Overjoyed & Overwhelmed

I wrote this post several months shortly after finishing one of several motherhood memoirs I’ve read over the last year. I had intended to revisit this and flesh out some of my thoughts, but I never did. Still, I was thinking about this kind of thing again recently, and decided to go ahead and publish this even if it does feel a little short or incomplete. Because even after a whole year, I feel like some part of me still hasn’t adjusted to parenthood. And maybe that’s the problem — instead of worrying that I haven’t adjusted, perhaps I need to recognize that the entire notion that I can ever truly “adjust” to such a monumental life change is a farce. And instead of waiting for things to seem easier, I need to just live my life.

One happy little girl

I’m going to just jump right in and be completely honest: there are still many days when I wonder what the heck I’ve gotten myself into by deciding to become a parent. I’ve never experienced something so completely overwhelming, and while the general assumption when one mentions this fact seems to be that this overwhelmed-ness is beautiful and magical, it has not been like that for me. Not exactly, anyway.

No, I have felt overwhelmed in every sense of the word. Engulfed. Affected deeply. Confronted by an excessive amount of…everything. Everything is heightened. I feel excessively happy. I feel excessively frustrated.

I’ve been in search of something, I suppose, that puts my feelings into words since I’ve had trouble doing it myself. As a result, I keep picking out “motherhood memoirs” for reading material, hoping to find someone else I can use to explain what’s going on in my head. “Sparkly Green Earrings” by Melanie Shankle was not that book, but it did contain a few things worth sharing, and a few things that I would be wise to remember:

Real motherhood is different. It’s better and it’s messier and it’s more complicated. It will break your heart and make you laugh harder than you ever imagined. You find yourself alternating between feeling like your friends talked you into some sort of pyramid scheme so you could share in their misery and thinking this is the most fulfilling thing you’ve ever done in your life.

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“This is it,” I replied. “We won’t be alone again for eighteen years. At least. And our lives are about to totally change, and there is no going back.” He looked at me with a straight face and said, “Yes, it’s called parenthood. We signed up for it nine months ago.” I knew that. But in that moment I felt overwhelmed by what was about to happen and how much our lives were about to be turned upside down.

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Because it’s all well and fine that your school is accredited by the blah-blah board of blah-blah, but preschool is really more about learning basic social skills than the Keynesian theory of economics. Let’s not take people who still poop in their pants too seriously.

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My birthday is in August. Also known as the Tim Duncan’s shoe of birthday months because it’s summer, it’s hot, and all your friends are probably on vacation. So the majority of my birthdays were spent either at the pool or at Six Flags with whatever friends had the misfortune of being born into a family that didn’t take vacations. And that was totally fine until September, when the first kid in my class would have a birthday and his mom would walk in with cupcakes and I’d be reminded of the fact that I’d been born in the worst month. Given this childhood trauma, I was a little disappointed when I realized my due date with Caroline fell smack dab in the middle of August. I had inadvertently passed the bad birthday gene to my offspring, who would suffer her mother’s fate of having party options that consisted of (1) having a pool party, (2) having a pool party, or (3) inviting people over to sit on a block of ice.

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I had to come to terms with the fact that, while I have other strengths, being a mom to a bunch of kids may not be my gift considering I don’t really handle chaos or messes well and have been known to hide in the closet to let my inner introvert take deep, cleansing breaths. I had to face who I really am and what I’m equipped to do versus the person I sometimes like to fantasize I am.

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It’s the daily balance of treasuring the moments even as we wish some of them away.