Mommy Needs a Raise by Sarah Parshall Perry

Author:Sarah Parshall Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FAM032000;REL012030;HUM011000;Mothers—Religious life;Motherhood—Religious aspects—Christianity;Working mothers;Work and family
ISBN: 9781493404155
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Speaking of intimate terms, it is at this point I would like to say something about personal space: you will lose it so fast you won’t even have time to mourn its loss.

How painful this sacrifice will be depends largely on your level of comfort with physical touch and personal boundaries. It will also depend on the personality of your spouse. If, for example, you chart a life course with someone who is content to host a dinner party in his pajamas, the robbery of your boundaries begins even before your children are born. I am a former ivory-tower dweller who is now an over-sharer. When I got married my life’s confines were slaughtered like sacrificial lambs.

So, now you’ve met my husband.

As for myself, my primary “love language” is physical touch.2 I wanted to eat my babies up when they were born. I could not bear to put them down and even struggled with offering them up to well-meaning visitors when I was asked if they could be held. Today I still cannot kiss or hug them enough. Jesse scrambles into bed with me every morning. Matt makes a point of waking him thirty minutes early so he can run to my room and get into a bigger, warmer, more comfortable bed with a mother who pulls him in like a blanket under her arm. Grace hugs me around the waist with all her might and kisses me so often I lose track of it during the day. Even my reticent Noah comes to me without being asked and wraps his arms lightly around me, seeming to fear that he will break me. It’s for this reason I experience lesser injuries to my sense of dignity and boundaries than most.

But. I have not been able to go to the bathroom in peace since 2004. I have had full conversations with my sons through the bathroom door. These dealings have included notes slipped between the bottom of the door and the tile, knocks and inquiries as to whether I was “done yet,” and even fingers—fingers coming from under the door like they do in a horror flick where the zombies signal their presence before they bust through the door with a hatchet.

A traveling husband further corrupts my personal space. During each of his trips, my bed is invaded by middle-of-the-night marauders. They are sometimes loud (Grace and Jesse) and sometimes stealthy as bats with sonar (Noah). If I’m lucky, I wake up in the morning and only then realize that sometime during the night, the covers have been breached. Something about Daddy’s absence flushes my children’s sleep patterns right down the toilet.

Certain nights I get more than just one extra in my bed. That’s really a blast. Not only does my bed not sleep four but there sometimes transpires a fight between the one who has priority based on the fact he or she got there first and the one who comes later. For example, last night Noah arrived first, complaining his ears were itchy.

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