Now my son is still too young for a lot of the typical demands of motherhood – I don’t bake for bake sales or sew costumes or help with homework yet, but this article about the invisibility of motherhood on momlogic.com still moved me a great deal. The brief description in my RSS feed led me to think maybe it would be about activism and doing something more with your life, but instead it is wholly focused on the truths of motherhood and embracing what that is. It moved me beyond words. And yet, now I’m going to use words to talk about it some more.
Being a mother is certainly a challenge – the chores and tasks we do are undoubtedly thankless. MLM is too young to thank me of his own accord (although I constantly demand the phrase anyway in an attempt to teach him kindess and manners) and I’m sure that when he is old enough to think of it himself, that most likely he will not.
I know that there will be no awards or medals or praise for defeating the most evil of butt rashes or cooking the best dinner they’ve had all month. Nobody will call the press because I managed to sit through the 100th viewing of Elmo in Grouchland without screaming. And that’s cool. I’m used to the feeling of invisible. If you flipped through my photo albums you’d see 8,000 pictures of the world’s cutest toddler and maybe 4 of myself. I’m the invisible girl behind the camera in pictures and in life. I think all mothers are. Especially SAHM’s with no other career to speak of.
While our husbands go off to make a name for themselves within their careers, we stay at home and strive to make men and women out of tiny neanderthals we call our children. But we did, in fact, sign up for this role. I meant it 100% when I uttered the words “I want to stay home with my children,” (over and over and over again to my disbelieving family) and I still mean it today. Because as thankless as the job is, I think most mothers will agree that it’s also like winning the lottery – we do have the best job in the world, even if it does come with a lack of vacation time and Christmas bonuses.
Anyway, if you haven’t read the article linked above yet, please do so now – because everything I’ve just said is nothing compared to the beautiful speculations in her article.
