never finished. Not even when you close your eyes at night. 365 days except in a leap year.
So the other day it hit me. In order to be the best mom to my children, I need to be the best me first. I need to buy that sexy new underwear. I need to spend the extra time fixing my hair and painting my nails, or at least removing the old polish that has been there for the better half of a year. I need to read that book that I’ve been trying to get around to, even if it is not as profound as a Jane Austen novel. Most importantly, I need to look at my husband as a man again and not just as Daddy. If I start acting more like a wife and a woman, we might be actually be able to cancel Cinemax.
It’s time to take back “me”. I am not suggesting that I am going to have my kids start calling me by my first name. I am suggesting that I find the “me” that I used to be and get her back. There is no reason I cannot be both, mommy and me. Feeling better about myself will make me feel a lot better about my children. I find that when I look and feel terrible it is easy to blame it on the children and my lack of time to care for myself while caring for them. It makes my children sound like more of a burden than the blessing that they truly are. In fact, there is always time, if I am honest with myself, to take care of me.
I realized that it is not my children that annoy me, it is me that annoys me. There is no reason that I can’t get up a little earlier and go to the gym. I can find the time once a week to get my nails painted or paint them myself for that matter. I can choose to wear sexier clothes and forego the flip flops and flannel. I can be a wife and a mother and still be me.
So off I go, to drop these maternity bras off at Goodwill, buy a razor and find Victoria’s Secret (which I firmly believe got its name because you have to keep secret from your husband the fact that you paid $60.00 for underwear). By next week, my cable bill will be $15.00 a month cheaper and I will have started, if not finished, an actual book that doesn’t begin with “What to Expect….”. I think I am going to like being mommy and me.
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