What “Real Mommies Do”: A Bittersweet Mothering Moment
Last Saturday was book club at my house and thank heavens for it. (If you aren’t in a book club, start one with your most food-oriented friends right now because, as it turns out, the food makes the book club!)
My kids love/hate when we host it at our house. They love seeing our book club friends and, in fact, marvel that we have friends we laugh and talk with until late at night. However, after they all went home my oldest son was heard to remark, “Mom and dad’s stupid friends ate all the food!”
Now he knows how it feels.
Our friends brought their baby to book club and my 5-year-old was very observant. This morning she was putting her doll in her toy car seat and told me that she saw, “Milo’s mommy reach really deep into the car seat to get him out, like this. . . ”
She has been practicing this new technique of reaching carefully all the way under the doll to get it out of the car seat without waking it up. She told me, “That’s how real mommies do it.”
I felt a little pang. Ellen, my youngest, is different from my other children because she will never see me taking care of a baby. She’ll never see me being a “real mommy.” It’s a little sad, but someone has to be my last kid. I can’t go on having babies forever, and if I’m honest, I really don’t want to.
Here’s your take away, folks: Love your babies! Life goes on! Start a book club!
Read more of my writing at Babble and on my blog, Every Day I Write the Book.
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I wish I could do a book club. But I’m just too judgy about what other people suggest to read and then their opinions of them. If everyone would just always read my suggestions and then we discussed them based on a script I would write…now THAT would be a book club I could join.
It is hard getting a good group together, Dede.
“Mom and Dads stupid friends ate all the food.”
It is real funny when kids accidentally get a glimpse of our real selves. Turns out we have friends and we laugh and we love to eat…all of the food. In our defense, we brought it, I’m interested in what it was your son thought he contributed to the meal.
Great post as always.