Stop the Mommy Bus

(originally written in 2001)

What do you mean there aren’t any stops? Nobody told me that when I got on this bus. I thought when the children reached a certain age we could get off for a while at least. But no; not only are there no stops, there are no doors either!

No wonder we have children when we are young. If we knew then what we knew now, we’d think a lot longer, plan more judiciously, and be a lot more certain before starting something that has no end.

In case you haven’t noticed, it just hit me that mommyhood is a terminal disease with no cure. We never stop being moms. It’s something we will be till the day we die. We never stop worrying about our offspring. It doesn’t matter if they live next door or 1200 miles away; all we have to do is hear that certain tone in their voices and WHAM! there we are again, being mom. The connection is never fully severed, no matter what anyone says. Heck, if a marriage fails you can get a divorce, but you can’t do that with your kids. You can ignore them, avoid them, not talk to them, even take them out of your will if you want, but the simple fact remains that they will always and forever be yours. They were inside your body for about 9 months, give or take depending on the child, and they will never totally leave it. It’s like they leave a piece of themselves inside when they are born, one guaranteed to pull at your heart when they hurt, or fall, or go through rough times.

You pour the best of all you have and know into them, hoping somehow to end up with contributing members of society. Interestingly enough, the things you like least about yourself are the things they emulate, and pick up on, and do…the annoying habits, the things you wish you could stop doing but can’t, the bad coping mechanisms you picked up from your own parents, the language, the attitudes…why can’t they just do what you tell them to? ~laughing~

It most certainly doesn’t help that no 2 of them are alike. What worked with Junior doesn’t touch little Jack’s heart one bit. He really doesn’t care about the starving kids in Africa. Hell, he’ll even share his oatmeal with them if you want him to. You look at Anna and she collapses in tears at the mere thought of displeasing you; you can put Ashley in the corner till you’re blue in the face and she doesn’t give a rip. You finally resort to spanking her little behind {waiting for the calls to protective services now}, and she dances off merrily to put the neighbor’s cat in the washer. You take them to church, and they become practicing pagans, lose their virginity early and experiment with every drug on the market; you never darken a church door and have a live-in housemate, and they want to go to Sunday School at 8 on a Sunday morning, for crying out loud, abstain from any form of sex till they are 35, and make straight A’s in school.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. They put us on this mommy-bus with our hormones all a-raging, listening to the sounds of our warped little biological clocks ticking away…and forget to tell us the clocks are really bombs.

{collapsing in laughter}