Hello blog, I miss you and I love you and please don't give up on me! You are so pretty and your hair smells delicious! Can we still be friends?
So, how can one have three children? It's not that hard, really. You have the first one and then the second and then the third. I'm not just being funny, having three kids is nothing like you would imagine it would be when you still have only one. (I will disregard the fact for a second that there are triplets in this world.) For one, having multiple children does not mean the workload of one is equally multiplied. Every subsequent child is probably about 30-50% more work. I realize this still adds up to like, a LOT of work, but still, it partially explains why it is possible to have more than one. The other factor is the experience and skillset as well as sheer determination of the mother. Basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm a much better mother than I was 5 years ago and... thank God for that! Whenever I thought of more children when I had Veronika my mind shut down because the visions of more work (when? how?!) were too scary, yet the idea of one child only was not appealing and thus: conflicting messages = mental collapse, replace malfunction with complete self-delusion and proceed with plan of having more kids regardless.
You grow with the challenge bla bla...yet it's true. With time you get faster, you get more organized, more intuitive and above all, you surrender more. The shape of your pre-child life is almost forgotten, you don't remember all the things that you are missing so well anymore and you know that the more you hang on to an idea of how things should be the more unhappy you will be and therefore slowly you let go and get with the program. Well, it's what I'd like to believe anyway.
Interestingly I hardly ever miss a shower and I put make-up on more frequently than when I just had Veronika. This is where the sheer determination comes in. It's been so many years of internal conflict between what the kids need and what I need that some things have emerged from fuzzy ideas into crystal-clear facts: "Must take shower, comb hair and get dressed properly every day." This looks funny when I type it because.. well, DUH.. and then EWWW, because who doesn't do that? My fellow home-confined-parents (where does "stay-at-home" come from anyway? I seriously dislike that term.) will probably confirm that there were plenty of times they didn't do any of the above, because there was no time or it was simply too much work. Besides the imperative of starting the day like a civilized human being I also have accepted "Must have decent amount of time to relax at the end of the day" as equally essential to my survival.
I will admit I occasionally fail to comply with the above mentioned requirements, lots of times not because I didn't try hard enough, but because someone else simply was better at complying with their own requirements. Mostly though, I win. (Here's a quick advice to new mothers: You MUST win. This is the core of my parental knowledge. Yeah. Don't look at me like that.) And so my day starts with goal #1 (shower, comb, dress) and goal #2 (make sure to relax 14 hours from now). In order to manage goal #2 I need a list, or lists to be fair. Even though items are regularly checked off there is never a completed list, only the date changes, but the list lives on. That's ok though, as long as the list retires to her chamber between 8 and 9 pm and I can start sitting. The funny thing is, I still prefer this insanity to my fairly confused self from 5 years ago when everything was so painfully new and I had no idea if at the end of it I would resemble my previous self at all. I still get bitter, oh I don't think I will ever be strong enough to avoid that, but I can see (and feel) much better now that I will most certainly not be dead inside when the kids grow up.
One more thing. Some people have claimed that three kids is like having two kids, so not much more work. Wrong. Maybe they meant once the kids are a little older. I can imagine that... but two little kids + infant = ... a lot more work! I never think it's possible and it always is. Who knew I could work even harder? Yay for me. Then again add an infant to any kind of life-scenario and it will result in a lot more work. Like, two donkeys + infant = a lot more work. Can you imagine?!
Posted at 04:41 PM on July 24, 2008 | Comments (3)