Share the Good Stuff Too – Mommy Blogger

03/17/2020

Jillian Guenter. I’m a 24-year-old wife and new mom to our daughter “Baby G”, as I refer to her in my blogs.  She is the new adventure in our marriage and the smile bringer to our everyday.  She is the main character in my stories lately, as she teaches me something new every day.  I love writing about her and the everyday happenings of mommy life, so I’m extremely excited to join this blogging group!

In this age of #filterfree, we praise stories that, at least claim to be, raw, unaltered truth.  The act of sharing our struggles and weaknesses with each other has benefits beyond what I could write about in a blog, so I won’t.  But there is a side-affect to this, somewhat of an unspoken credence society has come to accept, that it’s better to tell the bad than the good…in the name of truth of course.  It’s as though the simple, good stories without tear-jerking captions, have become, well, boring.  And it affects the mommy-world in a way I’d like to address.  Here it is.

With the utmost respect for every mom, every pregnancy, every struggle, every heart-break and every experience that any mom has ever gone through, there are a lot more good stories out there than bad.  We just don’t here them.  If I was a childless millennial considering having a kid who decided to peruse through mommy chat rooms and Facebook groups for some idea about whether I wanted to pursue having a child or not, I would probably decide against it.  The Internet is absolutely full of stories about ladies who gained an enormous amount of weight through pregnancy and two years later haven’t been able to shed a pound of it.  Instagram has no shortage of pictures of moms bravely sharing photos of their post-baby bodies that would make a kidless woman scared to risk putting her body through that.  Story after story has been posted about horrendous birthing experiences that would frighten even the bravest woman from ever attempting to have a child.  And it’s all in the name of truth and sharing, and there certainly is some good to it.  But it’s terrifying, and it hugely misrepresents what becoming a mom is most often like.  If I were giving advice to that childless millennial considering having a kid I’d say, there’s way more good than bad.

Here’s some truth.  And this stuff’s good.  Lots of women have relatively easy labours that they’re able to recover from in weeks.  Some of us actually get into the best shape we’ve ever been in post baby because being a mom keeps you on your feet 24/7.  There’s a pretty good chance your body will go basically back to the way it was before a baby and you might not even have to starve yourself to do it.  The image Hollywood loves to play up of the over-tired, zombie-looking lady who is desperately trying to make herself a cup of coffee amidst diaper blow-outs and failed attempts to breast-feed is also incredibly inaccurate in most cases.  First off, 99% of moms would make that cup of coffee before all the chaos and it would solve a lot of the problems.  Second, many of us don’t have a whole lot of trouble breast-feeding based on the fact that many babies are complete and total milk-monsters and will do pretty much anything for some mommy milk.  Thirdly, the zombie look isn’t great.  But in reality, many of us wore make-up pre-baby and continue to wear make-up post baby and don’t look model-worthy without it whether there’s a baby around or not.  Oh, and diaper blow-outs happen, but buy quality diapers, make sure they’re done up tight and on straight, and you’ll only have to deal with a few.

Again, I completely understand that each and every mommy-experience is different and that some are a million times more difficult than others.  But the fact is that we’re unnecessarily scaring young women out of having children in the name of “true stories” and we’re discouraging women who have relatively simple and easy stories from telling there’s.

So to the woman out there wondering if having a baby is a good idea, it’s awesome. There are a few difficulties babies bring into your lives, but a million more reasons to love being a mom so darn much.