You Can Sort of Do the Old Things Again...

Tomorrow I leave for a much-anticipated girl's day and night on Lake Michigan. I will be gone for exactly 24 hours and I am very, very, very excited about it. Matt's been gone for 12 of the past 21 days. It's been a lot of work and pretty mentally challenging. Lucy keeps me on my toes. And bless the Tomma's heart...the kid has teeth coming in left and right so he's a professional whiner at times.
I just need to "not be a mom" for a day or so. That, alone, will help me come back to the kiddos refreshed. For some reason, these thoughts took me back to a memory I conjured up on a run the other day.
Lucy was very young. Maybe a month old? I was breastfeeding her in bed at about 3 a.m. Did you know they rerun that night's Tonight Show at that time? Anyway, here I was...20 lbs. overweight, totally overwhelmed by the responsibility of motherhood newly placed on my shoulders, panicked that I would never sleep 4 hours in a row again, and convinced I would be fat, ugly and never go on another vacation. EVER.
And then...I turned the channel to MTV and watched this absurd rap song. I am warning you. It is a ridiculous video. I mean state of the art absurd. And as I watched it...I was all PLG thinking..."Wow...I will never dance again. I will never look like my old self again. I will never shake my booty that way. I am a mom now."
O.k. let's all be reminded I was totally post-baby nursing hormones whack job woman.
Never mind the fact that I never looked like the girls in that video or would ever shake my booty like that if my life depended on it. But there I was all sad...with child on boob...as far away from that MTV video you could be. O.k. I guess I could have been some amish woman churning butter but I wouldn't have owned a TV to watch it, right?
So anyway, I was thinking back to that memory and those feelings and almost laughed out loud on my run the other morning.
Hey Luce - while I'm thinking about all this (and will probably forget someday soon), I wanted to tell you something I wish someone would have told me before I had you...
You are going to feel like CRAPPOLA after you have your first baby. You will feel yucky and not cute and exhausted and like you will NEVER EVER get to do ANYTHING FUN again. But you will. You'll get your body back. You'll go on a vacation. You'll do fun things again, and they'll be even more fun because you'll have cute kids to do stuff with. You can do things alone, but you might have to make lists for people and plan things out and get people to help and have things laid out and birthday gifts wrapped and ready to roll for Dad and a fridge full of food but yes...you'll get to go do stuff on your own again.
And you won't have it any other way.