After a decade of motherhood: Another Top 10 List

OK, enough with all these posts about Strider. Now, back to.... me!

I have been a mom for 10 years now. That sounds really long. A decade was the time between riding with training wheels on my bike, and driving a car. There was a decade of time between when I was in elementary school, and when I had my first apartment, almost 700 miles away from my parents. A person can change a lot in 10 years!

I don't think I'm a radically different person than I was when Strider was first born, and I still haven't found the parenting formulas and equations I was hoping to, but I have learned a few things along the way... Such as:

1. I've realized that my whole thought process has shifted dramatically. In almost all of my textbooks, it seems, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs shows up --it looks like this:

And I could resonate with this, at least in some ways, before I had kids. I was concerned primarily for my physical needs (hunger, clothing, etc.) and then, once those things were satisfied, I was concerned with my safety, social needs, etc.

But now, as a parent, I've realized this hierarchy has some added levels:

There are many days that I spend over an hour in the kitchen at lunch time, and then walk out realizing I completely forgot to make myself anything to eat. Thinking about those bottom 4 rungs of the pyramind now takes up so much of my brain space, that the rest just comes out as gibberish it seems.

(This is not to say that I'm less selfish than I was before I had kids - that's still a constant. But now somehow I have little people wrapped up in my selfishness, too.)

2. I've learned that if a child asks me for water right before bedtime/getting in the car/going outside/anything else, I might as well just pour 4 cups right off the bat.

3. I've learned that I should have invested in a voice recorder that would play on an automatic loop for 15 hours a day. And I would have programmed it to say, "Take that out of your mouth" every 7 minutes, to save myself the trouble. I say that so often that I find myself saying it even when I can't see anyone with something in their mouth -- I still know it applies to whomever I can't see. It turns out that putting-things-in-one's-mouth phenomenon was not just a stage.

I've realized that I also say, "Go wash your hands" approximately 28 times a day. A person observing me repeating these 2 phrases all day might draw the conclusion that I am germaphobe. And they would be correct. Motherhood has not diminished that trait in me at all.

4. I've learned that I really don't like the words, "I have to go to the bathroom," specifically when spoken by a child when I have all 4 kids with me in the car. Especially by my daughter. And I've learned that these words, spoken by any of the kids, will almost always be followed by the words "Really bad."

5. I've learned that despite our best efforts to live a more simple life and have fewer toys and stuff than perhaps average, the stuff keeps breeding, and we are losing the war against it. At this very moment, there are SIX red boys' bikes in our garage. Six. It is always time to purge. It's funny how entropy often takes the form of multiplication when it comes to stuff.

6. I've learned to add an hour to any prep time to get out of the house, compared to what it used to take me, and to allow 10 minutes just for getting everyone in or out of the car (stroller transitions included).

7. I've learned how to do almost all household chores with one or more of my limbs doing something else (carrying someone, propping open the dryer door to keep a toddler from slamming it while I'm putting clothes in, etc.)

8. I've learned that I will do pretty much anything to make my baby continue belly-laughing.

9. I've learned that YES it is hard to keep storm doors clean and children's books in nice order. I used to think my parents were weak because they couldn't manage these simple tasks. Now every glass surface below 5 feet in my house has been smudge-free for a sum total of 8 seconds in the last 5 years. And our shelves of children's books look like hurricanes blow through nightly.

10. In fact, I'm learning that pretty much everything I ever said I would never do as a parent has been done with a vengeance in our home. From the first night home with our first baby ("we will never have a baby sleep in our bed with us") to this past weekend ("we will never have our weekends consumed by kids' sporting activities"), we consistently show that we don't know anything. We didn't know anything before we were parents, and we know even less now.

I realize that if this is all I can come up with for What I've Learned in the Last Ten Years, then that averages to just one thing a year, which makes me a very slow learner. But, A.) As explained in #1, I don't have a lot of brain space left to think about stuff like this, and B.) There are already way too many words in this post.

Ten years ago, my transition into motherhood was rough, and I was very slow to come on board the "Love this!" train. Now, though, I can definitely say I'm a happy passenger... and enjoying the journey.