A trip to the park yesterday was a sure reminder of how rare the choices in my life are becoming. Mid-Colorado-winter we were enjoying a day of sixty degree weather and the park was begging us to play despite the snow that is still lying around from a blizzard a couple of weeks ago. I turned up with my three little men ready to “rock this place.” Another young lady apparently had the same idea. We started to chat. She was there with her niece. After a little conversation, she asked me, “How old ARE you?” I replied that I’m twenty-eight. “And how many kids do you have?” I told her I have a daughter who is almost eight and three boys (5, 3, and 8 weeks). That’s four kids, if you’re keeping track. Her eyes gave away what she was thinking. I had to follow it up saying that they were all intentional and I was married young. Then I kicked myself for feeling like I had to defend my choices….choices I am proud of.
Motherhood and I are becoming better friends. It is exactly what I want for my life and always has been but it is hard. The whole world seems to have you under a microscope to see if you are doing a good enough job and if that’s not enough, I seem to do a fantastic job of comparing myself to the seemingly perfect lives of others. Lately though, I have been realizing more and more that to be the best mother, I have to be me. Trying to be someone else ends with us all frustrated. I have to use the talents I have. I have to stop worrying about what those dang idealistic parenting books have to say (I have a love-hate relationship with them) and use those motherly instincts that are floating around and get on my knees everyday and pray for each of my dear ones and then get up and do what God directs me to do that day. Some days, I am better at this than others. Even though sometimes I feel like these children are my own personal little experiments and I wonder who allowed me to be a mom in the first place, I have come believe that my children were sent to me because I am supposed to be their mom with my own little quirks and odd little set of skills.
The truth is, I am not my mother. I ADORE my mother. She is one of my best friends in this world and has been a truly phenomenal mother and grandmother-hood seems to be her best role yet. When I found out that I wasn’t her, I was more than a little disappointed. It has taken me a while to come to terms with that but I think that I am almost there. I am getting to know myself in motherhood. As I have learned more about my grandmothers and aunts and others, I have found myself more in them than I expected. I have learned that there isn’t one right way to do things. Nobody wrote the book for my Josh and so my husband and I and our loving Heavenly Father are working together on it. Although there are bumps in the road here and there, it is overall a beautiful story.
The wind picked up and the park started to get a little frigid. We swang as much as possible and tried to make the most of it and I watched my boys sprint up the hill along the path to where the car was. I admired how handsome they are. Their running and jumping and other antics made me feel grateful for how healthy and blessed we are and then (yikes!) the sudden sting of my milk letting down reminded me that the baby was hungry and I had to reign them in and hurry home.
Making dinner soothes my soul. I know that a lot of people don’t feel this way, but this is one thing that I proudly inherited from my mother. Cooking is my favorite kind of service and serving healthy delicious meals makes me feel like all is right in the world. Trying desperately to pull Caleb away from the Wii, I invited him to come and help with the meatloaf. He diligently scrubbed his hands. There is something about sticking your hands into a meatloaf mixture that gives boys the giggles. He cracked the eggs himself and one somehow burst and a bit of egg white splashed onto his forehead. His eyes glanced sideways to ascertain whether this was a disaster or not but when I smiled, he threw his head back and laughed. As we cleaned him up, the commotion naturally invited the two other “big kids” to join us in the kitchen. Caleb held onto his assigned job for dear life wanting to finish it through without another pair of anxious hands joining him in the bowl. I allowed him his moment. He emptied the mixture into the loaf pan and patted it down and proudly massaged it with his little fingers. He just knew that this is going to be an excellent dinner but for me, the food was cherry-on-top of a precious moment spent with my undemanding and unpretentious second born.
These children are my life. They were a choice that my husband and I made together. Yes, I work from home teaching piano lessons, directing a singing group for young girls and doing photography here and there, but the real point of it all is that I get to be home with my children and be a mother. I have nothing against women who work outside the home. I think that we all do what we have to for our lives to keep it all together and my work gives me the chance to be home and honestly, it’s where I want to be. That doesn’t mean that some days, by the time my husband comes home, I don’t feel like begging him to let me go to work the next day but generally, a good run and a hot bath bring me home feeling like I can try again tomorrow.
Tonight, as I wiped little droplets of pee off of the toilet seat for the bajillionth time, I realized that those droplets, and the forgotten lunch I dropped off at school, and the legos that I stand on in the middle of the night all mean one thing: I am a mother. I get to be a mother and that is a beautiful privilege. I get to hold these amazing, precious little human beings. I get to be the person they cry for when they are hurt. I get to be the person they are most excited to share their accomplishments with. I get to watch them sleep and even though there are millions of other not-so-shining-moments in between, these will be the sweet ones that stay with me. I get to watch them grow from these wondrous little beings into the people that they are meant to be and hopefully have a hand for good in their lives.
