"Eww MOM, there is puke everywhere," screamed my oldest, and then she started to gag also. And it was everywhere, including covering the five bags of groceries I had just barely bought and placed on the car floor in front of my babies car seat. Rookie mistake. Once home I removed a slippery stinking goo covered child from her seat and carried her straight into the bathroom, leaving of trail of grossness in our wake. I washed her and cradled her and rocked her to sleep, cleaned myself up, cleaned the bathroom, the hallway, started the washing machine, and then remembered the van. The puke devastated minivan. Mother Trucker. Once again I scooped and scraped and scrubbed. The van was clean, clean car seat, puke covered me. I looked at the five bags of ruined groceries. Should I try to salvage them? On one had they were covered in vomit, on the other had they had cost me roughly seventy bucks.
"What's for dinner?" my husband queried as he came in the door from work. Don't ask honey, just don't ask!
That night as I collapsed into bed only slightly more exhausted than usual I remembered a guest panel I had recently sat on at a local college. It was a career planning course, taught by a friend, consisting only of freshmen girls, and I was there to talk to them about being a stay at home mom. They asked questions, me and two other mothers gave advice.
"What's hardest about being a stay at home mom?" Uh, ya they came out with the heavy hitters right away. How to explain. How to tell these sweet innocent doe eyed girls about the horrors of cesarean scars and lack of a private moment ever. E V E R! That they would be in charge of keeping a helpless little living human alive, and fed and clean. Not only cared for but well adjusted and kind and compassionate and a million other things. That the career choice of motherhood meant no quiting time, no coffee breaks, no paid vacation. That on their best days they would look beraggled and on their worst days like three shades of hell warmed over. What were they doing thinking about motherhood anyway? I wanted to scream at them to bloody well finish college, run away to Italy for a year, get something pierced or tattooed, you are only babies yourselves! What I settled on saying was that being a mom is great, the best and hardest thing I had ever done, and that they should worry about giving birth to themselves first. I hope it stuck.
As I picked a chunk of who knows what out of my hair I thought about the freshmen girl who wanted to know how you handle the icky stuff.
"You know," she had said, "like the bloody noses and scraped knees and poo and stuff. That's gross and I don't think I could do that."
I started to laugh hysterically. Motherhood is the icky stuff. It is buggers on your shirt, and the five second rule. It is four people sharing the same spoon without blinking. It is crusty and messy and sticky. You will count down the days until its over, and then cry like a baby when it really is. You will never ever love so hard. The love will fill you up right in that spot under your rib cage until it hurts and you think you might burst with love. Then your daughter will lay her soft cheek on your shoulder and her downy curls with brush against your face and all your bones and joints will creek and groan with the weight of that love. And that's what you will get for braving the icky stuff.
