All The Ways Being A Mom Is Like Being A Dairy Farmer

There are so many different ways we describe motherhood – it’s like everything and nothing. Recently, I’ve realized that being a mom is a lot like being a dairy farmer. Here’s how I see things:

1. Everyone I care for acts like they were born in a barn. They leave the doors open willy-nilly. Everything gets so messy I am tempted to take a shovel to the piles of crap that accumulate.
2. Table manners what? They chew and sometimes food falls out of their mouths. They sit at the table looking like they are chewing the cud. It’s gross. We are working on it.
3. They poop a lot, and when they were little, they pooped basically everywhere with little regard for who is going to clean it up. SO MUCH POOP. Literally piles of poop.
4. Your whole life revolves around milk. As a breastfeeding mama, you spend a lot of time milking yourself. That stuff is liquid gold and you become intimately aware of how much hard work goes into milk production. You also spend a lot of time trying to convince tiny humans not to cry over spilled milk. When you spill pumped milk, you cry.
5. You get up obscenely early. Farm life starts early and so does mom life.
6. Your clothes get dirty – often with poop. Your clothes are normally designed for comfort, range of motion and function versus style. Yoga pants are to mommies as overalls are to farmhands – practical but not very fancy.
7. Everything smells. You know what general area the smell is coming from, but it’s pretty much permanent. It’s a fact of life.
8. Most of all, you spend every day trying to extract every drop – of joy, of sleep, of coffee and of love.

My perspective as a mom helps me appreciate that behind every one of Agropur’s Canadian products is a cooperative of passionate and committed dairy producers. I may not be a dairy farmer in real life, but I know where to get dairy products I can trust, and that’s from Agropur. My milking days are done, and I’m happy to hand over the reins to people I believe in.