The Mom I Want to Be

I used to have labor and delivery fantasies. You know, I was going to go au naturel and be beautiful while doing it.

We all know that fantasy didn't have a chance to come true or not come true. Of course, I always joke that my labor and delivery consisted of a 16 hour flight with two sick infants who were miserable and cried 14 of those hours...and I can tell you that I most definitely was NOT beautiful while doing that. Shudder.

I guess much of life is about anticipation and maybe fantasizing about how you will carry yourself in certain roles and in certain situations. Or is that just me?

I used to swear to DH that I wouldn't gripe or complain about the angst of motherhood, that I would take it all in stride, that I would not fall apart when a certain fifteen month old needed a huge diaper change right after we arrived at the grocery store and thus I found myself unzipping sixteen layers of clothes (it was 38 degrees here this morning!) and changing said fifteen month old in the back of our car because the double carts at the grocery store certainly won't fit into the bathroom and really, I abhor those public changing plastic things anyway... but yet I found myself bitching and complaining about it to DH on the drive home from the grocery store. As if he needed/wanted to hear that story.

In the early days I felt so overwhelmed and tired and frankly, and it wouldn't have mattered how much I wanted to appear in control and not overwhelmed because to sum up our look in one word: pitiful. Pitiful, pitiful, pitiful. We both looked gaunt, dark shadowed, and stressed. Yes, we were happy! happy! happy! too but the physical toll was real. And I hated that. We couldn't hide our overwhelmedness. It was hanging out all over the place. I mean, let's get real: I started crying on that plane ride within twenty minutes of take off. Pitiful indeedio.

I wanted and fantasized about being the Mom who took care of her two long awaited and anticipated infants with ease, who didn't freak out over every little thing, who took mealtime antics in stride, who cooked and cleaned and baked and ran and wrote and read and still talked to friends on the phone and kept up with everyone else's lives and did it all with aplomb. And I wanted to be fashionable while doing it, too, just to throw that in there.

Universe? Is that you laughing?

But I'm going to rely on my old technique of faking it until making it. Because it can be done. I do not have to regurgitate every.last.detail of their naps or leaking diapers or vomit sessions or mealtime antics to anyone who will listen. That makes me exactly the Mom I did not want to be. Shudder again. I will decide to pretend to be handling it all with aplomb and eventually, as the saying goes, I will.

Wish me luck.