This Post Nails Everything Moms Accomplish Before Their Day Even Begins

This mom’s crazy morning routine is all of us

Liz Petrone is a working mom of four. She gets four kids up and out the door every morning. She walks 2.5 miles before she sits down at her office chair to start her day. And she has a message for all the people who’ve said, “Wow, it sure must be nice to be able to waltz into work at 9:00 am.”

That message is: “Enough.”

In a Facebook post published yesterday, Petrone goes through her morning schedule, from the time she wakes up to the time she gets to work.

Petrone starts by talking about her efforts to wake up “four sleepy humans,” which — as many of us know or can imagine — is a herculean task. “Some I gently patted, some I prodded, and one I pulled the covers off and tried to roll onto the floor when the pat and the prod fell short,” she wrote. Somewhere in there she even manages to make herself a cup of coffee and fish a wet pull-up out from under her bed, because for every morning success there is a morning punishment. That’s just the way it goes when you’re a parent.

She flushes toilets that are always forgotten and begs for teeth to be brushed that she knows will not get brushed. She screams at screaming children and coordinates drop-offs and school buses. Once the kids are gone, it’s easy street for Petrone, right? Wrong.

“I dismantled pillow forts and unhooked Paw Patrol underwear from table lamps and threw in a load of laundry…I fed and watered the dog and wiped down the counter and turned off the TV and the coffee maker and a hundred lights and locked up.” Yes, she did. Because if she doesn’t do it now then she gets to do it when she gets home, and then there’s still dinner and homework and bedtime to contend with, and oh my God, how do people not understand what we’re dealing with, here?

When Petrone gets to her desk, her Fitbit tells her she has already walked 2.5 miles. And that’s when she writes what so many of us have felt at that point in our day: “If walking 2.5 miles and not actually making it anywhere at all ain’t exactly what this stage of life looks like I don’t what is.”

You speak the truth, Liz Petrone, and the truth thanks you for your service.

Petrone isn’t asking for pity, she knows she has a lot to be grateful for. What she is asking for, and what every working parent wants, is a little understanding and recognition that nothing about parenting is easy.

“As a mom of four young kids, I feel like I have been apologizing for being late or unavailable or generally scattered for over a decade now,” she told Scary Mommy. “I wrote the post from that place of frustration that happens when you are always apologizing for something you’re not necessarily sorry for.”

Whether they work from home or in an office, full-time or part-time, do paid work or their job is their kids, all parents work hard. And anytime they aren’t at their “day job,” they’re either actively doing, thinking about, planning for, or organizing life for their second job — raising their children.

“To the working mamas, I feel you. I feel you so hard right now. But more than that, to ALL the mamas, I’m raising my cup of (now cold) coffee. You keep on doing you, sister, whatever that looks like,” she writes.

“Unless it looks like judgment. Ain’t nobody got time for that ish. Some of us have work to do.”