Mothering the.... Oh, Forget It.

Tonight has been rough.  Well, if I'm leveling with you (and I believe I am), the last 14 years have been varied shades of rough.  Maybe you've already made the connection that my oldest is nearly 14.  If so, you've won a prize.  I'm not sure what the prize is yet, but it might be a glass--heck, a bottle--of wine shared with yours truly.  And, truthfully, I'm not really a wine-drinker, but it makes me feel more sophisticated to say "wine" instead of just about anything else.

When I was a little girl, I played with baby dolls endlessly.  I changed their diapers, I fed them little pretend bottles of milk.  I patted their little backs tenderly so they could pretend-burp.  We would stroll around the house with them strapped securely in their little teeny-tiny pink strollers...

Actually, no, no I didn't.  That was some other little girl.  I had one, count 'em, one, baby doll.  She was beautiful, but her eyes were molded shut, perpetually snoozing.  She never woke up to eat, just slept the day away, wrapped in the pink and brown afghan my step-mom crocheted for her.

You're looking at (well, looking at the words of) the girl who flunked her "egg baby" project in health class because I let my sweet little Shelly take a nap in the back of the family van for six hours while I schussed my Saturday away at the ski hill.  Shelly even got a full-body x-ray when we had to go through the TSA line to go pick my sisters up from the airport.  Mother. Of. The. Year.

When I played with Barbie(s) and Ken, they never fell in love and had children. They fell in love--that, friends, was my objective in life.  Falling in love.  Not having children.  My big dream was to own a big riding stable, train horses, have a wickedly handsome husband.  Period.  The End. 

Ironically, in my search for wickedly handsome, I managed to get the wicked part spot on.  Nine months later, I had a baby and no dashing husband.  That wasn't really the way this was supposed to happen.  Love, yes please! Babies, meh.

Three additional offspring (and one devilishly good-looking husband) later, here I am.  Ironically, I spend most of my professional time helping families welcome their little bundles of joy or figure out how to be their own brand of parents.  I can really identify with the parents who are just plain shell-shocked, and I feel a twinge of guilt when I am around parents who are ALL IN when it comes to this whole nurturing thing.  My kids have been short-changed.  I am afraid for them, my example has been so atrocious.  Good thing they're boys and don't have to emulate me--but goodness knows I wish a lot more for them in their future partners than what I am to them and to my husband.

Now, granted, parenthood hasn't been a skip in the park or anything.  Boys 2 and 3 came with expensive (time- and money-wise) diagnoses which solidified in me that survival was the ultimate goal, any free-and-easy good times we managed were icing on the cake, especially in those early years.  Boy 4 came as a surprise when we thought we'd made a surgical stand to be done with the procreating stuff, right when I'd chosen a brand new tack for life.

So, forgive me for my lack of warm fuzzies inside.  I'm, frankly, still in shock.  That makes me feel guilty, too, because I know plenty of couples who have been overlooked and wrenched in two in their agonizing quests for children.  I've been given four--like swag just for showing up to the party--and I'm not entirely sure what to do with them now.... except maybe string them up by their toes when they're naughty monkeys (which is, like, always).

So tonight, for the bajillionth time, I am verbally duking it out with mouthy teenage boy, the one who started it all.  He is too much like me, and yet so different.  I realize he is smarter than even he will give himself credit for, and he has been able to sense the resentment I've only recently confirmed is simmering in my veins.  Resentment.  A life that hasn't played out as planned, even though my initial plan wasn't ambitious at all.  It's so utterly selfish of me.    Life is good, sometimes unbelievably so.  I am lucky to wake up each morning on the very soil where I ran as a little girl.  My dashing husband works hard so I can afford things I love like horses and impulse-buying on Amazon.  No doubt, this is probably a much better life than what I'd planned for myself as a child.  I just wish I'd been endowed with more of a mother's heart instead of whatever ended up in its place.

They keep telling me it gets better--holding onto that.