going with the flow

Being a mom, I am discovering is about going with the flow. What I mean by that is that the whole journey is this constantly changing series of stages. As soon as you get used to something, it changes. Seriously, the moment you develop this ingenius way of occupying the baby in the cosleeper with toys so you can do your make-up without holding her, she learns to stand up, nearly vaulting herself out of the cosleeper. Yeah. The cosleeper is now my clothing rack for stuff I tried on but didn't actually wear but didn't have time to hang up. You have that clothing rack, too, right? Perhaps yours is shaped more like an exercise bike?

Being a mom is also about hurrying. I feel like I am always ALWAYS hurrying. Until that little bundle of cuteness hits the sack for the night, which she is now THANK YOU LORD JESUS doing fairly predictably and with little fanfare, I feel like I am in a race in which everyone is passing me up, and during which, I regularly lose a shoe, trip over one of those plastic stacking rings or have to pee. Speaking of peeing, I hurry when I pee now. That seems kind of ridiculous, I know, but when you have a very fast 9-month old headed straight for a big fat orange cat who, while tolerant to the point of sainthood, is about one ear tug away from retailiation...you pee fast.

Being a mom is about saying no. Not just to Princess Wiggle Bottom who enjoys such refined past times as pulling mom's hair and calling Finland by poking at my cell phone. But to adults. Adults who ask me to do fun stuff. Unfortunately sometimes that fun stuff is just too plain expensive. We're than couple, now, who doesn't stay in the hotel after the wedding, but rather flips a coin to see who has to stay sober enough to drive home. But even the less expensive activities like happy hours and bachelorette parties and afternoon lunches...well, my time is simply incredibly limited. I have to pick aand choose. And sometimes it kills me. But when I've asked my husband to do solo-daddy duty 3 friday nights in a row, it's time to regretfully decline. The next 8-10 weeks are particularly crazy. We have my birthday, my graduation, Mothers Day, my mom's birthday, my dad's birthday, Memorial Day, Fathers Day, my final grad school presentation, 2 major work events, a fundraiser event I am intmately involved with, 2 weddings, my husband's birthday and of course, Little Miss Mischief's very first birthday. I might die. Obviously, none of those things are really "optional." And some of them are pretty significant. Fortunately Grammie and Pappy are up for a lot of babysitting gigs. How I'm going to afford all of these things is yet to be seen.

Do people give you cash for your master's degree graduation? Yeah, didn't think so. How is it that high school kids hit the jackpot? You can pass high school rocking out to your Ipod while you text your friends and make out with your pimply faced boyfriend and yet, there are tent rentals and catering and lots of envelopes with generous checks to celebrate this accomplishment. For your bachelors degree, you're lucky if someone has a cookout for you and pays for the diploma. As for your master's degree? You're lucky if you parents show up at the auditorium. And if you want a party you'd better throw it yourself. Meanwhile 85% of Americans have a high school diploma and only about 7% have a master's degree. And yet, we celebrate and throw money at the people when they complete the bare minimum which cost them no money, and say "congrats" on Facebook to people when they complete a master's program that they now owe $25,000 for. This puzzles me. But it kind of goes the same way with weddings. Your friends who get married right out of college - everyone puts the most effort and time into those - you are thrilled to sit around and make bows out of ribbon. I recall spending an entire freezing cold afternoon driving all over Southeast Ohio in search of the perfect little white chapel for a friend who was getting married and searching on the Internet for weeks, attempting to locate a band that played a particularly obscure type of music for another friend's wedding. I once created an Excel spreadsheet for everyone helping with another friend's wedding, held a meeting with an agenda and considered renting walkie talkies for the day's events. There were entire days of spa treatments, entire months of weekends blocked out for dress hunting. But these days, when we're 32 and have a demanding job and a child, a husband and 160 hours of internship to complete...we think we deserve a medal for remembering to buy our bridesmaid dress and finding the time to shower before the wedding and leave our Blackberry in our purse during the ceremony. Also? If you ask me to sit still for 2 hours and shell out $75 for some blonde moron to figure out how to coax my unruly curls into an acceptable "updo" you are out of your bridezilla mind.

But doesn't that suck?!?! Much like those of us who have trudged through dozens of academic books, impractical theories and churned out more papers than you'd need to paper mache the Statue of Liberty, the hold-outs among us who waited to get married until they were old enough to know that doing a Jager-Bomb at an office function is just a terrible idea...don't they deserve the same kind of fireworks and standing ovations we were willing to offer up back when we were doing those Jager-Bombs?