Admit it: Being a stay at home mother sucks a lot of the time

ADMIT it. Being a stay at home mother is the most thankless, exhausting soul-sucking job there is. Em Rusciano knows.

Em Rusciano says it’s OK to hate being a Stay At Home Mother.

A FRIEND confessed to me this week that she only enjoys being a Stay At Home Mother for about eight minutes a day.

She loves the magical time when her nearly one-year-old first wakes up and then finds the following 12 hours a complete nightmare. She feels like her life has become about surviving and not about living.

“What am I doing wrong, Em? Why do I hate it so much? Am I a bad person?” she asked.

As I looked at my dead-eyed, three-day-old-trackie-wearing, greasy-haired pal I realised to my horror that she was under the impression she was supposed to be enjoying this time.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

NO.

Being a Stay at Home Mother (yep those b8tches get capital letters, they’ve earned it) is hands down the most thankless, exhausting, soul-sucking job there is.

Oh spare me your protests sanitary bin emptiers, professional bomb diffusers and Donald Trump’s wife: YOU GET PAID.

I’m not disputing that some of you out there genuinely LOVE being SAHMs, good for you. This is not a column designed to make you feel bad. No, this is a bunch of words put together to try and somehow make the others, the ones who are hiding from their children in the toilet questioning all that they hold dear reading this, feel better.

You guys, it’s totally fine to sometimes HATE being at home with your kids fulltime. This applies to those of you who work too.

Nowhere is it written that you’re a bad mother if you don’t always feel 100 per cent fulfilled by your children. Please, if you take nothing else away from me today just know that it’s OK to want more.

It’s not bad all the time, but when you’re in the domestic trenches, the washing is threatening to bury you alive, your child won’t leave your side and the dog had spewed all over the couch — you are allowed to hate it. You are well within your rights to feel as though you have made the biggest mistake of your life and yearn for the 9-5 work day you perhaps once had.

Kids are the best. Aren’t they? AREN’T THEY?!

For me, the thing I dreaded the most about being a SAHM was going to the bloody park.

Most suburban parks are joyless hell holes. They aren’t fun for anyone, Half the time I think the kids are faking their happiness for the benefit of their parents.

When you’re a SAHM sometimes the park is your only outing for the day, hell sometimes it’s your only outing for the week! You pack up all the crap you might need but rarely do, shove it in your nappy bag, load the spawn into the pusher and trudge to your local.

Upon arrival you will observe all the other SAHM’s, they’re easy to spot over nannies, babysitters and well meaning relatives. Look for the food stains on their tops, giant cups of coffee and the lack of will to live.

Then you have to actually PLAY with your kid. I mean let’s be real, the swing loses its novelty about three pushes in. I’m not ashamed to admit I sometimes pushed my kids a little too hard, just to scare them enough so that they’d want to get off.

Then we head to the slide, and I’m sorry but there’s nothing impressive about sitting at the top of a slope, gently pushing off and ending up at the bottom. It was going to happen anyway: Gravity.

The worst part though, the absolute BANE of my entire existence was playing cafes under the wooden jungle gym. Sitting down on the cold ground, counting out gumnuts to pay for my grass latte and then the ultimate insult: having to eat bark!

I WENT TO UNIVERSITY! I DON’T WANT TO EAT BARK YOU LITTLE D*** HEAD!

The good news is that there is a way to survive this time. You just need to look for the tiny spots of light and stand in them. The rays of sunshine can come in many different ways:

1. When your kids are clean and tucked in bed, smell their hair, read them a story, watch them drift off. You made that kid, they are safe and happy and warm. BOOM SUNSHINE.

2. When your kid is completely engaged in an activity stare at them hard. Take in their concentration face. What are their little hands doing? Are they smiling or serious? You are literally witnessing someone becoming someone! They’re independent of you in that moment, feeling something you didn’t create. How cool is that?! BOOM SUNSHINE.

3. When they’re not being demanding your kid(s) are probably close to being your best mates. Make time to just sit with them and hang out and ask them questions about their life. Things they wouldn’t expect. Be inquisitive, ask your four-year-old to show you how much toilet paper they use (that one was an eye opener for me and the answer to why we were going through 67 rolls a week).

Usually they are the ones asking 7,890,000 questions. So flip it and reverse it; their answers tend to be hysterical too. BOOM SUNSHINE.

The SAHM debate has been raging since for ever and I don’t understand why there needs to be two sides, it’s not that cut and dried.

Can we just agree that it’s soul destroying and exhilarating all at once. You just have to be OK with that, nestle in and roll around right to the edges of it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a working mother or a stay at home one, we’re all in the arena together. No-one has it any better or any worse, let’s be honest when you’re doing one of those things, you usually wish you were doing the other anyway.

Have less expectations of what it should be and just make your version of it bearable.

Em Rusciano is a comedian, writer, singer and regular news.com.au columnist. You can follow her on Facebook.