Dear moms,
If someone hasn’t told you how amazing you are lately, well, allow me.
December always brings lots of feelings for us. Feelings of intense joy followed by intense anxiety mixed with some worry, some stress, and some downright festiveness. Why is that? I think the meme that says, “When dad is just as surprised as the kids are when they open their gifts” is really all I need to say.
The holidays are in our hands, moms, and although we are a lot of things in December, we are also moms. So, we’ve got this.
We are hard workers.
Whether we are working inside the home, outside the home, or a hybrid model of that, we are workers. We never let a task go undone. We get that job done for our adult boss in the office as well as getting the job done for the three-year-old who we all know is really the boss. We work from sunup to sundown with no bonus pay, no paid holidays, no sick days, and no overtime pay for those 3am wake up calls. We use our sick days for their sick days and our personal days for their party days at school because we wouldn’t dare miss a moment.
We are over everything.
We are overwhelmed with noise and clutter, yet overjoyed that our kids are getting along and playing independently for ten minutes. We are overstimulated by the tablets, the tvs, and the phones, yet overflowing with gratitude that it allows a five-minute coffee break for us. We are over-touched and over-loved by little hands, but over-the-moon when our teenager leans in for a hug and then we make it weird for overstaying the hug limit that we didn’t know existed.
We are the magic makers.
We are the ones sitting straight up in bed at 2:30am realizing we forgot to move the elf and quietly dragging ourselves out of bed to do it because how many times can we say, “Well, someone must have touched the elf and it lost its magic.” We are the ones letting our kids decorate the tree and then going back to said tree and fixing the decorations once they aren’t looking. We are the ones making reindeer food with glitter, and cookies with sprinkles for Santa, and birthday cakes with candles for Jesus all the while insisting that our Christmas music be louder than the football game on tv.
We are the glue.
We run the show. We pick the outfits and we hire the photographer. We order the cards and we get the addresses. We volunteer for the class parties, send in the supplies, and buy the teacher gifts. We RSVP to our own parties, get the babysitters, and again pick out the outfits. We hold our family together during this month and somehow still manage to hold down a job, hold down appointments for ourselves and for our kids, and hold up family traditions.
We are moms.
We do all of these things the other eleven months of the year too, but in December, we should be on a pedestal. A dang light-up, singing, rotating, decorated pedestal for all the world to see how amazing we are. Because we are. You are.
