Rainbows & Unicorns: We Are Not Superheroes…

Sometime during the fall of last year, I read something that really upset me. I was in the middle of some struggle—teething, or bad anxiety, or feeling like I’d messed something up or something wasn’t going right, just…something. As I often do in times of high emotion, I opened a new post screen and wrote out a simple title: “We Aren’t Superheroes.”

And there the blinking cursor was, just waiting for the content.

I can’t tell you if I wrote anything or if it always remained blank, but there the draft sat. There it sat, months, untouched. Empty. Waiting…waiting for the right time.

The right time was when I stumbled across a fresh post from Lauren of OnFecundThought, also another member from the Rainbows & Unicorns team. Her poem on sleep deprivation broke my heart, in particular when she mentioned that she should be grateful.

And that’s when I returned to this post. Unwashed baby bottles filled one half of the sink, dirty dishes filled the other half. My dinner was only half-eaten, the show I’d DVR’d paused midway through. I brought up the dusty old draft with a “last edited” date of mid-October and wrote. Fiercely, with empathy, with the struggles and emotions I’d dealt with and felt, and the struggles and emotions I’d seen others deal with and feel over the last several years—I fucking wrote.

So here it is.

It starts shortly after you get that first positive test, when you feel that first bout of morning sickness. You shrug it off, because you know you’re lucky to be feeling so sick. You hang your head over the toilet, heaving for hours, but you don’t falter. You’re hyperaware of so many who haven’t (or can’t) experienced it themselves. As you wipe the vomit from your lips with a dish towel and eyeball the sleeve of saltines on your kitchen counter, you remind yourself: I need to own this.

You can read the rest of the post here. I hope you’re able to relate, to find some comfort in knowing you’re not alone in thinking that despite the gratitude we feel and how wonderful it is to have the opportunity to be parents, this parenting gig can be some tough, heavy shit sometimes. ❤

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