Whenever you hear about stay at home moms say how hard their job is, I think it automatically conjurs up this image of slaving away over some difficult physical task, or wracking your brown over an intellectually difficult issue.  But that’s not what makes being a stay at home mom hard.

It’s not physical or mental (or at least not all of it because it is that too).  It’s psychological.

Psychologically, staying at home with small children is hard.  Very, very hard.  Even if the children are extremely well behaved (which, lets face it, mine aren’t), the drain on your psyche would still be there.   And though your nerves are taxed to their very limits, you still have diapers to change, lunches to fix, sippy cups to fill, boo-boos to kiss better, baby’s to nurse and everything else that goes along with it.  It’s a long list.  You have to hear the same old songs and watch the same old preschool programming on television because as mind-numbing and god-awful as it is, it soothes the savage beasts and sometimes you need them to be soothed.  You have to say for the 7,643,495th time, “Liam!  Don’t hit your sister!”  You have to enforce the rules.  You have to give cuddles when they need them (and they always need them when your hands are full with something else).   You have to paw through the pantry in search of lunch food, wondering where all the graham crackers went anyhow.  You have to play the psychological games to make your overbearing toddler still think he’s getting his way when in reality, he’s getting YOUR way.  You have to figure out why the baby is unsatisfied and clingy and needy and then listen to her when you have to set her down to go change her brother’s diaper.

At the end of the day, you breathe a sigh of relief for a few moments to yourself.  And then you wake up in the morning and it all starts over again.  Each and every day.  The same.  No weekends.  No vacations.  No coffee break.  There is no escape.  Just more of the same, day after day after day.

And before long you find yourself wondering, “Is this all there is?”  And “Who am I?  Do I even know me anymore?”  And sometimes even, “What is the point?”

Of course, all it takes are those little moments where you your toddler crawls up on your lap and gives you a kiss, completely unprovoked or the baby flashes her dimple at you when you get her out of her crib after her nap and those little moments really do help you hold onto your sanity.  Because if it weren’t for those moments, you would have run screaming into traffic ages ago.

Then you see those moms who have it all together.  Who gush and say that they just love staying home and taking care of their children is a joy and a blessing.  Oh sure, it’s hard at times but they wouldn’t have it any other way and gosh, isn’t the sky blue today?  Then they bake another tray of cookies and moms like myself are thankful there aren’t any guns in the house because that would be the PERFECT time to put one to their temple and pull the trigger.   Are these “super moms” a myth?  I mean, we’ve all heard woman SAY this stuff, but do they really mean it?  I’d like to think that they don’t but maybe some of them do?   And if they do, then what the heck is the matter with ME?

And there the cycle of worthlessness continues.  But you don’t have time to wallow because someone just woke up in the night and you have to find a way to get her back to sleep without nursing her because you’re trying to wean her at night.

It’s hard.  Every day.  It’s hard.