People will always be willing to tell you how difficult it is to be a parent. I've been at it for just a little over two years now and, as hard as it can be, it's easier than I'd been led to believe. Sure, there were the long brand-new-baby months and now the 'terrible twos', not to mention the coming-faster-than-I-care-to-think teenage years, but if I just keep in mind that these stages are temporary until the next one comes along, I get through. So far, it's just been a combination of patience, repetition, and faith in my ability to turn this kid into a decent adult. I'm handling it as best I can.
What they should say is how hard it is to be a person while you're a parent. This I am not handling as well as I would like. That ability to still cultivate the same interests I had before my daughter's arrival eludes me. The time I can spend on these now frivolous things has dwindled to maybe a few minutes in the evening before I surrender to fatigue and turn out the lights. The fifty-pages-a-day of a book I'm reading has been reduced to five and the dvr is overloaded with shows that may never be watched. Movies, magazines, and, most tragically, music have all been tossed in the someday pile. I have become that cliche, that once-cool girl who is slowly blending into the mom crowd, with matching stains on their cardigans because they didn't take the time to look in the mirror before leaving the house.
But the real struggle in this identity crisis is my timing. Did I wait too long to have a child? I have finally joined the revered 'mommy club', only to find the members of my club are strangers, women I don't know and find hard to relate to. They are not yet my friends and may never be. They are...younger. While I had all of those years on my own and independent, friends took the motherhood path. Now their little ones are not so little, and they are getting back in the swing of things. While I put as much energy into maintaining those relationships as I can and being the best friend I can be, I'm not sure it's enough. There's this sense of being lost, of being left behind. It's a kind of being on my own I hadn't anticipated.
At the end of the day, despite all my whining, I have no regrets about the order I chose to do things. My daughter is my world, my universe. I know that when she is older and the heavy-duty parenting is more or less done, she will fly and I will experience yet another kind of being on my own. And I know I will get myself back somehow, with time to devote to old and new interests as well as old and new friends. I will tell people parenting is a piece of cake, that the sacrifices are temporary. My cardigans will be stain-free.
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