Mommy Mojo: Good Mommies Don’t Use Words Like Douchebag – Motherhood and Battling the Loss of Self

Growing up, to me motherhood meant wearing aprons, baking cookies and all things nice. We called our friends’ mothers “Mrs. So-and-So” and whenever I picture them, it’s always in the kitchen, tidying up the dishes or pouring us glasses of Cherry Koolaid.

Motherhood meant that to me in the abstract way that you see other people in a certain way and even admire it, but never see yourself fitting into that role. Despite always wanting to become a mom some day, I never quite saw myself as a mother or even motherly.

I even tried to shoehorn myself into the role of wife and homemaker when I first got married. A few disastrous cooking experiments later, including turning a simple roast chicken a pale green with greenish brown gravy to match, and mind-numbing boredom fussing over the household minutia, I discovered that a homemaker I am not.

So I put off even making the decision to whether or not have children, preferring to stay in the bliss of co-surviving with my best friend who just happened to be my husband in our college-esque state of cleanliness. And then, as they say, our lives changed forever when our daughter was born…

Oh those were the (I dare not say good old) days…

The sarcasm and snark gave way to coochie-coo and singing Twinkle Twinkle in Mommy & Me music class. The colorful banter among friends gave way to a constant vigil for any ‘bad words’ like stupid or shut-up (or even worse, a swear word). Going dancing with the girls or trips into the backcountry requiring specialized training and avalanche gear now replaced with pajama parties and walks around the block at a toddler pace.

Now relegated to a so-called normal life, I follow the path predicted by the business analysts at Proctor and Gamble. It started with choosing practical shoes, and easy to care for mom hair and soon-to-be a (I dread saying it out loud) 6 plus passenger vehicle of miniature proportions…a MINI VAN!

The only thrill seeking that happens in my life is using swear words in posts and wondering if my readers will love it or freak out and ban me from their reading list or making up complete bullshit stories to see if my 5-year-old will believe that all the animals at the zoo do indeed dance with each other when the zoo closes at 4 o’clock.

So far they haven’t and she rarely believes my stories unless it’s propagating the myth that a fat man dressed in a red suit traverses the entire globe in a single night bringing the same plastic crap you can buy at the mall (only made by elves in the coldest place on earth). Go figure on both counts.

Would I give up my life as a mother to go back to who I was? Not for a minute.

But how do you honor that part of you, the you that you loved, the you that you admire in the young women who look to you as a teacher and a mentor, while moving forward and embracing your new role as “So and So’s Mom”?

I’d like to think that this imperfect mommy has a few street smart lessons to teach my daughter beyond what is on the official “How to Raise Kids” parenting book curriculum. Stuff about band guys and do-it-yourself hair bleaching kits and letting friends help wax your bikini line filed under “Bad ideas to tell our daughters about when they are older”.

A few of the life lessons will likely come back to haunt me – probably in the form of an invitation to the principal’s office to discuss the origins of the flippant response I thought was funny to teach a 4-year-old, “Whatever blows your skirt”.

But if getting busted by the principal puts me a little more in the camp of “Cool Mom” and not “Fun Sucking Void” because my daughter gets little glimpses of the person I was when I was younger, then it’s not such a bad thing. So maybe, just maybe, good mommies do (sometimes) say “Douchebag”.