Behind the Scenes

Wrestling in a Skirt, Revisited: A Letter to my 2016 Self

November 9, 2026•By Shari J. Ryan

*Original blog post is on top and the current day post is below.

Sounds hot, right? 🤣

There is nothing better than waking up on a warm, sunny day and picking out something summery to wear. A cute top and a billowy floral skirt–ahh perfection. I pull in a deep breath, stretch a smile across my face and open my bedroom door to face the day. I can already imagine what’s waiting for me downstairs: two smiling kids pleasantly sitting at the table eating the breakfast they magically made for themselves, and watching a cartoon in silence.

Or, let me paint an alternative picture for you. The real picture…

It’s funny how my brain resets every night, convincing my subconscious that I have an easy, care-free life. I think it’s the same selective memory that convinced me childbirth wasn't so bad. The mind is powerful. I’m telling you. Each morning, I wake up feeling blessed. I love these babies more than anything. I don’t know what I would do without them. I’m here on this earth to be their mother. Life is perfect. Perfect as in, I even hear cute little birds chirping a pretty song outside my window.

Those aren’t birds. That’s the TV.

Anyway, back to the wrestling in the skirt thing…

As my feet hit the bottom step, I grab the banister and curl around it, trying to duck from an incoming flying object of my older son’s choice. Today, it is a transformer. On a side note: I’m a girl. I wasn’t bred to be a boy-mom. I wasn’t trained, and I didn’t study up on boys' toys. When my son hands me a transformer and asks me how it works, I look at him the same way he’d look at me if I asked him to braid my hair. These toys should really come with detailed instructions for the mom who wasn’t raised around boys.

Breakfast is a cattle call. Both kids are shouting at me while my chin rests on a shelf in the pantry. I think I’m starting to remember the details of what really happened yesterday.

I dump the cereal, pull out the granola, pour the milk, and place it down on the table for my royal princes. It’s at this moment where I’m reminded fifteen times in fifteen seconds that I forgot the spoons and the napkins. It’s at this moment when I trip over one of those tiny little cars that somehow “fell” out of the toy box twenty feet away from where I cleaned it up the night before.

There have now been thirty requests for a spoon.

I look at the clock. It's only been five minutes since I’ve left the comfort of my bedroom, and there is no turning back now.

Normally, I wouldn’t think I’d need to plan out every minute of the next three hours of my life because, usually, it all ends the same.

I should have sat down and made a good long plan. Thought about the choices I was going to make. I didn’t.

It was going to be a special day—a day I’ll forever remember as the day I wrestled in a skirt.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I made the kind of decision only a sleep-deprived mother makes—heading straight into a packed sandwich shop at the peak of lunch hour.

I’ve got one kid on the hip, the other by the collar, waiting in the pickup line for call-ahead orders.

The older child is now perusing around the chip rack and the younger child has spotted the older child’s “fun.”

The younger child shimmies out of my arms while I’m paying.

It’s fine. They’ll watch each other.

Nope.

The older child returns to my side, handing me a family size bag of…horseradish chips. Seriously?

Do you know what the word “no” does to a child?

I do.

He’s yelling at me. The cashier tells him to respect his mother. Now he’s even angrier. Why did she feel the need to insert herself?

The younger child is pulling multiple bags of chips off the rack so I ask my older child to hold the bag of food I just purchased. He drops the bag, on purpose, allowing all the food to fall out of the bag and onto the stampeded ground. Then, he stands there and stares at it.

The younger child falls to the ground in tantrum mode.

Mom realization: I don’t have enough arms and I’m wearing a stupid skirt shorter than I should have worn. Nice move, Mom.

There are at least fifteen men on their lunch break behind me who I probably mooned in the process of reaching for my little one. I hope they enjoy the show because I’m now on my knees in the middle of the shop, picking up the sandwiches, the forty bags of chips, and my two-year-old, flat on the ground—dead-man-float style. As I surrender to all fours, hovering over my son, negotiating, begging him to get up and walk out with me, I remind myself, again, I’m in a skirt…on the ground, peeling my child’s death grip away from the sticky linoleum tiles. And you know what I realize at this exact moment? I can’t be elegant while wrestling in a skirt.

At minute five of my visit to the sandwich shop, the woman behind the counter offers to help me out. While I deeply appreciate the gesture, my mom-feelings were hurt when she just offered her two cents to my oldest, telling him to respect me. Never mind, sweeping the three of us off her busy floor. I swear I can handle the two beings I brought into this world (Very funny. I know. I meant to say, I should be able to…). I stand up, put the sandwiches down, flip the little-one over my shoulder, fold in half again (yup, another show), grab the bag of sandwiches, shove it under my arm, grab my older bandit by the hood of his sweatshirt, and drag them out of the shop. There was definitely a round-of-applause when I left.

I’m not just a stay-at-home mom, I'm working the whole time, even if no one's paying me for it. I don’t lounge around in sweats every day (although I’d like to), I actually put effort into my appearance every morning (I still don’t know why), and I make an effort to live a “normal” life with two kids (what the heck is normal?). I look each day, head on every morning and say, “I can do what I want. I will do what I want, hard or not.” I cannot do a darn thing—let’s be real.

I’ve been pulled aside by three older moms in the past week, all who have warned me about these years flying by. I’m sure they do.

With all due respect, I’ll probably say the same thing to a thirty-something-year-old mom when I’m in my forties, but right now…this is hard. Really, really hard. I’m tired, moody, and while I applied make-up to the dark circles under my eyes this morning, it may or may not be in the right place now.

More importantly, I may not be elegant while wrestling in a skirt, but…I can say, without a doubt, that I CAN wrestle in a skirt.

Ten Years Later

Dear Shari,

You’ll be happy to know that you still wake up each morning to the sound of birds outside the window. Except, rather than a pretty song, it’s more like the murderous mating call from the hawk perched on the roof across the street, staring ominously at the house all day. Some days, I take it as an omen to watch where I step, but on others, I give it a quick wave because it hasn’t killed me yet.

Remember that dream about waking up to the kids feeding themselves breakfast, quietly, watching cartoons?

It happened. Partially.

Today, the younger one of the two wake up an hour earlier than you, goes down to the kitchen, and whips up a batch of fresh waffles. Not the frozen kind, nope. A mixer is involved. Turns out, he loves to cook. If the older one would wake up more than five minutes before he has to drive them to school, I bet they’d even have breakfast together. But I digress because the older one chooses something he can shove in his mouth while hopping around, tying a shoelace.

So I know we debunked the myth of chirping birds in the morning, confusing the sound for the TV in 2016, but there’s a stark difference in those sounds now. The hawk squawking sounds nothing like a TV. No one is watching the TV. The hawk actually has nothing on the older kid’s alarm, which is distinctly set to an air-raid siren against LEDs flashing like a rave. You’ll think it’s the answer to all the world’s problems, but he blissfully sleeps through it all. Do not worry, though…I’m not worried about him living in a dorm next year, waking up for a fire drill, or any type of alarm just to make it to class on time. Not worried in the slightest. Everything will be fine. Just fine.

I’m supposed to be responding to the idea of wrestling in a skirt, though, so here we go…

Shari, what were you thinking that day? Like, really? The younger kiddo never wanted to walk on his own. You were always carrying him around. You knew you only had two arms. You knew this! You learned it the hard way again that day. You haven’t needlessly worn a skirt since that day. I wouldn’t dare wear a skirt for fun now. No. When I get dressed in 2025, it’s leggings, sweatpants, or jeans with stretchy waistbands. In my years of wisdom, I’ve learned I’ll never know when I might have to maneuver around an obstacle. Maybe you would have understood all of this sooner if you had experience in raising boys ten years ago, but life is full of learning experiences. Now, I’m a seasoned boy-mom. I can duck faster than an MLB player with a 90 mph curveball coming right for his head. I catch things flying toward my back by the sound of speed and velocity. The toy Transformers you had trouble figuring out back in 2016…they’re actual robots now. And get this…the older kid’s has decided he’s going to college for robotics. No thanks to me and my ability to help him with a transformer. In fact, my lack of basic skills for how to use those toys might be what sparked his need to figure them out. That’s the actual story here.

When I make my way down the stairs in the mornings, the toys are gone, so I can’t trip over them anymore. Now, there’s just rogue socks, random shoes, phone chargers, pens, paper—all of which end up being way more dangerous than stepping on a Lego brick. It’s like a bunch of banana peels, and I’m the looney toon.

With the breakfast debacle out of the way, the only obstacle in the morning is time. The younger one is ready to hit the road with his bass guitar, leather coat, sunglasses (in the dark), and unlaced combat boots, needing to arrive at school twenty minutes early. The older one is more concerned about his car being a balmy eighty degrees with the perfect song choice queued up for his leisurely stroll to get a coffee on his way to school. To one kid, time is the essence of life, and to the other, it’s a philosophical hypothesis. That’s the fun these days, listening to the two of them fight like a married couple. I don’t even intervene. I just listen, knowing somehow it will work itself out.

Seeing as I don’t take the long way to sandwich shops in the middle of the day to break up play time any more, I wait for school to get out after cramming eight hours worth of work into six. I don’t even need to wait for them to come home to see how their days were because they both call me at the same moment they walk out of school, side-by-side, seeing who can get me on the phone first. One will spill all the important parts of his day, while the other is demanding a turn to talk, and then the phone goes dead. That’s when they listen the best, so I tell them about my day too... The race continues the moment they pull into the driveway, racing each other upstairs to continue wringing out their days as exaggerated drama—sons of an author. What did I do?

There’s one extra chair in my office. They fight over it. Whoever is in the chair talks. Some days, another chair ends up in my office, and they both talk at the same time, fighting over who can be louder. I’ve had to make an agenda. A schedule for them to take turns, and every conversation needs to include something good and a piece of gossip. Don’t judge me. We all do it. I’m setting myself up for success in their adult lives. Everyone needs someone to dump their gossip on. I love being that person for them.

Despite the fights and growling anger with each other, there’s something about those moments that remind me of those two little boys in the sandwich shop: The younger one is somehow sitting on two chairs at the same time, telling the older one he needs quiet so he can focus while the older one is testing out the click-y sounds on all 400 of my pens. Then, they look at each other in complete silence, exchanging thoughts only the two of them can read between their eyes, and I think to myself…Oh my God…they’re plotting against me. This is how they take care of each other—just like I always hoped they would…

At this point in my life, the words “Don’t worry. Things will get easier,” comes out of my mouth when I see a struggling young mom. I called that one. Then, I walk away and ask myself when I got so good at lying to innocent strangers? This is how the world turns. We all just lie to each other so well that we sometimes believe our own lies.

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