More Than 10 Things I Hate About Motherhood
I thought about writing a poem like Kat Stratford, but ended up with this instead
A few days ago, my son came home from school with a full lunchbox. It’s not uncommon for him to come home with a few things uneaten, but he’s never come home with the entire contents of his lunchbox fully untouched.
I ask him what happened. Why didn’t he eat lunch today? “I did eat lunch,” he reassured me. “I ate school lunch.”
“Wait,” I said. “You mean to tell me that you asked me to make lunch for you and then you opted to eat school lunch anyway?”
I’m trying to keep my calm. Keep my voice level. I want him to know I’m a little annoyed and I also don’t want to freak him out, but I can already see the worry in his eyes. I can already feel the steam building inside my head, threatening to pour out of my ears like a cartoon villain.
He nods yes and I can barely contain my rage. I know it sounds small. It’s just an uneaten lunch. And he did eat at school, so it’s not like he didn’t eat at all.
But it’s my time, my energy, and food that will now be thrown away, which is a huge pet peeve of mine.
Trying to feed my kids is enormously stressful and I hate it. It’s a part of motherhood that I never expected to struggle with, but I hate everything about feeding my kids.
I hate having to think about what I’m going to try and feed them because I know they probably won’t eat what I make, anyway. I hate that there are only a handful of meals that my kids are even willing to eat and they’re almost all just plain noodles and frozen peas.
Yes, you read that correctly. Frozen. Peas.
I used to get excited about trying new recipes, but now I just get stressed at the idea of trying new recipes because my kids have an aversion to anything new or different.
I hate that I can’t ever make anything new anymore because my kids reject anything unfamiliar.
And if they do miraculously try it, they won’t eat more than a bite or 2 and then say they hate it. Or they lie to me to try and save my feelings, which is also terrible because I will think I can make it again, but of course, I can’t. Because that’s when I find out that they actually didn’t like it.
I hate that I can’t even feed them “standard kid foods” because they don’t like any of them. So no quesadillas, no burgers, no pasta with red sauce, no tater tots. They also only eat 2 types of nuggets and I can only get one of those where we currently live. And they don’t like eating them too often.
I hate that they will randomly one day decide that they don’t like eating something they have happily eaten forever — this was burgers with my son and burgers, as well as pizza with one of my daughters.
I especially hate it when they refuse to eat a particular food if it’s not the exact same brand they’ve eaten in the past.
My son, who ate hummus like it was a personal hobby this summer, only likes one type of hummus and it's a brand you can only find at Walmart. Now that we live in a place where I do not have to go to Walmart for food, I don't want to go just for his preferred hummus.
Or even worse, when they suddenly don’t like the same brand they’ve been eating forever and tell you it’s because it “isn’t the same,” — even though it’s the exact same brand as always. My youngest did this recently with ketchup.
I hate it when my kids ask me to make them something and then just decide to not eat it. And I hate the guilt I feel when I sometimes try to convince them to eat food they’ve asked for, even if they decide they don’t want it, because some kid-feeding experts and activists tell us that’s a “bad thing to do.”
Speaking of experts, I hate the promises that kid-feeding experts will make about getting your kids to be less picky (I even hate that we’re not allowed to call them “picky”) or to be less “dessert driven” because they rarely work.
I hate dinnertime because I want it to be fun and a time for us to connect as a family, but it seldom is. Instead I have kids complaining about the food I made, flat out refusing to eat it, then requesting dessert after eating a miniscule amount of dinner (because you can’t put popsicles on a plate with the rest of your food like the kid-feeding experts suggest you do with “dessert”), then racing outside to play with their friends.
Later they come back inside, ravenously hungry and exhausted — my favorite nighttime combination. But they still won’t eat their dinner. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
But food struggles aren’t the only things I hate about motherhood.
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