Member-only story
Being A Mom Is A Lot Of Work
But I love it — do you?
I wish someone had taken me aside and said, “Listen. Being a mom is seriously hard work.” And then when I said, “Sure. Yeah! I bet,” while casually snacking on some chips or something, their response would have been to slap my snarky face and say, “God dammit, woman, are you even listening to me right now?”, then proceed to lay out all the ways that being a mom is seriously hard work until I was either in tears or literally had to leave hours or days later because there was somewhere else I had to be.
I chose not to take our home economics class elective in high school. It looked and seemed boring to me. What would I need to learn in there that I couldn’t figure out on my own? The girls all had to carry bags of flour around for a week and pretend they were babies. That alone made me check out. Not because I didn’t want to carry a bag of flour around (though I did not), but because it struck me as goofy, ridiculous and corny. If the class really wanted to show children what it was like to be a mom, they should have been more serious, and implemented tasks like having to make sandwiches or pull their pants down to use the toilet with one hand tied behind their back. They should have had to put water balloons into their bras and cart them around for six months or so. They should have been forced to do volunteer work at local daycare…
