I drove down Academy in our ready-for-baby four-door beige sedan listening to Peter Gabriel as loud as I could stand it, crying. I thought, this will be the last time I can do this. Ever.
I remember laughing when the tall ristretto hazelnut latte kicked in and we could see it kick in for the baby, too, because I was 24 hours into my “labour” and hooked up to the fetal monitors and the heart rate jumped 10 beats per minute across all the accels and decels.
I remember the tornado of hormones and exhaustion when the baby wouldn’t sleep because she was hungry, so hungry, and tired, and I was hungry and tired and gross and overwhelmed, except I’m retconning that, because what I actually remember is feeling that horrible mix of I will die if this goes on and this is so desperately important to me that I will die if it does not work. It was not me who called my aunt to come help us overnight, because I couldn’t. I was just dying.
All three births were moments of my life that have a pin stuck in them; they have been highlighted in neon and stand out from the mundane. They are the midpoint of the boring awfulness of gestation and the boring desperation of sleep-poop-eat.
I take a moment on my children’s birthdays to remember how I felt, on those highlighted days; the over-the-top drama of the events around the first one, the silent, abject horror that I was not going to survive the second, the grim knowledge that I only had one chance to get through the third.
I used to write a mommy blog. I wrote it for myself, and for my parents, but also because I secretly hoped to become a little bit internet famous. Then I realized that monetizing children is pretty gross and I deleted the whole thing. But I miss writing about parenting, and motherhood, because those things are a part of me. I am a far, far better mother because I read other people’s oversharing about their kids.
I still don’t think it’s okay to exploit my children’s lives for clicks. But I do find it valuable to document my life online, because writing for a public lens (even though no one reads this blog) changes my tone. It’s not the same as my journal, which is mostly yelling and swears. I want to write more about being a mother, so I’m going to.
Writing is how I remember what matters. And being a mother matters to me. My children matter to me. So I write.