Giving It Up for My Gals

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Hey you! I need you!

A big thing happened in my life about a year and a half ago.  I would say I found my voice, but that’s still changing and developing all the time, so that wouldn’t be true.  No, I would say I found my peace.

My true peace I of course seek from the Lord above, but when I first hit the publish button with The Mom of the Year, I started to connect.  I started to understand that I wasn’t totally crazy.  I realized that when my babies threw up on me and I thought I was going to die if I had to puree another sweet potato, I wasn’t the only mom in the world who wasn’t loving life.  I was granted permission to be something other than the current encompassing vortex, and with this came power and a chance to actually feel…good.  About myself.  About life. About forgotten parts of who I was that I wanted to remember.

As I connected with this awe-inspiring online crowd, some of my timidity started to fade.  I started to gain a confidence with in-real-life friends.  When I had a sucky day chasing my cherubs around the crowded mall, I felt comfortable saying this to the moms at playgroup.  And they laughed, because it was real.  I began to claim real; I began to claim me.

I could call my friend with older kids at 8:15 in the morning and plead for her reassurance, “Tell me your boys are on the bus already b/c I am having a meltdown and I don’t think I will survive my kids’ toddlerhood.”  I could closet-confess to another mom that I wish I stashed rum on top of my dryer so I could tipple whenever changing up a load.  I could finally proclaim without fear, “I HATE CRAFTS” and not feel like less of a woman.

With all this self-proclamation came another interesting development.  I started feeling less ticked at my husband because he didn’t understand.  He doesn’t understand, but who cares?  It doesn’t matter so much because my gals do understand and they have my back.  While I am shoving my hands up through the slats of my son’s loft bed trying to change the sheets, repetitively scraping off layers of skin off my arms and watching minutes of my life fade into black, I don’t actually feel that alone. I know that compassion, support and virtual hugs and/or glasses of wine are only a phone call, click, tweet, or Chick-Fil-A playdate away.

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Breathe with me, my friend, it feels really good

It feels good to have my gals.  Scratch that, it feels freakin’ great.   I may never understand why I fell into blogging, but for the sheer blessing alone of finding my gals, I am a believer.  And I’m gratefully pretending I can’t hear my kids fighting while I slooowly cart those poopy diapers out to the trash can in honor of all of you, dear sisters.  Solidarity, ladies.  Go get ’em.

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Meredith

Meredith blogs at The Mom of the Year, where she dedicatedly earns her title one epic parenting fail at a time, offering quick, relatable laughs for fellow parents and all their empathizers. She has been part of several best-selling anthologies, featured on prominent sites such as Huffington Post, In the Powder Room and BlogHer, and loves her role as the Executive VP/Operations Manager of The BlogU Conference. When she's not breaking up fights over Legos and juice boxes, she remains fully committed to sharing a less serious look at the world of parenting.

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