Dear Mamas,
Does it feel like Valentine’s Day?
When you haven’t showered for three days, and there’s a dirty frying pan from last night still sitting on a grease caked stovetop, and the sink is spewing dishes over the side?
Does it feel like the day of romance?
Maybe you used to enjoy getting a dozen red roses and ferrero rocher chocolates from your significant other. Maybe it meant curling your hair before you both slipped out to dinner together. Maybe it meant daydreaming in the days before about what your other half had planned for you on the day circled in bright red on the calendar.
Everything was quiet. Everything was so much easier, a lot less complicated. You figured that this was always the way it was always going to be.
There were no feeding routines. No babysitters that cancelled. No husbands that worked late, again. No radioactive sippy cups to clean, no laundry that clogged your hallways, multiplying surreptitiously in the hampers.
It was so much easier to feel loved when you felt good about yourself.
It was so much easier to feel love when that love came attached to candy hearts and dinner reservations at the swankiest place in town.
It was so much easier to feel loved when you felt interesting and mysterious to your other half because you were insulated in a bubble of self love. When you knew that you deserved to feel wanted.
Now?
It’s all you can do to keep your eyes open past nine p.m. Never mind even attempting to put on mascara, or managing to get both legs shaved in the shower before someone barges in needing a granola bar.
It’s easy to feel like you’re nailing it when your skin is clean and your hair is washed. When the kitchen counters are clean, the laundry is folded and put away, and the kids are sleeping soundly.
It’s easy to feel like you’re fascinating when you have things to talk about with other adults that aren’t related to children’s cartoons and bowel movements and changing polka-dotted sheets at 2 a.m. and how the last well checkup went.
It’s easy to feel like you’re a masterpiece in the making when your child isn’t angry with you; when you don’t feel like you fell just short of the parenting mark.
It’s easy to feel like you’re wonderful when you don’t have to be enough for other people.
Now, when it’s chaos piled upon mayhem, when winter germs move through your house like wildfire, and you have to count back the days in your head to the last time you snuck off to nab a shower before the baby started putting blueberries in the toilet…
You run solely on the fumes of hope that today will be easier than yesterday was.
And Valentine’s Day just becomes one more thing to do. One more part of life that feels completely contradictory to the season and place you find yourself in.
Nobody sees you. I get it.
Nobody sees you silently picking up crumbs and old french from off the floor in the van. Nobody sees how many times you have to scrub the crusted pee from behind the toilet. Nobody sees how many times your meals are interrupted, your sleep is interrupted, your life is interrupted.
