The Road to The Arnold is Paved with Gratitude

So some of you may have caught a glimpse of the little bio Rogue did on me as I prepare for my next meet, The 2017 Arnold Classic. I thought the final cut came out great and I am grateful that the light they shed was positive and somehow made me seem special and like I do something that is extraordinary. The response has been great overall, of course there are always a few rotten eggs, but nothing to write home about. The story they told focused on the intricate "balance" of having a marriage, some children, a career, and of course training.

A good majority of the feedback is centered around how "badass" I am for being a Mother and having a career and somehow finding the time and desire to go after these huge powerlifting goals. All of this is good, all of this is positive. Of course I can't help but reflect on what the road to the "Road to The  Arnold" has been like and my reflections took me all the way back to my very early days of Mothering. The evolution of becoming a Mother is near and dear to my heart and new Mothers make me cry my eyes out at the drop of a hat. So I'm going to talk about that a bit.

I remember when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, Taylor Ann. I had a pretty good idea that I was pregnant a good while before science could tell me. I put off taking the test, because I will be candid and say that this was not planned and the anxiety was real. I put it off until I knew that it was very unlikely that I could get a wrong reading on the test.

On my lunch break, I left my office, stopped by Walgreens to pick up a test and then went to my glorious one bedroom apartment in a hip neighborhood in Nashville. You see, I was COOL. I had a job, I made decent money, had my little apartment, and did whatever I wanted literally ALL THE TIME. If I wanted to go to dinner on Monday, fine. If I wanted to go wander through Target on Tuesday at 8:17pm, done. If I wanted to eat hot fries and drink beer for dinner, great! I was happy with my life, I specifically remember thinking how I should soak this time in because it was precious and not likely to last forever.

I went into to the bathroom of MY apartment, and read the instructions on the test. It said to let the pee flow a little before putting the stick under and then wait 3 minutes and I would have my results. So I followed the instructions to a tee because that's just who I am as a person. POSITIVE. Wait! Where is my three minutes?!?!?!? I needed those! I needed those three minutes like I needed air in my lungs!

And that was the last time anything was ever truly mine.

When you are growing a human, it feels like a pretty important job. It sorta feels like someone's life depends on it. It's terrifying. The moment I got that positive test, my needs no longer mattered. I was serving this little tiny beautiful life and I took the job very seriously.

I don't want to be cynical, but society has somehow managed to take the 40 weeks of gestation and turned it into this period of torture and pain and I swear if women could get an epidural at 20 weeks at a drive through window the line would wrap the earth. I will admit that I had my own moments of resentment while pregnant, and I suppose that's normal.

My heart breaks a little when women get impatient and want to have the baby sooner. It only breaks because I know what is to come! I often say, it's easier to take care of them in there than it is out here. While you are pregnant, you are special. Friends and family pampered me, strangers talked to me (and touched me), people threw parties for me, it was a special time, as it should have been. I felt like a queen. A huge, water retaining, cookie eating queen. It was glorious.

Fast forward to baby having time. The birth of my daughter was long and did not go the way I planned (shocker, I know). I had so much family (gasoline) at the hospital waiting for me to have this baby, that they took up the entire waiting room. They were making friends with the staff, they were ordering pizzas and playing games.

After a long night and a long day, I finally managed to have my gorgeous little baby girl. Everyone came in the room. Someone was holding the baby and they all crowed around as I sit in the bed, alone, looking from across the room as they all coo over the new family member.

Motherhood is hard. Way harder than lifting weights. Way harder than anything I've ever done. When I became a Mother, I struggled with the picture that I painted in my mind of what is was suppose to be like and the vastly different reality that I was living. In the early days I made myself absolutely crazy by comparing myself to this 'ideal' that I quite frankly made up.

In my attempts to make everything absolutely perfect, I managed to bury the woman that lived in that apartment and that was happy with her life. The lines of being a Mother, being the woman before you were a Mother, and being the one that is both are blurry. On the one hand, I loved this little baby more than I can express, I loved the new life she breathed into my extended family, I loved how adorable she was and couldn't believe that I somehow had something to do with.

On the other hand. I was hungry. I was tired. I wanted to do whatever I wanted. I wanted hot fries and trips to Target at 8:17pm. I wanted to feel like myself again. But the truth is, becoming a Mother is shedding one skin for another. You're still you, but different. It took me sometime to learn who the Mother Jennifer was.

Because babies are babies, they don't know how to talk, dress themselves, feed themselves, or tell you thank you. They do cry and not sleep and eat and sometimes not eat and spit up and are very good at sending mixed signals. But, as the Mother, you are their person. You are the person they need the most. It's exhausting. It is a season of serving. It is a season of foregoing your own needs for those of your helpless little child who depends on you for their own life experiences.

After about 12 weeks off I returned to work. At first, it was great. I felt like a human again. I remembered that I could do stuff on an excel sheet. I could answer phones and use my brain to think about things and draw conclusions. That was pretty short lived. I was then hit with the stress and guilt and anxiety of someone else caring for MY baby. Then there was the whole nursing/pumping saga. The stress and pressure that I put on myself to be everything to everyone was too much and I was unhappy. From here, I try to find a combination of working and mothering that will work for my life. My children are 8 and 5 and I think I've finally nailed down the combination that works.

Fast forward to being pregnant with my second child....my Leo. I had moved away from family and was super sad about that for a few months. After that I adjusted and started to feel more confident. The process of moving away from everything I knew somehow forced me into shedding another layer and brought me closer to figuring out how to be me again.

While I was pregnant with our son, my husband started doing crossfit. He would come home and tell me these stories about the workout and how his name got circled because he won. His physique started looking super hot. He was in a good mood. He would talk about the women in the class and tell me how they couldn't do a pull up. I thought, I can do a pull up. So I thought that maybe after I had this baby, I would maybe give crossfit a shot.

I did in fact walk into a crossfit gym. I was terrified that another baby or poop would fall out of me the second I attempted to do anything that required any exertion. I was pretty sure I looked dumb and like a wet noodle at everything I was doing. I was terrified that my shirt would be covered in milk if I had to do any sort of running or jumping. But none of that happened at all. While I was never very good at anything that required endurance....if it required strength, I dominated. I did a push/pull and that was it. I was hooked.

It has taken some time and another move back home and some tears and some fights and few million career re-directions, and scheduling adjustments, and more scheduling adjustments, and early mornings, and late nights to get to this place I am now.....but I am here now.

I am writing this to say that as Mothers, we all face this same struggle. The struggle of giving it all away. The struggle of making the decision to work full time or not. The struggle to do something for ourselves. The struggle to consider our own needs.

Through these struggles, I have learned that I am no good when I am not happy. I have learned that I am a much better Mother and wife when I am well nourished, rested, feel loved, and feel confident. I learned that in order to love my family the most, I must take care of myself first.

I have been very intentional in the last three years of figuring out a combination of caring for my family, making money, and training that would somehow work for all of us. I found that when I defined what was most valuable to me, I could work backwards from there to put everything into place.

I knew that my time was of the most value. I knew that I did not want a position in which I was exchanging time for money. From here I was able to negotiate a position that allows me to work from home and work on a commission. This frees me up to pick my children up from school and avoid wasting my life sitting in traffic or driving across town for hours picking them up from various family members.

Training. Training is very valuable to me, but my time is more important. I train early in the mornings because carving out this niche of time while my family is still sleeping gives me the freedom to train without sacrificing too much parenting time. While I am training, I am free to be Jennifer. All the way just Jennifer. This is very important for the Mother Jennifer to be the Mother. Do I sound insane yet?

Being intentional about what I define as the most valuable to me has been life changing. I am surrounded by others that are also being intentional. I go to a gym at 5am in a man's basement! That means that everyday people go to this man's home at 5am! I am sure there have been times when Wade wanted to burn the gym down, but I assure is he intentional about the way that gym operates. I don't train alone, I train with a team. A whole team of people who have decided that they value training enough to be there at 5am too.

I have a husband who I know is intentionally supportive of my training and competing. I know that he is intentional because I can promise you there are times he wishes I were home in the mornings and that I would just be a normal wife and mother and didn't want to also be a powerlifter. You see, this means putting your feelings aside and being intentionally supportive. This is being the gasoline.

So while it may seem as though I am making a sacrifice and I am doing something extraordinary, I would beg to differ. I face the same struggle every Mother faces. I face the same struggle as the Mother who works full time because she wants to provide for her family or because she is a bad ass at her job or because she just loves it. I face the same struggle as the Mother who works full time in the home and wonders if she is doing enough.  I face the same struggle as every Mother who has the inner dialogue between the woman she was before she was a Mother, the one she is as a Mother, and the one who is both.

I would say that getting up at 3:45am and heading to gym to train is far from a sacrifice and rather a privilege. To have this life that I have built, with the team of people who make it all possible is something that makes my heart burst with gratitude. To be able to care for my children, to have a career, to be able to pursue these crazy dreams.......what a privilege! A privilege that is well earned and well earned day after day.

So love your Momma! Cuz this shit is hard.      

Road to The Arnold