Learning the Hard Way

I remember growing up how my mother would always admonish me to put the dirty clothes in the basket instead of the bathroom floor. And each morning for my shower, the clothes, and towels, hair brush, and my brain would be picked up off the floor and put in the laundry basket by my mother.

How entertaining it is to know what it means to be a mother now. I constantly follow after my 18-month-old picking up her items, and teaching her how to sweep, mop, put away, and organize. She loves it, but it's hard to do these things having never really done them before in my life.

In fact over the past five days, I have started to iron for the first time in my life. I'm now sporting 4 battle wounds on my arms that make it look like I intentionally hurt myself, (It Really IS the iron!!) and each attempt to make clothes wrinkleless gets only slightly better.

At least practicing on children clothing is easy.

Why is it that some unknown factor in the universe makes every pregnant woman from about 6 months onward become this nesting cleaning machine. Because for me, if I stay still too long my legs start twitiching and I get the itch to do something! Anything! I've never had such a clean house, in fact, I worry I'll be able to keep it up after the new child is here (or if that's even important! LOL).

But I am learning slowly, the hard way, it's taken almost 3 years for my skills to reach passable, and only just now do I feel like I've left the plateau and headed to higher footing on the homemaking front. This all coming from a woman who cant sew on buttons, who never washed anything by hand, who played most the days of her child hood, and who's only homemaking skill was organization. This from the person who never ironed, never cleaned her own room, and was basically spoilt rotten. It's not like my parents didnt try to teach me! It's more like my brother bailed me out a lot. In fact, the best of my cooking skills before now was french toast.

But now, I'm proud to say I can make a half decent pizza. I can make bread that doesnt fall in the middle, and I only burn myself 50% of the time. I thought becoming a mother entitled you automatically to all the secret knowledge of savvy cleaning know-how. Boy was I wrong! And my poor arms and fingers are showing the battle scars of a girl-woman trying her best to be adult for her children.

I just have to keep asking myself, what's adult again?