The Secret Joys of Being a Mom

This isn’t a post about baby giggles or exciting firsts or even that well-deserved glass of wine at the end of the day. Plenty is written about those parenting perks. Today I want to talk about an underexploited joy of motherhood: How we learn to enjoy the hell out of some seriously mundane crap when we actually get to do it alone.

It may sound a little sad but it’s true. Once you have kids, something as simple as food shopping solo becomes like a day at the spa. Tooling around Target? Yes, please! A wait at the doc’s office? No problem, pass that Bon Appetit magazine from 2012. Airport delay? Four words: Book and Bloody Mary. Moms enjoy actually enjoyable things too but this ability to find bliss in the previously blissless is a great side effect of motherhood. Maybe a superpower, even.

I was with a few stay-at-home mom friends the other day and one told us she had just been selected to report for jury duty. We all groaned for her, but then I recalled my own recent jury duty experience and confessed that it wasn’t that bad. “The drive out there is relaxing, there’s WiFi, you just sit quietly most of the day, you get to leave for an hour for lunch, the courthouse is right by the outlets and three months later you get a check for $40.” Her eyes lit up. “Sounds fabulous,” she said. “How do I get jury duty?” another asked. We all laughed. Because an entire day sans kids disguised as doing your civic duty does sound kind of great. (Plus, her husband is a DA so she won’t get selected for a jury, which wouldn’t be so great.)

I asked some other friends what they thought and they all chimed in with their own if-I’m-alone-I’m-loving-it examples: Long commutes, short commutes, bad commutes, pumping in the closet at work, showers, driving (anywhere, even if there’s traffic), picking up the takeout, bikini waxes, gyno appointments (even the ones with long waits), grocery shopping, baby showers, folding laundry, Costco runs, cleaning without kids underfoot, being in the house when no one else is there (such a rarity! Such a gift!). One friend said she has come to seriously love the peace and quiet and solitude of…going to the bathroom. I would normally agree with her but my kids are older than hers and I think they’ve put a homing beacon in my ass because the second I sit on the pot—any pot—they come running. Another friend was pumped for her third C-section because it meant five days in the hospital being waited on instead of being home waiting on others. Zing!

I often think back to my pre-kid days when I had a lot of alone time and when pretty much anything on the list above would have been a source of frustration. Ha! It’s amazing how becoming a parent changes your perspective on so many things, even the simple things like wiping your a** alone. Of course we all love our kids and we love being moms and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when those kids are young and you’re on duty pretty much 24/7, the snippets of time when you find yourself solo are golden. And so we cherish them. You might think that’s kind of pathetic but I think it’s kind of genius. Being able to see all those glass-half-empty scenarios through rose-colored glasses (mixed metaphor alert!) is a gift. One that will keep on giving, at least until high school graduation.