Motherhood Has Revoked My Cool Girl Card and Now I Am Boring

17-year-old me is raising an eyebrow at 32-year-old me while Taking Back Sunday blares through her headphones and she dreams of a bold life free of children and other apparent hindrances.

Nov 04, 2024

My teenage self has emerged from the shadows of her suburban stucco walls, sun-kissed face glistening from the Florida humidity and holding a ripe orange picked fresh from the grove, to ask me why I’m no longer cool.

She was right about a lot of things. How important it was to remain in her convictions about her own feelings, how she deserved to be taken more seriously, how she knew she didn’t want to hear “you’ll see when you’re older” because youth was hardly ever as glittery as promised.

I smile while she stares wide-eyed at me on my front porch, juice dripping from her mouth with a half-eaten fruit in her hand, so hungry and drooling for what lies beyond. She looks terrified that I appear to have become what she feared. I’m holding a tiny human that looks just like her and it seems like she’s about to demand answers for the lives she hoped she would have lived in the years between us.

I pat her on the head and she braces for a challenge, but I whisper into her reddening ears, “You were not wrong, but there are also choices you were never shown.”

I then steal the orange out of her sticky hand, take a huge bite and grin wildly while the pulp shreds between my teeth, Joni on my hip with her spiky punk hair climbing unabashedly toward the sky — and I swallow the rind.

I kick open my front door with the same loud, melodramatic essence I never grew out of, the same electric guitars in her headphones still churning from a vintage turntable, my husband in the kitchen looking like a disheveled 1960s film star mouthing the lyrics while tossing me a pacifier. She notices the tattoos and scars between us both. She looks back and forth between the mementos of dreams fulfilled, lining the walls, and the spunky baby in my arms. She looks out the window and sees vast October skies, mountains for miles. She sees manuscripts scattered on the floor, a mess on the counter of ink and melted butter. The fullness of it all, humming and tactile. Mouth agape and confused, she stares, frozen in place.

I’m sorry, am I boring you?

My life didn’t end in my youth, like so many adults promised it would. I didn’t believe them, so they called me naïve. It turns out that the world didn’t stop spinning in high school, or college, and the thought of considering those years my “glory days” that I’ll “always miss” makes me audibly groan. It feels reductive to tell a teenage girl what her life can or cannot hold without wafting through her daydreams; to condescend curiosity by injecting pessimism into possibility instead of elaborating on the nuances of growing older. Is that not the real death of innocence?

I reminisce on my own youth mostly with adoration. Cool and fun, I wanted to emit. Sometimes I cringe at the presentation of my former audacity and other times I want to hug the younger version of me and tell her that her might is power. But never once have I ever wished to go back.

There is nothing more cool and fun to me now than being a mom. I didn’t know back then that being a mom could be cool and fun, able to be balanced with big dreams. I didn’t know how motherhood could be a big dream. My small town that I grew up in fostered a happy childhood but provided no outlet for the future. Choice felt binary, only one or the other — motherhood or childless doom. From child to child-bearing wife.

What about the formative intermediate? What about the boys?

I dreamed anyway, all day every day. It felt like a rebellion. I scribbled poems onto my calculus homework and escaped into books and fantasized about all the places I could become someone new. I moved coast to coast and watched each life I discovered get crossed off my adventure quest, just to watch five more appear. In my mid-20s, like Esther Greenwood, I began to panic that I might not have time to be everything. I shook the fig tree and knocked myself out.

How could I ever decide what matters most when the reward always comes after the choosing?

Teenage me is still standing in my kitchen, waiting for answers, and I tell her that there is no singular answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I tell her that she has more than one choice. That she can be more than one thing. That she can be different people at different times and still she will remain the same.

I tell her that there is no “just” being anything. There is no such thing as “just” being a mother, and that I didn’t want to be a mother when I was 17. I didn’t want to hear that motherhood was life’s “most precious gift” when I hadn’t yet lived beyond flat cow pastures and mosquito fields.

I wish motherhood wasn’t described as an expected concept piece painted only in black and white with a bland straight line trailing down an otherwise blank canvas begging for color and curves — because it is anything but.

I love being a mother. I don’t know if I would have loved being a mother back then, or even five years ago. But I do know that we are allowed to change our minds about who we want to become, or what we want, whenever we want.

When I was 17, I didn’t want to be boring. I didn’t mean to offend those who wanted to become moms before I did. If I had known what I knew now, I perhaps would’ve offered them more softness. I was only trying to survive, find my way, make my own decisions. Maybe they didn’t get a choice. Maybe they did, and it was simply different than my own. Maybe the adults failed all of us at presenting the possibilities.

I cannot over-intellectualize my desire to become a mom; it suddenly sprung upon me. I met a man I loved so much that I wanted to marry him and have his babies. That’s it. Before him, no, the 17-year-old boy who preposterously hated Lady Gaga and laughed at butt jokes in the back of my Chemistry classroom didn’t make me dream of becoming a pregnant wife. I was only dreaming of Chemistry.

Today, my life is anything but boring. Motherhood is anything but boring. I’m finding myself fitting everything else around my new identity, not replacing it. I’m a person with a thousand other selves waiting to be discovered. But the one at the forefront right now is Mom.

In my present, motherhood is not a trap. It is something that has set me free. It has made me confident, assured, high-octane in all the right places. And still I want more. I am still dreaming. I want my words in books, on shelves, on screen. I want my daughter to hold my dreams in her hand and know she has no limitations. I want her to dream now, too.

“More, more, more, she always wants more. She’s never satisfied.” — Stop! I scream to my inner critic, I am simply racing borrowed time.

So call me boring. Call me a woman of the mundane, folding onesies and speaking in babble. I am a purveyor of rattles and play-mats. Call me boring because my clothes have changed from crop tops and mini skirts to last week’s pajamas on repeat. Call me boring because my passport is gathering dust and my high from wild nights in foreign cities has turned into an uninterrupted hot shower after 8PM.

Right now, I am not eating crickets in a Thai market or spilling stouts all over the field outside an Oxford windowpane. I am not counting my years in boxes and packing tape. I am not going to bed when the sun rises or sleeping in splashes of champagne and sequins, charging in the night rain.

Instead, I am spilling over with stories to share with my daughter, my husband, my future self. I am celebrating the present, the simplicities, the privileges of a quiet life. Joni’s first hand grab. Her first coo. Her first everything. Me, a witness for all that is new and untarnished. My own new life, waiting to be discovered. Continuously redefining what is cool.

I tell my younger self that I have never felt cooler than I do right now. I grew a human being with my body. I fed her with my body. I watch her cling to my body like my body is a life-force — because it is. I watched a human try to dance out of my body legs first, then get cut-out of my body while I was awake. I heard my daughter take her first breath. I felt her first heartbeat. I watched her go from nothing to everything.

So, sure, call me boring as I sit on my cozy couch in marital, motherly bliss. Holding the two people I love without abandon close to my chest, eyes drifting shut.

To my younger self, I’ll watch you traverse the world and back and I’ll wait for you to join me here on this cushion. You are never one best version of yourself. You are only self, always evolving and learning and trying on faces. Run it out of your system. You will love it, and then you will keep on living. You will find something new to love. Over and over again.

These days, I rock in the dark, writing poetry on my Notes app in a nursery decorated with baby dragons, covered in baby drool. My hair is unkempt in a knot on top of my head. My hormones are out of control and my stomach is spongy. My brain is nowhere to be found.

I am boring. And still, I am the rockstar center of my daughter’s world.

I can’t think of anything cooler than that.

Xo,

Violet Carol

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