Motherhood Changes You

Motherhood changes you. Before you give birth/adopt, you assume that change is about how you've always got this little person depending on you now. Right after you give birth/adopt, you think it's about the overwhelming love you are feeling. A few months later, you realize the change is actually in the shape of your body and in your ability to function on forty-five minutes of sleep. The changes then accelerate and multiply, until one day you catch yourself making fart jokes with your kids.

I mean, I didn't even fart in front of another human being until I was 30 (for those of you keeping score at home, yes, that does mean that I survived my entire first marriage without farting in front of him). I never really laughed at fart jokes (sex jokes were and are a different story). I certainly didn't make them.

Until my kids began to find them the funniest things on the planet. Well, fart jokes and the word "poop" in any context. At first, I merely sighed resignedly as my husband and kids cracked up about farts. Then I started grinning, just a little bit, because it's impossible not to smile when the rest of the family is laughing.

Hugmonkey had just yelled, "Poop!" 

Somewhere along the way, "Read it funny" happened. Hot Guy and I have always done accents and strange voices when reading to the children. He's an actor, I'm a former high school drama nerd, we like to turn read alouds into mini-performances. But in the last year or so, Hot Guy started changing the words of the stories he read over and over. Usually by adding in some fart jokes. As a writer this kind of horrified me, but I got over it when the kids reacted with so much joy. I even started to make my own changes here and there, though I generally avoided scatological humor.

Until the other night when Lovebug expressed disappointment that Daddy wasn't there to read the current family favorite, Big Bad Wolf Is Good. "I wanted him to read it funny, Mom," he explained when I said I would be happy to read it again.

"I can read it funny," I said confidently. Meanwhile, years of prissy behavior flashed through my head. The years of holding in farts and stopping my students from talking about this stuff and rolling my eyes at fart jokes and not discussing my ulcerative colitis because it's totally about poop and never leaving the door to the bathroom open and horror when my kid farted at the dinner table and fear of turning into the family on Honey Boo Boo. Then my son looked at me with a mixture of hope and shock. He handed me the book.

In the book, which is really cute (and you should use my link above if you want to buy it because then I will make 15 cents), Big Bad Wolf decides he wants friends. At the beginning, he theorizes he has no friends because, "Perhaps it's because I'm big and scary." I added in, "and have a stinky butt." All three kids laughed out loud. I felt like supermom.

So now, even though I'm not as good as Daddy, I get requests for "read it funny" when he's not around. My prissy side, which I thought was part of my DNA, has crawled off into the sunset, weeping. And the phrase "stinky butt" now makes me laugh too. Motherhood does change you.