Motherhood is all consuming. The worry, the heartache, the bliss, the good and the bad of it all. It will literally take over your entire life if you allow it. So, what do we miss about our pre-baby lives? Well, the list is long but for good reason. Check out the Miss List…
We miss sleep. We miss restful, REM, sleep. Sleeping next to baby monitors? Not restful but stressful. As contradictory as this sounds, we also miss being able to stay awake past 9PM.
We miss peeing alone and without an audience. And as long as we’ve got bathroom habits on the brain, we also miss being able to laugh or workout without peeing our pants! You finally get to work-out after baby and get rewarded with pee dripping down your leg on the treadmill. If that isn’t motivating, I don’t know what is.
We miss hot coffee and hot meals. To add to this one…I miss eating a meal that hasn’t been touched by grubby little hands. It’s like they have a little radar that goes off any time you sit down to eat a meal. They instantly have to be in your lap, sticking their hands in your food. Even if it was a meal that you made, that they rejected an hour earlier.
We miss long-solo car rides with the windows down, choosing whatever music we want, playing it at whatever volume we want and no one screaming in the background. What’s your favorite song? Oh, it doesn’t matter, you’ll never hear it uninterrupted again.
We miss running errands alone. Quick errands no longer exist. The weekly (or in my case 3 times a week) trip to the grocery store used to take 30 minutes. Now, add an hour to that and leave without half your list…that’s running errands with toddlers.
We miss vacations and spontaneous weekend getaways. Because the reality is, you can’t call a trip with children a vacation. Relocation. A vacation with children is just a relocation. I can’t take credit for that – another mom taught me that term and it really is the only one that fits.
We miss our husbands, which is sometimes hard to believe. We miss date nights and not having to schedule time alone. We miss being each other’s first priority. We miss simple things like Happy Hour.
We miss being able to feel free to take care of ourselves. That’s a mouthful, I know. The point is, we know that we should be making ourselves a priority too. If we want to go to the gym or get a manicure or go to the damn doctor, we should be able to make those things happen. Lord knows we make everything else happen. We should feel completely free to take care of ourselves but it doesn’t always work out that way. We end up putting everyone else ahead of ourselves.
Speaking of taking care of ourselves, many of us miss our pre-baby bodies and that is nothing to be ashamed of.
We miss not having to worry ALL.OF.THE.TIME. The absolute worst part of the worry – I’m pretty sure it NEVER ends. We’ll be worrying about these little people for the rest of our damn lives.
We miss feeling fully functional. Mom brain is a real thing, friends and it is awful. Exhaustion? You’ll never know real exhaustion until you are a parent. The funny thing about the motherhood exhaustion, it may or may not have anything to do with how much sleep you got the night before.
The point of the ‘miss list’ isn’t to bash our lives as parents. Because, the funny thing about this – we wouldn’t change a thing. All of the things we miss, who knows if we’ll ever have those things again, but we still wouldn’t go back. Even if we could, we wouldn’t snap our fingers and go back in time to an easier point in our lives. Well, maybe if the universe was offering a one-day pass we would. So, we’re not bashing mommy life by admitting we miss pieces of our past, we’re simply allowing ourselves to remember that we had lives outside of these beautiful babies. And maybe, maybe, we should be working a little harder to get some of these pieces back. Maybe, we should be working a little harder to have a life outside of our children. Not maybe, definitely.
It’s realities like the ones above that may eventually lead us to give our own daughter’s advice like ‘don’t rush into getting married or having babies…take your time.’ Because, now we know. While, yes, being someone’s mother is the most important job we’ll ever have, it doesn’t come without great sacrifice. Sacrifices like bathroom privacy, restful sleep and a brain that was once fully functional.
While it would be all self-sacrificing to say that there is nothing we miss about pre-baby life, I wouldn’t buy that line from anyone, even if you paid me too. There will be times that we’ll need to vent, we’ll need to complain, or brag or remember the person we used to be. Let’s never feel guilty about THAT need because there are so many others that we push aside for the sake of everyone else.
So, when the time comes and it’s your turn to vent, remember the Miss List and that not only are we allowed to have one, but WE ALL have one. Sleep will return one day and until then, we have friends, fellow mommies and Mommy Diatribes to fall back on 🙂
Mommy Diatribes
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