Motherhood is singlehandedly the most contradicting “job” I have ever experienced.
I was 19 when I had my first baby, N I N E T E E N.
Heck I was still a baby. From the moment I saw the two pink lines on the test, I felt alone and the isolation I felt was real and riveted through my entire body. Motherhood- soak that in. I wondered then, at how I could feel so lonely when I knew that from this point on I was responsible for another human. My entire aching, exhausted, alien body. (I mean really postpartum bodies do some crazy things and I felt like I was living within a shell I had no idea I had crawled into)
I lost so many friends because, well at 19 none of them knew or could even begin to fathom what I was going through. I remember going to dinner at Olive Garden with a group of 10 of my then closest friends who were home from college to tell them I was pregnant. And one of them saying, “Well you can’t undo it…but babies are a blessing no matter what the circumstances…I just can’t fathom doing that now!”
I remember wishing I could just be “X-age” and free like everyone else. But mainly just wishing that my friends understood I wasn’t abandoning them. Wishing they checked in to see how I was doing, with a call or a text (and then gave me grace when two minutes into the conversation a screaming infant or toddler forced me to end the phone call early). Wishing that they understood it meant the world to me to just be INVITED, even if they knew I wouldn’t be able to go it’s nice to be reminded that people know you exist.
I haven’t been a “best friend” in a long time, and that’s okay. I don’t get tagged in posts on social media because honestly at 30 it is still rare for me to be invited out for girls night, and even more rare for schedules to align now that most of my friends have children as well. This is not a “woe is me post”, or one to elicit sympathy, and sure as heck isn’t one to place blame or guilt on people I used to hang out with. The sole purpose of this post is to remind the mom out there who feels forgotten and alone that you aren’t, there is/are little ones (in my case now two sweet babes) that think the sun rises and sets because of you, that would be completely lost without you as their Momma. And heck, you might be like me and never get tagged in a #nationalbestfriendday post- but I would much rather have my children think back to their childhood and remember me trying to be the best I could be every single day.
