I was gonna … but then I didn’t.

This is Chiara, day two:

 I woke up this morning wishing I didn’t have to. As the morning progressed and I had to convince kids to shower, make Noah’s lunch, make breakfast, cheer up Liam even though I felt like crap, change a poopy diaper and go out in the cold to start the car so it would be warm for my boys, I was writing a blog entry in my head.

I couldn’t wait to get home and write it all out. All the sad, hateful, angry thoughts of injustice of being a mommy. I had been thinking of it all since last night, really. When Daniel and I watched the 18 minute video capturing the essence of his Brothers Gone Wild trip he took last August for a week alone with his brothers. I thought about how unfair it was that I never get time away. Just me. No kids. Just calm. I got to do that with Daniel in Cancun last year, but so had he. And I had done it 8 months pregnant and nearly passed out in my compression garments and jeans, waiting for our flight to leave humid Cancun. I had the same vacation he had, but with humiliating stretch marks and massive thighs, waddling around a swanky hotel as a human balloon, watching all these bikini-clad, tan ladies with beautiful thin bodies. Oh man, I was gonna make Daniel understand what it’s like to be a mommy.

I was gonna write it all out. I was gonna do it in terms he would understand – I was planning on writing a job description of a mommy and ask him, with a smug smile on my face, “Would YOU take a job like this? huh?” And I would know the answer and look for empathy and love and appreciation from him. Instead, I know I would get a tired response, “no, honey, you have it rough. It sucks to be you. I’m sorry”. I was gonna, but then I didn’t.

My friend Christine has this way of finding specifically poignant stories and talks about motherhood and then sending me the link. Gah! I saw the link to a story she sent me yesterday and I thought I wanted to write my sob story of the drudgery it is to be a mother and NOT read her link. Then I read it. And teared up. And felt stupid. And thought – I have it all mixed up.

It’s true that Daniel will never experience labor and delivery, but he will never know love like I experience it either. He will not know the connection a mother has to her baby. The feelings of carrying that little human – growing him in your tummy. The miracle of birth. The overwhelming feelings of power and gratitude of birth; not knowing you could endure and carry out such a thing and then watch that tiny human grow before your eyes. He will not know what it is. He will watch it and feel a sense of it, but not live it. I will. I do.

This is the article that darn Christine sent me: These Are the Lines of a Story

It’s a beautiful remembrance of what I should see in my everyday life as a mother. So there. I didn’t write the job description like I kind of wanted to (it would’ve been awful … truly awful). But I wrote something else instead.

This one kind of goes out to my youngest sister, Aria, who just had her third baby, her first sweet baby girl, Chiara, yesterday. Aria did it. It’s a total miracle that we do what we do, Chick and you did it.