Sicker Than Others Saving the Landfills, one Giant Plastic Toy At a Time

and they don’t tell you that one day you might sit bleary eyed on the floor of a room where the contents of every drawer litter the ground around like confetti on new years day. and no one mentions that one morning you might find yourself singing a song about shit, a little melody about changing dirty diapers, an ode to disposable wipes and vaseline. They neglect to mention that you may one day be completely unsurprised to notice that you’ve given your small child your two hundred dollar cell phone to play with so that you can drink four sips of coffee in peace. Neither does anyone warn you about the toilet water baths, the destruction of your seldom worn but nevertheless expensive and precious makeup, the very short lifespan of every painted surface below the four foot mark, and the new, instantly recognizable (for this is how you will recognize your comrades along the way- by their bloodshot eyes and their accidentally Pollocked furniture) paint-spattered pattern on your household fabrics. All of them.

Oh, and then later! They failed to warn you that one day you may wake up to find your small child is no longer a small child but a hormone driven, just-smart-enough-to-be-dangerous, makeup wearing, explicit music listening, mini version of you yourself.

This may be the day on which you finally decide it’s time to abandon your post, to bury your head in the sand or a wine bottle or “your work” but if I may be so bold as to say, this is the time when you most cannot. This is when you look at your own ideals, your own example, your own behavior every minute of the day because SHE IS WATCHING (she has always been watching but has not always been so smart) and THEY are watching and suddenly it will hit you how impossible this job really is and it will overwhelm you, hitting that realization like a wall, but you will not falter; you will again find yourself doing things you never imagined, each day something new. Each moment another impossible trick of mothering magic, yet another entry on that endless list of “things you never pictured”, perhaps one day reduced to an email forward titled something like “what it means to be a mother” or “You know you’re the mother of a boy (or girl, or cat, or teenager) when….”.

They don’t tell you any of these things; They will simply hand you the little perfectly swaddled pink faced worm and say “congratulations! good luck!”. They will only assure you that “it’s all worth it”.

And they are right.