Still Becoming

★★★★★
“Absolutely exhausting. Weirdly worth it.”

I became a mother in 1995 with absolutely no experience and what I can only assume was an unreasonable amount of confidence.

Since then, I have survived approximately 47,000 loads of laundry, thousands of chicken nuggets, and enough emotional whiplash to qualify for some sort of compensation.

The hours are terrible. The clients are unstable. Someone is always yelling “Mom!” from another room like they’re trapped in a mine collapse.

One child once hid so well at my mother’s house that multiple adults were seconds away from calling the police before we finally discovered him under a desk laughing hysterically while the rest of us were actively losing years off our lives.

Another child hid under our bed while his grandmother searched for him for OVER THIRTY MINUTES in a complete panic. He refused to answer when called because apparently psychological warfare was his chosen hobby. I eventually had to leave work and come home to locate the tiny fugitive myself.

That same child later called 911 for absolutely no reason whatsoever and somehow ended up being rewarded with a stuffed bear from the responding officers. Honestly, respect the hustle.

Another memorable parenting experience involved one of my children tripping and slicing his hand open on a knife just two weeks after I’d had hip surgery. My husband had run to town for food, I had just taken pain medication, and suddenly there was blood EVERYWHERE. White carpet. White couch. White everything.

At first I thought he was messing around with fake blood and I actually fussed at him for making a mess.

Then I looked at his face and realized the child had turned the exact color of printer paper.

Turns out when blood is squirting across your living room, that’s generally considered serious.

So there I sat — freshly post-op, mildly medicated, covered in towels and panic — spending hours in the ER while waiting for stitches and reconsidering every life choice that had led me to that moment.

That SAME child also somehow managed to hit BOTH a boat and another vehicle with a vehicle that was not even technically operational. This all happened within literal minutes of each other in our own yard.

To this day I still do not fully understand the physics involved.

I’m fairly certain some children are born with guardian angels while others are assigned exhausted supervisors holding coffee and muttering, “Are you kidding me right now?”

And let us not forget the era of late-night video gaming, where I would wake suddenly from a dead sleep to the sound of screaming:

“I’M LAGGING!”

Sir. It is 2:13 in the morning. YOU are not lagging. You are simply grounded from reality.

There is truly no maternal instinct that prepares you for walking through your dark house at midnight only to hear an enraged teenage voice arguing with strangers online about internet speed.

Then there was the sleepover incident.

One of my children had several friends spend the night and at some point in the middle of the night I was jolted awake by absolute chaos.

I walked out to discover they had apparently decided the best possible use of their time was to have a full-scale popcorn fight.

There was popcorn EVERYWHERE.

The living room. The kitchen. The bedrooms. The basement steps. Places popcorn should never naturally occur.

It looked less like a sleepover and more like a tiny buttery tornado had touched down inside my house.

Those children cleaned every single piece of it up while I stood there in exhausted silence wondering how I had somehow become the manager of a low-budget zoo.

And then there were the twins.

Having twins means you eventually develop the survival instincts of someone diffusing explosives while sleep deprived.

When they were about 18 months old, I made the fatal mistake of going to the bathroom for approximately three minutes.

When I returned, they had somehow opened a cabinet, retrieved TWO FULL canisters of oats, and spread them across the house with the efficiency of tiny caffeinated farmers.

There were oats in the kitchen. Oats in the hallway. Oats under furniture. Oats in places that defied both gravity and logic.

I was still randomly finding oatmeal months later.

I’m fairly certain if I moved the refrigerator today, there’s a decent chance I’d uncover part of the original oat crime scene.

And then there are the wrestling figures.

At one point one of my older sons owned literally hundreds of them. Somehow, through what I can only assume was a generational transfer of chaos, the twins inherited them and the collection has continued to grow like a plastic-based infection.

There are wrestling figures EVERYWHERE.

I cannot walk through my house without making eye contact with tiny muscular men.

Hulk Hogan is in the living room. Bret Hart is under the couch. Rey Mysterio appears unexpectedly like a masked sleep paralysis demon.

At any given moment I could open a drawer, move a blanket, or step into the laundry room and discover an entire surprise Royal Rumble happening in my home.

I no longer question it.

I simply coexist with them.

Two of my children played baseball, one of them continuing on into travel ball which required us to spend enormous amounts of money in exchange for sitting on metal bleachers every weekend in temperatures roughly equivalent to the surface of the sun. I consumed enough concession stand nachos and Gatorade during those years to medically qualify as a Little League sponsor.

Now three of my five children are grown, married, and living lives of their own. One of them has two children himself now, which honestly feels both beautiful and a little suspiciously like karma.

The twins are still home at 11 years old, still loud, still chaotic, still somehow capable of turning an ordinary afternoon into a full documentary narrated by exhausted parents.

And the strange thing about motherhood is that it’s a double-edged sword.

I miss the chaos of the older three more than I ever thought I would.

I miss the noise. The messes. The baseball games. The late-night laughter. Even some of the insanity.

At the same time, there are days when I look around at the wrestling figures, snack wrappers, endless noise, and mysterious household destruction caused by the twins and think:

“How much longer?”

And somehow both feelings exist together.

You spend years praying for a little peace and quiet… and then one day the house gets quieter and you realize you’d give almost anything to hear some of that chaos again.

Pros:

• random hugs
• hearing them laugh so hard they snort
• inside jokes nobody else understands
• watching tiny humans slowly become people
• realizing one day that they’re actually kind, funny, decent adults

Cons:

• I have not gone to the bathroom alone since approximately 1996
• every trip to Walmart cost at least $200 and part of my sanity
• school fundraisers
• mysterious sticky substances
• the phrase “Mom, don’t freak out…” has permanently damaged my nervous system

Overall, motherhood is chaotic, loud, expensive, exhausting, emotionally unhinged, and somehow still the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.

Would recommend.

But I would also like a nap.