Our Mommyhood

By Lori, Guest Writer, In Pursuit of Martha Points (@marthapoints)

Years, that is.

Look at your toddler, your kidlet, your worldly seven-year-old…

And add 10 years.

You can’t do it. Your brain can’t look at your son’s little face with the wee chubby cheeks and imagine it covered in scraggly stubble. You can’t look at your daughter’s tender, silky-fine curls and imaging them flattened in a straight-iron.

You can’t sit across from the toddler who you are begging, bargaining, bribing or browbeating into eating and imagine that one day you will be yelling at him for inhaling your dinner ingredients as an afternoon snack.

Yet it will happen.

Your carpet of rainbow-hued plastic toys will be gradually replaced with books, binders, CD’s, sweatsocks, nail-polish bottles, iPod cords, jump drives and shoes the size of Volkswagons.

The sing-song cartoons that make you nauseous with their cloying sweetness will someday be replaced by battling-ogre videogames that will make you nauseous with their graphic bloodbath-ness.

The struggles over brushing teeth and saying please and thank you will give way to struggles over sharing the bathroom and saying anything.

It’s inconceivable, yet we know in our cells it’s inevitable, that these round faces, soft limbs and high voices will grow, evolving height, weight, heft and attitude. And the compulsion to hold tight, squeeze hard and freeze time almost makes your heart stop.

Unless you are still changing diapers, in which case the world isn’t orbiting the sun fast enough.

When your back aches now for bending over them, you can’t appreciate that eventually your neck will hurt for looking up at them. When you’re worried that they won’t make friends in elementary school it’s difficult to envision that you will long for a house free from the herd of starving elephants they call their friends when they are in high school.

But there are some advantages with teens. You can leave the house…without them. In fact, there’s a good chance that anywhere you want to go, they don’t. They can actually help with chores and housework in a way that is productive and meaningful, and not simply an exercise in “learning responsibility.”

At some point, their math homework will probably become too much for you, but that’s what lunch-hour appointments with the algebra teacher are for, and if their English assignment term papers are soggy with teen-age angst, that’s really their instructor’s bath to wade through, not yours.

As they get older, they show you magical glimpses of the people they will become. It becomes less about potential and more about reality. They think big things (which in their minds are always bigger than they really are), they dream big dreams (which they are certain no one ever dreamed before) and their ability to share their visions with you becomes more articulate and more sophisticated than you thought – at times – they were capable of. You will stare in slack-jawed amazement as the child who doesn’t remember how to operate a washing machine explains why water reclamation is critical to the survival of the species.

You do not stop being afraid for them, you just become fearful of different things. You do not stop wanting to wrap your arms around them and keep away anything that might hurt them, you just force yourself not to.

When they’re small, and you look at them in panic when you realize that they are growing and this precious wee thing is going to leave you, remind yourself of the amazing adult they will be when they are grown. You are not losing your small child, you are growing a later friend.

That huge-eyed, whispy-haired, rosy-cheeked, chubby-hands munchkin who wrote “I love you Momy” with the “e” reversed in the Mother’s Day card will still be tucked away in that teenager, lurking somewhere behind the spleen or left kidney. And that child will hide in the folds of the adult they will become, sharing space with the other used-to-be-me’s that live inside us all. And don’t worry, they will visit from time to time.

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