Green Grass

I am adjusting to being a stay-at-home mom.

That said, my house between the hours of four and five 0'clock are the closest thing I have ever experienced to the utter pandemonium often associated with being a full-time mom to three young children. Especially lately with Sam's new found mobility and accompanying curiosity. It's pretty much unbridled chaos around here. All three kids are home. Dave is not. They are tired. They are hungry. I am ready to have a conversation with someone over the age of six. Try as I might to find my happy place sauteing vegetables, I am inevitably interrupted (as I was this evening) by a child in need of a timeout for sticking her finger down her brother's throat, or by having to run outside to stop my little entrepreneurs from trying to sell their toys to our next door neighbors, or by fishing a full size grape out of the mouth of my ten month old...and then comforting him after he slams his face down on the kitchen floor, bloodying his lip as a means of protest. At this hour, the witching hour, I must remind myself that I chose this life.

I chose this life because right now because I've been on the other side. I've had the chance to dress up and put on make-up and go to work and bring home a paycheck and have an identity outside of my home and come back to my kids at the end of the day. And the grass is not always greener, though some days it seems that way.

Even on the hardest days, the green grass of my stay-at-home motherhood experience has been the new bond I've formed with my children. I drop them off in the morning. I pick them up every afternoon. I know what shows they watch and what they eat for breakfast and who they played with on the playground. I know how to calm a tantrum and what sets them off. I know their favorite books at the library and what kind of slush they will order at Sonic for Happy Hour. I am there to enforce chores and I know which consequences carry the most weight when they start to whine. I knew most of these things when I worked, too. But now these are the most important details of my day. The only things I have to remember. They are my job. I will not say that this life is the kind of domestic heaven that I always dreamed of as a girl. I have WAY too much laundry for that to be true. But I know my kids. And I know them in a way I've never known them before. That is priceless.

Times three.