Tag: Mommy

It’s amazing how becoming a mother can make you feel so very powerful and accomplished yet at the same damn time leave you feeling like the most inadequate human being who ever walked the earth.  I mean let’s sit and reflect that if you are a mother (biologically), you literally push a human being out of your vagitalia!! That’s some super human shyt!! And before you get all “well some women have c sections” on me, reflect on the fact that if a woman has a c section, she literally lays on a table, WIDE AWAKE while someone cuts her open and pulls a human being from her body!! I mean, fukk your favorite horror movie, that’s some scary shyt (hence the lovely white sheet that they hang in front of your face so you can’t see the massacre)!! So it’s no wonder that after having my children, I laid in the hospital bed feeling all ‘king-kong-aint-got-nuthin-on-me-call-me-morpheus-I-can-dodge-bullets-like-the-matrix’-ish!! While some women experience the whole ‘Oh my God, what do I do now’ feeling the day they leave the hospital, I must say I still continued to ride my ‘I am woman hear me roar’ high for quite some time after leaving the hospital. I felt like I can change these diapers, I can nurse this baby, I can get this dinner ready, I can do it all cause I’m every damn woman — yes me bitch– ME…WOO!! But for every woman there comes that day, that minute, that hour where something happens….that first moment (because many more of these moments soon follow) where you think to yourself Oh Shyt…what have I gotten myself into…I can’t do this…

My greatest feelings of inadequacy came the day my maternity leave ended and I once again entered the work force. My husband, who had been back at work for some time by the time I returned to work, seemed to transition from full time daddy back to full time business man with no problem (or if there was a problem, he never let on). I, on the other hand had MAJOR anxiety my first day back to work. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to be at home with my baby (update: babies — I have two now) — at least for a while longer…. It’s not that I no longer wanted to have my career (I didn’t spend all those years in school for nothing), it’s that all of sudden, the work that I would be performing at my “9 to 5” somehow paled in comparison to a far greater job that I had been called to do — be a mom.  And even though I knew that I was leaving my babies in extremely capable hands — their grandmother’s hands — it still felt so wrong to leave them. God gave them to me, and it was my job to be there to provide them with everything they needed. Days went by with me back at work and there weren’t enough FB posts, Instagram pictures, or FaceTime calls to make up for the guilt I felt at not being there with my babies. The quality time that I would spend with my babies as I nursed them, now became rubber bottles placed in their mouth. I struggled to keep up with pumping and breast feeding and soon more and more formula became the name of the game. I was being replaced… Every day that I would come home they would be doing something new or saying something different and I was missing it all in the name of making a dollar.  Teary eyes were wiped by grandma more than mommy and I was jealous. Meanwhile, daddy would always come home to cheers and big hugs like a hero while the heroine in their lives was no longer played by me…. This is how I felt and it tore me up inside. I would often wonder if they would one day understand why mommy works so hard and couldn’t be there with them during the day. Or would they one day resent me and feel that I put my job before them. How would they see me….

This insecurity began to rear its ugly head in the way I interacted with my husband. While I have never been a woman to date a man based on what he could offer me financially, I began to resent my husband when I returned to work…. Why wasn’t he making enough money so that I could stay home with the kids? Why wasn’t taking a few years off until the kids went to school an option for me? Why was I constantly in executive meetings with middle aged white men whose wives were home with the kids while they went to work, toting the lunches that their wives had packed for them, not at all consumed with feelings of I should be home with my kids and completely unaware of my longing…. They couldn’t understand my need to go to every doctor appointment or why I didn’t want to stay after work to go to Happy Hour… They couldn’t understand my world and I was envious of theirs. Feeling that all eyes were on me when I returned from maternity leave (many male counterparts expressed shock that I returned to work at all after having kids), I excelled. I attended every meeting, I worked on every “extra” project. I helped with every proposal. I didn’t ever want it to be said that having a baby affected my work ethic or my drive. I was a woman obsessed — trying to balance the impossible task of being a full time mother and full time executive and not allowing either area to suffer and I was lost. Something had to give and I just hoped it wasn’t me…

The question is often posed “can a woman have it all”? I won’t attempt to answer this question in this blog because “all” means different things to different people. What I do know is that being a working mother can be lonely. Your husband doesn’t understand and probably never will understand how you feel because mommies and daddies are wired differently. Even if you could get one of your friends with kids on the phone long enough to shed a few tears on their “shoulder”, they usually don’t really have the time to help you through your challenges because, well, they have kids of their own. Every mother’s story and experience is so different — but this blog is my story, my account, my diary as I try to be ‘every woman‘ for my family.  This is my story of realization…  I am not omnipotent. I am not omniscient. I am not omnipresent. I can’t do everything, I don’t know everything, I can’t be everywhere…. I am not God. I am just a wife mother woman….and that’s enough….    …it has to be…