Finding your tribe

You know that mom, the one who has it all together? You know; the one who never leaves the house without everything she needs and looks beautiful doing it?This is a story about that woman.

Wait, no, it’s not.

This is a story about me, when my three kids were little. The exact opposite of that lady.

Let me paint you a picture of a lovely winter day in Maryland. It was approximately 100 degrees below whatever is tolerable for my three year old, who wont stop screaming from the back seat that she “doesn’t want to go to the grocery store because they make it too cold in there!” It is sleeting, and my two year old thinks she doesn’t need a jacket, or a hat, or gloves, or socks or shoes or anything else that a sane person would be wearing on this horrible day. My infant is sleeping soundly because she wants to be my favorite.

We’re taking this lovely trip to the grocery store because my life has been reduced to buying food and feeding these people who look like they’re going to barf every time I try to serve up some delicious, over-priced, organic meal.

We get to the grocery store, I wrangle the baby into the Ergo, and get the hands of the other two- one dressed for arctic camping trip, and the other like she’s headed to the beach- my tattered reusable bags and the diaper bag. We cannot go to the grocery store without utilizing the restroom at least once. Before I can get into the store, I have no less than three highly perceptive people exclaim, “You have your hands full!” And, at least one person suggests I put a hat on the kid who, by absolutely no means, will keep a hat on her head. I get the older two into one of those horrible over-sized carts which looks like a race car with two steering wheels, one for each of them to bang on over and over again, announcing our presence as we make our way through the store. I came for ten items, all of which seem to be placed directly behind the pillar blocking my massive cart from passing through the aisle.

As two sweet elderly ladies come walking toward us, smiling at me and the girls, I hear my pig tailed, cherub-faced child honking her horn and yelling “wasch out, biiiiches!!!” There must have been a grocery store god watching out for me because those sweet ladies did not understand what she was saying. I make a mental note to stop saying that while in the car, and head up to the checkout.

Of course every person on the face of the earth is checking out at the exact same time, so I make the horrible decision to check out at one of those terrible time-wasting machines known as the “self checkout”. They should really have a warning sign there stating that they are not to be used with children in tow. I put my oranges on the scale to be weighed. The three oranges weigh in at 16 pounds. (What? These cannot be that heavy!) Then I notice a small child hanging on the scale. I get her back into her stupid race car and begin to check out again. Suddenly the other small child has popped out and started pushing buttons on the kiosk and now everything has turned to Spanish. (Great, I took French in high school, so this should be totally fine.) So I continue, having absolutely no idea what this machine is saying to me. I finish weighing everything and placing them in my trusty reusable bags. I’m trying to get this machine to make any sense and I reach for my wallet only to find my wallet is not there. (What? No, this cannot be happening to me right now.) I have $23 in the diaper bag and this mountain of groceries comes to “noventa y siete”- that is $97 for all of you who took French in high school. I’m fumbling with the damn machine and finally get it turned back to English. I start taking items off one at a time and hear a voice from behind me say “what kind of person can’t even afford the groceries for her three kids?” I turn to give a tongue lashing worse than the one my cherub was giving from the race car, only to see one of my friends with cash in hand, ready to pay my grocery bill.

This is how you survive the fourth trimester my friends: with support from angels who are there when you didn’t even know you’d need them. If you have everything together, like the put-together lady at the beginning of this story, I promise you, you will need your support system in place, even if it is just for a good laugh and an “I’ve been there too.”

The reason I became a postpartum doula is because I remember the struggle. A postpartum doula could have helped me by swinging by the grocery store to get my items before she came to my house to offer me the support I needed. Then she would have come in, not judged the chaos that was my life, and instead, she would have actually put away the groceries, helped me with laundry, made those delicious organic meals for my children (who would actually eat them because I wasn’t the cook), she would let me take an uninterrupted shower, and she would have been there to listen when I said “this is really hard.”