My friend Karen is the tall six foot blonde woman that most women would love to hate… if they didn’t know her. But to know Karen is to love her. She’s fun and full of energy and hilarious! You simply cannot help but love her. 
I met Karen when I was in college. We were both spending a semester in Chicago. She was one of my four roommates in a two bedroom apartment near downtown. We had a blast. The first photo in this post was taken during one of Karen’s renditions of the many musicals she loved. While she has matured somewhat since then I hope she is passing on her love for musicals to her children.
We don’t live remotely close to one another any more but Karen is someone I want to stay in touch with. She is the mother to three young children. Her oldest is five, her youngest is three months. She is real and easily shared both her joys and her pitfalls in parenting. During our short conversation I got so busy chatting and catching up that sometimes I forgot that we were doing an interview…and Karen made me laugh harder than I’ve laughed in a while, mostly because I could so easily relate to her challenges.
“Potty training was the hardest time so far. I turned into a monster. If I never have to relive those days in my life I will be so glad. But it was all me! I had expectations, because my son had all girl friends. And they were all training at 2 or 2 1/2. Boys are different.
I was reading a list of the top 25 things you should not do when potty training your kid, and I think I did 24 of them. Just shy of beating my child- that was the one thing I did not do.”
I could easily relate. My children are all potty trained but I wish I had done it differently; been more patient, pushed them less. I would definitely have described myself as a monster during that period, and I hated it. I love that Karen was willing to share this with me. It was so good to laugh about it with her, to know that I was not alone.
We shared stores of how our second and third kids got a mom who was a lot more relaxed.
With my first I did everything by the book. I remember when he was three months old and he was doing something and my husband and I are screaming at each other “WELL WHAT DOES THE BOOK SAY?”
Her advice to new mom’s is “Take pieces from books and work with what works for you. With my second I took on the mentality of “what would I do if this was 1920?” if I didn’t have the internet and didn’t have all of my friends at my beck and call. I’m going to use my God given motherly instinct. If the baby is crying…FEED it. You don’t have to wait three hours because a book says wait three hours. The baby is freaking hungry-FEED THE BABY!”
Karen may be the mom of young children, but she also had some really sage advice, the kind of stuff you might hear from a seasoned veteran.
My single most important piece of advice is to get involved in a mom’s group-dealing with other women. Get yourself out of the house. Just hang out with other women.
When my oldest was between four months and nine months I got really sad. I didn’t have my identity as a working woman. I was now a stay at home mom. I didn’t have my family around. I was all alone and all of my friends were not mothers. They were all career women. For the first little bit I was in the honeymoon stage. I loved my life. At about four months in it was suddenly “what do we do now?” You can only read so many books to a four month old. I got so sad, I just wanted to move home. Right around nine months, I met a girl from church and she was starting a mom’s group. So I started with this mom’s group and my life really turned on it’s head- just having other mom’s to hang out with. Now I had a new identity.
When Karen and I talked we both shared how much we loved getting to know women whose children were older, or getting to know couples who’ve been married longer than we have. There is less competition within those ranks and more support. However after reflecting on my conversation with Karen I realized that having good relationships with women whose children are in the same stage is also incredibly important. It is with these women that we can share battle stories and compare wounds and joys. As Karen said “Motherhood should be telling war stories with each other so you can help each other get through it. How else would you?”
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