The Unmumsy Mum Diary

by The Unmumsy Mum

  This week has been bloody awful. A house move while fifteen weeks pregnant plus a two-and-a-half-year-old and my wisdom-tooth surgery scheduled for the same day. I’ve felt awful mum guilt for having spent the last months packing and trying (!) to clean instead of being able to focus solely on my daughter. I’ve barely even registered that I’m pregnant. To top it off, my mother-in-law persistently pointed out the dust as furniture was moved out of our old house (how I managed to resist the urge to scream, ‘Grab a fucking duster then!’ – I deserve a medal), then pointed out flaws in the new house that we’ve scraped together every last penny to buy. After spending the day after surgery trying desperately to get the new house looking perfect and impossible to criticise, I resigned to actually following doctor’s orders and sent my daughter to my mum’s (where she has done all the horrible glittery crafts and baked apparently delicious cookies that I can’t even eat as my face has swollen to the size of a football), and I came across one of your dusty skirting boards pictures on Facebook. I honestly can’t describe the overwhelming sense of relief! I don’t give a flying fuck that my mother-in-law received a bottle of wine as a ‘Thank You’ for how clean she’d left her previous house. I have better things to do with my time than dick about moving sofas. Plus, the wine would be about as much use to me right now as the sodding chewy cookies. My husband lost his shit with her towards the end of the day, and I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated him more than I did during that outburst. Luckily, my face was totally useless so nobody realised I was grinning.

  Thank you for giving me vital perspective about giving myself a break.

  Jess x

  Priceless. I can just picture her paralysed, post-tooth-extraction face wanting to smirk. There is indeed more to life than cleaning skirting boards. Before we had kids I used to pull out the furniture and dust even the hidden skirting boards. Nowadays, I barely find the time to blow the dust off the telly. Jess’s mother-in-law should come and spend some time at our house, then she’d realise how lucky her son is to not be my husband. I still don’t iron anything. Nothing. A few weeks ago, when Henry was invited to a birthday party, I used my straighteners to iron the collar of his party shirt and, as I stood at the party, making awkward, ‘How old is she now?’ small-talk attempts, I couldn’t help but wonder how many other children were wearing hair-straightened outfits. One kid was so well turned out that I can only assume his socks and pants were ironed, and that’s something I will never succumb to (I’m standing by January’s Parenting Priority Pyramid). I do a victory punch in the air if I manage to find matching socks for the boys and, even then, I’ve started to consider a ‘pair’ as anything that comes from the same pack, which means one ‘Wednesday’ and one ‘Saturday’ sock is absolutely fine, on a Monday.

  17:20

  After my little episode a couple of months ago and many subsequent weeks of thinking that I was just going to have to scrap sleep altogether and look after the kids in the daytime before working through the night (perhaps whizzing up some coffee, Berocca and other non-ecstasybased stimulants in the NutriBullet – yes, I’ve finally bought one! – just to stay awake), James’s part-time hours have at last been agreed. As of the week commencing 13 June, he will be working three days a week and I will be working five, though not five full days, because I’ll need to be around for the preschool run, and we will continue to be absolutely buggered during the school holidays, but that’s just life, I think.

  On the face of it, this new pattern is great news. It means I will no longer have to fire up the laptop as the boys hang off my legs asking for ‘more Peppa!’ (because one episode is barely long enough to get the browser open) and I won’t find myself giving in to their pleas for blackcurrant squash again when I know they should really be having water. (I just always feel terrible when I clock them both staring blankly at the telly again, and giving them what they ask for makes me feel better in the short term but even guiltier overall, a shitty trade-off.)

  James reducing his days is what needs to happen.

  Yet when he told me the news (and after my initial ‘Thank God for that!’ declaration) another feeling started to creep in and, though I’ve tried, I can’t seem to bury it. Why can’t feelings be simple? I wanted something to happen and it has happened so, by rights, I should be nipping out for some champers and toasting the upcoming shift in our family’s work dynamic. It’s what I have been pushing for all year. In fact, it’s what I have been pushing for ever since I first went part-time to look after baby Henry four years ago. I was always going to get back to working full-time (or a combination of hours close to full-time) as soon as it became practically possible, and the long and short of it is that I’m earning more pennies than James is. This new arrangement is what works for us on so many levels …

  And yet today, perhaps inevitably (I’ve long since realised that no feeling in parenthood comes without a side order of guilt), I feel bad about celebrating. The pang hit me when I checked my diary to work out how many weeks there are before the new work pattern kicks in. Usually, you count down or cross off days you want to get out of the way because you are eager to get to a particular event or occasion. My diary is now a countdown of the days I have left looking after my own children. I am crossing off our midweek days together until I reach the week when I will be spending those days working, on my own. How awful is that? I am feeling guilty that, in the ‘something’s got to give before all the spinning plates smash’ exercise, I am handing over the plate my children are on. That is the plate I am giving up. I am willingly giving up my time with them to spend more time working and I think it’s only just started to sink in that it’s going to feel strange.

  I will miss them on those days. They are going to love having their dad at home for two days every week, and why shouldn’t he be at home with them? He has no lesser claim to spending his weekdays looking after them than I do and I strongly suspect he will do a better job than I have been doing. For a start, he won’t be trying to do any work, so they will have his full attention and not my glazed distracted glare. But if I’m cutting out the bullshit and sharing my innermost thoughts about this change, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling a tad resentful towards James and his new part-time week. It is not in any way his fault but there you have it: the truth.

  I suppose I am feeling quietly bitter that I am handing over the baton of midweek parenting when the kids are no longer babies. He will never know how it feels to take a two-year-old and a newborn to the doctor’s. He will never spend a day ‘feeding on demand’ while simultaneously having to come up with toddler games and prevent potty-training accidents. He will never spend a day on his hands and knees cleaning up baby sick, using an old debit card wrapped in a baby wipe to get to the bits in the floorboard cracks because experience has taught him that failure to do so leaves the house smelling like gone-off yoghurt. The worst of those days I have so desperately struggled with are over. From September, Henry will be at school and, on his two days at home, James will be looking after a two-year-old Jude, who, though as mad as a box of frogs, is pretty delightful to look after on his own. Henry was delightful to look after on his own aged two, too, but I never ever had him on his own because I had his little brother welded to a nipple.

  I can’t take anything away from the fact that his ‘home days’ before school starts are going to be tough, particularly now Jude is a biter and Henry is foolish enough to keep engaging in bite-inducing toy wrestles. Their requests remain constant: they need a drink/they’ve broken something/they’re bored/they can’t find Fireman Sam’s quad bike – so when James bounded through the door and declared that having two days at home would be ‘living the dream’ I couldn’t help but mutter, ‘Just you wait’ under my breath.

  He is a great dad. It would be easy for me to get defensive and hide behind the fact that I have been up against work stresses during the days I have been looking after the boys, but the truth is that, even before that, when it was just me and them (and a trillion
weekly trips to the park), it was never a natural fit. There is a part of me that knows he is better equipped on a more fundamental level to cope with the day-to-day kids’ demands than I am. He is more patient. He won’t allow himself to sweat about feeling unpopular at playgroup. I have a sneaky suspicion he will enjoy his solo parenting days more than I ever have – truly enjoy them, I mean: he won’t just sit in a circle at Bounce and Rhyme going through the motions of winding the bobbin up while wondering what happened to his life.

  This suspicion brings with it a niggling insecurity that the boys will enjoy their solo Dad Days more than they ever enjoyed their solo Mum Days. In some ways, I hope they do, and that in turn they enjoy spending time with me when I can actually offer them my time, properly. I hope they see less of Stressy Work Mum and more of Fun Mum. Fun Mum hasn’t been out to play for a while. I miss her.

  Sunday 29th

  Yesterday, Henry said, ‘I wish I could go to preschool every day!’ I can’t quite remember my response (because I thought nothing of it at the time), but I imagine it was probably ‘Do you, sweetheart? Well, you can’t go every day, but you’re going twice this week, you lucky thing,’ or similar, and it only struck me this morning that there was a time not so long ago when this was something I longed for him to say more than anything else. It was something I never, ever thought I would hear him say. If I cast my mind back to six months ago, his relationship with preschool (or, more specifically, the going to thereof) was a testing one. So much so that on the eve of any day he was due to go I would start to get The Dreads, knowing just what the morning would have in store.

  ‘He’ll soon get used to it!’ people told me and, at first, that was adequate reassurance for what I was finding to be emotionally pretty bloody traumatic. ‘Stick with it.’ So stick with it I did. But then two months had passed, then three months, four months, almost five months, and he was still crying all the way there, dragging his heels, telling me how sad it made him when I left him and clinging on to me for dear life, clamping his little legs around my waist until one of the preschool ladies prised his limbs from me and steered him to a tiny table to sit on a tiny chair, where he looked so very small and lost and alone. On the worst such occasion, when I could still hear his whimpering halfway back up the corridor, I cried all the way home. The whole situation just felt so miserable. Back at home, I had visions of my little Pooh Bear sat forlornly in the book corner, waiting for his mummy to rescue him, and, unable to concentrate on anything else, I phoned to check on him.

  ‘He’s absolutely fine!’ they told me. ‘He’s currently playing outside in the wooden boat, instructing the other children to pretend it’s a spaceship.’ I hung up the phone and cried some more that he was fine (if a little bossy) before wondering if we would be subjected to this devastation-guilt-relief cycle forever.

  The ‘He’ll soon get used to it’ parent gurus had been right all along, of course. I can’t remember the first day he didn’t cry because it was a gradual evolution of less fuss over the course of a few weeks. Christmas played its part, I think, because Henry simply loves Christmas and the promise of Christmassy things at preschool was enough of a draw to get him interested. The clamp-like leg grip stopped first, and I found I could walk him in; he would still be crying, but it was a step in the right direction. Then he started walking in quite chirpily, crying only at the very last moment, when I kissed him on the head and told him to have a lovely day. Eventually, the tears must have just stopped, and when they did I stopped analysing his reaction every time I dropped him off. There was no need for James to text with ‘Was H all right?’ because I would have told him if he wasn’t. The new normal was that he was fine and preschool had become a normal part of our routine, not a distressing twice-weekly affair.

  So Henry’s declaration yesterday that he’d be happy going to preschool every day was actually the most opposite of extremes that we could have reached. I hadn’t noticed how far we’d come because, well, because life gets in the way and you don’t stop to think about how quickly things are changing. It’s sinking in that he will be at school soon, and I am sure he will be fine. Even if he’s not fine to start with, he will be fine in time, and I’m starting to feel excited about all that school is going to bring for him.

  The best part about being a parent is watching your child grow up.

  The worst part about being a parent is watching your child grow up.

  Or maybe the absolute worst part is realising your child has grown up and feeling painfully guilty about all the stuff you should have treasured – but never seemed able to – about those earliest days. ‘They grow up so quickly!’ was dead to me during prolonged periods of teething, but teething-baby Henry with the red cheeks and the dribbly chin all of a sudden feels like a lifetime ago.

  I am going to be a wreck come September.

  Sunday 5th

  22:11

  The holiday is almost here! The house was like a circus today, with the four of us tripping over each other as we attempted to get everything in order. Trying to pack with the kids around was hysterical. At one stage I set them up with the train set on Henry’s bedroom floor so I could grab ten minutes to quickly sort out the suitcases. After nipping to the bathroom to pack up some toiletries, I returned to find that they had abandoned the trains in favour of the unattended suitcase, seizing the opportunity to throw the neatly folded clothes out of the case and on to the floor. I could have cried – but it’s very difficult to maintain any level of upset when your children are running around wearing sunhats and deflated armbands while blowing tunes on the ‘paper whistles’ they found in the secret suitcase pocket (those would be my tampons, then).

  I’ve since been panicking over the seven-day weather forecast, which seems to get worse every time I check it and has led me to substitute two of my summer dresses for the boys’ raincoats, while muttering, ‘Just our luck to be jetting off to a week of soggy boredom. It’s set to be sunnier in fucking Paignton!’ But now we’re all packed I am sure it will be fine.

  Despite the mayhem of today, it has actually been very sweet seeing how excited the boys are. At one point this afternoon Henry was karate-kicking his way around the living room, shouting, ‘Holiday, oh yeah, oh yeah!’ (a welcome break from the willy show) and Jude was dancing behind him, clapping his hands and echoing, ‘Hol-day! Yeah!’ He has no idea that we’re even leaving the house, but if something warrants his big brother’s attention he’s all over it.

  I’m now finally in bed after triple-checking the flight times and squeezing in a pre-holiday shaving session where I entered the bathroom as Chewbacca and came out as sleek as a dolphin. Before I had kids, I used to love having a bath the night before going somewhere, exfoliating, slapping on some fake tan and painting my toenails – it was all part of the holiday experience. So I couldn’t help but laugh this evening when the lack of a bath, coupled with the decline in my overall standard of self-maintenance, left me crouched down in the shower tray trying to rectify the fuzz situation from various angles with the lather from a Spongebob Squarepants sponge. I then had to cut my hobbit-like nails and dig out one of those foot files, the kind that looks a bit like a hand-held cheese grater and files off all your rough foot-skin gratings into a pile on the floor (which is gross but immensely satisfying). These kinds of activities become hurried or forgotten when you’re planning a family holiday because you spend all of your time worrying about whether you’ve packed enough swim nappies, remembered the factor fifty and if your hand luggage contains sufficient confectionery to bribe your children into subservience on the plane.

  I’m keeping everything crossed for the plane. I have always been amazed by parents who jet off to faraway shores with a newborn, or who think nothing of regularly taking their entire brood on a long-haul flight. I read a story recently about a couple who were trying to cram in visits to as many countries as possible with their new baby during nine months’ maternity leave and, though I am in awe of this ambition, I am also a bit bewild
ered by it. Perhaps we have missed out, but I can quite honestly think of nothing worse than taking a small child on a round-the-world trip. Apparently, it is ‘more than possible’ to hike along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with a toddler in tow but I have absolutely no idea why anybody would willingly put themselves through it. During both my maternity-leave stints I considered it an achievement if I got my arse to Tuesday’s Stay and Play at the town hall – and even loading up the pram for that (mainly with backup muslins for my refluxy infant) felt like a lot of faff and effort. So although a week in France feels like it will be positively stress-free compared to a trek to Peru, it still feels like a big deal for us. Perhaps we’ll come back inspired, bitten by the travel bug and deliberating home-schooling options so we can whisk Henry and Jude off for an Indonesian travel adventure in the autumn. Or perhaps we’ll come back broken and decide that we’re better off at Center Parcs. We’ll soon find out. Very soon, in fact – the alarm is set for 3 a.m.

  Monday 6th

  04:40

  We’re not even at the airport yet and Jude has done a poo. So we’ve stopped at the services to change him but, otherwise, so far, so good, and our holiday spirits are high. France, here we come!

  07:00

  Fuck my life. Hands up who looked up the checked-in baggage weight allowance but didn’t think to check that we actually have allocated checked-in baggage? That would be me (and no, we don’t – with this airline you only get hand luggage as standard with your ticket), so we’re now considerably poorer after being forced to pay for emergency hold baggage. This is why I could never be trusted to take my kids on a trek to Machu Picchu; I can’t even successfully navigate my way through check-in at Bristol airport.