I'm pretty sure that just five minutes ago I was laying on the floor with my friends, playing MASH, trying to pick out which boy we'd grow up and marry, what color our wedding colors would be, the amazing car we would drive and, of course, how many kids we would have. Never in this simple game of Mansion Apartment Shack House was there ever a choice for how in debt you would be, how many times you would get spit up on in the course of a day, how that "amazing car" would look more like a mobile daycare and how often you'd want to ship your children to Guam.......but here we are just the same.
I swear I always got the mansion, the famous husband, the limo with a driver and the children who never cried when I played that game! What I have though, is the 1950's poster version of the quintessential American family - a nice husband, 2 cute kids - a boy and a girl, a big dog, some debt, a car I don't fully own, a house I don't own at all and a decade worth of clutter.
Gone are the days when I would fight every day just to feel human - those days when you feel like a walking burp rag, you haven't showered, your legs could fake a picture for a Sasquatch sighting, you're pretty sure you brushed your teeth but let's face it - you can't remember back all the way to this morning ....those days when formula and diaper changes were ways to mark the passage of daytime hours: "Poopy diaper, must be 10 am" and "That sounds like the 'I'm hungry, get me a bottle before I REALLY start screaming' cry - must be noon." Don't worry, even though I'm no longer relishing a 3 minute shower like it's a vacation I have not forgotten - we will revisit those days in this blog. I survived them, I'm going to brag about them!
If you have a normal life like mine then you spend most of it trying to swim upstream - hopefully you'll get a little ahead so you can take a breather for a second before jumping back into the fray. I never seem to get ahead tho, those darn bills expect to be paid every month - how rude is that?? And those kids expect to be fed at least three times a day - sheesh! And did you know that when you clean your house once it has to be done again and again and again FOR ETERNITY??
Most people say they spend 2 hours a day cleaning (seriously - I agree, these people are lying through their teeth) BUT we'll say 2 hours a day because on the weekends you've got laundry, spring cleaning etc - SO 2 hours a day, 365 days a year.....in your child's 18 years of life with you, you will have spent 546 days of it (a year and a half) CLEANING. Nope, sorry, not gonna do it. It's just gonna get messy tomorrow! Put down the toilet brush, wash you hands (gross mom!) and go grab a puzzle or a coloring book or a bouncy ball and spend that time with your offspring instead. Maybe if we spent more time interacting with them and less time scooting them in front of the TV so we could clean without interruption we wouldn't want to ship them to Guam once a week!
That gives me an idea for tomorrow's blog - How to survive without the boobtube.....and who started calling it that anyway? Do you think it was because the first TV's were bubbled outward like a big boob? This must be researched, I will let you know tomorrow. Until then, give yourself a pat on the back for having survived motherhood thus far - congratulations!
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