The following is written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Today has been one of those days.
You know the ones.
The kind of day that feels like it’s dragging you under.
The kind when everything just sort of goes wrong.
Today was a crying day.
A kid band-aid,
lost shoe day.
Today was a missed the important call,
felt let-down, lonely, hollowed out,
very stressed out kind of day.
I texted friends, and then my mom,
reaching out for support.
I tried to put on the comfort they offered,
but, like a child, I yanked at that comfort a little bit.
It felt itchy up by my neck.
“I just feel like it’s hard to take care of others when I just want to be taken care of myself” I said.
“I want someone to take care of ME.”
Being a stay-at-home mom for the last 13 years has been a dream realized,
and I have treasured the time that it’s given,
but every once in awhile it feels like it’s trying to eat me up alive.
Sometimes I feel swallowed whole.
There have been beautiful first-step days,
play at the park days,
and lazy warm afternoons.
I have had time to be down in the floor eye-to-eye with my babies,
and I’ve watched them grow with a front-row seat all these years that I have been home.
We’ve colored, and sung, and read.
We’ve gone on long walks, and taken naps all in the same bed.
It has been so many things that I’ve dreamed;
But some days I wish someone was packing my lunch up just the way that *I* like it,
and writing MY name pretty on the bag.
Some days I want MY hair combed gently,
and my shoes tied.
I want someone to sing soft to me.
Some days I just want to nuzzle up next to someone bigger who will handle it all for me if the kids cry, and the food burns, and I miss an appointment, or I don’t know how to help them with their seventh grade math homework.
Some days I want someone to take my face in their hands and tell me,
“I know this is hard, but you’ve got this.
Kerri, I believe in you.”
As I tried to help Chloe with her homework tonight, and she cried, “It’s just so hard,”
I heard my own voice in there, too,
and I told her what we both needed to hear:
“Yes. This is hard.
It’s going to get even harder sometimes,
but one thing I know about you is that
you can do hard things.
Look at just how much you’ve learned to do! Right now this feels hard, but one day you will have grown, and learned, and become something through doing it,
and it won’t seem so hard anymore.”
Yes.
Today was just one of those days.
In the middle of the thick of it,
struggling with feeling like I was unseen –
Just a frumpy mom in cotton pants picking wrappers up off the floor,
cupping the crumbs,
and somehow identifying with them –
I walked to the back room to put the dinosaurs away again.
(The sound of their feet going back on the shelf like the soundtrack of my every day)
When I returned to the living room,
there, laying on the center of my ottoman
also wanting to be noticed,
was a tiny plucked dandelion bud that had not been laying there before.
While I had been in the back room,
the 20 month old little boy that I care for had slipped outside and picked it for me.
He had lay it there for me to find.
I stood looking at that dandelion for the longest time,
hearing the soft, “I see you” that it was speaking then to me.
“…You in your loneliness…You on this exact kind of day.”
It was a little mangled, and
if you looked close you could see bugs on it,
but the first thing I noticed about it as I came down the hall was it’s beautiful, happy color.
Like it took seriously its only job of being the one to make people’s wishes happen.
Oh,
so many days I long for a motherhood that is a giant, beautiful mixed bouquet.
I wish for a door delivery,
and a thoughtfully penned note tucked inside.
But often what shows up is, instead,
a humble dandelion that has been left for us to find.
A small symbol of wishing coming from our own back yard.
Some days we, ourselves, are are fragrant peonies, impossible to miss.
But other days we are the dandelion,
clenched in a tiny fist.
That mangled cheerful yellow flower meant more to me in that moment than any grand bouquet could have.
Its tiny voice spoke the loudest.
It reminded me what I’m doing it all for.
Its small voice,
it sang to me.
It sang that sometimes we may be a little beat up looking,
some days we will feel smaller than we’d like,
but we have power,
even in our lowliest days,
to be something beautiful to someone who maybe just really needed our dandelion.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
