I intended for this blog to help me remember all the little things about being a first time mommy. The way she looked at me when the nurse placed her on my belly, the way Luke cried when he first saw her, the way he rubbed my back through each contraction, the deep soul wrenching connection that we had while I labored to birth our child. These are all memories that I wanted... that I needed... to have written down. I thought that if I started a blog and gain followers I would find something to force me to keep up with all of this. But alas, I have only found an additional source of "mommy guilt". I sat down this morning while Amelia naps in her swing with a growing pile of tissues accumulating next to me from this icky sickness she was kind enough to share with me. And I thought,
I should write in my blog. And then it set in, the guilt.
I can't write, it's been too long. How will I ever catch up? It's not even worth it. So instead I read a few posts from one of my very favorite bloggers, Kelle Hampton, over at enjoyingthesmallthings[dot]com. She truly is fabulous, but she has her own down falls too. Which is part of the reason I love reading her writing so much. She doesn't pretend to be a fantastic housekeeper and I'm pretty sure she doesn't make a homemade dinner every night but girlfriend is all about making memories and recording them with her kids. There's some kind of irony in all this. I want so badly to be able to record all of the memories. There are so many ways that I imagine doing that. Family 'yearbooks', yearly photo books for Amelia, this blog... and yet I find myself putting it all off just to hold her while she naps, or to do 'airplane' for the 36th time because just maybe that is the time her gasps of joy will turn into an actual giggle.
I'm so hard on myself and frankly, I'm over it. I feel so guilty about working full time and even more guilty that I enjoy it so much. I feel guilty that she is in day care, I feel guilty that I don't cook dinner every night, I feel guilty that our house is coming close to being eligible to be on an episode of
Hoarders. But every now and then I have a moment (and maybe this is the sickness talking) where I realize that maybe frozen pizza for the 2nd night in a row is okay, because I got to hold that sweet little girl a moment longer. And you know, I really don't think Luke minds that our garlic bread is from a bag and not home made... I have all these Martha Stewart expectations of myself and I'm beginning to think the only person disappointed in me, is
me. So I'm going to stop being so hard on myself and realize that this blog, it's really for me. It's for me to wade through this mess of life and find the poetry in it. It may be months between posts, I may never write again. But whatever ends up coming of this will be more than if I had written nothing at all, and one day when Amelia has children of her own and she struggles with decisions like staying at home or going to work, how to start solids, how long to breastfeed, are vaccines really safe?, or whatever new issues mommy's have to deal with then, she'll realize that all you can do is your best and love those kiddos with everything in you. Because really, I don't think she cares that her cloth diaper is made of non organic cotton or that mom's milk might have a trace of diet coke in it. But I do know that when I hold her she rubs her sweet little hand on my arm as if to say
Thank you mommy, I love you too. And that is what makes everything worth it.
