Mommification

A state of static existence that occurs after becoming a mommy—mommified. This term popped into my brain a while ago, and the more I think about the term, the more I warm up to it. A state of existence in which you are neither dead nor alive, but wrapped up in the sometimes suffocating bindings of a mommy. Sometimes these bindings are physical, sometimes mental, sometimes a combination. An example of a physical manifestation would be the extra postnatal pounds we carry around as a souvenir following the birth of each child. The mental would be the idea that now that we are post-delivery of an 8 pound human being, we have morphed into asexual beings that can no longer wear a bikini.

Now, I am not vilifying motherhood here; far be it from me to go down the disastrous road of my Baby Boomer foremothers. However, I think we still have a long way to go in striking a balance between being a mommy (and defining exactly what that is, and if there is even one definition that fits all) and who we were as individuals pre-mommification. Perhaps mommification is an inevitable state of being. I have rid myself of some of the physical bindings, but having self-christened myself a slacker mom, feel I have a long way to go in escaping the mental ones. Then again, no one said being mommified was either a good thing or a bad thing or perhaps it’s both. After all, yes, we are covered in uniformly tightly wrapped linen bindings making us indistinguishable from one another, but underneath those bindings is a tautly bound hot Egyptian princess…so what if she’s petrified?