10 bits of motherhood that can be harder than giving birth

Ah…childbirth. That fully female privilege, met with both terrifying imaginations and romantic dreams by soon-to-be mothers all over the world.

Personally, I love giving birth. But maybe I can so valiantly say that because I’m not facing contractions and an episiotomy any time soon. 

I am, however, facing raising the four children I once housed in my womb. Sometimes the drama and excitement of child rearing parallels or even exceeds the child birthing experience. 

As an experienced mother once told me during my first pregnancy, it’s a lot easier to take care of a child who is still in utero.

Here are a smattering of challenges that make lying in a delivery room appealing in all sorts of ways….

10. Hard bleachers in freezing weather. Saturday we spent five hours at the baseball fields. The wind was icy cold and even grown men were lamenting our fate. I don’t suffer with grace. I was plagued with this thought, “First I have to give birth and then I have to do stuff like this???” I wrapped my blanket tighter around my shivering shoulders and tried to distract myself with deep breathing and the scoreboard as a focal point. Lawsy. “Spring baseball” is false advertising.

9. Wearing vomit (and I don’t mean spit-up). Spit up is like Braxton Hicks contractions: you think it’s bad until the real thing comes your way. The day hot dogs and macaroni and cheese and Twizzlers are partially digested and up-chucked all over your sweater, you long for the days of breast milk dribble on your shoulder again.

8. Packing lunches that never get eaten. You spread peanut butter, wrap cookies, carefully select juice boxes, and then send the children to school. Then at 9:00 pm you open that Iron Man lunch box and find everything poked at, smashed, moved a little, but not eaten. But what can you do- except pack a new lunch for tomorrow, and hope a turkey sandwich with chips on the side will fare better? But if a good game of soccer starts or someone has a book of jokes to read, that food will never be eaten. If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, then packing lunches is purely insane.

7. Public restrooms. With a baby there is the horror of those fold-out changing tables. Whose baby has been on there? What’s that dark smudge on the other end? Then with toddlers you face putting a child who must touch everything on a bare public toilet. The paper covers just freak little children out, and they never stay put as you sling the child up on the throne. Years later, your children rebuke you for insisting on going in with them. Grown boys have too much self-worth and too little understanding of the dangerous place a bathroom can be, and they run into the men’s restroom before you can coerce them into the women’s, where at least there are doors, and you can check on them without breaking laws and codes of decency. I despise public restrooms. In fact, I may never leave the house again.

6. Homework with a side of strong will. It is impossible to make a child do his homework. You can’t force a kid to practice his times tables, or push a record button and make her memorize the Gettysburg address. You can’t control her brain and convince her to read her chapters of Farmer Boy. You can, however, explain that if they don’t do their Second Grade work this year, they will get to do it again next year, which can be very satisfying- like crunching ice chips between contractions.

5. Clenched teeth. Have you ever tried to force bad-tasting medicine into a child’s mouth, when they clench their teeth and flail their arms? It’s about as enjoyable as wrestling a giant prehistoric electric eel. When you know that something is wholly necessary for the health of your child, and yet your child adamantly refuses to do it, you stare at life through a tunnel that seems to be swallowing you. Childbirth eventually just happens, whether the baby likes it or not. Nasty medicine, unfortunately, can be avoided, spit out, or thrown up. 

4. Public meltdowns. There is no doubt about it, any time you are in Target and your child decides to throw a Starbucks hot chocolate and scream at the top of her lungs, “You’re a MEAN Mommy!!”, there will be seventeen judgmental  and graceless onlookers. Their eyes will bore holes in your soul until a fellow trench-dwelling mom walks up with a pack of wipes and loves you right where you are (which is on the floor, mopping up the mess with the last partially used Kleenex you had in your purse). Back labor hurts, but the painful humbling lasts until you decide that caring properly for your imperfect children is more important than anyone else’s opinion of you. A psychological epidural hits in that moment and you never look back, baby.

3. Mean kids. The other babies in the hospital nursery never called my baby names. I’m sure they could have thought of some funny ones, “Watermelon Head”, “Scrunchy Face”, or  “Squawky” all would have fit the bill. But navigating the complicated world of social politics on the playground comes much later in life. And even when we mine it for good like this, it’s still a painful road we walk with our growing children.

2. Being bossed by a toddler. Once a child knows their name, their birthday, and a few odd bits of knowledge- how to count, their colors, etc- they come to believe they know everything. They tell you when you ran a red light (turning right at the intersection after stopping, of course), they rebuke you for not drying your hands after washing them (when you are about to get back in the pool), or they freeze and refuse to walk another step when you won’t buy their favorite food in the grocery store (which the store has run out of). The baby who relied on your safekeeping for their survival has deemed you inferior in intelligence, and they aren’t afraid to let you know that you’ve been found lacking.

1. Letting go. First they live inside you. Then your touch and care is their source for all comfort. The days become years and they grow up and away a little more all the time. Our children unabashedly embrace each birthday as evidence that they are wholly their own person. Of course we know they are becoming independent, but our children uniquely live in our hearts, a part of all our dreams and hopes in life. And so we let go with our hands a little more all the time, but our hearts cling to every laugh and smile that reminds us of the day we first played peek-a-boo, the first time we held the screaming baby in our arms, the day they first said our name, and the memories of early morning books, late night fevers, and swinging at the park. The nurses never told us about these of after-labor pains of the heart. But even if they had, we wouldn’t have understood as we held that new, helpless baby, so sure we would never let go….