Mommy-Hood

First of all…my name is not “Mommy”…it’s “Mamma”. At least until Jimmy starts calling me something that can’t be undone. I have a vivid memory of the kid that I played house with on the playground at Kings Way Language School calling his mom “Mommy”. I was in kindergarten, maybe barely 1st grade, and Paul (I think that was his name) disgusted me with his use of “Mommy”. It sounded so babyish and I didn’t like him to be my husband when we played house…I only chose him if there was no one else to play the part. Since then I’ve always known that my kids would call me “Mamma”.

I don’t remember ever calling my mom “Mommy” although she would probably remember better than I do. So I don’t think I’m being a hypocrite…if she does remember me calling her that maybe she can just keep that to herself. ;-)

What is Mommy-hood? It’s a place, it’s a state of being, it’s a feeling, it’s a million things more than I can describe. My heart packed up and moved to this place the minute I saw and held my baby boy. I’ve spent the almost last 18 months adjusting and re-adjusting to the loveliness, the overwhelming sensations, the worry… Just when you think you’ve learned all the ins and outs of Mommy-hood your baby does something new, turns the established routine on its head, prefers daddy, no he prefers you and any number of other things that can cause you to have to adjust all over again and realize you know nothing, zero, zilch, nada about what it means to be a part of this Mommy-hood.

My most recent revelation of being a Mamma to two little boys…one that’s still incubating…is that this pretty much permanent exhaustion that I have isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I clean the house at 5pm while he’s napping and by 8pm it’s a wreck again. I lovingly gather up all the strewn toys and the drumset he now carries all over the house and put it all back in its place and we start again 5 minutes later. I set him in his high chair in the kitchen in an effort to keep him corralled for 30 minutes while I cook…the result? Toys all over the kitchen floor where he’s thrown them and food that he sweeps off the tray into his lap, the floor or wherever else it lands. He thinks if he throws it down he can get down to pick it up. The whole bit about not being able to use the bathroom alone when you have toddlers? True. Every single word of it. Jimmy sat in my lap this morning while I peed.

I am learning that there are levels and types of exhaustion. There is peaceful, content exhaustion and then there is the frustrated, throw all the toys away, buy paper plates, become nudists so I don’t have to do laundry ever again exhaustion. The lowest level of exhaustion sometimes can be mistaken for laziness by onlookers. This level can be remedied by an evening or evenings sitting on the couch not caring that the house is caving in. Some of the higher levels of exhaustion include an inability to care that a shower hasn’t taken place in way to long, napping at my desk, falling into a dead sleep at 8:30pm, temporarily losing brain cells and the list goes on.

The beauty of Mommy-hood is that I love the little booger to no end that inflicts that exhaustion on me. At the end of my figurative rope he’ll do something to make me laugh so hard and recharges my batteries for the next little bit.

In 4 months it will be twice the adjustments, twice the exhaustion, twice the laughter and twice the love and I can't wait!