When you’re staring at your beautiful newborn or cuddling with your (miraculously silent, momentarily well-behaved) toddler, you know that life is good. Really good.
But wouldn’t it be nice if a few things were just a little bit better? Nothing about your perfect little cherubs, of course. I’m talking about a few teensy, tinsy things having to do with mom life that are just plain, flat-out wrong—or, as my my 3-year-old would say, “not fair!” Here are 16 things that, well, just aren’t.
16. You lug around a 30-plus-pound toddler all day, but it doesn’t make a dent in your muffin top.
15. Just when you’re thinking that you look good, your toddler pokes that muffin top and gleefully exclaims, “Squishy!”
14. On the one day that your husband says he’ll get up with the baby in the morning, the baby miraculously sleeps until 8 a.m.
13. Until 9 a.m. if your mother or mother-in-law babysat overnight.
12. Your child has been potty trained for ages…but inevitably has a disastrous accident on the rare occasion you forget to bring a change of clothing.
11. You give away all of your pregnancy clothes, only to find out that you’re pregnant shortly thereafter.
10. When your boobs are especially fabulous during pregnancy, you don’t want anyone to touch them. And then you have a baby attached to them. Or they’re leaking. And then once they’re all yours again, they don’t look quite as fabulous.
9. You’re saving the perfect potato chip to eat last, but it’s stolen by your toddler.
8. When you have a second baby, laundry for two somehow equals laundry for 20.
7. Your husband drops the F-bomb so much, you could fund a Hawaiian vacation with your swear-jar savings, but your kid ignores everything he says. You say one tiny little curse word when you practically amputate a finger in the kitchen and your kid repeats it again and again and again—in school, in church and in front of your in-laws.
6. After the baby finally falls asleep, you stare at him for an hour and/or obsessively check to make sure he’s still breathing. And then he’s up again and you’ve missed your window for errands, eating and sleep.
5. When your baby is finally quiet during a car ride, you spend the rest of the drive in a complete panic because you can’t see him in his rear-facing car seat and are convinced that he’s stopped breathing.
4. Your words aren’t the lessons that you’d hoped. In the hands of a toddler or preschooler, they’re weapons of destruction, aimed right at you. My personal favorites from my 3-year-old: “I mean it,” “No means no,” and “You need a timeout!”
3. When you finally take that long-overdue shower, you hear phantom baby cries and have to keep turning off the water and sticking out your head out from behind the shower curtain because they sound insanely real.
2. Just when you think you’ve gotten everyone into a good routine with bedtime, your child changes the rules and everything goes to hell.
1. When your husband takes the 3-year-old to the park so you can get some work done, the newborn refuses to sleep during her regularly scheduled nap time…which is exactly what’s happening to me right now!
Tell Us: Which parts of motherhood do you wish would cooperate with you a little bit more?
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