Motherhood is Messy

Motherhood is Messy is a real life depiction about the messy moments that we don’t always talk about in parenting. 

Get a solid night’s sleep without waking up 14 times.
Clothes staying folded in a pile when you walked away from them.
Eat food when it was hot.
Showering alone.
Running into a convenience store because you wanted a smoothie without having to unbuckle and rebuckle and wait 15 minutes because, “I can do it myself.”

Life was definitely more simple before having kids. Motherhood is Messy.

In all sense of the words, literally and figuratively, motherhood is messy.

I mean, for starters, your body changes during pregnancy and fluids randomly leak at inconvenient times is just a premonition of what is to come.  You laugh, you pee. You sneeze, you pee. Hiccup, cough, tip-toe across the room you pee yourself. Then, you actually birth said child and you didn’t realize that so many bodily fluids could happen at one time.

Okay, you think, it can’t get worse. But then, you wake up in a sweat every 2.5 hours only to realize every single time that it’s actually just breastmilk leaking from your boobs because your nursing pad fell out of your top. Then, you look at the calendar and it’s only Day 4 of motherhood.

You go through the next few months of leaking milk when you forget your nursing pads, projectile vomit and poop, sometimes at the same time, and more tears than you’ve cried the previous 26 years combined.

You are emotionally a hot mess. Motherhood is Messy.

Moving on past infancy, you swear things are going to get better.

Then, your whole life is flipped upside down when your little starts to walk. Opening cabinets, pulling things out of drawers behind you, dumping every single bucket of toys they own only not to play with any of them. The next few years aren’t any easier. Then, bam, positive pregnancy test.  WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!? Did you not just go through all of this? We’re going to do it again?  Yup, we’re going to do it again.

Repeat everything that happened in the first three paragraphs, but add in a potty training toddler who will only pee 35 seconds after you took them off the toilet, a kid who likes to squeeze all the yogurt out of the pouch as fast as they can, and also loves seeing if they can actually manage to get all the water out of the tub in the 23 seconds it takes you to run to the hall closet to grab a towel. Hint: They’re pretty successful at doing the last one. 

Motherhood is Messy. 

Fast forward to having a toddler and preschooler and you finally feel like you are above water. The only issue is, it’s an entirely new set of messy obstacles. Schedules shift to include school and extracurricular activities, there’s new found messy fun like painting and mudpie making. It’s always something. You finally felt like you have it down, but the truth is, it’s always changing.  There’s always a new messy obstacle and always something that keeps you from feeling like you actually have it together.

One thing remains constant – Motherhood is Messy. 

But it’s your messy. It’s your normal. While every day isn’t perfect, most moments are. We can embrace the good times. Shoot, we can even get messy with them. One thing remains true through it all and that is that laughter is the best remedy for those overwhelmed moments. Sit down and finger paint with them. Toss all the clothes up in the air.  Leave the dishes in the sink for an extra few hour to go outside and swing together. Whatever it is, embrace the messiness of motherhood.

Motherhood is no easy flight, but I promise there’s moments that make it all worth it. When your kid asks to sit near you while you do a chore. Or when they bring you a picture that they made just for you. We have to be willing to accept and embrace our imperfections. Because while motherhood is messy, it’s all ours.