I’m quoted today in “Of Tigers, Guilt and Beehive Mothers,” an LDS/Mormon response to the WSJ’s “Tiger mother” article on a Jewish website. Multicultural FTW!
When I was a freshman in college, one of our reading assignments was an essay by a woman diagnosed with Lupus. I took great offense at her thesis, which I remember as being something about God creating the good and the bad parts of everything.
I think what she meant to say was that because we live in a “fallen” world, we will always experience only a taste of the ultimate perfection, tempered with the tang of the poison. A little heavy, maybe, but ultimately the point.
In motherhood, we often get to experience these things side-by-side, the extremes of heaven and hell in a single day. I’ve come across several tales of this twinning lately, the manic depressive nature of the challenges of motherhood.
One minute, we’re on top of the world, juggling a passel of kids and our home and our hobbies and skills AND loving every second. (It’s so easy to love when you’re on top of it!) The next, suddenly all of those things are the burdens piled on our back.
I do this most days, when I go from cuddling a sleeping angel to refereeing the bickering ones. Or I plan and prepare three really fun activities that go really well—but spend ten minutes of extra prep snapping at my kids to back off until I’m ready.
And I know I’m not alone. Janelle at Regally Blonde recently posted about a single day where she had one of those sublime, blissful moments—and hours later, she’s wallowing in Poopageddon. My friend Shannon posted about this today, outlining the highs and lows so typical of motherhood, and how sometimes, dancing as fast as we can, we can bridge that gap.
I guess the point is just to keep dancing: keep trying to bridge the gap, striving for those sublime moments, reveling when they come—and holding onto them through Poopageddon.
How do you balance the extremes of motherhood? How do you keep those slices of heaven in mind when passing through the valley of the shadow of poop?