Am I doing this right?

Ok here we go....

So I decided to start a blog.  I've been thinking about it for months.  I remember the exact moment that I first thought about it.  I have prayed about it, thought mostly about what I would name it, and finally mentioned it to my husband.  His response is what made me decide to just do it.  I thought he would make fun of me, but instead he seemed interested, and encouraged me that what I have to say might actually be interesting.  This is not a blog about recipes, how to lose weight or eat healthy and 100% organic, or how to clean your whole house with a potato and bottle of lemon juice.  You won't find any coupon links or freebies on here. Nothing like that.  This blog is about the wonderful, fascinating, hard, emotional, exhausting, and overwhelming realities that smacked me in the face when I became a mother 7 months, 1 week, and 1 day ago.  If I took more time, I could come up with a lot more than six words to describe these realities.

Back to the exact moment.  I was having a conversation with one of my best friends.  She gave birth to a little boy about 9 months before me.  We went through trying to get pregnant together.  She found out she was pregnant May of 2011.  We had both been trying for about 6 months at that point.  During her pregnancy, she told me she thought I would get pregnant first.  She thought I would go through the entire pregnancy and give birth, and then she would get pregnant.  It happened the exact opposite.  She gave birth January of 2012, and I found out I was pregnant in February 2012. I was actually pregnant while she was in the hospital having her son, but only a couple of weeks along.  
My friend and I both had a lot of experience taking care of children before we decided to start trying to have our own.  She even ran an in home day care.  We both knew exactly what to do with our own baby.  We knew everything about taking care of tiny humans.  We knew all the baby gadgets we needed and wanted.  We knew more than most moms.  We knew exactly how things would go, and didn't need help from anyone.  We had it all figured out.  Or did we?  Now I don't want to sound like a bad mother, and I don't want to make her sound like one either.  She is an amazing mother!  And my kid is still alive and smiles a lot, so I can't be doing too bad either.  We have talked a lot about our children, and finally one night we swallowed our pride and said it...this is hard.  It's really hard.  Not hard in a wish-we-hadn't-done-it kind of way, but hard in a holy-crap-how-do-people-have-more-than-one kind of way.  It's not what either of us expected, to say the least.

So we were great at taking care of the little people before we had our own. What makes this different?  That is what this blog will be about.  The emotions, the trials that no one talks about, the stuff that is hard to explain of motherhood.  I have thought a lot about why this is hard for us, but seems so easy for so many other women.  I have wondered if that makes us bad mothers, or if that makes us great mothers.  Is it that we wanted these little people so bad, that we feel like we have to give every inch of our all to make them perfect???  Kind of.  But do all mother's not feel that way?  Is it easier for them than it is for us?  What I am finding out is that, no, it's not, but no one talks about it.  If we talked about it, that might make us bad mothers.

  But just look at that smile!  I have to be doing

something right...right?

People talk about the love you will have for your child.  How there is nothing else like it.  They try to explain it, but really they can't.  I use to say,  "I love my nephew so much, I can't imagine how much I will love my own child."  And I couldn't. If you're not a parent, you can't.  No one can tell you, or prepare you.  Not just for the love part, but for the whole entire motherhood experience.  So basically I am writing a blog about something that can't be put into words.  Got it?  Good, lets move on.

A few of my thoughts around why I feel like this is so much harder than I expected.  First, when you are taking care of someone else's child, it is easier to know what they want.  Crazy, I know...that's what I'm talking about here.  When I would babysit for a friend, or keep my nephew,  I was confident in my responsibilities of caring for them.  I had them figured out.  For example, I could never quite figure out why my nephew's mother (who, even though we don't speak any more, holds a very dear place in my heart) would not just let him cry for a few minutes until he fell asleep.  When I would keep him, I would lay him down, he would cry for 10 minutes or so, and then was out for the night (of course she never asked me not to do this).  When she would stay the night with me with him, she would run in at every sound.  If he didn't want to go to sleep, she would get him back up.  I thought, what child wants to go to sleep?  He needs to know its bed time...MAKE him go to bed.  I get it now.  It's hard.  Letting your child cry is hard.  You think of things with your own child that you don't consider when it is someone else's child.  Are they hungry? Do their teeth hurt?  What if they have a headache?  Is he hot?  Is he cold?  Am I going to scar him so bad emotionally, by letting him cry for a few minutes, that he will never be able to function as a productive member of society?  Ok...I'm going in to get him.  Those are the questions you ask yourself outside of the unbearable stabbing pain you get directly in your heart every time you hear that little yelp.  

I am part of an amazing group of women that found each other in the beginning of our pregnancies on a pregnancy forum.  I have learned so much from them, and we have all became great friends.  I turned to them during my pregnancy, and I still turn to them almost daily when something is over my new mother head.  We have created a group on facebook, and we chat daily.  I will probably refer to them a lot throughout this blog, so I am just going to refer to them how I normally do anytime they come up in my conversations, "my pregnancy group".  Seriously, I don't know if I would have made it this far without them. 

So the morale to the story (or the morale to the creation of the blog, or just why I am creating the blog, whatever) is this...      One of the girls in my group had twins.  She had posted a picture of her two boys, within a month's age of my son, on our group page.  I commented on there and said something along the lines of "I don't know how you do it."  And I really don't know how she does it.  Most of the time I feel like I'm sinking in a never ending land of diapers, bottles, breast feeding, poop, and all other things baby with just one.  She responded to me and told me she didn't know how she did it either.  She said that people asked her often and all she could say was that she had to, because she was their mom.  That is so true.  I love my son.  He is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me.  I love being a mother.  I said for years before I had a child that I felt like God sent me here to be a mom.  Having my son just confirmed that for me.  So why is it so hard?  I don't know.  Will I ever figure it all out?  I doubt it.  Will my friend and I grow perfectly good humans who will turn out to be good people?  We'll see. But rest assured as I travel on my journey to figure it all out, I will post it here.  I will also continue to thrive daily in my mission to be the best mother God could have chosen for my son.  I will swallow the nervous lumps in my throat and ignore the "am I doing this right" questions in my head and life will go on.  Why?

Because motherhood.