Call Me Crazy

Being a mom turns your crazy. It's inevitable and it's true. I see crazy three different ways. The first kind of crazy is awesome. You sing silly songs, dance like a maniac, talk in creepy voices, end all your words in ie and so forth. It's fun. Your kid laughs and you smile. Your husband laughs too but for different reasons. You're really just a nut.
The less glamorous kind of crazy makes you do things like pick a turd up off the floor with your bare hands, pick boogers and wipe them on your jeans, find yourself walking around the house everyday without a bra on etc. etc. It makes you like the smell of your kids breath and change poopy diapers in the pew during sacrament meeting.
But the really ugly kind of crazy makes you cranky. You're frazzled and exhausted and just plain mean! That part of crazy has been really hard for me to swallow. Let me tell you why.

When I was in high school I did a lot of shtuff. I played every sport, joined clubs, and sang in our awesome high school a Capella choir. I was okay at a lot of shtuff, but I was never the "star", you know? I did pretty well and I had a lot of fun. But I was kind of the behind the scenes gal. Necessary, but not the exciting part. So at a very young age that I won't admit I started thinking about having children. I wanted to find my thing, The thing I really excelled at and impressed people with. So I decided then and there that I was going to be a stellar mom and people would gawk and applaud and award me for it. I don't know what made me think I would be a pro mom. I don't cook anything well, I'm not all that organized and I'm certainly not very creative when it comes to thinking up fun activities for us to do. But I can love. I knew then and I know now I can love a child so hard that they have no choice but to love me back :)  That qualifies as a super mom right?

It's partly competitiveness and mostly pride but I hate getting unsolicited mommy advice because I think I can do it already. I prefer to google things and any hard lessons to be learned I like to learn on my own. Mostly because I tend to think that a lot of the hard stuff about raising kids isn't that hard. But it is. And I hate to admit defeat but being a new parent is tiring and messy and sometimes it's down right ugly. I want so badly for Oliver to start walking and give me a break from all the toting and every mom that hears me say that insists that it's way worse when they are walking. That's another one of those lessons I'll have to learn on my own folks, because these pregnant hips can't take it anymore. Plus, this kid is such a dynamite climber already I don't see how it can get worse. Why do I do this? Why can't I learn from other mothers and not try to fight everything I'm told? It's because for some reason I think I'm a different kind of mom. A mom that can take the tantrums and disasters and let them roll off my back and say with a shrug, "he's just doing what kids do". And I think I have some special super human baby that behaves better and reaches milestones earlier than normal babies and we skip the hard parts. But I'm a regular mom who gets to the point of wanting to shake a baby almost daily and he's a regular kid who screams when he doesn't get what he wants. I hope I don't offend anyone and I hope I'm not the only crazy out there. I absolutely love my baby and my life right now is so amazing. It has more meaning now than ever before. But I have to stand before you all today and make my confession about being just like everyone else. It's hard.

I apologize for a heavy, personal post but I needed to confess and I don't have many readers anyway that will actually see it. But the ones I have I know and trust and love and they won't mind hearing about my momma struggles. They've got em (or will have them) too.

I can have mental break downs and still achieve Rock Star Mom status, right?

P.S. I'm still going to pretend that having and raising kids comes easy to me and that our life is candy canes and rainbows. Because it mostly is. Just not always. And I've never admitte that before.