Stop laughing, you're hurting my ears... said no kid, ever.

I take this motherhood thing somewhat seriously – too seriously perhaps. I consider it make or break if dinner isn’t served at precisely 5:45pm and doesn’t include at least one protein, one starch and one veg… anything less is complete failure because honestly, how difficult is it to get dinner done? It’s not rocket science… unless of course I have two kids screaming at my feet that they want to play, play, play.

There are many evenings where my kids just want me to read them a story, or help them build a Lego-garage for their cars, or play just another 10 minutes in the garden and I decline with the usual, “Mommy has to make dinner, here’s your digital babysitter iPad…”

Things gotta get done, and dinner doesn’t make itself… Just like doctor’s appointments don’t make themselves, chronic medicines don’t magically appear, therapy appointments don’t keep themselves and those painfully boring daily fine-motor exercises disguised as ‘fun’ do not invent themselves… So yes, things gotta get done and mama’s on it!

But I realised the other day that all this stuff; the nitty-gritty of keeping kids clean, fed, housed and early-interventioned (that's not a real word, of course) makes me frown. Possibly more than I should frown… because like I said; I take it all so very seriously… I blame it on a ‘worry gene’ that expresses itself in my ability to have an anxiety attack over pretty much anything. But enough about me.

Let’s talk about the kids… and what they actually want from me.

I am delusional if I think that they care whether dinner is half-an-hour late, or if they even noticed that I hid veggies in their pasta sauce. They probably couldn’t care less if I put clean pants on them, or yesterday’s pair (ok, I lie… Harlan would care. very. much. But he’s strange like that). And have they noticed lately that their toys are sorted by theme, size, colour and function? Huh? Nope. They simply don't care about that stuff.

What they do want from me is lots of time… lots and lots… in fact, they spell ‘time’ this way – L.O.V.E.

And they don’t settle for just any kind of time, oh no. They’d much rather prefer the kind of time that includes lots of mess, stickiness, chaos, jumping, hiding, running, laughing, hooting and tooting… The kind of time that will etch itself in their little cells… because let’s get real, they’re never going to actually remember each moment of these early years. They may actually not remember any specific moments at all… but they will remember how they felt because it’s etched into their little bodies at a cellular level – and their very essence will be screaming ‘I am loved’, and perhaps more important than that – ‘my mom doesn’t just love me, but she loves being my mom.”

Because there’s a difference between loving your children, and loving the process of being their mother.

I find it easy to love my children, as I imagine most mothers do – how could I not love my children after carrying them for nine months in my own body. It is biologically and hormonally impossible to not simply love the daylights out of every little inch of them! I am totally crazy about my kids – stark raving bat-shit crazy.

It’s the process of being a mom that’s a little more challenging – the balancing of delivering everything they need to be safe, secure, and healthy while also remembering to just have some fun, laugh, make funny faces, dance under the stars, and make shadow puppets in bed at night – you know, the cellular stuff, the actions that show my children I love being their mom, the stuff that will leave an indelible mark on them as they grow from little-ones into big-ones. The stuff that says ‘I am loved'.

I’ve realised that above all else, I need to show my children that I love being their mom.