YOU MAY BE A MOM IF...

My youngest and I were tracking through WalMart behind a young mother with four little children. On the dairy aisle, Helen leaned over and whispered, "I think I've heard 'Mom!' shouted fourteen times in the last five minutes!"

I laughed. I remember days when my own children were small, when I thought the incessant "Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" would drive me crazy. Occasionally, I would announce, "My name is not Mom today. I changed it, and I am not telling anyone what it is!"

Yesterday, I was working on an article about coffee. Specifically, about how many times I reheat a cup of coffee in a given morning, before I actually have a quiet moment to sit down and drink said coffee. Which got me to thinking...

YOU MAY BE A MOM IF:
(in no particular order, because moms don't have time for that kind of nonsense)

• You have ever exchanged "Mom" for a secret name known only to yourself.
• You have ever heated your cup of coffee more than five times before drinking it - or - you completely forgot about your cup of coffee in the microwave (eg., found Monday morning's coffee sitting cold and forlorn in the microwave on Tuesday morning).
• You pick spinach off of other people's teeth or boogers out of other people's noses.
• You seem to have an inordinate preoccupation with poop...not your own, but everyone else's in the family.
• You have ever locked yourself in the bathroom, not to use the toilet but to have two minutes alone to yourself so you can breathe.
• You are the only person in your house who knows that light switches and electronics have an off position as well as an on position.
• You have a secret stash of chocolate in the freezer or on the top shelf of the pantry.
• You make a circuit to flush all the toilets before you leave the house.
• You have ever woken up terrified at 3:00 am because a small child was standing next to your bed staring silently into your face.
• You sleep with "mom ears" - no matter how exhausted you are when you fall into bed at the end of the day, you are suddenly wide awake at the sound of the faintest bad-dream or tummy-ache whimper from down the hall.
• Your idea of an all-nighter is getting five consecutive hours of uninterrupted sleep.
• More times than you can remember, your lunch has consisted of half-eaten PBJs and leftover Cheetos that got lost in the clutter on the kitchen table.
• You have ever held the hem of your shirt up to a small person's snotty face and said, "Blow!"
• You have ever caught throw-up in your hands.
• Little people have waked you up in the middle of reading a bedtime storybook because you fell asleep and they did not.
• Comments like "Do you want me to pick up pizza on the way home?" - or - "Let me take care of baths and bedtime with the kids tonight" - or - "Here, sit down and enjoy a glass of wine while I wash the dishes" are sooooo much more romantic than "You sure do make those jeans look good, Baby!"
• You feel like the inside of your heart is bigger than the entire universe because of the space your children occupy in it.