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.
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6 Responses to “The Hardest Job Ever”
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AMEN, Marilyn!!
You forgot “no sick days” when you were talking about no vacations and/or coffee breaks.
And the super mom is a myth. Any woman who seems to have it all together, doesn’t really. It’s an act we put on for other women, because as a gender we are our harshest critics. So, we must not show weakness. It may be stupid, but no one ever said that we ladies make sense.
First of all, I don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with you for thinking that motherhood is hard. It’s incredibly hard. We all know that it’s incredibly rewarding, too, but that doesn’t negate the long and difficult days.
Second, hang in there. Things change, and although the days seem long the years go fast, I promise. I know you’ve heard something along those lines before, because I did, and I wanted to smack those people, but don’t smack me. I’m sincere, I promise!
Lastly, I love that you ask the question: are they for real? The jury’s still out on that one, I think. We are so unique, all of us, and yet so similar that I can’t imagine there’s never an impossible day for anyone. That said, perhaps it’s perspective; maybe some women really feel that way because they see the world through a different lens. I think most of them are full of baloney, but I’m not willing to throw the whole bunch out…
Wow, this was long. So I have some thoughts about this, clearly!
I think sometimes they are real. I have my moments where you could find me making muffins from scratch while prattling on about how I just love being home with my kids & how great it is to do it. Then there are the other moments where you find me hiding in the bathroom reading romance novels while my kids whack the heck out of each other reenacting the light saber duels they saw in a 4 hour Star Wars marathon because it was the only way to get them out of my hair before I started shrieking endlessly.
I think some women feel that have to show the super mom, that to be less than overjoyed all the time to stay home is a failure on their part & they can’t admit it. So they make a point of only letting people see the perfect & maybe if you were in their yard at 2am you would see them baying at the moon in frustration.
Stacey@Havoc&Mayhems last blog post..Havoc’s journal entry
When I said the super mom was a myth, I didn’t mean that there aren’t times when each SAHM has a little Martha Stewart moment. I myself bake cookies and cakes all the time.
What I meant was, even if the SAHM is blissfully happy, chances are, something in her life isn’t as perfect as it seems. It might be as small as dust bunnies under the bed, or a mountain of laundry waiting to be done. At one of my MOPS meetings, my discussion group was talking about how so-and-so’s house is always perfectly clean, and she said “thank God you didn’t look in my closets, cuz that’s where I shoved all the crap 5 minutes before you got there”. So, even if something seems perfect, under the surface, there’s a little mess somewhere.
This may sound like a silly question, but what’s the difference between mental and psychological?
I don’t think many would say mother’s work isn’t hard, the big difference of opinion seems to be on whether it matters and is worth chronicalling. My vote, of course, would be “yes” to both.
good post
i got what you meant about the perfect mom…. the one who would never ever admit it is hard even for a second…. because then she would seem to herself to be less perfect.
mojavi at Simple Thingss last blog post..the claw!