And what I quickly realized is that being a working mom is not something that you just organically make your way through like following a gently winding path in the country – it’s like merging onto a highway where everyone is going 80 mph and you’re busting your ass to find a spot in the mix. Everyday has to be carefully orchestrated, strategized and scheduled so that priorities are able to be, well, priorities. My day goes zooming by while I try to keep tabs on all the different things flying at me – clients, emails, projects, meals, bills, laundry (ha!) and exercise (double ha!) – and unless I have time carved out for and a reminder of (with an accompanying alarm and a message) a specific task, it ain’t happening. Right now, for example, I am writing this with my tensed shoulders up near my ears, eyeballing the clock, trying to get the most out of this hour that I’ve penciled in. In the days of yore, I would’ve used the online thesaurus to give this post a little more pop, but today people, I’ve got an hour and there’s no bones about it – must stay on target! Gone are the days of flitting around a post, giving it some space, coming back to it when the juices are flowing. It’s GO time!

My weekends, which at one time were opportunities to relax and stay in one’s pajamas all day are now “planning periods” for the week ahead. I use a chunk of the weekends to meal plan, shop for said meals, do laundry and any other chore that surely won’t make the cut during the week – not to mention spend time with my son and husband (who?). The irony here is that the overall feeling I have with being a working mom is similar to how I felt when my son was an infant and I became a stay-at-home-mom. A part of me (okay, all of me) was in survival mode then and I felt successful at the end of the day if everyone in the house was at least fed and somewhat sleeping – bathing didn’t matter, nor did dishes, folded laundry or any other annoyance/chore. Today, I feel this grind as well and if I had a free moment, I would be Googling how the hell other moms balance work and non-work life! Seriously, I just set a calendar reminder to Google how the hell other moms balance this.

On the upside, although I feel this urgency to be doing a thousand things until I drop at the end of the day because God forbid I get swamped with a huge work project tomorrow, I actually feel way more organized and capable than I did before. Before, I mostly didn’t bother with preparing for the week ahead because I knew I would have the time to do whatever I needed to (which was a fallacy). But now, for example, there is always food in the house and meals planned because there has to be. That’s not to say that we don’t still have time for relaxing and fun – in fact, we went on a mini vacation this past weekend and something that surprised me was how much I enjoyed every minute of it – it really felt like a break, not just an extension of my normal week. Like a little more contrast had been added to my life. And what shocked me even more is that when we got back, I wasn’t bummed for “real life” start again – I was excited to pick up where I’d left off with work! Who knew that the part of my brain that has been in sleep mode the past five years is thriving on the challenges that my new work life is offering me?!

The other huge upside is something called a paycheck. Right now, that little gem is worth it to me to have to formally schedule a date with Costco. I also think not having earned a steady paycheck for five years does a little something to ya – personally, I’m thrilled that someone still wants to pay me for my time and skills!

After picking up my son from school yesterday, I pounced on a woman in the hall whom I knew was a working mom and basically took her collar and shook her while demanding, “Tell me your secrets!!” This is what she had to say: 1. Go to Target after 8pm on weeknights to do your errands and it will save me a boatload of time (as opposed to Saturdays at Target) 2. Do you have a cleaning lady? You no longer have time to clean. Get one (I loved having someone sternly tell me that I no longer had time to clean – yes ma’am, I’ll get right on that one!) and 3. It will get easier once you get into the rhythm.

I became a single, grieving widow and mom of two babies.

When I had almost lost sight of new love, I met my second husband when he responded to my query on a dating web site.

I married him three years later, and the following year had a third child.

I am a full time teacher to fantastic second graders, a lousy housekeeper to a house that I love, in a new town that I feel lucky to live in.

I am an owner of two dogs, one cat.

I am moderately psychic and as a result have a constant knot of anxiety in my stomach. I need to learn to live in the moment, not with dread for the future.

A healer has told me that I need to let more fun into my life. I welcome that suggestion.

I am a writer. I am here to write. I hope you will enjoy what I have to say.

I’m actually not here to complain. I covet supermarket flowers. I love French toast. And, I’ll celebrate any day that gives me at least an annual co-appearance with my children in the family photo album.

The chagrined admission, from homilies to Hallmark, is that mothers are not very well appreciated. Our daily tedium is daily overlooked; our deep sacrifices are deeply unacknowledged.  While I’d like to call tally-ho and chase down the red foxes of appreciation and honor, I can’t shake this one burr off my thumb: we seem to assume we deserve it.

We talk a good talk, of course—berating our habits of shaming or bribing or rescuing in any playdate hen circle. And I do believe deeply in the pit of self-doubt left by emptied wombs. I know the topography of my particular pit nearly as well as my children’s palms. But, categorically, we seem to assume that we mothers deserve credit just because we, well, are.

It’s a problem because some women, well, aren’t. Good. Or mothers.

Personally, I’m pricked because I see how the assumption flatters my ego. Being culturally acknowledged as a saint is a personal growth hall pass without an expiration date. Yelled at my preschooler today? It’s okay. Kids can be relentless. Don’t feel like having sex tonight? Totally understandable. Nursing is grueling. Haven’t written a poem for seven months? How could you? Mothering is a full time job. The pass is a nice break, but what if I get to graduation and haven’t cracked a book? If I get credit just for being in the building, how much am I going to study—or explore?

Socially, the thorn draws blood. An assumption that mothers categorically deserve honor silences a lot of people. Children, young and grown, whose mothers are not honorable. Mothers, rapt or absent, who long for better selves. Fathers, altruistic or otherwise, who desire healthier partners. Women, longing or liberated or losing, who do not have children.

I’m a mom, but I didn’t make myself one in any sense beyond the biological. I didn’t manage even that by myself, and it’s in no way to my credit that I was able to do so. (Or to my fault that, twice, I wasn’t.) When I consider that, the national holiday starts to feel as meaningful as Employee of the Month or Student of the Week. I didn’t make my children. And, frankly, the days I think I am making them are the worst ones—inside and out.

Here’s what I think: Being a good mother isn’t any different, or any better, than being a good human. A good mother is a good human. Nothing less. And nothing more.

Sunday morning, my four year-old brought me a croissant and a hug. He told me I’m the best mommy of the whole world. Brunch (and the fishing rod) were nice, but the rewards for being a good mother are the rewards of being a good human. They’re the rewards of any task worth doing. They’re rewards given in the only place that counts— the quiet, carpeted, shelf-less room of the soul—and they’re open to anyone.

Image by Paper Antler.  Where our friends Jonny + Michelle are using photography to fight human trafficking. At paperantler.com

So why is it I thought the moment I had a baby that I would be a full-grown mother?

It came to me a few months ago when I was talking with an adoptive mother at the park. She brought home her baby boy 4 months ago, and he was now a year and a half old. “It’s been hard to relate to the other moms with kids his age because we’re just hitting the 4 month mark of having a kid,” she said. Without even thinking, I said, “Yeah, I mean, he’s an 18-month-old baby and you’re a 4-month-old mom.”

That means I’m a 2-and-a-half-year-old mom. And back when I was wondering if I would ever feel like a “natural mother,” I was a 3-week-old mom. A newborn. I was 4 months old when I was white-knuckling through my exhaustion, anxiety and depression.

My maternal grandmother, who we called Dee Dee, was most definitely a full grown mother when I knew her. Since she had a son and a daughter who were 61 and 59 when she died, I'd say she grew to the ripe old mom age of 120.

Thinking about my mom age this way makes me feel better. It helps me have more compassion for myself in those first few disorienting months. Things often felt wobbly and strange. Am I doing this right? Is it supposed to feel this way? But we don’t expect newborn babes to come out of the womb quoting Shakespeare. So why do we expect the equivalent of ourselves as mothers?

And here's my dear friend E. Who will become a 2-year-old mom this August and give birth to kiddo #2, growing her mom age by leaps and bounds ahead of mine.

So for my Mother’s Day gift to myself and to all of you, I’d like to let us all be the mom age that we are.

For a mom in her toddler years, I feel like I’m doing okay. I don’t have everything down to a science, like my 7-year-old mom friends, but I’m starting to have fewer tantrums.

How old of a mom are you? Or if you’re not a mom yourself, how old of a mother is the mom that you’re closest to? Does thinking about mothers in terms of their mom age change how you feel or think about motherhood?

~

Read more posts from An Honest Mom at www.anhonestmom.wordpress.com.

The first year I raised monarchs, it freaked me out when my first caterpillar suddenly stopped moving and eating. I thought I’d killed it. A monarch-savvy friend told me, “Don’t give up! Sometimes they just do that when they’re getting ready to split their skin.” And sure enough, I found the crumpled remains of a caterpillar skin not long after that, and a newly ravenous, noticeably bigger caterpillar chomping down on milkweed again. That still, waiting time was necessary for the caterpillar to keep growing, just as the long, dangling-upside-down wait inside the chrysalis would be necessary, too.

I homeschool my kids–actually, we unschool, which means that I don’t try to teach my kids unless they ask me to teach them. I watch them closely, trying to follow their interests and get them the resources and opportunities to pursue those interests wherever they take them. I try to trust that, like the monarch caterpillar, my kids are in a process of transformation. Sometimes, like with the caterpillars, it’s hard for me to see the growth that’s happening. Sometimes, it just looks like my kids are sitting there doing nothing. And then, suddenly, they’ll surprise me with some new skill they’ve mastered, some new breakthrough or insight they’ve had.

Right now, my son loves to play games on our computer. He also tries to create computer games and animations. Sometimes it’s really hard for me to trust that all the time he spends at the computer is leading him toward the kind of life I want for him. It’s hard for me to strike a balance between respecting his choices and heeding my own inner alarm bells about screen time and too much time spent alone in our computer room. I still don’t know what the right balance is, but I try to remember something a friend of mine said–that it’s probably better to offer fun alternatives than to just tell my kid to get off the computer.

I also try to remember myself as an eleven-year-old girl who loved my solitude, who loved rainy days because I knew I could read and watch old movies without my parents pestering me to get outside and get some exercise. I’ve turned into a woman who revels in being outside and loves to bike, hike, and run. Who could have predicted my metamorphosis? It had to happen in its own time, its own way, like the butterfly’s transformation. I pray for the patience to wait for my son’s own transformation, and the wisdom to know when I need to guide him and when I need to step back and let him guide himself.

When I first realized that my day to post on the get, Born blog was also Mother’s Day, I was actually excited…until I sat down at the keyboard to write. My first inclination was to write something overly witty and ironic about the “mommy wars.” Well, thanks a lot overly-opinionated-yet-clueless-magazine-read-by-millions, you BEAT me to that this week.

Then I was thinking about writing something about the real meaning of Mother’s Day, the increasing Hallmarking of the day…bla, bla, bla…yeah, uh, no. I don’t even want to read about that.

So, then I was thinking about what Mother’s Day means to me.

And to be honest, it is not a whole lot.

My own mother died when I was 22 and she had just turned 50. Her death was long and slow and incredibly painful. Cancer is a bitch. I was a young mother myself, with an almost four year old daughter. Mother’s Day always sneaks up on me because I don’t have to worry about remembering. I know sooo morbid, right? But it doesn’t make it any less true. I spend most days still thinking about my mom in some way, I don’t need a certain day to dwell on her and how much I miss her and how I wish she was still alive to meet the rest of her grandchildren. This is all about me, not her or my memory of her.

But what does Mother’s Day mean to my own children? They seem to enjoy making their crafts and projects at school and giving them to me and that I love. I also love that because I don’t have a huge attachment to Mother’s Day as “my day” my husband has taken the cue and not made it into something that is stressful for the kids. This makes it all about them.

Okay what is my point? Well, I guess my point is that Mother’s Day means a great deal to many moms but there are some of us out in the world who might not even notice it was coming up if it weren’t for the ads on Hulu or the memes on facebook. And really, I’m fine with both! So happy Mother’s Day moms out there in internetland! You are valuable women and not just on Mother’s Day!

Eden lives in Colorado with her partner, four kidos, four chickens, a dog and a cat.