A mother’s love looks so…….

ordinary.

It looks like late nights and early mornings. A mother’s love looks like cutting up food into bite size pieces and kissing boo boos. It looks like staying home on a Friday night to play Candyland and eat ice cream. It looks like burp cloths and breast pads and tubes of nipple cream scattered all over the living room.

A mother’s love looks like rereading the same bedtime stories until you all can recite them from memory. It looks like building Magnatile towers and cleaning Playdough off the kitchen floor. It’s knowing you should put the baby down for a nap, but you just can’t quite bring yourself to do it. 

It looks like practicing letters and numbers and colors and shapes over and over again. It’s your toddler pleading “mommy lay down,” at bedtime and the baby reaching for you with her chubby, slobbery little hands. It’s getting excited with every milestone your child makes, but also a little sad because with each new thing they learn, they need you just a little bit less.

A mother’s love looks like tirelessly searching for a good dairy-free pizza for your allergic 3-year-old, knowing you’d search forever if it meant you got to see his face light up with excitement like that again. It’s scheduling pediatrician appointments and remembering to buy bandaids at the store. It’s windows and a sliding glass door that is covered in little handprints and doggie slobber.

It’s feeling the crunch of Cheerios under your feet and tripping over LEGOs and Matchbox cars. A mother’s love looks like the never ending collection of bottles and pump parts sitting next to the kitchen sink, waiting to be washed. It’s waking up with a sore back after sleeping next to your feverish toddler all night.

A mother’s love looks like just one more cup of coffee because you were camped out in the nursery with a clingy baby until 4 am. It’s hanging scribbled pictures up on the fridge and finding little socks everywhere. A mother’s love looks like the never ending accumulation of tiny clothes to fold and a camera roll full of too many pictures of your kids. 

It looks like joy and patience and sorrow and heartbreak. And in this season of mothering young children, it’s exhausting and all-consuming. But one day that will change. Because while right now a mother’s love looks like baby cuddles and coloring and not nearly enough sleep, one day it will look like handing over the car keys to a very excited 16-year-old. It will look like being a shoulder to cry on after a breakup, and sending your “they were just babies,” off to college. So while a mother’s love requires a lot from me right now, I will savor it because one day a mother’s love will look like letting go.

I can finally understand what my mom was talking about all the times she said “someday you’ll understand.” And more than anything, I hope my children will one day have the privilege of understanding what this love feels like. Because I’m only 3 years into loving these kids, and I already know it’s the greatest thing I will ever do.

So you see, a mother’s love may consist of a million little ordinary moments. But it is anything but ordinary. A mother’s love is harder and more beautiful than I ever thought it could be. It is infinite and powerful and it changes a person forever. A mother’s love is single-handedly the greatest love that exists.  

Nope, there’s nothing ordinary about it.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Love Looks Like".