The Great Dichotomy

Dichotomy.  It’s a word I’ve always loved, I just didn’t realize it would be the one to define my everyday existence.  According to Webster, dichotomy means “a division into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities.”  In other words, one thing containing opposing parts.  Highs and lows. Good and bad. I believe the dictionary should also have included “see also: motherhood” because I don’t think there is any better example of living dichotomy than raising children.

I want to be a mom who loves everything about motherhood.  But I don’t.  There is so much I love, but equally so much that brings me to the end: the end of my patience, the end of my sanity.  And the struggle sometimes feels like it’s going to tear me apart.  

Motherhood is loving little fingers and toes, gentle coos and smiles.  It’s celebrating wonderful milestones like first steps and first words and first days of school.  It is unexpected hugs and “you’re the best mom ever!”  It’s watching these tiny miracles learn and grow and become incredible human beings who share with their siblings and stand up for their friends and who one day start to teach youthings. 

Motherhood is equally a daily grind of getting food on the table for three toddlers complaining their bellies are hurting (even though they ate an hour ago).  It’s managing your anger as you fold laundry while your one year old simultaneously unfolds everything you just did.   It’s endless amounts of wiping bums and sleep deprivation.  And that doesn’t even consider the emotional toll.

There are huge milestones, like my three year old waking up dry in the morning followed immediately by potty training accidents, when said three year old wakes up nearly every single night having wet the bed, despite the fact that she was overnight potty trained a year ago.  There’s children refusing to go to bed at night and then waking up at the crack of dawn, only to come snuggle in your bed.  You feel your frustration start to mount as you’re looking at your child before you even become vertical while you feel their warm bodies curl in next to you.  Wild hair in your face, tiny chests rising and falling, you hear those sweet little words whispered, “I love you, Mommy” and all frustration melts away in an instant.  Suddenly, this moment you loathed becomes your favorite part of the day.          

There’s poopy diaper explosions all over your clothes, the high chair, the bed.  There’s dirt dragged all over the freshly-vacuumed floor every day.  There are piles of laundry that never go away no matter how many loads I wash and toilet bowls with poop streaks no matter how many times I clean them.  The fridge is always near-empty even though we spend half our income just feeding these kids.  

Being in a relationship with my toddlers is like being in a relationship with emotionally abusive people.  One minute you’re the “best mommy in the world” and then next your eardrum is shattering because of the scream coming from a mouth three inches away when you took away their ice cream since they were abusing their sibling but refused to stop even after repeatedly being asked to.  There are sweet hugs and unexpected kisses followed by a surprise slap in the face from your one year old when you said she couldn’t have more juice.  There are jumping, joyful smiles when you take the kids to the pool and screaming epic meltdowns when you tell them it’s time to go, despite the fact that you gave them eighteen warnings about leaving and it’s past their nap time and they’re all exhausted.  The emotional whiplash should put us all in neck braces.

Parenting is days filled with new and exciting experiences like watching your children discover the ocean and flip when they see their favorite animal at the zoo. It is joyfully listening to your children stutter through their first book as they learn to read and also the forced patience during the painfully long time it takes to make it through one five-page book as they learn to read.  It is wishing your children don’t age one single moment and wishing they’d skip the next ten years and just be big already so we don’t have to keep living in this exhausting chaos.  It’s holding these precious moments in your heart to be cherished for years and praying it all ends soon so you can start to sleep again.    

With all these crazy emotions, it makes me wonder how in the world we survive as mothers.  How do we carry these burdens, these emotional highs and lows, the healing children bring and the scars they leave, the love they give to us and the life they take from us?  I carry a healthy amount of guilt and shame when I don’t love being a mom.  When I’m at the end of my rope, when I’m “done.”  When my patience won’t get me through one more tantrum.  And then the guilt pours in, telling me I’m not appreciating being a mom, I’m not loving these three precious beings enough.  I’m failing.

But lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a mother.  Or at least what it means to have a child.  Children don’t come wrapped in neat little boxes to sit quietly on our shelves.  They are loud and messy and chaotic, just like us.  They come with jumbled mixes of good and bad, sweet and sour, preciousness and predatory senses of survival. They are tiny versions of us, only with less developed brains and underdeveloped senses of emotional control.

Parenting is one thing with opposing parts.  Maybe the way we all keep going is just to acknowledge the fullness of our children, which means living in dichotomy of motherhood.  The reality that motherhood is both/and.  It is both love and chaos.  It is both life-taking and life-giving.  It is both the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.  We can feel blessed and overwhelmed, content and chaotic, joyful and exhausted, filled and completely at the end of our rope.  It’s not wrong.  We’re not bad or failing.  We are straddling the opposing experiences that make up the one beautiful thing called motherhood.  And maybe, just maybe, by acknowledging this dichotomy it will make walking down the road of parenting a tad easier.  

It is easy to succumb to the feelings of guilt and shame when I don’t feel helplessly in love with my children every single moment.  When sometimes, they feel much more like a burden than a blessing.  But in the end, their blessings and burdens all come wrapped up together.  And therefore, so do our emotions.  Hopefully, by understanding the extremes all come tucked into these creatures we call children, we can better embrace this crazy experience of dichotomy and find a few strands of peace amidst the chaos we call motherhood.