Are You a Power Mom?

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL: POWER MOMS has just come out, and I have a piece in it.

I think every pediatrician’s office ought to have a copy of this book in its waiting room, for all those exhausted moms sitting glassy-eyed and shell-shocked with their crying children after yet another sleepless night mopping a fevered brow/changing a wet bed/cleaning up vomit/chasing away nightmares. It’s inspirational reading.

I’ve never really thought of myself as a Power Mom. I’m definitely a mom but sometimes when I’m going one-on-one with my seven year old, I’m not quite sure exactly who is wielding the power. But I like the concept of Power Moms. I think it’s great.

Because as we all know, the whole mom thing is totally underestimated by innocent bystanders.

I mean, nobody who hasn’t been through it really understands what’s involved.

I still remember my own rude awakening. During my first pregnancy I felt terribly important. Everybody treated me as if I were really delicate and fragile and special. People wanted to touch my bump. They wanted to know all the details of how I felt, what I was eating, how I was sleeping.

When we checked into the hospital, the special treatment went on. People were monitoring my every heart beat—oh, hang on, maybe it was the baby’s every heart beat. But they were definitely monitoring my blood pressure, and they kept asking me to describe my ‘discomfort’, on a scale of one to ten. They were hanging on my every word. I was the center of the universe.

Then, finally, the big moment arrived and my baby made her grand entrance into the world. On cue, the door of the hospital room flew open and about half a dozen people burst in—all decked out in white coats and masks. Somebody let me hold the baby for a fraction of a second, then a person in a white coat plucked her off my breast and marched out of the room with her. And everybody followed. Every last soul. Not even my husband stayed behind to hold my hand and ask if I wanted a drink of water. Which I did, pretty badly, to be frank.

So there I lay, battered and bleeding and bent out of shape, wondering when my crowd of admirers would come flocking back to my bedside, full of admiration and congratulations.

They never did. From the moment she entered the world, it wasn’t about me anymore. It was all about the baby.

And me—I was chopped liver.

And that’s what being a mom is all about: becoming a support system for another human life. There’s no ‘me’ anymore, only ‘mom-meee’.

Of course, the real trick is not losing track of yourself while you’re doing all that supporting. The real trick is holding on to a sense of yourself as an individual, that person you were before the baby made its grand entrance. The women who wrote the stories in CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL: POWER MOMS are power moms because, one way or another (and it hasn’t always been pretty), they’ve managed to do this. They’ve managed to maintain a sense of themselves in the midst of diapers and bottles and binkies, homework and carpools and soccer matches. Better still, instead of draining them dry, motherhood has made them stronger and wiser.

As I said, every pediatrician’s waiting room ought to have a copy of this book. But maybe the OB/gyn offices shouldn’t stock them. No point in scaring the living daylights out of pregnant women.