Parenting is really just 18 long years of survival mode. Two decades of purgatory in which our lives are no longer our own, but don’t entirely belong to our children either. To make it through these years of bizarre life limbo, we tell our children a string of fabrications, half-truths and outright lies that are entirely justified for the sake of preserving our sanity. And just crazy enough to be believable.
But sometimes the weight of our deception becomes too much for us to carry alone. Sometimes we feel just a teenie bit guilty for telling our kids that the ice cream truck only plays music when it’s out of ice cream. Sometimes we need a place to unburden our deep, dark secrets. Our mom confessions.
Our Momfessions, if you will.
I turned to social media to be that confessor for my fellow exhausted mamas. To give them a place to lay their lies and burdens down. Lies and burdens I am totally stealing, by the way. These are some of my favorite Momfessions.
Shopping
The ‘R’ in Toys ‘R’ Us is backwards when they are closed.
Those are Target’s toys. We can’t take them home.
There are two kids of money: toy money and food money. “Oh shoot! I forgot the toy money at home! We just have food money today.”
Toy batteries aren’t interchangeable. “Sorry buns, they don’t sell replacement batteries for your sing-along piano.”
My son believed for years that the candies in the checkout line at Target are treats for cats and dogs.
Food and Restaurants
They only sell Lucky Charms in California.
French fries don’t cook in houses.
Chuck E Cheese is open by invitation only. Never open to the general public. It’s also always booked when their birthdays roll around.
Sometimes McDonald’s runs out of happy meals. Weird.
My kids don’t like cheese, so when they catch me sneaking chocolate, I tell them it has cheese in it. My 5-year-old refers to my dark chocolate Ghirardelli squares as “cheese chocolates.”
My peanut butter cups are stashed in the green beans bag in the freezer. No one in this house likes green beans.
Toys and Entertainment
Sofia texts me when she needs to take a nap, so we can’t watch that mind-numbing show anymore. Sometimes those “Paw Patrol” dogs call, too.
iPads only work on airplanes.
The sign at the park says I can only push you on the swing if it’s the last thing you’re going to do before we leave.
The most annoying songs and apps only work on Grandma’s phone.
Potty and Hygiene
When my daughter was 3, she informed me that she wouldn’t pee in the toilet until she turned 4. So I moved her birthday up 5 months. Everyone at the birthday party was in on it. Then she told me that she wouldn’t poop in the toilet until she was 5. So, I moved her birthday up again by 7 months. Her preschool couldn’t do calendar time that month, since my daughter knew her birthday was in August.
If you ever think about peeing in a pool, your pee turns blue, and everyone can see it’s from you.
This is a booger bug. This is where boogers come from. Do you still want to pick your nose and eat it?
Behavior
I tell my three-year-old that he can’t go in the street without me because he’s small and cars can’t see him. He literally thinks he’s invisible.
I have a built-in lie detector in my head that beeps really loudly and causes terrible pain when my kids lie. So whenever they try to fib, all I have to do is squint my eyes and they quickly tell the truth.
To occupy my fighting and screaming kids in the car, I tell them I’ll give a dollar to the first kid to lick the back of their elbows or back of their knees.
I use my son’s potty mouth against him. “Oh you want to buy those cookies? Well, I would, but they taste like poop.” Or, “Don’t fall in that pool. There’s totally poop in there.”
Getting Time Alone
I once sat on the floor of the bathroom for 30 minutes with the shower running. I was eating the last of the ice cream and didn’t want to share.
Sometimes I tell my husband I’m putting away laundry, but I’m really just sitting in our kids’ room playing on my phone. Once I even snuck a glass of wine in there.
I pretend to be asleep when the baby wakes in the middle of the night so my husband has to be the one to get up. I may or may not have also put the monitor next to his head.
Every trip I take to the store is a minimum of 20 minutes. That’s 20 minutes of just me, my phone, and Candy Crush, hanging out in the parking lot before I ever go into the store. It takes 25 minutes to buy milk, y’all. Not including drive time.
One early morning when my son was little, he heard me trying to creep quietly down the stairs to get time some time to myself. He said, “Mommy?” And I meowed, pretending to be the cat.
I want to hear your best Momfessions. Sound off in the Facebook comments or online using #RebelliousMomfessions.
Pictured above: The ferocious booger bug. OK, actually it’s some sort of frog. But don’t tell our kids that.