Do you mean to tell me the reality of staying at home with an infant and a toddler isn’t sexy?

I was having lunch with a friend who is also a mother. This is a once per quarter experience for me, so I was pretty excited. My son was at daycare, so I only had my 1-year-old in tow. We were eating food I didn’t have to prepare, on dishes I didn’t have to wash. I was talking to an adult I wasn’t related to.

In short, I was in heaven.

“So”, she asked, “is being a stay-at-home mom good? Is it still what you want and all you had hoped for?”

I was quiet for a second. This is a hard question, especially from a friend who I respect and trust. We talk to one another about sex, birth, and breastfeeding. We discuss the dark and dirty parts of motherhood. Answering her question was hard because I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t loving every minute of this life.

I thought for a second and replied honestly. “I love being home with my kids.” She looked at me, smiled, and said, “But?”

I took a deep breath and responded, “It’s not what I thought it would be.”

I told her about the picture I had in my head. The kids and I would go out on long walks. We would look at bugs, do amazing art projects, and go on wild adventures.

Then I told her about my reality. I basically shepherd two small humans from one meal to the next. I’m always watching the clock to make sure naps and food come on schedule. I told her the gaps between all these things rarely allow time for adventures and, at this point, both kids are as likely to eat a bug as to inspect one. I told her a 3-year-old’s attention span results in mediocre art projects.

She actually laughed at me and said, “Do you mean to tell me the reality of staying at home with an infant and a toddler isn’t as sexy as you imagined?”

No, it’s not. It’s tiring, it’s isolating, it’s hard. Hard. It’s also amazing and rewarding and fills me to the brim. As I write this my 3 year old is, thankfully, napping after a tantrum-filled morning. I have an overtired 13 month old attached to my breast. I had intended to wean her the day she turned 12 months, but I can’t quite bring myself to do it. So, here we are. We’ll get there someday. It’s not like she will go off to college still nursing.

One day, hopefully soon, we won’t be slaves to the nap clock and hungry little bellies. We will take longer adventures, we will do amazing artwork and yes, we will lay in the grass watching bugs.

Someday, our lives will be sexy. Until then, I’m doing my best to get us all to dinnertime.