It's Not Fair!

(Written for momaha.com)

We love story time. Well, sometimes we love story time. It’s actually quite a surprise each Friday at our neighborhood library. Some days, it’s fun and creative with a cool little craft; other days it’s long and boring and downright painful. Occasionally, I’m left wondering if the librarian of the day even likes children or if she’s ever practiced reading aloud.

My 2 ½-year-old daughter, Emma Claire, is oblivious to the good vs. the not-so-good. She simply doesn’t care. She’s happy to just be there. She sometimes forgets to listen to the story. Two weeks ago, she walked to the middle of the circle, lifted up her shirt and exclaimed, “These are my breasts!”


After a recent story and craft, Emma Claire became fixated on the baby playing next to us. I’ve seen this baby before and have often wondered why her mother brings her to a pre-school story hour. (Of course, I’m sure people are wondering the same about me since the librarian usually reminds me that toddler time is the next hour, which I’m thinking is their way of saying, “Your daughter and her breasts are driving us all crazy.”)

This is a cute baby, but his mother is young and she is struggling. She yells at him for crumpling his paper. She swats at him for trying to touch my daughter. She thinks he should act like the 3- and 4-year-olds surrounding him. She is overwhelmed, but she is there. She is trying. My heart aches for her.

And then she tells me, with a nervous giggle, that she’s pregnant. “Can you imagine?” she asks. No. I cannot. I am taken over by ugly emotions. I judge her. I think about my friends who can’t have babies and I wonder, “WHY?” She laughs again, this time revealing a mouth full of rotten teeth. Oh my gosh, is she on drugs? Does she do drugs in front of her baby? Is she on drugs right now?

Now, I am fuming. Why is it that so many women – women I know and love, smart women, loving women, on the ball mature enough to handle it not on drugs women — spend thousands and thousands of dollars only to be devastated month after month while other women — careless, too young, don’t even want a baby women — get pregnant with seemingly the bat of an eye?

As my children would say, “It’s NOT fair!”And maybe it’s not, but as I’ve told my children again and again, we should be thankful that life isn’t always fair because all I have to do is look at the two miracles that are my children to know that I have way more than I deserve.

Is this woman on drugs? Who knows and who am I to judge? Because if being a mother was only for the worthy then I would have surely been passed by. There’s no way I was smart enough, ready enough or together enough to be deemed worthy of motherhood.

We will never understand the “life’s not fair” moments, and perhaps we’re not supposed to. As I regularly bask in the joy of being a mommy, I know that I’m no more deserving than Library Mom.

But hallelujah for me — life’s not always fair.