Becoming A Mum: 10 Things You WILL Do

Women, in their pre-baby state, often have a lot of opinions about how they will mother in when they finally have kids. They see mums, with their tantrum-throwing toddlers at the store and throwing chip over the booth at a restaurant, and they know they’ll never, ever, EVER be that person.

Or, they hear about the mum who gave birth to her baby in a blow pool in her living room while homeschooling her tween and knitting her husband socks for Christmas, and she knows instantly she is not about to get down like that.

But then, two years and a husband later, and you’re ordering your home birth kit while your toddler screams on the floor at the midwife’s office.

You see, motherhood makes you do things you never thought you’d do, makes you feel things you never thought you’d feel, and sometimes, it just really blows your mind and turns you into your own mother. Here are 15 rites of passage we all go through…

1. You will miss a meeting or a parent teacher conference or a coffee date that you really didn’t want to go to anyway and blame it on your baby. Never mind that you hated it when coworkers used their kids as an excuse for things in your pre-kid days, they’re handy and whatever, it’s your turn!

2. You will go out in public, possibly even to a job interview, with stickers on your butt and you won’t have any idea they were there until you come home and get undressed for bed.

3. You will have to catch your child’s barf, possibly in your bare hands, while in a public place that is not designed or even remotely equipped for open palm barf handling. Like on an plane. Or at the table in that Italian restaurant they just opened within walking distance from your house. Or, and this one tops them all, the swimming pool. There are few things more embarrassing than being the reason the first day of summer is ruined for 50 kids.

4. You will do every single thing in your power to avoid the car nap. And, should you fail in your attempts to keep your toddler awake until you get home where he can nap uninterrupted (because he’s too big to seamlessly make the car seat to bed transfer without interruption and you refuse to count the 20 minutes you were driving home as nap time), you will leave him asleep in the car while you sit in there with him and read.

5. You will injure yourself doing some kid thing you just have to prove to your kid you can still do. Pogo sticking, riding a skateboard (ask me how I know this), climbing on the jungle gym, or trying to climb on the jungle gym but nearly plummeting to your death when you discover that the weight of your body dangling from just your arms makes you feel like they are going to rip clean outta their sockets.

6. You will sound just like your mother. And sometimes even your father when you start in on the turn-off-the-lights thing. You will be okay with it.

7. You will get into an undeclared “my baby is better than your baby” bidding war with some random mum at your Mummy & Me class. You’ve never been that person, and you know comparisons don’t matter because every kid develops at their own pace, but she started it. And hello, your kid started walking at 8 months, so there.

8. You will refer to yourself as Mummy, often in the third person. As in, “Mummy said it’s time for bed.” And, “Mummy doesn’t like it when you do that.” And, “Mummy has a real name, but she never bothers to use it anymore and she’s thinking of just having the people at work call her Mummy too since she looks around every time she hears it anyway.”

9. You will clutch his lovey/blankie/bearie to your face and cry into it when you clean out the toy box and find it buried in the bottom, missing an eye, and smelling like cheese.

10. You will say to some new mum, the words you really hated hearing when you were in the clutches of this-kid-never-sleeps-and-cries-constantly-and-please-someone-just-let-me-shower new mum life: cherish it, it goes so quickly. Because you wish you cherished it and it’s going so, so, sooooo unbearably quickly.

So go on, get doing!