Chickenless Nuggets of Wisdom

I don’t have any pearls of motherly wisdom to pass along this Mother’s Day (or Smotherhood Day as I like to call it). Having been a mother for a mere 5 ½ years, I hardly feel qualified to wax philosophic on the subject. But, if someone confined me to a chair, stuck an IV of Capri Sun in my arm and forced me to watch a marathon of Dora the Explorer until I spilled my thoughts, I would probably say something like this:

Ali’s Chickenless Nuggets of Motherly Wisdom

1) If your kid is looking in the mirror with her mouth wide open and proclaims, “Hey Mom, I can see my uterus!”, she probably means her uvula. In the event she actually can see her uterus, you should think long and hard about if that $25 fee for paging the pediatrician after hours is worth it.

2) Unless you cherish the look and feel of plastic covered furniture, NEVER EVER let your kids eat on the couch. I mean it. This is serious. Not even Sandra Day O’Connor would be successful in overruling a binding precedent that establishes the couch as the eminent domain of people who eat yogurt with their hands. Start as you mean to go on.

3) When your kid says, “Mom, will you play with me?”, immediately stop what you’re doing, bend down, look him square in the eyes and say, “I would love to.” Some day soon you’ll never be asked that question again.

4) If you’re at Disneyworld and you’re taking a 45-minute bus ride back to the airport and you have to stop at everyone else’s hotel to pick them up first, but then your sick kid takes an explosive crap in her diaper that smells like a combination of dead opossum and boiled cabbage, make your spouse hold the hazmat formerly known as your kid. Also, apologize profusely to the driver and the other passengers and offer to not set foot in Florida for at least 5 years.

5) Let your kids get dirty. A lot.

6) Turn up the music and dance with your kids. Besides lugging in groceries from the car and schlepping laundry baskets up the stairs, some days it will be the only workout you’ll get.

7) Take a picture of your kid when they’re in that deep sleep just after bedtime. Don’t text it, Facebook it or tweet it. This is the most unburdened they will ever be in their lives – protect that for them.

8 ) You know that sweaty head smell they get after a long nap or an afternoon spent in the sun? Drink it in. Then lock it in an inescapable choke hold in your memory. It will be the only thing that keeps you from throwing them out a window some times.

9) Let your kids see you being as passionate about the other parts of yourself as you are about the Mom part of yourself; the businesswoman, the artist, the physician, the musician, the athlete, the spouse, the woman.

10) Everything you think you won’t do? Oh, you’ll do it; from pacifiers to eating at McDonald’s, from letting them cry it out to grabbing them just a little too forcefully when they’ve got you at your wits’ end. Maybe most of all, motherhood is a daily master class in the art of eating crow, flavored with savory pride and sweet humility.

Happy Mother’s Day. Now go call your mother.

~Ali