Why babies have mothers.
I thought I'd put up some old posts for a laugh or two. Well also to mitigate the drivel below. Happy Mother's Day!~ Live, Love, Breath and Hope.
Been mothering for twelve years now. My siblings, family and friends may beg to differ. My name and the word 'mother' were often put into the same sentence long before I had my first Easy Bake Oven.
Serious, world on her shoulders, earnest-- I have heard them all.
I had dinner the other night with this mama friend in my old home town. I grew up babysitting her kids. It's a friendship where we meet every few years and make massive downloads into one another's brains. We relay what we are doing, have those nfw that kid is that old?! Tell him to quit growing THIS instant conversations. We talk about what inanities can drive us us to drink, put our fists through drywall, make us laugh beverage through our noses and assess just how much damage that last pass through the atmosphere did to our heat reflectors. You know, mama talk.
She asked what I had been up to and so I told her of the projects and interests I have now and her eyes never wavered as she looked at me from her seat across the table.
"So working with warriors eh? I'm not surprised. You've been a warrior since I met you."
She's right. And yet, I wasn't sure how to take it. For it meant I must admit with no equivocation I have been taut and vigilant ever since I can remember and that I own the mother lion, the OCD angst ridden, I'll-never-fit-into-his family-I-wonder-how-much-therapy-the-kids-will-need-if-I-can-just-fix-that-or-bring-the-right-dish-to-the-potluck-everything-will-be-fine-who am-I-kidding-I'm-so-full-of-crap role I share with a great number of the population on the planet.
One thing I've come to understand through age, fatigue, discomfort all necessitating an eventual need for understanding, is that any of those traits are all are bearable in the absence of second guessing. In it's presence all bets are off. It's the one rock that when you put it in anyone's wagon, lifts the donkey harnessed to said cart, straight into the air.
So I've been turning off that second guess switch--a little I mean. I think it comes with age. One hits that forty mark and the sticky, thick Self Conscious vaccine some of us self administrate in spite of our loathing of sharp, shiny, painful needles all those years becomes less of a given.
I have now found the nerve to throw that stuff right into the bio-hazard container. I'm glad, too, cause if I threw it in a regular trash can, I'd dive right in to get it bacl after an hour.
Bio-hazard containers have those little doors that you can't pull back out, see. Once your crap is in, there's no getting it out. I've seen other more well adjusted mamas with one mounted on the wall and I kept lusting theirs from afar. Thinking I did not have the emotional currency to invest in one, I never put it on my Christmas list.
Alas I scraped the human cash together.
My bio-hazard container was telling my mother in law just what I thought and then repeating it to her offspring less there were any issues with translation. It was also pursuing passions and realizing the kids would survive if they ate cold cereal for breakfast every once in a while. It's in the gym, this grad school app sitting at my desk, the priority boxes my feet are resting on here under my desk waiting to be mailed across the pond and in the friends I've kept as well as the friends I remember fondly.
Without the vaccine, dongivafukitis is beginning to flourish.It feels like any condition would especially as your body and mind get the first flush of its little beasties. Nothing is particularly better or easier, but the viral load is shifted so it feels less heavy despite of the fact that when I look in my wagon all the good and the bad is present and accounted for--the same but loaded differently, less awkwardly.
I know this is true. It is because even now after all this time, motherhood is not a role I feel extremely confident in and I'm not so freaked out by that. I'd even go so far as to say it's a role that keeps me pretty frustrated at my lack of grace or clarity most of the time, but again I have begun to expect that time will change that.
I know motherhood is not a role you can ever put down or in my case would want to put down. Leave in personal storage while I renovate...well maybe--but I digress.
How you shoulder the role is something you will answer for one way or the other as it marks your mind and your body, indelibly and ephemerally and as it marks those you love in some ways.
I often joke I'd prefer to have been born a man. Only sometimes, I'm not really joking.
Given the inherent, sophomoric humor of the Universe, I understand why I wasn't.
------
Blogging Milsupport here and here (scroll halfway down on this post. I may have been having a moment. *eyes looking up innocently*) Go have a look if you haven't. Trying to gather a few things for some guys in Iraq.
