Applicant #25: Karla Briggs

Karla Briggs is a mom from Milton.

My video application:

A bit about me:

Momming it up, one day at a time. Hi, I'm Karla! I live near Tacoma and I love to laugh. Loudly. Sometimes awkwardly. But I enjoy a good time. I love to eat, run, (and run so I can eat), read, watch movies, and surf the internets. My husband and I have one 16 month old, and are hoping to have another bun in the oven, soon.

My blog post:

Charting the course of motherhood

When I was first pregnant, I thought it was calming to know that the whole “mother” thing had already been done for thousands of years before me. I told myself “well, if she can do it, I can do it.” And I went about my gestating reassuring myself that everything would be okay. Because really, if I allowed myself to think too much about my new role as a mom, and all the responsibilities, I’d probably start freaking out at random times throughout my day.

So when the big day came and I left the hospital with my daughter, there was a part of me that was a bit surprised that the nurses didn’t hand me the mothering manual I had suspected they issued to all newly minted moms. Instead, what I found during the first few weeks were a lot of people with very strong convictions: you MUST breastfeed, you MUST keep the TV off in your house, you MUST use thrice filtered spring water from a specific well hidden in the Alps in which to wash your infant’s clothing. Because if you DON’T do these things, who KNOWS what will happen! But you can be sure to cross any school with “Ivy League” off your kid’s college list.

Then the unthinkable happened: life! I didn’t produce any milk and I had to use (gasp!) formula. I was a lonely stay-at-home mom and needed to watch a few TV shows to stem the lonely isolation. And I never did find the source of that Alpine water I was supposed to use.

Yet my kid has, so far, turned out fine. Healthy. Happy. And I learned an important lesson, one of many as a new mom. The key is love: love your kid, love yourself, do the best you can, and it’ll all be okay. Which I guess isn’t long enough to put in a new parent manual, but perhaps hospitals could monogram it on a keepsake towel for the first-timers? Or at least put it in on a nice wall plaque or something.

Karla