Cue the dirge music over the montage of this motherhood documentary.  Imagine a narrator providing a voiceover of my daily motherhood log. The camera sweeps over images of an empty backyard covered in frost, wind whipping through the bare branches of trees, an empty swing rocking in the breeze.

 It’s mid-March.  We have run out of fingerpaints.  We have run out of new Peppa episodes.  We have run out of playdough.  I think we’re just about out of patience, too.  Patience for the cold, patience for being stuck indoors as the winds gust outside.  Patience for the other tired parents crowding the children’s museum.  I don’t know if we’re going to make it.  I don’t know how much more of endless March we can take.  It is forever the bleak midwinter in our souls.

Insert some sort of Ken Burns fade-out music here on a photo of my tired mom face.  Fade out.

March is an awful time, because you know it’ll just be a few more weeks of blistering cold, just a few more weeks of misery — but the days and weeks slog on endlessly, each just as cold as the one before.  How many more cookies can you bake together to eat up the time?  How many more toddler dance parties can you have in the living room before you pass out from exhaustion (and from wearing out that Disney Pandora station)?  It’s going to be winter forever!  You’ll be stuck inside for the rest of your lives with no snow for sledding but no spring for springing!

Patience is hard on good days.  Much harder on the blustery, miserable ones.  Especially when it seems like it’s been cold for a thousand years.  Do you even remember what it was like to go outside and push your child on the swing without your teeth chattering?  It’s hard to be patient with a toddler who’s just as bored as you are, who’s just as tired of playing tea party for the umpteenth time while her swing whooshes back and forth emptily outside in the freezing wind.

And then — suddenly, the bulbs are sprouting.  There’s a crocus!  A tiny petaled fist breaking out from the soil, determined to come out from hiding, determined that spring is on its way.  Naturally, my child accidentally crushes the crocus with her rain boots but it was there!  Growing!  So full of hope.  And I know there will be more of them to come.  We just have to hold on — hold onto patience, hold onto hope, hold onto the belief that spring is almost here.

Soon, we’ll race outside in bare feet.  Soon, we’ll be pulling up weeds from the garden beds, splashing in the sprinkler, feeling the sun warm our faces.  Soon we’ll be slathering wiggly little ones in sunscreen, picking up hats, reminding everyone that you need a helmet if you want to ride your bike.  Soon.  Soon.  So soon!  It’s almost here.

We’ll make it. We will.

Cue the happier music.  Fade out.