Trena Eiden

I’m here to give mothers hope. Your whining brood will grow up and though that’s bittersweet, just know they’ll still happily blame you for everything crummy that ever happened in their life. At least they’ll be communicating with you. 

I’m grateful I had children because, though they blame me for their trials and tribulations, I blame them too. All my faults, failings and fallibilities are because of my offspring — and before you take their side, hear me out. I was skinny before child-bearing so who, other than the kids, should feel guilty? 

I recently read an article where a woman gushed, “I’ve lost over 30 pounds because I wanted to get back to the weight I was before I had Katy.” I read that sentence again, and my only thought was, “Did she mean she wanted to get back to the weight she was before she got pregnant, or the weight right before she gave birth?” If I was going for pre-pregnancy, I wouldn’t. Who needs that torment? But pre-birth? Well now, my quandary’s over. I’ve arrived and I never had to do a chin-up. 

When it comes to wrinkles, I’m showing my current age on my right side with lines and ditches. My left side is a sadder story; it’s 99 plus. I sleep on my left side and that ear seems to have been molested by a vice grip on more than one occasion. No matter, these wrinkles I’m steadily developing weren’t there before children, and they weren’t there before a husband either, so …

My gray hair was only seen on old women like my Gram, but come to think of it, she had children and a husband. I’m telling you, there’s a connection. The family is what causes these maladies because family knows how to push your buttons — they’re the ones who installed them.

I’ve always said, “Children are great stress relievers because they make us laugh. This is only right because they’re the ones that caused our stress in the first place.” We could add a husband.

Motherhood isn’t as easy as we make it look and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, but on Mother’s Day we’re considered amazing. In church we’re honored, at the store we’re touted as special and in our homes, well, not so much. Most meals, no matter how much time put into them, get an eye roll from the offspring. I had a son who once told our company that the spaghetti we were eating was actually meat loaf the day before. Mothers have no recourse because nobody wants “murderess” after their name. 

I feel bad for women who’ve never birthed a human. Who do they blame things on? I mean when we turn 30, our metabolism decides it’s got a mind of its own and it’ll do whatever it wants that doesn’t involve expending energy.

It’s maddening since, when it comes to being a woman, God has a wicked sense of humor. We work on weight loss by eating less — and when I say “less,” I mean nothing. We might lose a pound in about as long as it takes to drive from El Paso to Lake Placid, as long as we’re stopping at every roadside turnout to run in place. If we eat a carrot (and not a whole carrot, but a matchstick-sized morsel), we’ll gain 17 pounds, maybe more if we don’t do jumping jacks while nibbling. 

Don’t you think one reason this whole weight gain/loss dilemma is so infuriating as a mother is because the animal kingdom frolics through life not caring if it’s fat or thin? In fact, a newborn blue whale calf weighs 6,000 pounds and nobody looks at its mother and asks, “Did you have gestational diabetes?” Its mother makes 50 gallons of milk a day so her baby can gain 200 pounds every 24 hours for a year.

Fifty gallons … how do they know? I wanna be on the front row watching the guy milking a whale to find out how much came from her big mammaries. They’re each nearly 5 feet long and weigh almost 250 pounds apiece. That’s slightly less than mine before the breast reduction. 

As for children, last summer I drove Gar to the airport to attend a training. As I waited for him to depart, I texted the kids, “I put Dad on the plane and I feel like I’m sending my little man to summer camp.” One smart-aleck son texted back, “They grow up so fast.”