Real Moms Don't Wear Lipstick!

First and foremost, why did I call my book Real Moms Don't Where Lipstick? It speaks to the idea that when we become Moms we give up a lot. A lot of our former self. In some cases, we become a shell of our former self where things that were important before, just aren't. Like putting on lipstick! Who has time! I feel like so many Moms can relate to this, even gorgeous celebrity Moms. When you have a child your identity completely shifts, even if you maintain the same status at work, something in your core dramatically changes. For so many of us, the old self becomes last priority and for a lot of Moms that means giving up a lot - working out, clothes shopping, going out with friends, looking cute. But it doesn't have to! It's all about finding the balance. What I mean by that is not time management. I mean, finding out what works for YOU to be the happiest Mom YOU can be. And to start, we have to stop comparing ourselves to others, because what works for one woman, won't necessarily work for you.

We women love to do this endless comparison game. Whether it's about each other's outfits, boyfriends, husbands, careers, children. It's how we size ourselves up - by sizing each other up. Let's face it, don't you look other women up and down and make an almost immediate judgement about who they are, what they do, if you are better or worse than them? Immediately feelings like admiration, envy, adoration, curiousity pop up. As women we are infinitely curious about ourselves and our inner workings and we often try to discover more of ourselves through other women and how alike or disalike we are.

My Mom always boosted my ego and told me I was great. However, one day she said, "There will always be someone prettier than you." There was great freedom in that statement because I was able to take myself off the hook for constantly and never-endingly competing in the looks department. I applied it to other areas as well. "There will always be someone smarter, more successful, etc." The idea is that the only person you have to compete with is yourself - to be the best YOU you can be. you were born with certain assets and some of those are fixed. I have fair, freckled skin. I'm not going to have smooth olive skin no matter how hard I try. But I can play on my features to be the most attractive ME I can be. Freedom.

Same goes with Motherhood. You can be the best Mom YOU can be. Not the Mom your neighbor or best friend is. Stop trying to be someone else and embrace who you are.

CDD - CONSTANT DISTRACTION DISORDER

Hudson and I were on the go from the 2^nd week of his little life. Now, by on the go, it’s not like I was dressing him up and sending him off to prep school. No! I would bundle him up safely and comfortably and put him in his car seat and put him in the comfort of our beautiful escalade and go for a car ride…sometimes a very long car ride. Looking back, I don’t think it was so much that Hudson was a newborn and didn’t like being in the car. I think it was that Hudson was a newborn and lived for eating and sleeping, both of which were disrupted by long periods of time in the car…which is why I often pulled over into random parking lots and neighborhoods to nurse him! The things you do!

It wasn’t until Hudson was 4 months old that I realized that flying by the seat of my pants wasn’t really working for either of us anymore. That’s when I got religion, and by religion I mean I put Hudson on a sleep and eat schedule and it changed our lives. ALL NEW MOMS LISTEN UP. If you don’t read any other blog of mine, read the one on sleep training. Bbecause if you’re like me or any other new Mom, you have serious sleep deprivation, ADD and CDD (constant-distraction-disorder…that one I made up!)

ATTENTION MOTHERS OF CRYING BABIES!

I don’t think there is any way to condition yourself to hear your baby cry. It’s not something you can prepare yourself for either, which is why there aren’t any “baby crying” self help CD’s on the market for new Moms. Sure, you’ve heard babies cry – on airplanes, in restaurants - but until it’s YOUR baby, it’s just white noise – something in the background so familiar to you, you don’t even hear it. Well, when it’s your baby, believe me, YOU HEAR IT. It is the most disturbing, distracting sound you’ve ever heard!!!!!! And unless you have one of those “perfect” babies – what are THOSE anyway??!! – your baby WILL cry. They will cry at first because they have no other way to express themselves. This is how they get their point across, and boy do they!

When my baby was first born, he would scream and cry bloody murder in the car. I KNOW, most babies fall asleep in the car. In fact, a lot of Moms go for car rides in order to put their babies to sleep. Well, not my baby. And the worst part about the car rides (from hell) is that we had to do so many of them. When Hudson was born, we were living with our in laws (that’s a whole different blog entry!) Our house was being remodeled and it wasn’t a suitable place to bring an infant home to. Very fortunately for us, we had somewhere else to go. But unfortunately for us, that somewhere else was far away. Our in laws lived about one hour from our house, without traffic. That’s an oxymoron since we live in LA – there is always traffic. So depending on what time of day we would commute between the two houses, the drive could take up to 1.5 to 2 hours. With a screaming infant in the backseat, you can only imagine the types of guns I fantasized about putting to my head on a bad day (that’s a joke by the way!)

Part of the reason we had to drive back and forth between the two houses so much was because I had to manage the remodel project and make sure everything was on track. The other reason why is because I had to get out of the house!