Thoughts on Motherhood

Today David and the boys headed out on a three day river trip.  Other Moms get pretty excited when I tell them this.

“What are you going to do for three days?”

“I am jealous of you with a long quiet stretch of time alone.  Wow, all the things I would do.”

I kind of snicker and wonder whether it’s worth explaining.

For one, I still have a seventeen month old at home.  Make that a seventeen month old who needs very little sleep and started trying very hard to boycott her one nap of the day this past weekend.  She is also entirely too accustomed to watching her brothers play and turns into a rather bored, whiny, clingy version of her normally happy self if they are both out of the house simultaneously.

Two, “three days on the river” means that I helped them get packed the morning of day one.  Because we were out of town over the weekend they didn’t get to work ahead at getting ready and so it was noon instead of morning when we headed out.  Since they can’t shuttle their vehicle, I drove with them to their take out destination and then took them to their put in spot.  The water levels are very low so they switched plans this morning and canoed a larger river which meant significantly more driving time.

But Zara and I did get to do a bit of shopping this evening before we got groceries and it was so much fun to actually walk through the shoe aisles for the first time in a very long while.

We also stopped for Mexican food. I could make it sound like the beginning of a fabulous tradition of mother / daughter time; but the truth is I spontaneously decided I was willing to pay someone else to clean the rice up from under the table.

I found it so interesting to see two other Mom / daughter combos in the same room.  One of them was a mother to a forty year old.  The other looked like a ten year old daughter.  The first set was there before we arrived and sat in the booth behind us.  I heard very little of the words they said aside from, “Well in your relationship with him ….” but they were obviously discussing heavy stuff.  I could almost feel the stress just from the tone of their conversation and the way their voices stayed intense and at the same pitch.  It seemed they were trying hard to find solutions to big problems.

The mom with the ten year old daughter arrived when we were about halfway through our meal.  They both looked liked they’d just showered and the girl sported a cute ponytail.  She crossed her feet adorably while she ate.  They ate quickly, but with questions and short answers.  Mom seemed present instead of preoccupied.  Long before we were done, they finished up and left.

It made me remember the days soon after Zara was born when I would rock her in the living room, trying to decide whether she needed to burp or had tummy ache or just needed to sleep.  I remember the pockets of light from the lamps and feeling so intensely protective and in love with this tiny, new child of ours.  And in those hours, I remember often thinking of how many generations of mamas have mothered their children.  How my Mom rocked me and my grandma rocked her and her mama before her all the way back to some mama who rocked her baby on the ocean voyage to America and before that how her mama rocked her somewhere in Switzerland or Germany.

For generations Moms have been cuddling newborns and trying to learn “hungry” cries from “I’m tired” cries as opposed to “my tummy hurts” cries.  They’ve bathed babies and swaddled them and fed them and felt floods of indescribable emotion as that baby snuggled into their chest and fell asleep.  They’ve wrestled with two year olds who had melt downs in the meat aisle and worried through the night as fevers spiked higher.  They’ve cheered the first bike ride without training wheels and listened to 1,604,923 stories and answered double that many questions.  But they’ve listened to more than just the questions.  They’ve listened to hearts and watched actions and noticed when three day canoe trips are kind of exciting and kind of not because the only life jacket that fits is the one your mom found at a yard sale and it’s purple and that’s just about enough to ruin the entire trip.

Tonight I saw again what I realized sometime after Adam was born.  Once you’re a mom, you’re always a mom.  Whether your daughter is seventeen months or ten or forty-three, you’re still going to be taking her out for Mexican and listening to her heart.  And whether your boys are out blacksmithing over the fire in your yard or out canoeing the river, they’re still at the forefront of your mind.  You’re still going to wonder if their sleeping bag is warm enough when the night temperatures drop to the sixties and it rains even if there isn’t a thing you can do if it’s not.

It made me realize that that their are stages of motherhood, but there is no graduation.  Our meals tonight were so different.   From long discussion, to focused questions and answers, to me simply focusing on trying to get food into a moving target — there we all were in the same room.  Same relationship. Different chapters of our lives.  I was pretty sure I had the best of the three worlds because I was the only Mom who got forty-seven kisses during dinner.  I wonder if those other Moms would have said the same thing …  that they’re in the best stage of their lives?  I can hardly ever remember wishing to be in a different stage with the boys (ok, I lied.  I’m pretty sure I always want to fast forward the spitting out baby food stage).  I hope I always feel that way.

Here we are.  Another generation of Moms loving their kids.  Trying to find answers to the same life questions applied in 2015.  Loving. Living. Worrying. Praying. Teaching. And someday, learning to let go.  Our journey is new, but it is an old, old path.  Maybe it will give us courage to remember we are not alone.

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