Last week was a rough one as both of my kids {aged 3 and 1} had terrific colds. We were trapped inside the house, grouchy and bored, dealing with hacking coughs and noses on the run. It always amazes me how much more work it is to be a mom when your children are sick versus when they are well. Illness requires you to be extra understanding, extra caring, and extra attentive but gives you no extra time or resources to keep up this “extra” attitude.
One night last week I woke to hear my daughter in the throes of a coughing fit. It is scary when coughing just seems to go on and on, and she wasn’t helping matters because she was crying and getting worked up. I was exhausted and had just fallen asleep myself, but I went to her room, scooped her up, took her to the bathroom, and started the shower as hot as it could go. I sat with her on the floor as she cried and coughed and cried and coughed as the room started to fill with steam. I tried to speak calmly as she raged, her little body shaking with fever and frustration. Three-year-olds are not the most rational of creatures, and my words were seemingly doing nothing, so I stopped talking and just held her on the floor, rocking slightly.
Slowly, the tears subsided and stopped as the room became cloudy with steam, filling her lungs and calming her coughs.
As I sat there with her, I took in my spot on the bathroom floor and realized I had spent a lot of time there recently. I’m not very far into my journey as a mother, but it has had several very distinct stages. Right after your child is born, there is the “Shock and Awe Stage” of mothering; you are overwhelmed by the upheaval that your body, brain, relationships, and life have undergone at the hands of this tiny, beautiful creature. You have no idea how you are going to keep this human alive for 3 weeks, much less 3 months or 3 years. It is an earthquake, but a gorgeous one that often leaves you in sad tears and happy tears on the same day.
Slowly, you start to understand your role and learn that being a mom involves much less sleep than you thought. This is called the “Zombie Stage” and it can last months or years, depending on what kind of a sleeper God gave you. It involves waking up four times a night for months on end, paying high sums of money for any baby item that will help your child sleep more than four hours at a stretch, and continually being unable to string together coherent sentences.
Somewhere after the Zombie Stage, you enter the “Bathroom Floor Stage” of mothering, where you end up spending a lot of time on the bathroom floor that you have no time to clean. I have sat on our bathroom floor with a toddler full to the brim with juice boxes as we navigated the oddly thrilling waters of potty training.
I have sat there alone as I was in the middle of a 12-hour day solo parenting my two littles, praying and trying to breathe a little as they beat their tiny fists against the door; their needs so great and constant that it became hard to bear alone.
I have sat on the bathroom floor and given my kids a bubble bath, my legs and back aching from leaning over the tub and scrubbing their slippery, lively bodies after a long day of lifting, squatting, reaching, running, bending and getting down on the floor to care for them.
I have sat on the bathroom floor and taught my kids how to brush their teeth, sat on the floor and let them spool out the toilet paper because it was winter and we had nothing else to do, and sat on the bathroom floor with a toddler throwing a tantrum because the bathroom is on the far side of the house and I did not want her to wake her brother, asleep on the other side.
As I again sat on the bathroom floor with my daughter, clouds swirling gently, fogging up the mirror, she sighed and said, “Mommy, I just wanted to be with you.” I looked at the grime on the floor, the overflowing garbage can and the toilet that needed cleaning, and I hugged her closer and said, “Well, here I am.”
Bathroom floor mothers, I salute you. This job ain’t easy, but we are right where we are meant to be.
Do you spend a lot of time on the bathroom floor with your kids? How else would you describe this stage of motherhood?
