Motherhood is...

Here is my non-winning essay for the NieNie Dialogues essay contest. The essay winners wrote really good and inspiring essays (and they all involved some life drama - adoption, illness, death - and I'm good staying out of those categories). 

Today as I loved on my six-month-old daughter’s neck and thought about how beautiful and amazing she was…she spit up on me. I grabbed the nearest thing, wiped up the spit-up, and scolded her in sing-song baby speak until she gurgled with laughter and started cooing. I was still over the moon for her, just slightly wetter and smellier than ten seconds before.

Motherhood.

Messes and bleach, mayhem and quiet time, wonder and futility. Motherhood is the mother of all contradictions. I have never loved a little person so completely, and I have never been so immobilized and furious at the same little person’s irrationality. The fact that God can both complete me and disassemble me with my own child is further evidence of his genius.

My own coming-to-motherhood story began like the grade school chant:

First came love, then came marriage, then came a bouncing baby girl who stripped me of any parenting ideals I might have had. She was beautiful and demanding, chubby and picky, happy and gloriously opinionated. At six months all eighteen pounds of her felt like the weight of the world – how amazing that I was allowed to hold her; how terrifying it was to be her world! I felt marvelously under-qualified. (She is seven now – I still feel the same way.)

Motherhood, she taught me, is about sick days and adventures, veggies and treats, early bedtimes and late night glow-sticks. One moment I was elated to claim that beautiful pigtailed girl singing in the front row of the program at church, and the next I realized that her brother (next to her) was proudly picking his nose. The son that could be Evel Knievel on his bicycle was reduced to tears when put on a t-ball team. Bandaids could heal anything and, “Go empty the dishwasher,” was a life sentence. My three-year-old once lamented after eating a ring pop, “My hands are going to be sticky forever!” I could relate. Sometimes, in hard times, I feared that everything would be the same way forever: boogers and tears and cries like chicken pecks on a weary mother hen. And then my daughter would paint me a picture, “That’s you and me momma,” and I would wish that I could package her in that moment, store her carefully in tissue and ribbons and keep her that way forever…Small hands with dirty chipped nails, skewed pigtails and a streak of pink paint on her cheek.

Slowly, painstakingly, the trickling streams of experience have deposited themselves into one simple pool and reflect the age old wisdom that grandmas like to share in the grocery store line: Being a mom is so hard. But once you are one, not being one is unimaginable. Being a mother is the contradictions – the constantly shifting ground, the heartache and bliss, the sneaking suspicion that you might be going crazy – and it is joy – the deeply felt happiness that in my house has four distinct names: Rebekah. Jacob. Beau. Marianne.