“Do moms know everything?” my daughter asked me one day while we were driving.
“Oh, they know most things!” I chirped back brightly.
For a second I felt like maybe just a minor-league liar, but then, the weight of everything I didn’t know settled on my shoulders as I gripped the steering wheel.
There are so many things I didn’t know when I first became a mom, and there are still so many more things I have yet to learn.
When I first had a baby, I didn’t know how to hold her. Oh, I knew how to hold babies in general. But you have to learn what makes each baby happy or sad. I didn’t know.
When I first had a baby, I didn’t know that car rides would be so difficult for her, or how to soothe her. It was all trial and error until I found what worked. I didn’t know.
When I first had a baby, I didn’t know what each cry meant. I had to learn. I didn’t know.
So much about motherhood is not innate. I had to realize that even though I’d gotten through life knowing plenty, I was brand new at this. And so was my daughter! And no matter how much we both tried to figure this whole “being a mama/being a baby” thing out, there were time when it was just hard.
So hard in fact that I made up a song about it. I called it, “It’s So Hard to Be a Baby.” It went like this:
Oh it’s so hard to be a baby.
It’s so hard to be a baby.
Oh it’s so hard to be a baby like you.
Oh it’s so hard to be a baby.
It’s so hard to be a baby.
It’s so hard to be a baby, my dear.
But the truth of the matter is, it might also have gone like this:
Oh it’s so hard to be a mama.
It’s so hard to be a mama.
Oh it’s so hard to be a baby like me.
Oh it’s so hard to be a mama.
It’s so hard to be a mama.
It’s so hard to be a mama, my dear.
Because lady (yes you, reading this) it IS hard.
Our kids might think we know everything, and that’s DELIGHTFUL, but everything we know, we learned the hard way. Everything is trial by fire with babies, it seems. Everything is hard sometimes.
So if you’re there, in the thick of things, stuck in the hard place, please know that someday, your child might look at you with big Bambi eyes and comment about how you know everything. And to them, you do! Because blessedly, they don’t remember all the times you didn’t.
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