Motherhood: It's just Poop

Make no mistake; I love my son. He is the god damn Disney World of my life and as far as I am concerned he shits fairy dust. Still, I must admit, motherhood is no picture off a box of Pampers, and I feel that reality of parenting must be brought to light. After all, it is the most critiqued, closely studied, and most often judged part of one’s behavior. My bookshelf is currently covered with literature written by doctors, scholars and gurus that dictate parenting styles word for word, page for page, and warn me about how badly I am already fucking up as a mother. Sometimes, I look at my newborn peacefully sleeping in his swing and think, “I’m doing alright.” And then that Bitch from Chapter 3 whispers in my ear, “He isn’t swaddled you worthless piece of crap.”

I hear people say practice makes perfect. Well, when it comes to being a parent, that saying is just a load of shit. Honestly, at the end of the day, no matter how many diapers you changed, every now and then, you will find fecal matter in your hair and not one chapter of any f-ing book will convince me otherwise. Shit just happens.

 For example, the first few weeks of my son Chace Jaxon’s life, my husband and I were in survival mode. My role as a mother was to provide food, new diapers, and a place for my baby to sleep. Two hours would go by, and I would rinse and repeat:  Food. Diaper. Sleep.

 At week four, I thought I had it in the bag. I was running remarkable well on adrenaline and found myself in a routine nonetheless. Then, my husband, Chris, got the Nurovirus. What is the Nurovirus you ask? Simply put- it’s the stomach flu on mother f-ing steroids and it is 200 times more contagious than any other strand of flu. So there I was, 1:30 am, with a newborn latched onto my the right breast, peacefully nursing as I ran  up and down two flights of stairs to care for my sick husband and his abundance of bodily fluid projecting out of every orifice of his grown body.

Epic latch skills, I know. That night, Chace and I mind fucked Chapter 2: Perfecting the Latch that night. I can assure you none of those books that lined my shelves would know what the fuck to do in this situation nor would my super educated friend Google. So, did I fall to the floor and cry like a coward? Well, maybe a little. But after my brief mental break, I did what any new mother would do with her horribly needy and super contagious husband. I checked him to a Holiday Inn.

Just kidding, that was option A and I chose option B. I called the only person that would give a shit if Chris preferred yellow vs. red Gatorade at 3:30 am; the one person that understood that caring for a newborn was similar to caring for Chris. I called his mother.