Why didn't anyone tell me this?

THINGS YOU DON'T KNOW WHEN YOU BECOME A MOTHER

While browsing the internet, I came across The Daily Lady, a nice site about women's issues. They wrote a piece about what you don't know when you become a mother. It inspired me to make my own list, because there are a thousand things that no one told me.

The diaper

I still remember unpacking my maternity box, which was delivered about eight weeks before the delivery I expected all sorts of cute little cloths, pacifiers, and bibs, but I saw plastic sheets (to catch the blood and other excretions, I understood), a gauzy thing with tubes that was supposed to serve as underwear (those holes let oxygen through so that the bloody mess down there wouldn't smell so bad) and it was completed with gigantic Tena Lady-like diapers that were meant for me, not for the little one.

I had understood that the delivery was no party. But could someone have prepared me for the period after?

No more sleeping in

Unless your kids are staying with your dearest parents (whom you will love even more when you have kids, how they can lighten your life, there should be a medal for that) like mine are while I type this piece. Finally getting a good old eight-hour night without waking up to someone crawling into bed with you, having had ‘a little dream’, or just having an overwhelming urge to crawl behind daddy's drum set at five in the morning.

Coming home was never this fun

Of course, I have a key to my own house, but I always ring the bell. My girls are with my parents or with Stella, our super nanny, and when they hear the bell, a cacophony of cheers and screams erupts. Followed by a fight over who gets to open the door. Really, that moment. Gold.

School is a job

I always thought I would save a ton of money when my kids went to school and that I would have oceans of time. The first part is true, but how I came to the second... No idea. Kids are up early, and the school asks a lot from you. Whether you want to come clean, for example. Or if you want to join a meeting about the atmosphere of this year's Christmas decorations. Or if you want to attend the annual meeting to see if your parental contribution is being spent well, or if you want to give the kids computer lessons one morning, or you, or you, or you.

Suddenly you have a fear of flying

I always found flying a joy. Offline, in the air, and out of the air. Watching movies, catching up on reading, and chatting with the flight attendants. I still do all that, but during takeoff and landing, I always have that big ball in my stomach and think about how my daughters will be told that mommy has crashed. A big sense of drama, I admit, but it's there and I fear it will never go away.

And then those tears

At the Televizier Ring awards; crying. When Loiza told me she was transgender: crying. When my daughter writes ‘love from Belize for mama’: crying. At the average Unox commercial: crying. It's sometimes just embarrassing, how emotionally incontinent a person can become. Oh, and never watch ‘Eighth graders don't cry’. That's already hell for the childless, but mothers; protect yourself. This movie is too beautiful and too moving for our bleeding mother hearts.