Decisions, decisions

What is it about becoming a parent that heightens your every sense? Since discovering our pregnancy the strength and volatility of my emotions has completely caught me off guard. Every action, decision and thought surrounding our kids results in a reaction of the heart that can be too much to handle. When the boys trigger that motherly love I feel it so deep within my soul that I honestly believe I could crush them with it. When they frustrate me, it’s everything I can do not to run down the road screaming my head off (you mothers know you’ve thought about it).

When I imagined what it would be like to be a mom, I thought nothing could be more difficult than adjusting to that very first day. And then maybe I realized it would take a good three months (when the babies are done with their colicky, spit uppy, screamy behavior) before I would really feel like things are getting back to normal.

The truth of the matter is that things never go back to normal. Before kids, our most difficult decisions involved where to move, what to get each other for Christmas and where to vacation. Now our decisions are tied to these two precious boys who are at the heart of our family. Sure, we’ve had our fair share of tough situations like the boys stay in the NICU and Taylor’s week long bout with pneumonia, but even the seemingly small decisions seem huge. I feel as if this first year of life sets the ground work for their entire life and boy that’s a big load to handle.

My mind reels with an infinite number of questions on a regular basis: Am I feeding the boys enough? Am I feeding them the right things? How’s their social life faring? Do we need to get them out more? Is it okay to switch laundry detergent now? The questions keep going and going. And every question seems to take some monumental decision-making on my part. It’s no wonder that our decision to change the kids daycare situation would end up causing me so much stress that I would literally come down with a self-induced migraine.

For weeks I would weigh the advantages and disadvantages of hiring a nanny. And, believe me, there were way too many to even recount here. In the end, we realized that the best thing to do would be to lay our cards out on the table and see which one God would point us to. That’s when we met Miss A. We had no doubt that God led her to our doorstep. But even with the surety we felt as we hired Miss A to start as our nanny, I felt a deep sadness at removing the kids from their current daycare. The strength of my emotions literally brought me to tears the day I broke the news to the current childcare provider. I recall driving to work that morning in awe and wonder at the onset of these feelings. Kids provide a whole new dynamic to our decision-making and it’s truly unbelievable how emotionally charged these decisions really are.

So, as we close out their first year in daycare and enter their first year under the care of a nanny, I remind myself that we have 17 more years of this. At some point, I must learn to relax a little, right? Or maybe this is what being a mother is all about. Every year there will be some big decisions to make and each year these kids will move closer and closer to independence and I will have to trust that as I lay my cards out on the table, God will always help me to choose the right one.