Mom Rites of Passage: 15 Things You WILL Do

Women, in their pre-kid state, often have a ton of opinions about how they’re gonna get down when it actually comes to mothering. They see moms, with their toddlers tantruming at the grocery store and throwing French fries over the booth at a restaurant, and they know they’ll never, ever, EVER be that person.

Or, they hear about the mom who gave birth to her baby in a blow pool in her living room while homeschooling her tween and knitting her husband socks for Christmas, and she knows instantly she is not about to get down like that.

Two years, a husband, and an egg fertilization or two later, and you’re ordering your home birth kit while your toddler screams on the floor at the midwife’s office.

Motherhood makes you do things you never thought you’d do, it makes you feel things you never thought you’d feel, and sometimes it just really blows your mind and turns you into your own mother. Here are 15 rites of passage we all go through…

1. You will be pushing one of those obnoxious car shaped shopping carts around the grocery store, kids pouring from the windows, while you bump into everything even if you try to cut the corners wide. And, as much as you hate it and what it says about you, you will get irrationally upset when you get to the store and all of them are taken.

2. You will miss a meeting or a parent teacher conference or a coffee date with your great aunt and blame it on your baby. Never mind that you hated it when coworkers used their kids as an excuse for things in your pre-kid days, they’re handy and whatever, it’s your turn!

3. You will go out in public, possibly even to a job interview, with stickers on your butt and you won’t have any idea they were there until you come home and get undressed for bed.

4. You will have to catch your child’s barf, possibly in your bare hands, while in a public place that is not designed or even remotely equipped for open palm barf handling. Like on an airplane. Or, at church, dead center of holy communion. Or, at the table in that Italian restaurant they just opened within walking distance from your house. Or, and this one tops them all, the swimming pool. There are few things more embarrassing than being the reason the first day of summer is ruined for 50 kids. Ask me how I know this.

5. You will do every single thing in your power to avoid the car nap. And, should you fail in your attempts to keep your toddler awake until you get home where he can nap uninterrupted (because he’s too big to seamlessly make the car seat to bed transfer without interruption and you refuse to count the 20 minutes you were driving home as nap time), you will leave him asleep in the car while you sit in there with him and read.

6. You will injure yourself doing some kid thing you just have to prove to your kid you can still do. Pogo sticking, riding a skateboard, climbing on the jungle gym, or trying to climb on the jungle gym but nearly plummeting to your death when you discover that the weight of your body dangling from just your arms makes you feel like they are going to rip clean outta their sockets, zombie style.

7. You will have a mom nemesis. We allll have them. That one mom that just pushes all of your buttons every where all at once. She’s inescapable (because she’s at the mommy & me class, and her kid is on your kid’s soccer team, and she goes to your salon, and uses the same OB/GYN and, seriously you need to basically change everything about your life at this point) and she has no idea that she makes you want to claw your ears out to escape her and her endless advice about how to be the best mom ever. Like her.

8. You will sound just like your mother. And sometimes even your father when you start in on the turn-off-the-lights thing. You will be okay with it.

9. You will show perfect strangers photos of your children without them even asking.

10. You will get into an undeclared “my baby is better than your baby” bidding war with some random mom at your Mommy & Me class. You’ve never been that person, and you know comparisons don’t matter because every kid develops at their own pace, but she started it. And hello, your kid started walking at 8 months, so there.

11. You will refer to yourself as Mommy, often in the third person. As in, “Mommy said it’s time for bed.” And, “Mommy doesn’t like it when you do that.” And, “Mommy has a real name, but she never bothers to use it anymore and she’s thinking of just having the people at work call her Mommy too since she looks around every time she hears it anyway.”

12. You will feel really guilty for wanting to be alone on Mother’s Day. And, you’ll probably never tell a single soul that you don’t want a terribly-constructed-still-raw-in-the-center breakfast in bed, because just this one day, more than anything, you wanted to sleep past breakfast, and maybe even right up through lunch.

13. You will feel really freaking old and dramatically uncool the first time you embarrass your middle schooler in public by doing something that he used to think was awesome.

14. You will clutch his lovey to your face and cry into it when you clean out the toy box and find it buried in the bottom, missing an eye, and smelling like cheese.

15. You will say to some new mom the words you really hated hearing when you were in the clutches of this-kid-never-sleeps-and-cries-constantly-and-please-someone-just-let-me-shower new mom life: cherish it, it goes so quickly. Because you wish you cherished it and it’s going so, so, sooooo unbearably quickly.

Related post: The Top 20 Pieces of Advice Moms Wish They’d Gotten