Thoughts On Disappearing Into the Background
I’m a mom, and darn it, I do a lot.
My day began at 12:30 this morning. As in — middle of the night 12:30. The two-year-old woke up sobbing: she’d peed the bed. My husband is out of town for the week, and so it was up to me to calm her down, get her new undies, and move her into the guest bed. She’d also been coughing since bedtime, so I gave her a syringe of fakey herbal cough medicine (what can you really give a two-year-old, after all?), kissed her on top of the head, and went back to my own bed.
Not ten minutes later, she was sobbing again. This time, it was because she’d gotten her finger caught in her hair from twirling it for comfort. After several seconds of coaxing, it came loose. I asked the poor child if she wanted to sleep in my bedroom, and she said yes, so I carried her there and tucked her into her dad’s side of the bed.
So far today I’ve emptied the dishwasher, gotten the kids off to school, returned a package at the UPS store, done an entire week’s worth of grocery shopping, and put in two loads of laundry. It’s not even 10 a.m. yet. Halloween costume shopping is on my list today, as is checking on the status of the my son’s replacement glasses frames and calling a prospective violin teacher for him. We have swim class this evening, which means I’ll need to get the chicken in the oven during afternoon naps if I want to avoid a last-minute trip to McDonald’s on the way home.
I won’t go into every second of my day, but yeah. I’m a stay-at-home mom, and I’m busy. And a lot of that busy-ness is in the form of tiny, thankless, unseen tasks.
Recently, the Scary Mommy Instagram account reposted something that user @imthatwife shared on their feed. In its entirety:
I think at the end of the day mothers and wives are begging someone to notice that the floor was mopped, the form was filled out, the weird crevice between the sink and wall was vacuumed, the favorite snacks were bought, the appointment was made, the day was planned, and everyone had everything they didn’t know they needed. We are asking for our work to be acknowledged, because if it isn’t, it’s like what we spend our lives doing doesn’t matter. Caring for the people we love brings so much joy, but the weight of all these small things is unbearable when unnoticed.
And if that isn’t just the perfect summation of what I feel every day of my mothering life. I am consumed with work, but 90% of the time, that work goes unnoticed. The 10% of the time it does get noticed is when I’ve let something fall through the cracks. Glasses didn’t get put on the preschooler. A mess didn’t get cleaned up in time.
I often find myself bitter at the end of yet another long day of doing everything and nothing, and can’t pinpoint why, exactly. Aren’t I living the dream? I get to stay at home with the kids. I can (and do) take a mid-day nap every single day, provided everyone cooperates. I have time for stroller jogs with the baby while the big kids are at school. My life is fairly low-stress, compared to my husband’s work.
The problem is, I often feel just…invisible. We go together as a package, the kids and I, like some sort of Barbie Family Deluxe: Frazzled Mom, Goofy Preschooler, Crazy Toddler, Fussy Baby. Who am I, aside from the woman pushing the stroller at the park, yelling at the kids not to throw sand, and putting clothes back on the toddler who’s managed to strip in five seconds flat because she ran through a splash pad that’s inexplicably still on in October?
Oddly — and incredibly personally — I think this is why I spend so much time focusing on myself. I need to separate myself from these kids, to form a separate identity outside of Mom of Three. And so I quietly work out every single day, to lose the baby weight. I put together outfit boards on Pinterest after bedtime to define my definitely-not-a-mom style. (Note: it is totally Mom Style. Heels and blazers aren’t exactly practical for the amount of time I spend on the floor.) I’m learning Latin on Duolingo, and at any given moment, I’ve got three books I’m reading. And, of course, there’s my writing.
Is any of it helping? I don’t know. Maybe? Not really? Maybe the key here all along has been to demand recognition from the adult closest to me — my husband. After all, would anyone continue to work at a job with insanely grueling hours and zero job feedback? Probably not.
Which is not to say that my husband doesn’t ever acknowledge the work I do. He does, if I’ve anticipated something so absurdly well that he’s taken by surprise. But a lot of it disappears into the background of everyday life.
We’re just asking to be seen, us moms. It takes five seconds to say, “Hey, wow! The toilet is clean again, and the pantry is stocked up on mixed nuts. Thanks for doing all that.” And, heck. I’ll start tooting my own horn on the reg. Today I changed our address on the DMV website and stashed some old kids’ clothes in the garage. Toot toot, baby. Toot toot.
