The strapping 21-year-old pizza man rings the doorbell and is greeted by the gorgeous blond in her silk Teddy.  Minutes later they are in bed together.  My six-week-old daughter stares up at me while finishing her 3am meal.  She is oblivious to the humping and moaning going on on the television.  We bounce up and down on the exercise ball that Corky the owner of “The Pump Station” insists that we use.  It is a recommended cure for colicky, crying babies.  I spend the majority of the day and night bouncing on the ball.  When friends come to visit, I sit them on the ball hand them my daughter and insist that they bounce up and down as well.

By 4am I climb back into bed with my baby curled up on my arm next to my sleeping husband.  It is very still and peaceful.  I am happy to catch up on missed episodes of Red Shoe Diaries.  I feel like I’ve accomplished something.  It is still difficult for me to see the day pass by and not get anything done on my to do list.

Around three months into this new routine, I realize that I have disconnected from the “normalcy” of everyday life, or at least my former everyday life.  I sleep when everyone else is awake and I’m awake when everyone else is asleep.  I feel a kinship with truckers and nurses who work the nightshift.   By the 5:30am feeding when I turn on the TV there are lots of commercials for careers in hospital billing or as a dental assistant.  I guess people who are up watching TV at this hour might be looking for a new way of life.  The commercials make it look so pleasant I start considering a career change.

About six months into this whole motherhood thing, my daughter is still up every four hours.  The sleep deprivation is starting to get to me.  My former life has slipped away.  I have entered a version of the Twilight Zone.  Only this zone is more like the “I now only have Twilight Sleep Zone.”  I rely on the surging post pregnancy/breast feeding hormones to re-energize me.

Don’t get me wrong I love my new life.  I had my first child at age 40 after being told by doctors that my eggs were kaput…no good.  I was more then ready.  I had begged and pleaded and prayed and yearned to the gods of any and all religions to give me a baby.  So when that little miracle popped out of my belly I was ready to give her my all.

Seventeen months after my daughter was born I found myself with another newborn baby…a son.  He was a complete surprise, but that’s another essay!  With a newborn and an almost eighteen month old I am waking up twice as much.  Thank God I had help during the day or I would’ve lost my mind.

Three years, and one vasectomy later my daughter (who is four) is finally sleeping through the night.  My son is still waking up because “somesing squares (scares) me” he tells me at 1:30 in the morning.  I consider putting him up for adoption on Craigslist.

Every once and a while I get a reprieve.  A few weeks of them sleeping through the night, actually eating something that resembles a meal, and not in a constant state of nose wiping.  I get lulled into thinking that I can focus on regular old things like finishing a phone conversation without yelling at them to stop sticking raisins up their noses.  Inevitably someone gets sick, someone watches Sponge Bob during a play date (a cause for nightmares in my house), someone fractures their wrist climbing up shelves (my son is currently in a cast) and it’s back to square one…Up half the night, phone calls unreturned, the house resembling a mad science experiment.

In between my daughter licking my face (she likes to pretend she is a doggie) and my son running around in my daughters Snow White dress and red sparkly shoes I decide to surrender to the reality of my life.  I will never return to my old world. I will never go back to working full time, be able to run out carelessly to a yoga class, or fit into my skinny jeans.  Sleeping through the night is just over with.   When they are teenagers I will lay awake worrying about whether they are doing all awful things that I did as a teenager.

I wish I had known before I had kids that life when motherhood begins is wonderful, meaningful, hectic, beautiful, astonishing, gorgeous fun, full of love…and never the same again.  Moms keep this a secret.  Either they don’t want to be alone in this mayhem or they are too tired and overwhelmed to tell.  I thought there would be some things that would resemble my old life.   

Take clothes for example.  I was never a huge “dresser upper” but with kids it’s not worth shopping anywhere but Target.  By the end of the day my clothes are covered in food, snot and other miscellaneous muck.  On the extremely rare occasion that I get to wear something other then my mom outfit, (applying makeup, maybe even wearing high heels) my daughter looks at me as if I were a Martian.  She knows I look familiar to her but can’t quite place me without the hair sticking up in the middle of my head from not getting a shower that day

There is the physical day-to-day survival mode that my husband and I live in but there is also the strong emotional component. This is what enables me to withstand all of the insanity and chaos.  If I won some kind of contest where Super Nanny Jo took care of my children while I vacationed for a month my trip would be ruined.  After the first few days of sleeping through the night and past 5:30am I would be in a fog.  Who was making sure my little Shayna was sleeping with the exact animals that made her feel safe?  Whose “night night” (boob) would my sweet Jonah grab onto as he was going to sleep at night?

They light up when they see me want to kiss and hug me, and tell me they love me spontaneously…even when I have been a grumpy yelling mommy.

As they get older and more independent I know I will have more time to pursue career opportunities, go out to dinner without it costing us $100 for a babysitter and finish a phone conversation.  But I will never again hear a phone ring when I’m away from them without grabbing it in a panic thinking that…God forbid!!!…Something terrible happened to one of them.

If they are away from me for more then their allotted school or play date time I miss them terribly and yearn for their little smells and the way they climb all over me wanting to play doggie and mommy and baby endlessly.  My world is wrapped around them but before they got here I took the time to have it wrapped around me. Lots of years contemplating my belly button, getting manicures and pedicures and spending all my money on drink beads at Club Med.  

When exhaustion and not enough caffeine are colliding, and I’ve told my child for the four hundred and seventh time to take that plastic ball out of his/her mouth so s/he doesn’t choke, I take a breath.   Then I can dig deep to find the resources not to run out of the house like a screaming lunatic.

Speaking of choking here is one piece of advice; don’t forget to take the infant CPR class.  I didn’t have time because I was too busy taking the birthing class.  When you’re having a drugless birth because you got to the hospital too late for an epidural and you are yelling, “get this thing out of me!” you will remember nothing from your birthing class.  Just take the infant CPR class instead.  Finally, don’t give up on getting into your skinny jeans. I know that someday I will get there too.


Francine Weinberg Graff lives in Culver City with her husband and two children.  She just started her own business as a professional organizer because she loves telling people what to do and how to live their lives.