Making It Look Hard (SAHP)

My son going to kindergarten feels like I’ve shipped him off to college.

I can’t untangle the mess of joy and fear, anxiety and anticipation over the start of school and the end of an era, my most important job, being a SAHM. Raising a small human doesn’t stop with elementary school, but the stay at home mom years of my life are officially over. I need the space and dread it. He needs other faces and voices besides mine, but he’ll need mine more than ever once he gets them.

After five years, I can look back and give myself the grace I never afforded myself in the throes of his tantrums (and mine). Mistakes were made, but they were honest ones.

I didn’t SAHM with ease and grace and pretty hair and a perpetual smile. Without yelling or comparing myself to the other mamas with more kids and full time jobs who seemed to have their shit together when I was burning the candle at twelve ends, igniting fires in my wake.

I wasn’t wearing flowing skirts that brushed along the elegantly dusty floors while I made reels about homeschooling and baked fresh bread, my face serene and free of frown lines, donning the first strands of gray in my part with pride.

I didn’t SAHP without losing my mind, my sense of self, or with a bottomless well of patience. Like a Phoenix, I learned, I grew, I crumpled, I burst into flames. Then I rose—tired but determined—from those ashes to do it all over again. Sometimes many times in one day.

I busted my ass and made every second look hard. I cringed at photos of myself that I didn’t recognize, wondered when I was going to shave my legs or…anything else…wondered if there would be anything left of me once I had a moment to breathe, anything left for my husband at the end of the day in the five minutes we spent together before he fell asleep. I’ve felt like absolute trash and Superwoman, always one matchstick away from a dumpster fire.

I’ve known the most intense love and debilitating fear. I’ve been overwhelmed by grief, responsibilities, GUILT, comparison, anger, and doubt.

I’ve also never felt this much joy, gratitude, creativity, and hope. I’ve never felt so ALIVE.

Knowing what I know now, I almost wish I could go back and do it all over again—

NO. Not that. Never that.

I do I wish I could reclaim the moments where I wasn’t myself, where trauma or post partem depression ran the show, and show up as the mom that I know I am. To stop trying to be all things to everyone, knowing that it’s more than one person can ever do.

What I do know is that I was the mom that I needed when I was young. One who made mistakes but recognized that those were the places I needed to heal, and never, ever stopped doing the work.

And, maybe for the first time, I’m proud of myself for trying.