This Stage of Life? It's Hard

The blog post, This Stage of Life? It's Hard was showing up all over my friends' Facebook walls recently.  Maybe that's not surprising given that many of my friends fit the demographic the author addresses - 30-something moms with two, three, even four kids, ages newborn to seven or eight.  But what was surprising was realizing how many of my friends feel the same way I do. Because my friends are awesome and all superwomen in my eyes. And there they were publicly admitting that this stage of life is damn hard. 

I need to remind myself that it's okay to admit that and I'm not less of a mom for it. I've proven I can handle a lot, but that doesn't mean that these little parenting and life challenges, when all added up, leave me feeling pretty depleted.  So that's why on Mother's Day, while seemingly all the other moms were posting pictures of themselves with their children on Instagram and Facebook, I did what I often do on Mother's Day, and that's spend time without my children. Acknowledging that this stage in life is hard is the first step in working on not just surviving this stage, but enjoying it, and for me, that means I need to learn how to recharge.  Without a plan for the day, I ended up on my bike and headed towards the river where I laid in the sun, read a book and actually accomplished something I'm not very good at - relaxing.

Even though I was pedaling uphill on my way home, the exercise, outdoors and time to myself had started to recharge me and this stage in life felt a little less hard. 

Happy Mother's Day to Me

I feel really guilty about saying this, because I really love my children, obviously I do, but every year on Mother's Day, what I really want is a day off.  It's rare I get even a couple of hours to myself, let alone in my own house.  All I wanted to do was go wherever I wanted to go or do whatever I wanted to do, even if that meant nothing at all.   



Chris granted my wish, (I'll return the favor on Father's Day) but when the weather forecast for Mother's Day called for a day of rain, I asked if I could take my Mother's Day day off on Saturday instead.  So this morning he packed lunches and loaded the kids in the car for an excursion to the Tamarack Nature Center. 

Chris said he and Oliver had talked about what Oliver wanted me to do on my day off.  Except when Chris asked him to tell me what those things were, Oliver couldn't quite remember and with a hint of question in his voice, said, "Join Paloma's [next door neighbor girl] family?"  With Chris helping to jog his memory, Oliver finally remembered he had really wanted me to "plant some flowers and go on a walk and look for dogs."

The only walk I went on was the few blocks to the running store to buy myself a new pair of running shoes to replace the ones I had worn down to the sole and had planned to throw away at the end of our trip to China.  But I did see all my favorite neighborhood dogs and got tons of slobbery kisses to brighten my day.  And I did plant A LOT of flowers.  All my window boxes are now stuffed with flowers and I can't wait until the plants are fully grown and bursting with color.

The only mishap in my bright and sunny, and quiet, day was I managed to smash a storm window over my head.  I was trying to open one of the windows on our three-season porch so I could access the window box from inside, when the top of the window popped out of the frame, tipped towards me, hit my head and shattered.  I gently lifted what was left of the window off my head and I felt mild stinging on my scalp.  The last thing I needed on my day-before-Mother's-Day-day-to-myself was a shard of glass poking out of my head.  I obviously couldn't see if anything was stuck, so unsure of what else to do, I knocked on my neighbor's door, and in the oddest request I've ever made of them, asked if they could make sure no slivers of glass were stuck in my hair. 

The broken window aside, the rest of the day was exactly how I had envisioned it.

Mother's Day Quotes

As I spend much of Mother's Day on the couch or in bed with a soar throat, I've got these funny quotes to get me through the day.

"Mother's Day is the holiday of mamas!" - Oliver, age 4.5

"Kids, you survived another year of Mom being your mom." - Chris

"You need to give your mom tons of kisses tomorrow.  Kisses will fill her heart with love." - FedEx delivery guy to my kids, who were playing in the yard when he dropped off a package. 

Mother's Day and Another Planting Season

When Chris asked me what I wanted to do for Mother's Day, I insisted I didn't want to do anything more than start the garden. This pregnancy has taken so much out of me that when Chris heads out of town most Monday mornings, I wonder how I'm going to make it until Friday when he arrives back home. And then despite how much he's worked during the week, Chris puts himself on near full-time Oliver duty on the weekends. He takes him to the zoo, goes on walks and pushes him on the swings at the park. I don't have to be in charge of every snack, meal and clean-up, can go out at nap time and don't have to be home by Oliver's 6:30 p.m. bedtime. For those two days, at least, I remember how much easier and more enjoyable parenting is when you have someone else to trade off responsibilities with. So honestly, I just want Chris to keep doing what he's doing whether the calendar says it's Mother's Day or not.

With my low energy due to both pregnancy and a cold, gardening was a perfect activity. We ended up making two trips to the garden store, and while we're not quite ready yet here in Minnesota to plant anything other than hardy crops, we finally planted some flowers. Our house came with flower boxes lining the length of the porch, but I never got around to planting anything our first summer last year. After getting what turned into a pep talk from an employee at the garden store near our house who pointed us towards annuals that were inexpensive enough to plant and just see what happens, we settled on Impatiens. They look pretty dinky right now in the flower boxes - you can barely see them from the sidewalk - but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that if I can keep them alive, (that's the hard part for me!) they'll be looking beautiful in a few weeks.

As for the rest of the yard, we made the first step in our modest plans for adding color to our small city lot. Although the former owners had done simple and tasteful landscaping, Chris and I were so unfamiliar with plants that once we got behind on maintenance, we lost track of what was a weed and what was not. Last fall, we decided it'd be less stressful to start with a clean slate, even if that meant undoing the work the former owners had put into the yard, and we completely ripped out some of the garden plots. The empty patches of dirt committed us to putting something new there this spring. Whereas I had previously been overwhelmed with all the options for flowers and how to make the garden look good, I realized that something was better than nothing and adopted the strategy of picking plants in varying heights and colors, and like the flower boxes, will just have to see what happens.

I finished planting what I had planned for the weekend before the thunderstorm and downpour started. The rain ended up altering the one official Mother's Day celebration we had planned, a picnic my brother-in-law organized in honor of my mother-in-law and me. Instead, we "picnicked" on my in-law's living room floor (picnic basket, blanket and all). Our indoor location had the advantage of the big-screen TV, on which my father-in-law showed us the videos he had taken of Oliver the last couple of months. It was almost as much fun to watch Oliver watch the videos as it was to watch the videos themselves. I really think Oliver recognized himself! Either way, he enjoyed sitting in Dad's lap and having some rare television time.