Yep, Motherhood is Effin Hard!

Have you seen Sex and the City 2 yet?
What a horrible way to start my very first blog posting...oh well, I said I'd live shamelessly, and that's what I'm gonna do!

So, seriously, have you seen it? More specifically have you seen the motherhood scene? If you have, you know the scene I'm talking about. The scene where Miranda and Charlotte sit down over a couple of double cosmos (I assume) and talk with gut-wrenching honesty about how hard it is to be a mother.

I cried through the entire scene - big, wet, messy tears with snot coming out of my nose. "Finally!" I thought, "Finally someone is saying it! And in a mainstream movie that a lot of women will go see, no less! Yay!" Miranda and Charlotte, with much help from some Grey Goose vodka (ok, I don't know that part, but that's what I would have if I wasn't breastfeeding) say right out loud that, no matter how much you love your kids, sometimes being a mother really, really REALLY sucks!
Sometimes you even - gasp! - hate it.

Why is it no one prepares us for this? What if, at every baby shower, there came a point when all the shades were drawn, the childless were ushered from the room, a few black candles were lit, and the pregnant guest of honor was initiated into The Truth of Motherhood? There you sit with your mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, and friends and they all, one-by-one, tell you their war stories, their moments of chaos, their ugly and shameful secrets. Now that's a useful baby shower activity!

But that doesn't happen. You might have that one family friend - you know the one - who winks and says "Well, good luck!" Or the cousin who tells you how horrible natural childbirth was for her, but tells you nothing about what happens A.B. (After Baby, afterbirth is something different.) Or someone, a distant aunt maybe, tells you in the only acceptable code we have: "Just remember to take care of yourself first." And you sit there in your blissed-out hormone cocktail of pregnancy and think "Take care of myself? They have to tell me that? How hard can that be?"

Let me tell ya - pretty effin' hard! And no one wants to admit it. Mothers want to seem like they have it all together. If you, as a mother, ask a new mother how it's going, chances are she will say "Good!" without even thinking about it. From prenatal yoga class to library storyhour to mom and baby playgroups to online forums, we all seem out to prove that we are Good Moms. No, not good enough, we want to be Perfect Mothers. And I've had enough of it. So I am here to declare "I am a Shamelessly Imperfect Mother!" I'm done apologizing and I'm done competing for the Perfect Mother tiara. My two year old son would probably wear it in the bathtub and ruin it anyway.