Remarking on all the failed expectations of parenthood is actually one of my favourite pastimes. Not in a ‘Wow, look at all the things I hoped I would do/say/be as a parent, I’m none of them, hahaha!’ way, but just a chuckle over all the shit I thought I would do but actually haven’t done.
Except that’s not strictly true.
Clear as a toddler’s backwashed sippy cup? Allow me to explain.
I’m not saying I have been lying about imagining a whole host of shit I’ve subsequently never come close to doing, I’m saying that imagining doing these things is not the same as genuinely believing that I would do them. Is anybody still with me? This feels like that bit in Titanic when Rose is calling the rescue boats back and begging Jack to stay with her but it’s too late because his bollocks have frozen after she hogged the floating door big enough for two. Stay with me, Jack, I’m getting to the point.
My point is that, deep down, I knew my vision of parenthood was unrealistic, even before I threw a baby into the mix. And that’s actually got nothing to do with parenthood itself, not really, because I’ve been setting myself up to fail against unrealistic imaginings all my life.
Before I started secondary school, I imagined that I would be instantly accepted by the cool crowd and that I’d successfully attract a boyfriend to hold hands with in the corridors between PE and double chemistry. Only it turns out that when you have Deirdre Barlow glasses engulfing two-thirds of your face and you team ankle-basher trousers with ‘square’ shoes (because your mum wouldn’t let you go to Shoezone and get the platform ones), you never do slot straight in with the cool kids. In fact, you later find yourself in Year 11 with nothing to show by way of romance except a drunken snog in the football-club car park with a boy you suspect ate a burger before he kissed you.
When I started working in finance, fresh-faced from university and keen as mustard, I imagined that I would absolutely smash my sales targets every month, leaving my other team members awestruck. Credit where credit’s due, I had a pretty good bash at smashing sales targets, but I also had spells of mediocrity. I got things wrong, I didn’t always make a dynamic impression on my team and I once managed to get myself locked in the staff toilet and had to be rescued by a commercial banking manager, who climbed over the top of my cubicle and gave me a leg-up. Upon returning to the office I discovered word of the escape had spread and I was greeted with a round of applause. Work life wasn’t always a roaring success, in the end – but it did provide a lot of laughter.
Parenthood has taken these unrealistic visions to a whole new level because every stage of the parenting game brings new anticipation. When I first imagined myself having children I visualised a mum who would rustle up fresh pesto with a pestle and mortar while listening to jazz. Who would glide around looking positively glowy with her baby in a sling and her toddler sitting nicely doing crafts. She would exude maternal confidence and have all sorts of educational crafty ideas because that’s what imaginary glowy, pestopulsing mums do.
Only I’ve never been a glider, not ever, and there’s nothing about growing a small human that automatically makes you more glidey, is there? The reality is that I’m clumsy, I walk into things and I always seem to manage to get the belt loop from my dressing gown caught on the door handle so it pulls me backwards with great force. Plus, I’m crap at cooking and I hate crafts.
It’s not the boys’ fault that I haven’t blossomed into the beacon of delicious yummy mumminess I imagined. That was never my calling. My calling has always been slightly crummier. Deep down I think I always knew that, on a higher-than-ideal number of weekdays, I would resort to cooking up ‘freezer tapas’ (fish fingers/smiley potatoes/an old giant Yorkshire pud from the bottom tray) and that the footwells in the back of our car would slowly fill up with Lego body parts, a gazillion old water bottles and an assortment of unidentifiable and possibly mouldy food items that would remain there until they started to smell. I just imagined a sleeker, cleaner and overall more proficient version of my maternal self, because that’s what imagination does. It creates expectation.
So you see, it’s not exclusively parenthood that has failed to become ‘everything I imagined it would be’. It’s just that, by their very nature, our imaginings are a bit fucking daft.
They are also inevitable, I think. It’s almost impossible not to try and picture how key stages or events in our lives will pan out and, when we picture these things, it’s only natural to add a bit of gloss. Which is why I can’t help but imagine myself absolutely bossing the role of School Mum when Henry heads into the classroom for the first time next month. I will be on top of costume-making and cake-baking and the trillion emails I’m told I can expect every day. I’ll have a magnetic family organiser and I’ll have my shit together at all times.
I imagine.
Friday 26th
Oh my God, I can’t breathe for laughing. I just received the following message and I was so gripped I stood transfixed in the kitchen reading it, stopping only to ‘Shhhh’ Henry and Jude’s demands for a Mr Freeze ice pop. This tale of early motherhood, from a mum who has asked to remain anonymous, is, quite frankly, the sort of stuff I wish I had heard at antenatal classes – not that it would have prepared me for anything (there could be no preparation for this, and you’ll see why), but it would have made me laugh and given me a snapshot of reality, which is a darn sight more than the Bounty pack ever did. The message is pretty lengthy but I couldn’t bring myself to condense what the sender has said when she described the unfolding events so well. Enjoy. Oh, and maybe don’t read on if you’re eating …
So I was reading a ‘things no one tells you when you have a baby’ article the other day – you know, the ones that circulate on Facebook, and it made me think of a particular occurrence in our house, from not long after I had our son, my second baby. My husband and I lovingly refer to this day as ‘Shitgate’, and I think I’m ready, after two years, to share this with the world. This is something that nobody warned me about.
I arrived home after a few extra days on the ward, having had an elective C-section (thanks to problems with previous labour, but that’s a whole other horror story), and, after probably a few more days, I felt that familiar rumble and decided it was that time – time for my first poo. The fear hit me, as it had last time – what would happen, would I be able to poo? Would my bum fall out? Would I burst a stitch? Would I end up with piles? Would I even be able to go? It occurred to me that I couldn’t actually recollect my last ‘motion’. It was certainly before I went into hospital, so it must have been at least a week ago, and with someone bringing me three square meals a day, which I didn’t have to cook myself (or wait to go cold while feeding everyone else before eating), I obviously didn’t turn any of it down. A considerable volume of additional boredom snacks, late-night feed snacks, and any-excuse-for-extra-snacks snacks had also been consumed. This might be a bit of a biggun, I thought.
Little did I know.
So I told hubby what I was up to and could he keep an eye on the kids, and off I went up the stairs, with no idea of the events that would unfold. I sat down and, at first, there was nothing. How could this be? I definitely needed to go, why couldn’t I go? As the minutes wore on I started to worry. I tried moving about, walking around, feet up on a stool, you know, all the normal stuff. This was starting to hurt, I was getting desperate, I really, REALLY needed to go. I asked hubster for some laxatives, but no luck, they didn’t help, so in a bit of panic now, I called the out-of-hours doctor. He (yes, a man, fab) was very understanding and said he’d email a prescription straight to Sainsbury’s so I could collect it. Several phone calls to Sainsbury’s and nearly two hours later, hurrah – they have my suppositories there and we can collect them immediately. By this time it’s the middle of the night, I’m glued to the loo, afraid that I’m gonna have an epic bum explosion at any given moment, but at the same time petrified that I won’t.
The only person my husband can get hold of to come and sit with the
kids, so he can nip out and collect the prescription while I’m stuck on the loo, is my father-in-law. Arghhhhh. He’s one of those manly builder types, so over he comes (did I mention that our bathroom door, at the top of the stairs, directly in front of you as you come in the front door, doesn’t close?) and now he’s sat downstairs in probable silence with my brand-new baby while I’m sat on the loo trying to shit. Thank God, he’s had four of his own, so I try to convince myself that he’s seen it all before and that at some point he’s surely already encountered some sort of labour/pregnancy/baby poo situations.
This was painful now. I felt like I was gonna poo, but no poo (plenty of sodding wind, though), and I felt like my stitches were just about to burst open. This was hideous.
Hubby arrived home with the thing, with THE most fear I’ve ever seen in a man’s eyes, as he bounded up the stairs two at a time it crossed his mind that he might be asked to administer his bounty. Over my dead body. So I did the deed alone and, bloody hell, it did do what it was meant to do, in some respects. If you didn’t know this, apparently glycerol, which is what suppositories are made of, is a mild irritant – they basically make your bum muscles angry. So angry that, hopefully, you poo. Is that what I needed, to make it MORE ANGRY?! This was an epic fail. Now I felt EVEN MORE DESPERATE to poo, like more desperate than ever, and EVEN MORE ANGRY. I couldn’t understand it, why couldn’t I just poo? I’d felt permanently just on the brink for the past five hours, FIVE HOURS on the loo.
I did next something that I will regret forever: I decided to reach around and have a feel. There were piles. Lots of piles. Could this get any worse? I asked myself.
Yes. Yes, it could.
Ah, I’ll call NHS direct, they’ll help. They wanted to know everything – my whole medical history, my life story, my every movement since the moment I became pregnant. On their clever multiple choice ‘yes go left, no go right’ flowchart thingy, one of the questions was ‘Do you have any pain in your chest?’ Well, by this time, everything ached, so innocently, the response that fell from my mouth was ‘Well, yes, a little actually.’
That was it. I was informed that, because I had answered yes to this question, they’d be sending an ambulance. WTF? I didn’t need an ambulance, I just needed a poo! I pleaded, I begged, please pleeeeeease don’t send an ambulance, it’s a total waste, they’re not THOSE kind of chest pains, Christ that’s not what I meant.
No, they’re sorry, they have to send one, it’s on the screen.
Fucking hell. There was a knock on the door as the dark bathroom filled with flashes of blue, and in they came, perched now on the side of the bath, while I sat there, pants round my ankles, horrific wind, piles the size of small countries, a desperate look on my face, and toilet-seat marks imprinted on my arse. I could not have apologised enough as we all sat there together, making small talk in our now foul-smelling bathroom, while I tried to poo and everyone else tried badly to pretend that this was ‘all in a day’s work’. Unbeknown to me, there was a small crowd of neighbours gathering outside, who’d seen the blue lights and, knowing I was about to have the baby, put two and two together and got God knows what, so my husband went out to let them know that all is OK and Mum and babe are fine, thanks for the concern.
But all was not well, Mum is definitely not fine. If Mum doesn’t poo soon she is actually and genuinely going to explode. Her stitches are going to burst and a fortnight’s worth of poo is going to fly out. The ambulance crew – satisfied that I am not on the brink of a poo-induced heart attack and having fulfilled their duty of care – make their escape.
A couple more suppositories and close to half a litre of lactulose later, and finally, through gritted teeth, and with tears in my eyes, it happens! And Jesus Christ does it happen. Once I start, I literally cannot stop. It goes on for what feels like forever, it’s like a labour all on its own – I swear the evacuated material was close to the weight of a newborn. As I turned in fear to observe my creation, it was with utter shock that I discovered that I hadn’t just blocked the toilet: no, no, I had filled it. YES, FILLED IT. Right to the top, the very top. How was this even possible?
Exhausted from my ordeal, I had a quick shower and flaked out on the couch as, by this time, we were in the small hours and the baby would need another feed any moment. I had no idea, then, that my husband was about to undertake a task no husband should ever have to undertake. Yes, I’m pretty sure all husbands or partners see things or do things that they definitely didn’t foresee or sign up for when they got us up the duff, but that night, my husband, with a dustpan and carrier bag in hand, silently did the unthinkable.
The toilet was finally clear and my husband had the same look on his face that he had after his first peek of me crowning in my first labour – the look of a man changed forever. Only this time, instead of a beautiful bouncing baby to hold at the end, he had a pegged nose and a Bag for Life full of his wife’s poo. Two years later, and we are thankfully able to laugh about it, but I’m surprised he’s been able to look at me ‘that way’ since then.
It’s certainly something I don’t recall being warned about before I got pregnant.
Wow. Just wow.
Tuesday 30th
On a scale of one to ten, how ridiculous would it be to feel envious of the relationship my spouse has with our son? It’s a ten, isn’t it? That’s me, though, ten out of ten on the ridiculous scale.
Most of the time I love our family dynamic and I’m only joking when I pretend to be upset that James is Henry’s favourite. But sometimes Henry makes it so painfully apparent that Daddy is his favourite that it winds me up. Like whenever I excitedly offer to take him to the cinema for a special mum-and-son date, just the two of us, and he replies, ‘Can’t Dad take me? You can look after Jude.’ Just recently, the paternal bromance has hit dizzying new heights and they are as thick as thieves, play-fighting and sniggering, and while it is lovely to witness how great a dad James is, I sometimes feel like I’m wafting around like the destroyer of all fun, asking if teeth have been brushed and suggesting that everybody calms down. It’s a bit like when you’re at school and you get left out of a friendship group, only instead of catching an exchange of glances between two school-friends, I catch an exchange of glances between the man I married and the firstborn we created.
Granted, at times their chumminess is amusing, like yesterday, when I told the pair of them off for firing the Nerf gun at me (James was loading it and Henry was firing it), only to catch them fist-bumping behind my back and whispering, ‘Bad boys for life.’
But this evening, as I was tucking Henry in to bed, he said, ‘Mummy, do you know how much I love Daddy?’ to which I replied, ‘No, darling, how much do you love Daddy?’
‘More than I love you.’
Excellent.
Lucky Daddy, eh? To think he didn’t even have to suffer elongated labia after prolonged pushing in exchange for that love.
Thursday 1st
What could be more fun than the four of us sharing a family room with no air-conditioning for two nights during one of the hottest weeks of the year? Well, OK, there’s a lot that could be more fun, such as pulling hair out of the shower plug-hole or having a smear test with your kids in the room – but sometimes, you just have to do these things. (I had no choice but to take both the boys with me on Smear Day last year. In fact, it wasn’t as stressful as I had imagined, although, as I was lying with my legs akimbo under the paper modesty sheet, I could have done without Henry popping his head around the curtain and asking, ‘Is that lady putting something in your bum, Mum?’)
Anyhow, we’re staying in Windsor for a couple of days, and the main reason we’re subjecting ourselves to the hottest family sleepover on record is so that we can take the boys to Legoland tomorrow. I have been having sentimental pangs about Henry starting school next week and felt I wanted to treat him to a special outing before the big day, so Legoland it is. We only told him about it on the drive up from home yesterday, and he was beside himself with
excitement: ‘For real? Are we going to Legoland in real life?!’ Though, somewhat worryingly, he’s since been reeling off a list of all the rides he wants to go on and I’m pretty sure he’s too young/too small for most of them, so it could be an interesting day.
I’ll admit that at one stage last night I did wonder if this trip had been a colossal error of judgement on my part: the four of us were stripped off to near-nakedness and were sitting sweating on the bed, swigging lukewarm water from bottles as we watched The Great British Bake Offon a tiny telly with no sign of the boys getting tired. Eventually, we did all fall asleep – either that or we passed out from heat exhaustion – and this morning when we woke we were in good spirits.
After giving the kids a quick bath (in which Henry farted; he then encouraged Jude to drink the farty bath water – do girls do this?), we decided we’d make the most of being in this neck of the woods by squeezing in a little train trip to my publisher’s office in London so the whole family could meet the team. Other than Jude having a paddy on the platform (we insisted on reins and he was angry that he wasn’t allowed to cross the yellow line and climb down on to the track), the boys were both extremely well behaved. It was actually really nice having them by my side in a work environment for once – I felt like my two worlds had collided, which is silly really, because family life is my work when you think about it. All the chaos and the mishaps and the embarrassing shouts of ‘Booby bum-bum!’ when I’m on the phone to the accountant is what keeps me in business. I’d never really thought about it like that until I was at a book event earlier in the year and a mum in the audience put her hand up to ask me if I ever get worried that there might come a point when all the stuff which inspires me to write blogs and books and generally keeps me commenting on parenthood will dry up.
The Unmumsy Mum Diary Page 15