Supermom Marsha Maung Says: Enjoy the Chaos While It Lasts

Written by Ageless Moms on May 7th, 2009

“Ohhhh!!! She’s so adorable! I feel like I want to take her home with me. Here, let me hold her for a while, can I?”, other mothers would coo at the bundle in your arms, the one that you’ve been carrying all day long and you can’t wait to detach from so that you can grab yourself a muffin….and if you’re lucky, a glass of red wine! You’re completely poofed and you’re willing to bet that you look like you’re poofed. Everyone is too polite to say anything about it.

Babies are adorable and while it’s incredible to be around them and have them, there are some things that people don’t tell you about being a mother. They tell you about how amazing it is to watch them breathe when they sleep. They tell you how incredibly overwhelming the feeling is when they first call you ‘mahmah’ or ‘dahdah’ for the first time. They tell you, of course, about how fantastic it feels to watch their first step, the first tooth, the first EVERYTHING.

Now, I am going to tell you the truth. For mothers who are accustomed to getting things done right the first time, meeting deadlines, climbing the corporate ladder or perhaps, having a team of people who take instructions well….you’re in for a culture shock.

This ‘team’ of people don’t listen very well, they can’t talk, they are completely irresponsible about going to the toilet, is always having tea breaks, have no idea that there’s a boundary between your personal life and professional one and there’s no such thing as day-off. You jump in and get the job done, that’s it…there’s no such thing as time for you to learn and there’s definitely no training permitted or promotion. You’re on call. PERIOD.

Having number one does not necessarily prepare you for that smug little number two because record shows that number one and number two are usually so different, you have to readjust your speed accordingly, change diapers differently, feed differently and is more or could be less demanding. The way they give their orders is quite different too, for your information. In other words, you’re never ever quite prepared or experienced enough for a kid.

When someone else asks to hold your baby for you, you silently stare up into the ceiling and whisper, ‘Thank you, Lord. I will go to church this Sunday’. You’ve been running around in circles all day long and if you don’t get to sit down soon, you have a feeling that you’re going to lose your legs. And if you have more than one child, the feeling gets even worse because you have two circles to run…and you forget that there are another two to run around…one for you and one for your partner/spouse. The number of circles you have to run increases with the exact number of members in your little family.

The good news is, sometimes, the circles overlap.

This post makes motherhood sound like it’s not much fun and if this article gets popular, I bet I just helped decrease human population. But you know what? I have good news too. The secret to motherhood is that you have no control of how things are run or what’s going to happen, so, stop disillusioning yourself with the fact that you are IN CONTROL. Nothing ever is when you have kids!

You will say and do the wrong things, you WILL lose your cool. Your kids will insult you to no end and not listen to you. They WILL watch more TV than you’d like. You will feel like running away with a handsome hunk instead of laboriously running around those circles.

And that’s the fun of it all. As long as at the end of the day (or whichever part of the day it is that permits you a 15 minute recharge moment) you sit there and make yourself see that the chaos is what makes this family works, you’ll appreciate motherhood and parenting for what it is. This is it! You’re in it and when you see the result of what you’ve done, when they turn around and tell you, ‘You’re the best mom in the world’, everything bad and negative will begin to look absolutely positively POSITIVE.

So, you see, as negative as everything I’ve said so far has been, it’s actually positive. Enjoy the chaos while it lasts because one day, the chaos is going to go away.