3rd anniversary of all the kids in school...

I just sent my crew off for their first day of school.  Oddly, it did not give me the same euphoric feeling it ALWAYS has.  I didn’t spend this summer on the verge of nervous breakdowns and yearning for the first day of school.   And the summer went by in a flash rather than it’s usual eternity.   Don’t get me wrong, it was rough.  It was it’s typical mix of ice cream and swimming and frolicking and playing and laughing and fighting and bickering and tattling and bickering and fighting and tattling and laughing and bickering and fighting, and whining and the endless, relentlessly exhausting task of putting smiles on my precious, ungrateful children's faces, who, quite frankly were just as sick of me and each other as I was of all of them.  But as usual, we made the best and most of it.  And we survived.  

It helps that they can all fend for themselves (far more than they would ever actually let on).  They can get their own snacks and pour their own drinks.  We can go anywhere now, without strollers.  Everyone can buckle themselves into their car seats.  We don’t need diaper bags and snacks and sippy cups.  

Maybe it helped that I was down one kid most of the time (though I missed her like hell) as my teenager found herself a summer home this year and had a two month “sleepover” at a friends house, in an effort to be anywhere else but a house filled with her siblings (can’t say that I blamed her).  Maybe it helps that my boys took every moment that I didn’t insist on entertaining them to entertain themselves with their video game obsession.  It did get a bit worrisome at times, but I just had to keep reminding myself of the summer I spent trying to save Princess Peach.  

I’m sure it helps that I’m forced to share custody of my kids with their dad half the time.  I never imagined  that would happen, but it did, and in the interest of full disclosure, I needed it, whether I knew it or not.  I remember one time, while I was really in the thick of stay at home motherhood, with toddlers and babies and diapers and he was working 9-5, telling someone “I just worry that he thinks he works harder than I do.”  And he did.  Deep down inside, we always both knew he did.  And I think, deep down, underneath other far more painful reasons that I had to leave him, we both knew that I was never going to get the help I desperately needed with parenthood if I stayed.  Shared custody was a necessary sacrifice.  It takes the edge off, and I still struggle to cope with it.  

My growing, capable children and new found moments of silence and a very quiet house on this first day of school morning, have reminded me how lucky I was to be able to stay home with ever one of my children (and there are a lot of them) before sending them off to school.  It was a genuine blessing and there was never ever a moment that I wanted to be doing something else with my life.  One of my favorite things to do every morning when I have my coffee is check my Facebook memories where I have obsessivley document my journey through motherhood.  And they never fail to remind me how much I have loved this job.  Motherhood is my passion and even in the midst of my occasional nervous breakdowns, I didn’t take a single second of it for granted, I swear.  Those years at home with my babies brought me an overwheling and exhausting joy, great enough to overshadow my unrequited love.  He worked hard enough to afford me an invaluable opportunity of a lifetime, and I worked my ass off trying to be worthy of it.  

It’s not lost on me.  And on this third anniversary of having all four kids in school, and surviving a survival of the fittest type challenge,  I can look back at those very long grueling days that I once believed would never ever end, and I would never survive, and pinch myself at the selective memories of that moment in time.