Motherhood is Bittersweet {guest blogger Tonya}

As our family enjoys a babymoon at our house, it is my pleasure to share with becoming claudine readers special guest posts from bloggers who are mothers.  These are women graciously sharing words and pictures about birth and mothering.  Each has a wonderful reflection about the complexity, joy, challenges, happiness and gifts of mothering, and I am truly privileged to host their stories over the next several weeks.  Enjoy!

 

Hi, my name is Tonya, and I am thrilled to be guest posting for Claudine while she takes a little bonding time with baby. 

As I write this post, I’m sitting in Panera.  A few tables away a couple is having their lunch.  He’s a big man, probably retirement age, his hair shaved short in the way men are wearing it these days.  The woman’s black hair is cut almost as short, pixie-like, although she herself is no pixie.  She’s large in the way my mother would call “big boned.”   Somehow her stature makes her seem strong.  Right now she is laughing uproariously at something the man is reading off his smart phone. 

I must admit to being fascinated by older, married folks who have long since sent their kids off to college and are living their “golden years.”  To me, these couples seem to have risen to a higher realm of living, able to relax after the years of washing sticky maple syrup hands, stepping on Legos, driving to early morning hockey practices, and waiting up way past their bedtimes for returning teenagers. 

I envy them.

Not every day, mind you.  There are those days when everything seems to gel, where all of the times reminding the kids to say “please” or put their towels on the hook on the back of the bathroom door or to not call their sibling a stinky poo-poo head...it all comes together.  Well, it may not come together for an entire day. More like a particular afternoon.  Or an hour at bedtime.  Or even just a moment after eating peanut butter crackers at 2:35 on a Tuesday afternoon.  All seems to be going as I had envisioned it, when my four children were only a distant vision down the road of life.

In that magical vision of motherhood, I would use cloth diapers and make my own baby food and soak up all the wonderful maternal bliss of nursing.  But somehow I lost the memo about how sore I’d be after an unexpected c-section to think of washing diapers, and how baby may prefer the jarred peas to the army green ones frozen into ice cube-sized portions, or cracked, bleeding nipples.

However, my dissolution with first-time motherhood didn’t keep me from having three more.

Interestingly, last Christmas Eve at church, I noticed a woman who I know had recently embarked upon her “golden years,” looking our direction.  At the time, Husband and I were wrangling our two little boys up to communion, Josh and Owen barely able to contain the excitement inside their two little argyle-vested bodies.  And this woman, she was looking at us with a mixture of delight and yearning.   If I could see her thoughts, I knew she was reliving the Christmas Eves of her past, with her own little ones squirming in their little loafers.

And I knew with all my heart that someday, I will be she, looking over at the young mother and her brood, and I will be yearning for the days when my children were that small.

~ The insightful and witty Tonya writes at Whoopsidaisy.