The Unmumsy Mum
Page 9
I also nag …
Like a broken record of parental fussiness, repeating instructions that nobody (least of all my children) are listening to, like, ‘Can everybody just calm down a bit?’ ‘Play nicely!’ and ‘We’re not going anywhere until you stop whingeing!’ The latter will be said as we exit the house, while everybody is very much still whingeing because escape to anywhere is better than confinement in the house.
… and make ridiculous empty threats
Alongside the general warnings issued to get arses out of the door, I often hear myself threatening disproportionate consequences that are both unenforceable and unwise:
‘Right, I’m not going to tell you again: no more TV for the week!’ (As soon as this comes out of my mouth, I realise it’s an error – how the hell would I make tea, for a start?)
‘I’m phoning Father Christmas in a minute to get your name taken off the list. There will be no chance to make amends this time.’ (Shitballs, what a stupid thing to say, and it’s only August.)
‘Say goodbye to all of your favourite toys, they are going to the dump.’ (Henry has cottoned on to the fact that his mummy is a bit highly strung and simply waits for me to calm down before quietly retrieving the toys from the ‘take to the dump’ pile in our bedroom.)
* * *
‘I’m forever saying, “I will not tell you again!” Except, clearly, I will. In about five seconds. And every five minutes until bedtime.’
Nicola, Barnes
* * *
I use baby talk
I give every object a nickname. Milk becomes ‘milkies’. Bottle becomes ‘bot bots’. Nappies become ‘nap naps’. Soft toys become ‘snuggies’ or ‘bunnykins’. Just the other day I said to my husband (and I quote), ‘If you sort out his bot bots, I’ll change his nap naps and find his snuggies.’ What a twat. This use of language is bloody annoying for all concerned, but it’s what parents do.
That said, there is something quite comforting about not caring and just enjoying those babyish moments. When I go in to get Jude first thing in the morning I pick him up and say, without any embarrassment, ‘Good morning, my Angel Plum Plums.’ I don’t know why or how he became my Angel Plum Plums, but that is what he is. And a bloody lovely Angel Plum Plums he is, too. If this was a Facebook status I’d be inserting a heart emoji here, alongside an angel and a plum.
* * *
‘I definitely did not catch myself, at work, saying, “Uh-Oh-Printer” as I loaded another toner cartridge. Definitely not.’
Owen, Poole
* * *
fn1 Based on no scientific study or opinion-poll survey; in fact, this is a completely unsubstantiated figure.
Why it’s Fine to Reminisce about Before
Chatting to James about what life was like before we became parents is one of my all-time favourite pastimes. The conversation usually goes something like this:
‘Do you remember when I used to say, “Shall we go for a walk, or some fresh air?” and we would just go out for a walk or some fresh air?! Right then! Without packing a bag?! Unbelievable!’
‘Do you remember when we had chats about how our days at work had been over dinner? Do you remember when we had proper chats? Do you remember when we had proper dinner?’
‘Do you remember when we went to the Dominican Republic and, aside from a token monster-truck excursion to a sugar plantation, we did nothing but swim and sunbathe for three weeks? Three weeks! We even had sex in the afternoon!’
Though I have met lots of parents who share my ‘God, I’d kill for a duvet day!’ sentiment, I sometimes question whether I am looking back at our pre-parent existence a little too much – particularly when I meet parents who don’t seem to wistfully reflect on life before their children arrived at all.
Pre-parent Nostalgia Spectrum
0 = ‘I cannot remember life before we were blessed with children, nor would I want to.’
5 = ‘I do miss the odd lie-in.’
10 = ‘I just want to eat my tea in peace and not have to do a speed poo with both children hanging off my ankles and not have bladder/sneezing issues and not have to buy the budget supermarket shampoo. Do you remember when we had disposable income? Do you remember when I had actual boobs, not small, empty sacks?!’
Yes, I am a 10.
But, every now and then, I deliberately stop myself harking back to the good old days, because an increasingly familiar feeling of guilt creeps in (see Mum Guilt, here) and leads me to reason as follows:
Persistently thinking back to life before becoming a mum must signify regret for having joined The Motherhood and a lack of appreciation for having had children.
I persistently think back to life before becoming a mum.
Therefore, I do not appreciate my children.
This is, of course, just daft. I do appreciate my children and – shaky, guilt-ridden days aside (when everything you do/don’t do makes you feel like a terrible parent) – I see no reason why we should feel bad about this reminiscing. In fact, I would go so far as to say we should celebrate the before days for all they represented:
Spontaneity
Uninterrupted sleep
Going to the cinema to watch something without Minions in it
Having something to get dressed up for (outside of Wednesday’s Stay and Play)
Having time to browse
Having money to buy
Those wild nights out which ended in dirty kebabs and blister plasters
‘Popping’ anywhere in under an hour
Having a tantrum-free dinner
Having an efficient pelvic floor
Sunbathing with your eyes shut
Reading in peace (doing anything in peace)
Devouring a grown-up ice cream like a Magnum in its entirety and not having to donate it to the toddler who has dropped the bottom third of his Rocket …
When my (then) two-year-old lay on the floor at the bottom of the escalator in Next, screaming, ‘Help me, I’m stuck! Fire! Call Fireman Sam!’ (he wasn’t stuck, there was no fire), I remembered with great fondness the days when I could actually look at clothes while out shopping. And try them on. Without getting red and sweaty. Without taking somebody’s ankles out with the stroller. Without swearing.
When I had a nasty chest infection last year (and felt pretty bloody sorry for myself), I couldn’t help but think back to poorly days spent in bed with a Lemsip. I also couldn’t help but curse the fact that I was already downstairs at 7 a.m. watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, mustering up the strength to wrestle the baby into a new nappy and wondering why Mickey is such a bellend. (‘Hot dog, hot dog, hot diggety dog …’ Kill . . . me …)
Every time a heatwave is promised, I can’t help but crave the days of basking in the sun without being consumed by infant-sunburn worries. Days when I didn’t spend the day running around slathering everyone in Factor 50 and constantly repositioning the baby’s sunhat. (We weren’t prepared for our second-born to come out quite so . . . quite so . . . ginger. He could easily pass as Max Branning’s love child. This has only heightened the need to keep the sunhat on him.)
Do I miss life before motherhood?
Yes, sometimes I miss life before motherhood.
Sometimes, when the end of my tether has been well and truly reached and I’m so bloody done in, I long for that old life back. To relive it.
But I don’t genuinely wish to go back there, because the situation is different now. It’s true that my life is no longer carefree or spontaneous. It’s true I really would like to enjoy a mealtime without somebody crying. It’s true I quite liked it when my pelvic floor was intact. But, between the tiredness and the cursing at oversized rodents singing about hot dogs, I can hand on heart say I wouldn’t change it (unless I had a licence to borrow Marty McFly’s time machine and head back to 2008 once a month on a Sunday, in which case I totally would).
I spend significantly more time celebrating my life as a parent than I do reflecting on the glory of life when I was
not. Every day provides a celebration of the after days, because spending time with my boys knocks spots off all the other stuff from days gone by. So I hope I am in no way being unfaithful to the special life I now have with my boys by remembering what my life was like before them.
I am simply remembering a different time, which was a special time in its own right.
These days, when other parents declare, ‘God I can’t even remember what life was like without the kids, can you?’ I mostly stick to upfront honesty.
‘Yes, I bloody can. It was beautiful.’
‘The risk of a dirty protest in the waiting room was a genuine one.’
Having Another One
I reckon we managed approximately six months of parenthood before the subtle SCI (Second-Child Interrogation) started. ‘When’s Henry going to have a little brother or sister?’ they asked (‘they’ as in the world, his wife and their nosey sodding dog). Had we thought about the ideal age gap? Had we planned when we would start trying? Wasn’t it lucky we already had the three-bedroomed house to accommodate the second baby?! Cue rabbit-in-the-headlights face.
What was the right thing to say and do here? I racked my brain for a politer way of saying, ‘You must be fucking joking!’ because, quite honestly, at that stage, i.e. during Henry’s first year and, in fact, some months beyond it, the idea of bringing another sleep-stealing bairn into the world was not one I was prepared to entertain. The first year of motherhood had not exactly lived up to my expectations, though, in hindsight, those expectations were probably derived from a Boots Parenting Club article where a mum with very white teeth threw her non-refluxy baby in the air on a warm spring day.
At Henry’s first-birthday party, I can quite vividly remember thinking, I love him at this age and I’m enjoying this bit. I felt as though I had settled into my role as Mum. But that same day I can also remember looking over at somebody else’s newborn baby and thinking, ‘Sod that for a game of soldiers.’ I was just starting to feel like myself again, with Henry sleeping through the night, and chatting to me (sort of) and making me laugh. I did feel slightly guilty for having wished his first year away but I was still quietly glad the baby bit was done and dusted. The worst was over.
So I found the constant SCI questions really exasperating. I knew that the people who were asking them were well meaning and just expressing their curiosity about the shape our family would take. But at times I felt quite troubled by the fact that it was simply assumed we would be having another one. As if it must just be a question of when because we’d be foolish to have ‘just the one’.
‘Loads of people have one child and live happily ever after. I actually can’t see us having any more,’ I eventually began to tell people. I hoped that would halt the questioning.
‘But you can’t just have one!’ came the replies. ‘Wouldn’t it be a shame for poor Henry?’ ‘You’ll regret it.’ ‘Don’t leave it too late!’
We continued to present our united ‘one and done’ stance and, mostly, people stopped asking. But I still felt an unspoken pressure to give it more thought, not least because Thou Shalt Have Two Children is like an unwritten commandment in our family: you have two children (with a gap of somewhere between two and four years) because, well, because that is just what you do. I’m one of two siblings; James is one of two siblings; our respective siblings each have two children. It’s as if they all employed the Goldilocks and the Three Bears logic of child numbers:
One is not enough (and is lonely).
Three is too many (and a bit crazy; you’d need a new car, for a start).
Two is just right.
So, despite telling anybody who would listen that we had no plans for a second (‘God no, zero desire to activate the self-destruct button here, ta!’) I’m sure the general consensus, particularly among our family, was simply that we would come round to the idea. ‘You’ll change your mind!’ they said …
And I guess they, the two-child enforcers, were right because our story doesn’t end with Henry as our only child. We must have ‘come round to the idea’, right? Something must have happened to make us broody and tempt us to get back on the babycoaster?
Well, kind of.
Jude was, after all, another planned pregnancy. I’ve pledged total honesty in this book, and I would tell you if he was a ‘surprise’ (or, indeed, an Ooopsie Baby, as I once read on a parenting forum; I do hope Baby Ooopsie doesn’t grow up with a complex). But no, just like his big brother, the bun was intentionally sited in the oven.
So what changed?
It certainly wasn’t my overall maternal broodiness. I waited in vain to start longing for another baby and no broody feelings surfaced.
But I just had this niggle.
And when I told James about my niggle it turned out he had it, too. It wasn’t tied to a feeling of duty to ‘avoid’ an only child, as we had already decided quite confidently that having happy parents was more instrumental to our child’s wellbeing than having parents unhappily engineer him a sibling. But something was niggling. When people talked to me about having more children and I said, ‘We’re happy with one, thanks!’ I no longer felt like I said it with such conviction. I was starting to doubt myself. And, as we approached Henry’s second Christmas, we began to engage in The Chat all over again. We faced the niggle head on and, after a good few hours of conversation, we concluded that yes, we would try for another baby. What follows is a summation of our reasoning:
We always thought we would have two children. When we discussed our vision of ‘life in ten years’ time’ there were always two children in the picture. Two children in the back of the car, two children with us on holiday, two children at the dinner table . . . a happy family of four.
It was true that, as the owners of an almost-two-year-old, we were quite happy with our lot. It was also true we had no desire to have another baby. Zero desire to be pregnant or battle through those early months again. But looking ahead at the long term, taking the immediate reality of babies and toddlers out of the equation, we were still picturing ourselves with two. Our vision was still intact and had manifested itself as a niggle. I suppose it’s just possible we’d internalised the aspirational norm of being a 2.4-children family but I suspected it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t just about somebody to keep Henry company, it was about completing our family. (And, on a selfish level, we did discuss how we hoped it would ‘pay off’ because, as older siblings, they would entertain each other and we would be able to sunbathe and drink mojitos on holiday.)
Whether we liked it or not, our second child, the one from Our Vision, was simply not going to appear by process of teleportation into the back of our car or at the dinner table. We knew all too well the real process required to get to that point.
So, no, we didn’t really change our minds about wanting another baby but focused instead on our agreement that we did want another child. It was decided at the beginning of December 2013 that we would ‘go for it’, and there was no time to rethink our decision, because I was pregnant by New Year’s Eve.
Had I focused on the whole baby bit, I’m not sure I would ever have done it again. This seems mad now, as Jude turned out to be a delightful baby and a total legend. (If you’re reading this, Henry, my darling, please know you were a lovely baby and a legend, too, in your own special vomiting and nap-refusing way . . . you just really blossomed aged one.)
I recently found myself, for the first time ever, looking at a newborn baby and thinking, Ahhh, I really miss that snuggly baby stage. I may even have momentarily thought, Maybe we could just have one more, as I sniffed said baby’s head with fondness.
I’m now slightly fearful that, as I approach thirty, a genuine hormonal broodiness is creeping up on me for the first time, as if Mother Nature is telling me, ‘Now’s your time.’
Perhaps now is the time I should have started having children. Perhaps I was four or five years too early to the baby party.
It would certainly explain a lot.
* * *
‘On our return from our mini-break weekend the toddler got travel sick. The only thing to hand was his welly . . . and then the eight-month-old did a smelly poo. So I found myself sat between two car seats holding a welly full of sick while breathing in shitty vapours. It was a great drive home.’
Julie, Devon
* * *
One to Two: What’s the Deal?
As well as the interrogation about ‘having another one’, it also used to quietly piss me off that, when I mentioned how hard I was finding looking after Henry, how I was struggling after a bad night or a meltdown on the bus, the stock response was always ‘Just you wait until you have two!’ (Because I couldn’t possibly be struggling with ‘just the one’, obviously.) I was struggling.
I overheard another mum saying something at a playgroup once which has turned out to be a pretty fair assessment. She was talking in a group of ‘one-child’ mums about the arrival of her second child, and she reflected, ‘I’m worrying less with her [her second baby] because I have less time to worry, and I’ve realised that much of what I found impossible with him [her first baby] was stuff I was making impossible for myself. It was easier with one, but I couldn’t have known that then. The benefit of hindsight, eh?’
There was definitely something in that. Every so often, James and I reflect fondly on our lives with one child in much the same way as we reflected on our lives with no children and find ourselves saying things like, ‘God, wasn’t it easy with one! Why didn’t we take Henry abroad? It would have been so easy with one.’ But, mostly, we stop ourselves, because the fact of the matter is we would not have found it easy. We found everything hard, partly because we over-obsessed about how we were doing things and partly because, whether you have one child or ten children, it can still be bloody tough going.