Domestic Manifesto!

Mollie writes:

I was once a serious mother. Subjects like projectile pooping, HazMat suits for the nursery, mastitis and other nuclear issues barely brought a pause to my step. I occasionally actually thought that maternity was synonymous to sainthood and all things good. But deep down inside of me lurked an evil gnome who knew that oftentimes, Motherhood sucked.

This is hardly a revelation to the best of us, meaning those of us who (wo)man the trenches 24/7. We've exchanged recipes for diarrhea remover far more often than cookie recipes (take THAT, Hillary). We've partied when the diagnosis was ONLY MS (coulda been a brain tumor, deary, right?) cheered when our kids barely passed chemistry, clapped for them when they got parts in school plays whilst secretly cursing the drama coach, and other acts of superior morality.

If you were to ask my adult children, I was probably an ok mom. But what the heck do they know??? This was their only exposure to the parent/child relationship and didn't know that somewhere in America, women actually got up in the mornings and didn't have to decide whether to wear the coveralls or the hefty bag (with holes cut out for arms and legs, thank you very much) to clean the baby's room. Somewhere, in a universe far, far away, a mother actually chose to have her nails done rather than buy soccer shoes for her prodigy.

OMG!!!!!

And not all mothers were size six. Some of us ate the pizza we bought after the soccer games, the hot dogs at the baseball games, the chocolate chip cookies, the birthday cakes and other mandatory pre-requisites of childhood. And don't give me that sugar that we shouldda fed 'em wild hickory nuts - it ain't gonna happen when Ronald McDonald is just a block away and your kid whines in High C (the musical note, not the drink!) with all the other kidlets in the mini-van.

My kids never knew that some mothers got their hair styled regularly while I got mine done annually, the rest of the year holding it back with a rubber band at the nape of my neck. But they had their play-stations and and game-boys and didn't notice that their mother had a unibrow and split ends. Not that I'm complaining, of course.

So I'm gonna write more often about some of the more cynical sides of motherhood. We lost the Ad-sense add placement a couple of weeks ago because readership wasn't enough to justify their place in our lives. Which ended up just fine for me because there's no room in motherhood for capitalism. But the commercial loss is more than compensated by my decision to write about motherhood from the gut as well as the brain and the heart!