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Editor’s Note: This month, as is fitting for our Family issue, we welcome to the magazine award-winning humor writer Wendi Aarons to help launch a new column on parenting with her poignant and humorous take on its many challenges and rewards. Aarons lives in Austin with her husband and two sons, and can usually be found near the 50% off rack at Target. She is currently working on her first book and blogging at wendiaarons.com.
In just a few weeks, my youngest son Jack will become a kindergartner. It’s a day I’ve both dreaded and looked forward to for years now. Because while I’m excited that he’s finally starting “real school,” just like his brother Sam did two years ago; one big, nagging question keeps popping into my head and jolting me awake at night: What the hell am I going to do now? For the past seven years, I’ve been a full-time, full-tilt stay-at-home mother. (Where the “stay-at-home” part comes from is something I’ve never understood. I mean, it’s not like we moms are trapped in the house, chained to our ovens. It just feels that way.) I never planned on not working after I had kids, but unfortunately I was laid-off from my ad agency job when I was pregnant with my first son. This was due to either the bad economy, or the fact that I kept stealing everybody’s lunches out of the refrigerator and screaming, “I’m eating for two, so just leave me alone, people!”
At first I didn’t accept my unemployed fate and immediately tried to find a job at another agency. Obviously, it was a bit of a shock to interviewers when I waddled into the room six-months pregnant with the opening line of “What? You were expecting a virgin?” and so, not surprisingly, everyone I met with said I “just wasn’t the right fit.” Well, of course I wasn’t the right fit; I was a hormonal beached whale with swollen ankles and an ass you could watch a 70mm movie on if I happened to be wearing white pants that day. I mean, I didn’t even fit in my king-size bed, much less a desk chair writing jingles for The Scooter Store.
It was then that my husband Chris and I decided that maybe I should temporarily make our baby my full-time job. Luckily, we could afford it and hey, maybe I’d actually enjoy myself. After all, I could always go back to work once the baby was a little older. Once I had finally mastered motherhood. And how long could that take? A few weeks? A month, tops?Minutes after Sam was born, I gingerly held him in my arms and stared into his angry old-man face, and fell in love with all my might. Then I put my lips to his tiny, perfect ear and softly whispered to him that nothing in the world would make me happier than staying home with him all day. Absolutely nothing. And then the meds wore off.
The next few months were a blur of laundry, diaper changes and watching Judge Judy while breastfeeding every two hours. (That show is on a lot.) But like every new mom, I was exhausted, I was overwhelmed, I was frighteningly close to telling Chris that I wanted a divorce just so I could go to the bathroom alone two weekends a month. I mean, I was fine with being a mother and all, but did it have to be all day? Not to mention all damn night?
It seems ridiculous now, but at the time I couldn’t figure out why no one had ever told me motherhood was going to be so hard. After all, none of the women in the Pampers commercials looked like they just escaped from spending 10 years in a Thai prison like I did. None of them were standing in the bathroom trying desperately to lull their newborn to sleep with a blow dryer set on “Low.” None of them had breast milk leaking through their shirt, or their backs covered in layers of spit-up, or hair with roots so dark they looked like incompetent coalminers. So what was I doing wrong?
When Sam was almost a year old, salvation finally arrived. Surprisingly, not in the form of a little, brown bottle from Walgreen’s, either. The first big change was that Sam started sleeping through the night. And, after a few weeks of waking up every hour out of habit, so did I. The second change was that I enrolled him in a wonderful Mother’s Day Out program, so he and I could now spend eight hours apart each week. Time enough for me to relax, rejuvenate and realize that I wasn’t doing such a bad job, after all.
A year later, I had another baby, Jack, and this time everything was much easier. During the years that followed, I spent almost all of my time with the boys and actually became pretty good at my full-time motherhood gig. The play dates, the preschools, the playgrounds – I now have it all down cold and my career, such as it is, is going well. So maybe that’s the reason I’m a little upset that my hours will be reduced by seven hours a day once they start school. It’s almost like I’m getting laid-off all over again.
What am I going to do now? Work? Volunteer? Sit on my couch and eat tubs of whipped cream in my underwear while watching Judge Judy? I’m really not sure yet. But whatever it is, whatever I end up doing, I know that I’m going to miss those little boys like crazy.