I Want to be a Mother

The other day I walked into the daycare where I work. I hadn’t been there for a week and a half, and I could hear and identify “my” babies crying.
         I have the greatest children at my daycare. Darrian has acid reflux. I’m lucky to make it through the day without being covered in a sour milky-white substance. Magen is spoiled and loves to be held…all the time. But she has the sweetest smile in the world. When she’s sad, though, she buries her head in her hands and fills her diaper with something that smells like dying. LaLa, short for LaNecia, is my puffy cheeked one and a half year old. She loves to cuddle, but, more importantly, she loves me.
         When I walked into the back of the daycare, through the red-painted gate to the baby room, LaLa smiled as wide as her fat cheeks would allow and ran to me as fast as her fat legs could carry her. She held her hands above her head and yelled the only word she knows, “Lala!”
         I picked her up, thinking only one thing in the world could be better than this: If the child in my arms were mine; if she had my eyes and my husband’s nose, his ears and my flat thumbs.
         Working at a daycare is great. But the greatest job I could ever do, if God blesses me with the chance to do it, is to be a mother.
         I took the job at the daycare for the same reason I take any job—to learn. I worked as a seamstress so I could sew my own clothes. I worked at Starbucks so I could figure out how to work my freaking espresso machine at home. And I work at the daycare so that one day when I have my own children, I won’t screw it all up.
         My job is simple enough. Some responsibilities I have are changing diapers every hour and keeping track of the sleeping and eating schedule. In the baby room, we have a sheet for every child where I write down whether they were wet or whether they exploded in their pants, and I had to change their clothes.
         Working at a daycare isn’t easy though. I have to be more patient than I think most mothers do. When you have eight screaming one year olds and four poopy babies in one room, and you are required to follow DHS’s rules and not kill them all, patience is your only ally.
         Discipline, too, is a very demanding responsibility. It’s incredibly hard to maintain consistency with other people’s children, then send them home where your version of consistency may be thrown out the window.
And DHS’s rules, though they keep me from murder, do not work on some children. I am only allowed to give one minute of timeout per year of age. Once I had a child bite a baby’s fingers. She broke the skin and if I hadn’t have stopped her, she would have bitten to the bone. But timeout meant nothing to her. She sat there smiling at the wall and never connected the discipline to her actions. After the child continued biting, I told the mother that this form of discipline was not working for her child. She agreed with me, but there was nothing I could do about it.
         However, apart from doing the job itself, I’ve learned a lot about children while working at the daycare. They love snack time. It doesn’t bother them to hear the same song or story over and over again. They can fill a diaper so full with an alien substance that it overflows onto their clothing. They love to hug and sit on people’s laps. They are all different.
         Some throw tantrums when they don’t get what they want. Some stop what they’re doing at the very sound of their name. Some love attention. Some can entertain themselves. And then some throw up on me everyday.
         But the one thing I have learned while working there, above anything else, is that I will never be completely ready or prepared to have my own children (mine don’t go home at 6:00pm). Every child is a person. It has to be a God-given gift for one screwed-up human being to take care of another person’s life. I hope God blesses me with that gift when I’m ready to start my family. Because to me, being a mother would be the greatest job, no, the greatest privilege I can think of having.