Sometimes Motherhood is just Shit
A TMI post about Motherhood
A post from earlier this year- written late May 2023.
For the first time in 6 weeks I had the house all to myself!
Well, not entirely, but just me and the 2 year old, and my Uncle’s dog, Sister. The rest of my family having driven 30 miles to retrieve a whole pile of treasure being given to us by my mom’s friend, who is currently in the process of clearing out old things. So far we have procured a beat up but very classy wooden rocking chair, several straight ladders, a pile of bricks, a pile of cinder blocks, 5 wooden backed Windsor style chairs (similar to below) in need of refinishing, a printer, a vintage sewing table, and a lawn mower.
We are currently living with my father’s brother in my family home of 30 years, and for part of the week, I take the toddler to stay with my parents on their 40 acre rural property an hour’s drive to the west to bask in the country, fall asleep to frogs, keep awake by the incessant whippoorwills, or the 3am “BEEP BEEP BEEP” of the back up horns of the trucks coming and going from the pet food factory, and occasionally help in my mother’s garden. My son is back on the West Coast, having chosen to do 8th grade back on island with his dad and his family the days). We will be reunited this summer (of which I am counting down the days), though his absence is a phantom limb in my days. Which is very very hard to explain to anyone who has never had their nuclear family detonated by divorce.
Meanwhile, my husband and I and our toddler are back in my home state of South Carolina to work on our house, the very first house we have ever owned! It’s a 1935 fixer upper. You can read more about that journey over at South by Maple, if you’re as into old houses as we are. Which means I now maintain three websites- my doula business Wild Beloved, this newsletter, and now the blog dedicated to our renovation project. This is my work for now as I have no paid work from outside the home, and I live in a culture that not only depends upon my unpaid work as Mother but profits off it, and at this point I have no pension, no retirement, and very little in social security. (And I am a white able bodied woman with access to things like generational wealth, with a Masters Level of education, of which I still have $20k in debt from and probably won’t be paying off any time soon). Meanwhile, I have a hearing next Monday, June 5th, for a dispute over unemployment benefits I was paid during the pandemic. I’m mostly a stay at home Mom at this point, no new doula clients on the horizon. Update as of fall 2023, my appeal hearing did not go through, and now I am still being told by the state of WA that I owe them over $5k in unemployment benefits THEY ALREADY PAID ME saying I was overpaid. I asked for a waiver back in April and still have heard nothing back. Such is capitalism where the working class suffer the most.
As all of these older people are now retired they are around all the time. My Mom, a multi-passionate woman obsessed with resilience and climate change, is always in some type of doomsday book group facilitated by British back-to-the-landers, working on her non-profit, helping in the community permaculture orchard she helped to found, or working in her own massive garden (while recently being stymied by voracious and intrepid deer who know just where the worn spots in the fence are). My dad can be found puttering on projects around the property, going on walks with Birdie dog, off on birding excursions, or enjoying reading a murder mystery in his favorite chair. My Uncle, a loner, spend his days looking at things to buy online, working out, drinking countless cups of coffee from his Keurig maker, smoking pot to help manage his various ongoing ailments and being a kind and doting father to his dog Sister. And while everyone respects, for the most part, each others space and need for solitude, if you have never lived with family for an extended period of time in a home that is not fundamentally yours- your manner of home keeping or decorating or cleaning, etc, you may not know the particular level of subtle but very clear distress and anxiety this can create.
It’s taken me most of my adult life to realize that being alone is one of my favorite things. Some people tell me it’s because I’m an introvert or an INFJ or a HSP (highly sensitive person) or an empath or because I’m a 4 on the Enneagram or because I’m a sensitive Pisces. I don’t know about all of that, but it is true, one of the quickest ways for me to recharge is to have everyone else I’m sharing space with get the fuck out. And being a full time stay at home parent to a still nursing toddler means I rarely get alone time. I sometimes wonder if a main reason I split with my son’s father was because I simply needed time and space for myself again. The process of carrying and birthing humans obliterates everything you once knew.
So today, I’m enjoying a leisurely morning after staying up til 2am account of the toddler not falling asleep until well after midnight. Then, on account of me rarely, these days, getting even a daily dose of alone time, I stayed up late reading (just finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad) usually fiction because I need something to take my mind off all the other systemic and climatic and culturally impoverished and political things I think about all the other fucking hours of the day, or watching a show (just binged all of season one of Yellowjackets- which is soo good! And I do not tend to like any horror or thriller type of shows, but this one is not a fest of that sort, more like a horrific flourish here and there, which only adds to the suspense and over all thrill of the show)
I’m on my second cup of of coffee, sitting on the couch with the cool breeze South Carolina morning streaming in from the screened in back porch, picking up my reading from where I left off last night at 2am, when I finally called it a night, desperately trying to fall asleep when a male Mockingbird decided it was time to sing out to try to get a mate. And he just kept going…. Then my daughter woke up at 4am, crying on the monitor, which is usually her first time for morning "mee-mee.” However, she settled back down until 5am. Then, on the hour, every hour from 5 am until around 8:30am, she wakes whining and crying asking for "mee-mee.” At that point I am utterly parched and have also consumed my entire night’s water ration of a 32 ounce Nalgene bottle.
It’s around 10am when I’ve finally got both her and me fed breakfast. The morning dishes soaking, coffee made, and the dishes in the drying rack put away. I take a cursory look at The State newspaper (which my father in a civic minded way continues to subscribe too, even as print journalism in the newspaper form seems to be on its last leg), whose headlines, given that this is South Carolina we’re talking about are always fucking terrible.
The lovely thing about a toddler, at least both the two I have parented so far, is that they are brilliant, curious, communicative, and can play alone for quite some time. I shooed Aubrey, my 2 year old away, saying “Go play with your animals or read a book. I need to finish eating.” So she toddled off.
I catch up on some Substacks, and then open my phone tabs to finish reading what I didn’t finish last night at 2am, a blog post from the erotica site, Girl On the Net, “The Trembling off-balance spreader bar fuck,” a 2014. While I’m gaping that I’ve never heard of such a think as a “spreader bar” and feeling quite sorry for myself given my quite sexless marriage these days (toddler parenthood and gutting a house will do that to you). Sigh…. which is why, we’ve had some element of consensual non-monogamy since we first started dating in 2018. I follow the spreader bar post to one about a rabbit vibrator being reviewed. Which sends me on a mental rabbit hole of realizing I left the charging bloc for my vibrator back in WA state.
YES this is what I’m doing when my Motherintuition kicks in- ya know, the voice that says "The toddler has been quiet for too long!” So I go look for her. I round the corner to find her sitting at the bottom of the stairs, her plastic animals arranged in various groupings on the stairs. Next to her is a huge pile of dirt. Wait, no, it’s not dirt. It’s poop! I look closer and see poop all over the stairs, smeared on the staircase, some of her animals are stepping in it. She actually has a fitted cloth diaper on, just no cover, and the poop is so massive it’s simply spooged out of the containment area and she has just continued playing, oblivious to the excrement all around her.
Some days Motherhood is just shit.
Oh god. As a fellow infj, empath, hsp, 4, this all sounds really awful.
Um, that last bit made me lol in a really needed way. TY but also SHIT--that sucks.