For the Sake of the Ovaries ... Please Stop

Dear You,

I'm reaching out to you as a desperate woman.

You see, I have four kiddos. I love them madly. Sometimes I want to freak out because I didn't know it was humanly possible to love so much.

Mixed in with all that love is a quiet desperation. While my children are some of the greatest joys of my life, parenting is slowly killing me. Which I'm pretty sure it's supposed to do. Parenting is about learning to sacrifice joyfully for someone else's needs. It's calmly cleaning up puke at 4:00 a.m. and soothing an irrational and scared child when really you need to be in bed because you cleaned your own puke 45 minutes prior. It's wanting "just one freaking second to think without interruption" but helping with school work while cooking dinner and tying a shoe. All that sacrifice makes you a better person. But it is hard, and I've become very familiar with the end of my rope.

I have four kiddos. I homeschool them. I have a food allergy child. I have a child with speech and fine motor apraxia. We are on our ninth month of potty training. (Shut up.) I have a six year old daughter who is on a pirate joke kick. This is an intense stage of life. We have reached capacity.

Maybe.

Probably.

But maybe probably not.

Which is why I am publicly pleading my case.

You, dearest Facebook/Instagram/Twitter parents of the world, please stop. Stop with the pictures of your babies.

Your baby in her Christmas picture, with her chubbo cheeks and unruly wisps of hair peeking out from beneath the Santa hat? Just stop.

Your tiny newborn all swaddled in fleece, showing off his first gassy smiles in the midst of peaceful slumber? C'mon on.

And you with the video? Do you know happens when I see the ten second clip of your three month old expressing their pleasures with their new-found ability to coo? Puppies wrapped in red bows shower down from rainbows and Dove chocolate grows on the boxwood hedge in my front yard. And honestly, that's too much happiness for one planet to contain.

The worst by far is this type of picture:

Do you know what happens when I view any baby from this angle? I am made acutely aware that my "baby" is now three years old and it has been a long time since I snuggled someone using only my arms. And then my ovaries explode.

Every time I see one of these adorable pictures, I want another baby of my own. To snuggle, to feed, to coo with. My kids would looooove another baby. But we are at capacity.

Maybe.

Probably.

Or maybe probably not.

So please, for the sake of my ovaries, stop. Your baby is awesome, and I just can't handle it.