Like A Mother.

Things college doesn't teach you.

I originally started this post last week, before Mother’s Day, as a way of combing through how becoming a parent changed me, for better or worse. But like all things involving children, it quickly went off the rails and my best-laid plans took a backseat to chaos.

But it was good to have a writing prompt ready, given that yesterday, someone was wrong on the Internet. Truth be told, I never lasted long with breastfeeding. Unlike getting pregnant, I was actually pretty good at nursing, but the first round was twins and the second round was a baby when those twins were 16 months old and just starting to flirt with the domestic terrorism of toddlerhood, so, you know, things didn’t work out. But that’s okay. Years later, the baby I didn’t really nurse ate salad out of a trash can so, it turns out, that was probably a waste of mental energy.

It also turns out, when you’re in your mid-20s and don’t have kids, you know a lot about parenting. Should women breastfeed in public? I have no idea. There is a resurgence in the “modesty wars” right now and people are proscribing everything from workout pants to “topless nursing,” which seems like something most breastfeeding women wouldn’t be interested in.

Modesty, of course, is a two-way street, and involves more than just what you wear. And it’s always fascinating to me that the Internet’s alpha males have enough self-discipline to build Bitcoin fortunes and bench 500 can’t avert their eyes when a baby needs to eat.

But forget all that. Maybe its the benefit of being an older first-time mother or knowing that even my most experienced mom friends hadn’t yet raised two at once, but I had very few expectations of motherhood when my twins were born. But motherhood still surprised me.

For instance, I didn’t know how many naked butts I would see on a daily basis — and continue to see well into toddlerhood. And now I see even more than that. And everyone else does. And we talk about it a lot. Like a lot. So many questions about butts. And not butts.

I assumed that kids would be expensive, but I had no idea how much of my hard earned money would go to fruit. Specifically, those tiny oranges that come in red net bags. Just so many tiny oranges.

I thought my kids would dress in what I set out for them. No. Yes, I was planning on Ralph Lauren models, and I got Bass Pro Shop rewards members. I consider “roughing it” a hotel without a breakfast bar. My daughter wears camo overalls without a shirt underneath and I fully expect to some day be pulling her out of backwoods parties at 3am after she’s shot six stop signs out.

I didn’t realize how intelligent my children would be so early. And this is not a humble-brag. I get owned constantly by tinier versions of myself. Maybe learning sarcasm is a sign of a high IQ, but it’s brutal, regardless.

Wearing black is a survival tactic.

Nice rugs are for masochists and people who decorate with smashed bananas.

Baby wipes can get a stain out of anything.

There is nothing in your home that cannot be repurposed to be a container for food, and that includes other food.

You can sanitize the pacifier, but while you were doing it, they were eating stale carseat Goldfish.

There’s no more important question than poop or chocolate.

They say you shouldn’t pretend your pets are your children, and that pet ownership will never prepare your for kids and they couldn’t be more wrong. The most valuable experience I’ve had with wrangling children came from attempts at clipping my cat’s nails.

If they say they have a worm, believe them.

Pockets aren’t your friends.

And the best part of having kids is that you can relive your childhood, and you don’t even have to pretend you’re not weird.