A Cookie

I just read a mama blog in which she referred to the birth of her kid as "magical," and the first two weeks of her kid's life as "the best time."

Seriously?

This was not my experience. To me, birth is an explosion of liquids. And the first weeks after giving birth are purely survival.

I just got G to bed. It is 10 p.m. She was up at 6:30 a.m. Somebody, get me a cookie, fast.

"I just wish other mamas would have warned us how hard it would be," my mama neighbor said to me. This is a funny comment now that I am writing it, but my friend was totally serious. She is six months pregnant and was sitting with her two year old, talking about how she and her husband were figuring out how they were going to handle their lives with two kids, two careers, and a bazillion chores.

I didn't ask her if she would have done things differently had she known what mamahood entailed.

I love the real mamas who live in my building, all weighing careers with kids, and their own lives with their families' lives. And at the same time trying to maintain presentable bathrooms, and relationships with the ones who got them into this mess in the first place: their husbands.

The instinct to have kids must run really deep. Why do people do it over and over and over again throughout the ages? It's hard! And gross! And it totally screws up your schedule!

Is it for love? That kind of voracious, grind your teeth and hold your breath love that feels at times more like pain than love? Is it for hope? Belief in the future? Belief in mankind? What is it that compels us to keep breeding?

I would expound further, but it's midnight and I have to get up in six hours to my Moody Morning G.

Really, I deserve that cookie.