Motherhood

When you are a mother you wear pastal blue Easter socks with giant bunny pom poms in the back during the middle of Halloween season because your daughter descended the stairs from your room, delighted to have found just the right pair of light blue socks to match your blue shirt. Wearing the socks inside your tennis shoes makes her grin.

When you are a mother you take your daughter to a special restaurant and then lament with her because the restaurant does not serve chicken strips and regular French fries like you thought it would. You feel guilty that you just didn't go to McDonald's in the first place.

When you are a mother you delight in the Thomas Train table at Barnes and Nobles, and the shopping carts at Kohls which let kids face forward as they zoom around because these things make little people under three feet tall happy and joyful.

When you are a mother you love driving home in the car when everyone else is asleep. But then you stop for a stoplight, and your two year old wakes up. Before she was supposed to. And she's grumpy. She insists her shoes don't fit. She is upset because the sun is in her eyes. She is angry because her potatoes came with skins at supper. She hurls her building blocks across the living room and you put her in time out. She throws a fit when you try to take her for a stroller ride and you scramble back to your house hoping your neighbors won't notice your out of control child.

You give up and put your daughter to bed a half hour early and let her cry herself to sleep. Then you read a good book for the next 5 hours and have a glass of 100% pink grapefruit juice, and consider that when she wakes up in the morning she will ask you for a glass of milk in a sippy cup and want to rock in the rocking chair with you, and you'll be friends again.