Sometimes the Biggest Challenge is Our Greatest Opportunity

At the age of 31 I had an epiphany that I shared with my husband over a bottle (or two) of wine one night on the front porch of our first home – I wanted children.  That was not news.  The news was that I had realized that I wanted children, but I did not feel the need to be pregnant or to give birth to them.  My husband, the amiable, amiable, indicated he was ok with that and if we adopted or did not ever have children he was ok with that too.  

By confirming we were on the same page I freed myself. I was able to silence the noise of my biological clock, which had been ticking in my ears since my 30^th birthday.  I grabbed this opportunity with both hands and spent the next 6 years enjoying being married to my best friend.  We danced and drank.  We threw dinner and birthday parties. We threw wedding and baby showers.  We slept in. We had sex whenever and wherever we wanted.  We took our time working long hours in jobs we loved. We stayed awake for movies.  We spent those 6 years building our village with hopes that the village would be there if and when we did bring children into our family.  

Our last year as a childless couple was quite an adventure.

At 36 years old I became pregnant with our first child.  We were lucky, we got pregnant within the first month of trying and our lives were forever changed.  At 37 I gave birth to our son Whitman and the center of our world shifted. 

January 19, 2012 Whitman Stevens Hagan Dier made

two wild and crazy kids playing adults into parents!

August 2011 - 14 weeks pregnant & walking in the Tomato Art Fest Fashion Show
at the tender young age of 36

At 40 I got pregnant again with our last child, our baby daughter Eliza.  Gone were the days of thinking of myself first and doing whatever I wanted on a daily basis.  

Our little family of three as photographed by the talented Judith Hill of Judith Hill Photography
before we became a family of four.

Today, as a 41 year old woman (gasp) who is the mother of a 4 year old son and an infant daughter, who works full-time outside of the home, is the breadwinner and the family organizer and coordinator, I sometimes feel like I am the female version of Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog’s Day.  In the movie Bill Murray plays an arrogant TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, finds himself in a time loop, repeating the same day again and again.

His character wakes up to the same alarm clock playing the same song at the same time every day.  The same announcements and the same people doing and saying the same things.  Once he realizes he is actually repeating the same day over and over and he is the only one who remembers it he begins to take chances and do things he would never otherwise do. I mean, why not right?  What an opportunity.  He has nothing to lose if he is just going to have another chance the next day.  Of course, my life is not a movie, but at times I do feel like it is just a series of “wash, rinse, and repeat.”

Almost every morning when my alarm goes off for the gym or for a run at 5:00 a.m. I hear this in my head, “you will never regret going, but you will always regret not going.”  This mantra really does help me get out of my comfy bed to go do something that is good for me both in mind and in body.  Most days, I put my feet on the floor and get out of the bedroom with the promise that if I get out of the house and still want to sleep I can come back.  Secondly, it has helped me to recognize that not unlike Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day, I can only escape repeating the same day over and over and losing myself in the process if I make time for what is important to me and my family.  This means establishing boundaries, picking battles, asking for help, taking chances, staying at work or walking away from work when I need to and paying attention when I am home.

For example, one day a few years back our child literally feel asleep in his lunch at day care. The

picture was hysterical.  If he hadn’t of deserved it, I would have felt awful. 

You see, that morning he got up at 5:00 a.m., which as I’ve mentioned is my sacred time and he would not go back to sleep.  So, guess who got to go with momma to the gym?  Yep.  In an attempt to not wake up his father and have to listen to the bitching session of how I “woke Whitman up early” with my alarm clock and then woke up the old man, I got Whitman dressed, put on his shoes, took the dogs out, fed the dogs and took him with me.  

Why? Because working out with my girls, like I have done for the past 8 years, keeps me from hurting people and makes me feel like Jennifer and not just Mother.  The child loved class and even learned to do a burpee, but apparently does not do well with super early mornings.  Now other parents might have stayed home so the child could sleep, but not me. Will this screw up my kids? I sure don’t think so.  In fact, I think I’d screw them up more if my world revolved around them and I stayed home with them and did not work or work out.  Society seems to think I need to feel “guilty” for these things, but at my ripe “advanced maternal age” I am now telling society to shut the hell up and mind its own damn business.  

As a Momma, I am an expanded version of who and what I used to be.  Some days I do not remember my life before my two children, but I do not and will not accept that being a Mother means I must be someone or something different that I was before they came into our lives.  The love I have for my children is not a love of choice.  It is an unconditional and consuming love that, without constant attention and boundaries might just take over the person I am today and smother the person I was before I had a family.  I look at my two beautiful children and our village and I know that if nothing else, I’ve done something right, something good and something worth the wait and my time.

Whitman, age 4, and Eliza, age 4 months, make everything better including me.  They don't complete me, but they do make me a better person every single day and I hope that they will think the same of me some day.

The moral of this story? It is ok to love both your family and yourself unconditionally.  It is ok to have a job you DON’T WANT TO LEAVE at the end of the day.  It is also OK to want to run out the door and grab your kiddos and take them to the park when it is sunny and you have a deadline at work.  This is your life and you have the power to do with this time what you want.  Don’t let anyone tell you any differently.  Do what your gut AND your heart tell you is right because there is a very good chance that “regret” only visits when you are not listening or paying attention to yourself.  You were you before you had children and you'll be you after they leave the nest so be sure not to lose yourself.