The kids are all (except for the one I'm gestating) at camp for a solid twelve hours today. Oh, the thrill of watching them drive away on a bus, sunscreen pre-applied, immunization forms in hand! They won't be back until 4:30 this afternoon! Callooh! Callay!
If this is such an amazing experience for me, why are we having another baby? Like, totally-on-purpose, I mean?
This is a really hard thing to explain. I can't speak for other mothers, whether they have large or small or medium-sized families, but I happen to live in a conflicted state of momhood. This state is especially impossible to describe to a person who isn't sure whether or not to have any kids at all. If I can't wait for the chillun' to be out of my hair so I can spend a summer's day internetting and/or trying to decide whether to make a trip to Walmart to get a haircut, then how can I possibly claim to love my job as a stay-at-homer? How can I be stoked or even slightly willing to tack on
at least another 4-5 years before all of my kids hop up the steps of the camp bus with hardly a backward glance?
The 'conflictedness' of being a mother of young kids is one of those things that doesn't translate well in English or any other language of which I'm aware. If you are not a mother (and, perhaps, even if you are) I can only speak in the Jabberwocky-Lewis-Carroll-ese of my ambivalence. It sounds like English, but it is nonsensical when you examine it. Or possibly German. BTW, the Germans have some excellent and difficult-to-translate abstract words, such as
kummerspeck ("grief bacon").
(See also:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19695_9-foreign-words-english-language-desperately-needs.html)
It comes to this: having kids is utterly mimsy and frabjous at the exact same time. And when they all grow up and fly out of the parental nest, this experience will taste exactly like grief bacon.
****Update**** It has come to my attention that Lewis Carroll, a.k.a. Charles Dodgson, apparently enjoyed drawing and taking pictures of naked children and is widely considered by modern biographers to have been a pedo. Oy. This is NOT the undertone I was hoping to have with this post.
In any case, grief bacon.
That is all.
