What’s more, starting right after my son was born, I had been working on a publicity campaign for a product that launched in early September. It was nice at first, because it gave me something outside of dirty diapers and breastfeeding to focus on, a reminder of my pre-baby life to help me transition into parenthood. But once the product was out and the publicity effort was over, I was suddenly left with no work, less support than I had before, and an increasingly alert and active baby who is no longer interested in just lying around, nursing and sleeping.

Gulp.

Luckily, after four months with my husband, my mom, and my in-laws all helping out, I finally felt like I was starting to get the hang of this whole mommy thing. Through trial and error, and with a whole lot of tears along the way, I was finally getting to know my son and how to take care of him, and no longer felt like quite such a hopeless amateur. By the time I was on my own most of the time, I could handle spending entire days with him solo — and here I know I am lucky, as most new moms have to face long days alone with their child mere days or weeks after coming home from the hospital.

Still, I have struggled as my days have gone from being productive and varied to single-minded and repetitive. In fact, I’ve decided that motherhood elevates mundanity to an Olympic-level sport. Getting my kid down for a nap with a minimum of effort is a huge triumph. Managing to get out the door on time with him rested, changed, and fed? Forget about it.

Don’t get me wrong: I adore my kid, and made a conscious decision with my husband that I would stay home with our children. I am happy and fulfilled being a mom. Even so, part of me is still trying to adjust to the fact that I am now “just” a mom, that there’s no external measurement of success or achievement for my long days. Oh yeah, and there’s no weekends.

Luckily, there are smiles, and giggles, and milestones that I am the first person to see. Following nearly a week of fussiness and screaming and disrupted nights, the other morning he rewarded my perseverance by sitting up on his own for a good three or four minutes, avidly watching as I brushed my teeth. Every time I start to think I can’t take any more, he gives me something like that, a small gem to hold onto when things get difficult again.

Whenever I get to that point, I remind myself that all jobs are hard, especially the ones you love the most. Those are the ones you can’t leave behind, that follow you home and populate your off-duty thoughts and consume your time and attention whether at the office or not. And in my experience, those are the jobs worth doing, because they are more than just a job. They are a vocation: a calling, work that is intrinsically fulfilling as well as financially or professionally.

So perhaps in giving up my job and becoming a full-time mom, I have found my vocation. Not a bad switch, if you ask me.

And there it was – that thought that had been lurking in the back of my mind over the past years and now hit me full force: I wanted another baby! Badly. The feeling that our family was not complete quite yet and that I wanted to hold a newborn again before my biological clock ran out, was breath-taking, overwhelming.

What was I thinking? Not only would I give up the aforementioned freedom for a return to sleepless nights, constant nursing, a body out of shape and a mountain of diapers. How would I balance the need of two teenagers and a toddler? Was it fair to bring a baby into a family that was already busy with many activities? What about our big vacation plans to Asia and Africa – we certainly couldn’t take a baby to the jungle! And my career plans that – after 10 years of being a stay-at-home mom (and part-time teacher at night) – were supposed to blossom in the years to come? The additional financial burden – retirement delayed and another college tuition to plan for! While the older boys would leave the house in 8-10 years and we could enjoy life as a couple again, we would have another grade schooler at home! Most of our friends have kids the same age as ours and the birth of another baby would shift our interests once again, possibly away from them. How often would they tolerate me bringing a baby to lunch? Or even worse, a squirming toddler? Play dates where the kids just go off while the parents BBQ and chat would once again be dominated by watching a little one and the impossibility of having a continuous conversation!

But there were also positive thoughts: the baby experience would be slightly different this time. I was older and more experienced in child rearing, more relaxed, too (hopefully). Both boys had often expressed the wish for another sibling. They are old enough to help out in the house, get dressed and have breakfast by themselves. I would have much more time for this baby than if I had had it 6 years ago, right after the other two! Surely the boys would be able to entertain the baby for a little bit while I finished cooking dinner and in about 5 years they could possibly babysit!?

Most importantly however I came to realize that would regret for the rest of my life, if I didn’t have another child. I think children are the biggest legacy we leave in this world and I just wasn’t done with mine. The experience of pregnancy, giving birth and nursing is – while not always complication-free – wonderful, awe-inspiring and in its emotional intensity comparable to nothing else. If I waited a couple more years to make up my mind, our opportunity might have passed for good. While worried whether my almost 40 year old body would be able to carry this feat out again, the risks only increased the longer I waited.

So we decided to embark on this adventure again and are expecting our third child next March. It’s very exciting, but also daunting at times. Did we make the right decision? Only time will tell. But I am full of hope and joy since a wise women once said “You never regret the children you have, only the ones you don’t have.”

I admit that before having kids, the thought of motherhood scared me. Mainly because I was happy with the person I was and the path I was traveling through life…for the most part. Why did I want to shake things up? Especially when the examples of moms I saw on TV, in the movies and in magazines were stereotypes of over-tired, over-worked, over-worried women who had forgotten themselves, and were consumed by their children and the fruitless efforts of attempting a “balanced” life. These moms seemed like simple and flat caricatures of women. I did not want to become one of them.

And so my journey to motherhood began with a healthy dose of fear and trepidation. Those concerns had nothing to do with the pregnancy, or labor and delivery portion. Instead my fears started with what happened after the delivery pains stopped. How I would soothe a newborn? What would I do with a baby in my house by myself all day long? Would I still be able to write? What if I traded in NPR for Barney? What if I no longer recognized myself? Who would I become?

So what would I tell my pre-mom self?

• Don’t be afraid of how motherhood will change you.

• Stay true to your core and there’s nothing to fear.

• Babies aren’t as frightening as they may appear.

• Every stage passes more quickly than you think it will.

• Trust yourself.

• Give yourself time to find your rhythm.

• It takes a village of support.

• Those caricatures aren’t as flat as you may have assumed.

What would you say?

Traditionally, girls were exposed to pregnant women and infants from a very young age, so by the time that they got pregnant themselves, they were already old hands at the whole mothering thing. But in this day and age, at least in the first world, things are different. My girlfriends and I have managed to reach our early thirties having little or no experience with either pregnant women or newborns.

I myself am six weeks away from having a baby, and have never changed a diaper, nor seen or held a baby younger than a month old. A couple of my friends have kids, but I was twenty-eight before I felt a baby move in my friend’s belly for the first time. It brought tears to my eyes, but still, that one experience in no way prepared me for what it would feel like to have my own child dancing inside of me three years later.

Since then, I’ve watched my friends react my own baby’s movements, and realized that they’re feeling the same thing as I did. For many of them, I am the first person they’re close to that’s been pregnant, so the whole thing is as much of a novelty to them as it is to me. It’s been exciting to share the adventure with them, but it also makes me a little sad that we can reach our third decade without ever being directly exposed to the creation of new life.

What has happened to that learning community of women? Has it been replaced by all the myriad pregnancy and parenthood books out there, the endless classes, the weekly updates from pregnancy websites? Have we really become that disconnected?

For a while, I was starting to despair about all this. But then I started seeing things in a different way.

In one hour spent with a new mama friend, I learned more about nursing and diaper changing than I had in both of the three hour classes I’d taken on breastfeeding and infant care. Hmm, I thought. Maybe I’m on to something here.

Then, when one of my best friends came to stay last weekend for our baby shower, I took her to my prenatal water aerobics class and our birth preparation class. As we spent basically all day talking about pregnancy and labor, I realized: wait a second. There is community here. It’s just in a different form. Granted it’s not elderly aunties telling us about childbirth or mothering, nor is it the kind of hands-on experience you gain by taking care of little siblings or cousins from a young age. And yes, we have only come to all this late in our lives, after twenty or more years spent blissfully unaware of the trials and travails of becoming a parent. But better late than never, right?

The moral of the story is that there is still a teaching community when it comes to motherhood. You just have to look for it in unexpected places: with the other people in all those classes, at prenatal exercise groups, and online through sites like this one.

Most importantly, you have to seek out the kind of first-hand wisdom that used to come so naturally by asking friends and mothers and in-laws about their own experiences with motherhood. One of my favorite shower gifts was a “mother’s essentials kit” that my friend put together for me, with all the things for mama and baby’s health that she could not have lived without. That’s wisdom it would have taken me ages of trial and error to gain.

So maybe our 21st century community of mamas would be unrecognizable to women from fifty or a hundred years ago. But to my huge relief, it’s still very much there. You just have to know where to find it.

I used to daydream about not working back before I had children.  I never really liked getting up and going into work every morning.  It was such a drag.  The thought of hanging out in PJs, drinking coffee, taking naps, and watching soap operas for the rest of my life was so appealing.  I even secretly hoped we could space out our baby-timing so that I could stay home for longer. HAHAHA.  I hope all you stay-at-home moms out there are laughing at me right now.

Even though that’s NOT what my life is like as a stay-at-home mom, I still love my job.  Sometimes, however, it gets tedious, even monotonous.  I then have a grass-is-greener moment and fantasize about working (never would have predicted that!).  For a fleeting second, I long for the day that my kids are a little older and I go out and get a job, one that involves other grown-ups and wearing cute outfits that require dry cleaning and going on business lunches.  Then I am consumed with terror that when that day comes for me to return to the workforce, a prospective employer will see me as a lazy sack who’s been unemployed for a decade, not as a woman who chose to stay home to raise babies.

My current bosses are pretty cute and pay me with sloppy kisses and rocks picked up from parking lots, but they would definitely have their drawbacks if I tried to use them as a reference.  They can’t read or write, so a letter of recommendation is out of the question.  They don’t care that I used to be smart and once graduated with highest honors from a university.  If you ask my four year old what Mommy’s job is, he says “You make dinner and milk the baby.”  Basically, they’re no help at all.

So since I can’t rely on my kids to help get me a job someday, I’m polishing up my resume to make my mommy skills seem more marketable.  After all, I don’t think an employer will find my obsession with birth or my “eau de spit up” perfume very worthwhile qualities.  Here’s a sampling of what I’ll include:

Education

B.S. in Domestic Engineering from Motherhood University, 2006

Professional Experience
Chief of Operations, McFadden Industries, 2006-present

Skills

Waste Management

• Earned the distinction of changing over 10,000 diapers, many of them poopy.
• Proven proficiency at changing diaper blow-outs with minimal damage to baby, clothing, and furniture.
• The ability to wipe multiple butts while simultaneously talking on the phone, checking Facebook, and playing Candyland shows outstanding multi-tasking skills.

Logistics Expert

• Successfully kept three children alive through such precarious and complicated scenarios such as navigating school parking lots, karate classes, grocery super centers, theme park lines, cross-country airline flights, trips to the park, and crossing the street.

Research and Development

• Grew a human being on three separate occasions
• After extensive analysis and research, implemented numerous, varied courses of action to get baby to sleep longer than two hours at a time
• Spent countless hours on Google researching preschools, developmentally appropriate toys, and various childhood ailments

Mediator

• Extensive on-the-job-training in conflict/resolution
• Tirelessly worked to create a peaceful work environment

Other responsibilities included but were not limited to: education facilitator, financial services, culinary arts, recreation supervisor, transportation coordinator, and boo-boo kisser.

What do you think?  What has been your experience?  How do employers view a 10 year gap in employment history?

If you’re a stay-at-home mom looking to return to the workforce soon, the web is full of helpful resources.  I’ve learned that an absence from work because you were home raising babies is much more favorable than a decade away from work for other reasons (because you were in prison, for instance!).  And you really can include your mommy skills on your return-to-work resume.  You just have to get the wording right!  For tips, tricks, and articles, check out:

Moms Back To Work
Resume-help.org
How to Document Stay-at-home-Mom Experience
How Stay-at-Home Moms Can Get back to Work
Returning to Work After Years at Home

For more from Amanda, visit Three Boys, One Love

Some problems seem ridiculously easy to solve while others can make my head spin. Let me explain.

Keeping my on-the-go supplies stocked is easy. Have an extra diaper bag in the car that contains: extra formula/food/snacks and utensils complete with bib, wipes, diapers, a change of clothes for everyone, and a blanket. Duh!

Figuring out how to deal with an infant and a toddler at the dinner table is HARD. I took me 29 months to figure out the best way to clean my kids’ hands and faces after a meal–a wash cloth soaked with warm water. Wipes dry out their face and add up in $$, and paper towels require constant running back and fourth to get more since they aren’t really efficient. Not to mention how to arrange the two chairs to keep my eye on both of them at the same time. On several occasions I can say that I have caught Nolan (29 months) feeding Garrett (10 months) something he is not ready for, like apple chunks. I finally rearranged some furniture and life got five times easier at meal times. See my picture.

I know when my kids are hungry, tired, or genuinely delighted. I can anticipate situations that may be overwhelming for them. I can improvise accordingly and make the day go from meltdown to happytown in a matter of 5 minutes. Rainy day, no problem. Out of milk, no problem. Dog food all over the kitchen floor with a 10 month old determined to shove as many as he can in his mouth as possible while the eggs are burning and the 29 month old has decided he needs to go potty now, NO PROBLEM!

I can play dragon, vacuum, plan dinner, calm a frantic girlfriend, and confirm a playdate via email with a baby on my hip. I am the master of the living room, kitchen, bathroom, playroom, and garage. (I leave the bedroom up to my dear husband.) So where do I put this on my resume?

When I was pregnant oh so long ago, I remember mother’s telling me about being overwhelmed, lonely, and so far in love all at the same time. I had Nolan and never felt that this was a huge job. I loved every minute of it including the diaper explosions. (Just sick!) But Garrett was thrown into the mix when Nolan was only 19 months and things got complicated fast.

I get it. I get what those moms were talking about. You don’t believe them until you are in the middle of it and have no idea how to ask for help. Your husband is looking at you like you are nuts because to him everything looks fine. After all, dinner is on the table and you shaved your legs last week. What do you mean everything isn’t fine?

Now I see these friends of mine who are pregnant. First time moms I am just excited for and want to tell them all of my favorite things about pregnancy (like PregTASTIC and maternity photos). Second time moms I feel like I have to warn them.

But with all that said. “Every mom is different. Every child is different.” So I really know nothing. I swear I do though. I swear I do.