A Brief List of My White Flags

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Here’s a fun mental exercise for moms. Take a moment, right now, and try and peer back through the looking glass at yourself, pre-kids. For real. Draw a mental image of who THAT lady thought THIS lady would be.

Okay, got it? You’ve got that image of the younger, perkier you, full of romanticized visions of motherhood in her idealistic head? Good. Let’s make fun of her, shall we? What follows is a list of things I  thought I’d do and (surprise, surprise) DON’T.

A Brief List of My White FlagsPerfect nutrition – I’m currently making an effort, based on some challenges a kid is facing + some real research linking artificial colors to behavior problems, to pull them from our diet. It’s real hard, friends, because there are so many artificial colors in our diets. Not sure how 20 year-old, hippy, environmentalist me got to the point where I gave my a kid a powdered donut this morning when she put on her shoes (true) but here we are.

I’d say that I fall into the “mostly healthy food,” category. I do limit processed food, and I cook and serve real food every day. But, Diet Puritanism? WHITE FLAG.

Professional Success – I looked forward to being a working mom. I imagined my kids would thrive in their nice, progressive day-care until they moved on, thriving at their nice, comfortable public school. After all, it takes a village, right?.

Daily, I’d kiss my darlings on their cherubic little heads as I dropped them off, my kitten heels clicking on the shiny floor as I headed to my high-powered job, which would feel like a comfortable balance with my relaxed home life, leaving me mentally fulfilled. “Good bye, mummy!” they’d chirp, as they bustled eagerly into their days of enrichment and socialization. Meanwhile, in my short skirt and long jacket, I’d spend my professional days using machete to cut through red tape, until I climbed into my clean car at the end of a satisfying day to collect my angels.

None of that happened. Leaving kids at daycare gets easier, WAY easier, than it was those first few days, when they would look at me with ET TU, BRUTE eyes, brimming with tears then breaking into screams.

It’s easier, now, and they DO thrive. Also, my working allows us to pay for such luxuries as (processed) food. But anyone who thinks that childcare is a set-it and forget-it situation is smoking something. Perhaps, they are smoking the SAME something that imagines that a career is easy to maintain on almost no sleep, and that anything about our individualistic society promotes “balance.” I wish I had some.

Balance is a hard-won commodity, and I’ve had my wobbles trying to maintain it. Frankly, I’ve wobbled back, to reliable hours, less money, and less ambition, at least for now. Which is fine – I’m working to live over here, not living to work. WHITE FLAG.

Television – Who out there said, pre-kids, denigrating things about parents who “used TV as a babysitter?” (I shyly raise my hand.) And who among you, now that you HAVE kids, uses the TV as a babysitter? (I keep my hand raised.)

I do have limits on screen time in my house, basically because there are NOT enough HOURS in the DAY to do all of the CRAP. But I have friends who don’t, and you know what? Their kids are way likelier than mine to choose to play outside rather than choose to sit in front of a glowing box. For my kids, the limits on the boob tube seem to be part of what makes it magical. We still will not allow SpongeBob (Because I hate him) and I managed to box out Barney (same) but basically, TV? WHITE FLAG.

Breastfeeding – I always expected to nurse my kids. But, I’ll admit it, pre-mom me did have a touch of ick-factor about the whole business (feeding a…who? WITH MY WHATS?) I didn’t expect to love it so much, or to have it comprise such a huge part of my fondest memories of infancy and toddler-hood. I also never expected it to be so HANDY, from lulling infants into a catatonic state, to calming nightmares, to giving me a way to bond with my babies at the end of long, hard days.

I nursed my kids for a long time, well into toddlerhood and far longer than I expected to. When it came time to wean, which it always does EVENTUALLY, I mourned. I’d thought that the fancy boobs of early-adulthood would be the high-point of my mammaries’ life cycles, but it wasn’t. It was the soft, full (sometimes HARD and full) boobs of early motherhood. The boobs that put the chunk on my babies’ thighs.

And here’s one of the things about choosing to wean: Once nursing is established, your baby is likely to want it to continue. At some point, the weaner must set a limit to a (likely) crying baby, telling them they can’t have a healthy, reasonable thing they want. I was always kinda like, Crying Baby, WHITE FLAG. Have a boob.

(Please understand – I’m not telling  YOU to nurse. You are the best mother for your kids, and I’m extremely glad that formula is there, too, putting chunk on baby thighs. Also, I think just because I kept at it so long, it’s easy for me to gloss over the bumps in my nursing road that DID occur in the first few sleep-deprived weeks. The vast majority of my nursing memories are fond ones. I raise my eyebrows at the version of me who ever thought “Ick.”)

Hanging out on weeknights (including Friday) – I’ve been any good at saying no, especially to a good time. And not celebrate the weekly holiday that is FRIDAY? On Friday, you can find a happy hour, but you don’t have to work the next day! It’s the best of both worlds!

Post-kid me realizes that it was…a little unhealthy. I probably drank too much. I spent way too many Saturdays with a hangover until 3:00 pm (You know what cures a hangover? NOTHING. You know what makes it worse? BABIES).

Anyway, with the craziness of working-dinner-parenting-bedtime, we mostly just don’t on weeknights. We stay in. We do laundry. We exercise, mostly after bedtime. On Friday, we have pizza and watch a movie, and we wake up Saturday with clear heads. ClearER heads, perhaps.

And impromptu happy post-work happy hour? I mean, yes, they’ve happened. But they take actual planning, which means “impromptu” they’re not. And in general, they’re a huge pain in the ass for the other parent. So social lives on week-nights? WHITE FLAG.

Sleep: Oh yeah, GIGANTIC white flag on all of the sleep things. Especially if “sleeping in a bed with adults only,” is on the list. If I could find sleep, I’d WHITE FLAG it. I haven’t seen it to surrender.

Timeliness: I am so sorry, you people who expect me to be on time and consider my 10 minutes of tardiness rude. I honestly have no idea how to go about showing up on time, to a place. Maybe it’s…sleep deprivation? WHITE FLAG.

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Maddie Forrester
Maddie is a recent transplant to the Northern Kentucky Area, where she moved last spring after a decade in Columbus, OH. She’s the mom of three kids: A son, born in 2009, and twin girls, born in 2011. This is as exhausting as it sounds. Luckily, she thrives on chaos. She balances the glamour of working full time with the rigors of first grade homework, playing dress-up, and moving mountains (both metaphorical mountains, and mountains of laundry). She had hobbies once, but doesn’t quite remember what they were. Now, when she gets a moment of free time, she uses it to catch up on her wine and/or sleep, usually in that order. She also loves to cooking, running, singing badly while playing her guitar even worse, and reading.

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