Cookies and Milk and Yellow Balloons

When I was a little girl my mom would sing a song to me by Janeen Jacobs Brady.

I Want to be a Mother

When I grow up,
I want to be a mother
and have a family:
one little, two little, three little babies of my own.

Of all the jobs for me,
I'll choose no other.
I'll have a family:
four little, five little, six little babies in my home.

And I will love them all day long
and give them cookies and milk and yellow balloons,
And cuddle them when things go wrong,
and read them stories and sing them pretty tunes.

When I grow up,
if I can be a mother,
how happy I will be:
one little, two little, three little babies I can love.

And you will say each sister and each brother
all look a lot like me:
four little, five little, six little blessings from above.

This message always rang true for me. I always knew I wanted to be a mother. The line that stuck with me the most is "and give them cookies and milk and yellow balloons."
I do love chocolate chip cookies with a passion and my own mother can whip up a batch without a recipe in no time. But lest some people think this description of motherhood is a little too rosy, let me tell you some of the deeper thoughts that come to mind about “cookies and milk and yellow balloons.”

• I make a mess whenever I bake my cookies but the results are worth it.

• The kids and I love to snitch some of the cookie dough and have fun along the way even with the mess all around us. (In the pre-health-code-worry days I had a fantastic great-aunt who would make one batch of c-c-c dough to bake and one to eat. What a treat!)

• Milk is yummy and good for you. But along with the daily milk come the almost daily milk spills at our house. (That’s what happens when you let a one year old learn to eat their own cereal.)

• Balloons are bright, fun and happy. They make people smile. But they deflate eventually and I can get quite annoyed with old balloons that are lying around the house, still with a little air left in them that my kids aren’t ready to part with quite yet.

Having kids has probably been the thing I looked forward to most in life next to getting married. But it has also been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The other day I was talking to one of my dearest friends and describing the ups and downs of my life. I mentioned one of the challenges has been that pre-motherhood I was always “good” at everything I did. Not to sound cocky, or so what if it does, but I got good grades, played the piano well, felt like I was a good kid, good daughter and good sister to my four younger brothers. I wasn’t perfect, but I felt capable. Motherhood blew that image away with a bang. I always thought I was a patient person before I became a mother. I thought I was organized and managed my time extremely well. All that was before I was in charge of the lives of two helpless creatures in my full time care.

So-back to cookies, milk and yellow balloons.

• Baking cookies: Motherhood is messy. You can’t live with kids and actually be LIVING, painting, play-doughing, baking, cooking, going to the beach, building forts in your front room and doing loads of laundry all the time without making messes. And at the end of the day you don’t necessarily have the energy to clean up those messes every day.

• Snitching dough: In the middle of the mess motherhood can be fun. My favorite moments are the smiles, cuddles, kisses, funny phrases, faces, entertaining thoughts, glimpses into their heads and imaginations. Often they are so small that you don’t even remember to tell Grandma about them on the phone, or write about them in their books. But they are there and they make me smile even though we might look like our front room was hit by a tornado.

• Milk spills and you have to learn to move on. Motherhood is about constantly moving on. Forgiving yourself, forgiving others, not comparing, just moving on. But we grow through all of the experiences and become stronger mothers and stronger women. Even the daily work of sweeping the floor 3-5 times a day (yes, there are some tasks I do manage to do most days) strengthens our patience and our ability to keep going through all of the mundane jobs that are part of motherhood.

• Just like the helium balloons that only last a day, childhood goes by fast and is precious. I hope I can be less annoyed by the milk spills and half dead balloons lying around the house and just enjoy the moments that much more each day.

A closing thought. I’ve always had a secret desire (not so secret anymore!) that someday my husband will bring me cookies and yellow balloons to the hospital if we have another baby (provided we make it to the hospital!). It would bring this song full-circle in my life. But in the meantime while I labor daily with my own mothering joys and inadequacies, I want this blog to celebrate the “cookies and milk and yellow balloon” days of childhood and motherhood in my own life.