I’m a bit sad that, someday soon, they will both be at school doing hours’ worth of stuff I know nothing about. Soon, they will be far too cool to dance with me in the kitchen or creep into my bed for a snuggle.
I will miss those things.
If, right now, you are living with a very small baby who keeps you up half the night/is sick in your bra/showers the Moses basket in yellow faeces, or if you have just returned from having to drag a screaming toddler out of Sainsbury’s, then it’s quite possible you will feel slightly sceptical of my cautionary tale about future nostalgic smushiness. As a first-time mum, I was certainly sceptical of all the mums who told me, ‘Before you know it, he’ll be at school and you’ll miss these times!’ because school seemed like a lifetime away. Yet here I am, selecting primary schools, worrying myself silly that Henry won’t cope without his mummy and worrying myself some more that he will undoubtedly cope just fine.
Perhaps sentimentality about the early years is something that cannot be passed on as secondary wisdom. Perhaps you have to discover it for yourself. Perhaps it’s simply part and parcel of parenthood that you will have days when you are beyond exasperated at owning small children and then, before you know it, you will wake up and think, I miss their smallness.
I’ll stop banging on about how time goes too quickly now and get back to stroking baby photos. You have been warned.
* * *
‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how quickly you wish some of the weeks away and then you find yourself wanting those early days back again?’
Mhairi, New Mills, High Peak
* * *
Does Being a Parent Change Who You Are?
A couple of weeks after Henry was born a friend asked me, ‘So, do you feel, you know, different now you’re a mum?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
When I said this, I felt physically different. My boobs were like boulders, and half a stone of human had just emerged from my vagina. I’d had finer hours. But, emotionally, mentally, in my head . . . no, I felt very much the same. I looked in the mirror and saw a fatter, more tired version of myself but it was the Same Old Me.
Holding a baby.
Granted, being a parent had kick-started a massive wave of changes in my life and body, but it wouldn’t change my personality, I was certain of that. In spite of the nappies and the muslins and the breast pads, I was just the same.
I had met mums who, to be quite honest, were unrecognisable versions of their pre-mum selves. I don’t just mean they had changed physically, I mean they became entirely different people. And I was genuinely quite scared about this happening to me. I was determined not to let the Old Me be swamped by the Mum Me. Motherhood would not change the essence of my being.
Then, recently, I had a bit of a moment in the car. I was alone, on my way to the childminder, and I had the rare chance to put one of my CDs on. The first one I pulled out was an old compilation. A mix tape. Among some random ’90s R’n’B and The Killers (my all-time-favourite band; love you, Brandon) was Jay-Z’s ‘Niggas in Paris’. I know.
At the exact moment I turned up the bit about ‘muhfuckas’ I caught sight of myself in the rear-view mirror. I glanced at the Maxi Cosi car seat and ‘Cat’ the sun shade. I spied the slightly crinkly corner of my eye and the crap job I had done at concealing my under-eye bags. And, suddenly, I felt like a total twat for singing about muhfuckas. I felt like a mum.
The truth was, I’d made that car compilation back in the day, when I was spending hours on the road each week driving to customer appointments in my BMW with its sporty seats and reasonable brake horsepower. Listening to Kanye rap about shit being ‘cray’ in a ten-year-old, sluggish Vauxhall Astra, surrounded by discarded Fruit Shoot bottles and unloved toys (a stray squeaky egg and half a Ninja Turtle) just didn’t feel the same. The sun shade, the car seat and the fact I would imminently be swapping Jay-Z for High School Musical felt like an obvious marker that my life is no longer the same. I am not the same either.
There are definitely still times when the Same Old Me comes out to play. On a recent night out with old work friends, ‘I’ll stick to gin’ went out of the window at 7 p.m. Despite three out of five of us being parents, we drunkenly chatted all evening about an array of ‘normal’ things outside the subject of our kids. In fact, there are conversations from that night that I’ve still not recovered from, including one about a real-life adult sharting-in-bed incident. (If you don’t know what sharting is, it’s a bit like farting but with messier consequences – I didn’t know this risk extended beyond toddlers. I learned a lot that night.)
Even without being rat-arsed, I’m pretty good at chatting about other stuff. At playgroup, I’m the first to try and break free from chats about teething and sleep regression and the weight of my baby – not because I’m in any way denying my role as a mother but because, every so often, it would just be nice to chat about EastEnders.
I have loads of friends who don’t have children. Sometimes, I prefer meeting up with my child-free friends to going on play dates because hearing about holiday romances, work news and shamelessly trashy gossip from the Mail Online is a welcome break from discussing childcare vouchers and follow-on milk. Perhaps I live vicariously through the lives of some of my non-parent friends, but I would be lying if I said my life was anything like theirs – and my life not being like theirs has meant I am not entirely like them either. Having children has changed my life, and it has changed me.
It has changed how I think and what is on my mind. I no longer feel carefree. I feel an enormous responsibility not to screw it all up, to make sure I keep my kids safe and happy. I feel anxious that I am not good enough, that they deserve better because, sometimes, I don’t cope all that well. Sometimes, I long for that life when I listened to mix tapes and enjoyed nights out without being expected to go to a birthday party at 10 a.m. the next day and pin the tail on the fucking donkey. Party games and noise with a hangover are proper torture territory.
Some days, I look at my boys and it seems surreal that they are mine. Days when I’ve been masquerading as the Old Me at work and, all of a sudden, it dawns on me that I am responsible for actual proper small human beings and I think, shit, how did this happen? Of course, I know how it happened (the stork’s delivery was slightly more extreme than I’d imagined) but I still occasionally feel shell-shocked that I am a mum.
I am a mother.
I am a lot more besides, of course. I’m a writer, a blogger (not a cool hipster one, unfortunately), a friend, a wife, a rape helpline volunteer, a remarkably clumsy person with a penchant for gin and iced Chelsea buns who is shit at doing the dishes (apparently, I don’t wash them properly – whatever). But if all the aspects of my being were captured in an Excel pie chart, my boys would be the biggest and most significant slice by far (James included, but we won’t tell him that).
It is unlikely that anything else in my life will affect me quite as much as having kids has. The impact is colossal. Over and above those silvery stretch marks (did I tell you they are on my thighs?) and the logistical impact of keeping two children alive, there is an emotional difference I can’t even compute. I challenge anybody to not be affected by that. Being a parent has indeed changed who I am. My boys have changed who I am. But, in many ways, I quite like it.
That shit really is ‘cray’.
* * *
‘I’ve definitely reached the point where life as a mother is not quite what I imagined: cheering my son’s first potty experience on as he farted in it . . . surely that counts? We were both quite proud.’
Amy, St Albans
* * *
‘You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are’
I can’t bring this book to a close without getting something off my chest. I feel the need to liberate the bee in my bonnet and have a moan. A moan about moaning. A moan about not being allowed to moan. (I’m writing this chapter with a glass of wine by my side, because it feels a bit like the sort of chat I’d have with a f
riend. I would start with a big sigh.)
Occasionally, after having bared my parenting soul through the medium of a blog post, I have found myself under fire for complaining about life with children. For complaining about how having children has made me feel and, perhaps, once remarking that if parenting were a paid job I would without hesitation have resigned with immediate effect.
Mostly, bar the odd attack on my use of expletives, these criticisms have been variations on a ‘you have no reason to complain’ theme:
‘You should be more grateful, some people can’t have children.’
‘Why have children at all if you’re just going to moan about them?’
‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’
I haven’t laughed these comments off or stuck two fingers up to my laptop while muttering, ‘Oh, piss off, you self-righteous wanker,’ because I have found myself feeling a bit crushed after reading them. One time, I confided to James that I felt like shutting down the blog (and my social-media pages) and getting on with my life simply as ‘mum’ and not as The Unmumsy Mum, whose parenting attitude was being hung out to dry on the internet.
Of course, I had no real intention of shutting down the blog so, outwardly, I remained thick-skinned enough to ignore the criticism. A selection of recurring comments were circling my brain, though, niggling away at me and making me feel just a little bit shit. In moments of self-doubt and crisis I usually find that Taylor Swift brings sage advice to the table, but there was a period when I just couldn’t heed her ‘Shake It Off’ advice. I think, to a large extent, this was because I knew there was truth in what they were telling me.
I am bloody lucky.
I have no reason to complain.
I should be more grateful.
I recognise all of these things because I have perspective, and perspective is a powerful beast. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been having an almighty moan (probably about the kids’ incessant whingeing or my withdrawal symptoms from work or the overall shittiness of a testing day at home) and I’ve been stopped in my tracks after seeing something, hearing something or reading something that has made me think, Shit, why am I moaning?
I’ve followed stories of parents whose children have disabilities, parents who have lost the love of their life (and parenting partner), parents who have lost children. I’ve heard stories about couples who have tried for years to become parents and never succeeded, parents who have experienced a beacon of hope by way of IVF only to suffer loss through miscarriage. Just watching the news is often perspective enough; I cried all day after seeing pictures of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi’s tiny body washed up on a Turkish beach and vowed never to moan about my life again.
All of these stories are accompanied by completely un-imaginable levels of pain and subsequent strength, and they almost always prompt me to have a word with myself about trying to moan less and appreciate more.
I have my boys, our house, my health, their health – Christ, I only have to watch one episode of DIY SOS and I’m dashing upstairs to hold my babies tight and breathe deep sighs of relief that everything is okay. My lovely mum was only in her forties when she died, and I have grown up knowing that ‘life is too short’. There is a lot to be said for counting one’s blessings and recognising at any given time that it could be so much worse. (You’re sensing a but coming, aren’t you? You’re right, there is one coming.)
I could easily end this chapter with ‘So count your blessings and stop complaining,’ but I’m not going to. I’m not going to because I have been mulling over the hundreds of messages I’ve received from other parents which, cumulatively, have prompted a U-turn in my thoughts.
These parents who message me to tell me they are at their wits’ end and struggling to enjoy their day or their week (or, sadly, on occasion, struggling to enjoy parenthood at all) are not people who enjoy moaning. In fact, alongside their honesty about having a difficult time of it, there is almost always an expression of guilt attached to having a moan. They end their messages with ‘I know I should think myself lucky …’ or ‘I know there are people far worse off than me …’ and, while I recognise that I myself have those feelings, I’ve also started to find them quite frustrating. Mainly, I have the urge to reply, ‘I know you appreciate how lucky you are. Moaning doesn’t mean that you are ungrateful.’ Moaning is part of life. We should share our gripes and our worries and our moments of frustration, because doing so helps us all to feel normal.
I think a turning point for me was speaking to a mum who had struggled for ten years to conceive before IVF delivered a miracle daughter. She told me that after a difficult day she had once shouted, ‘It wasn’t fucking worth it!’ at a shocked friend before crying tears of guilt for sounding so ungrateful. The fact that her daughter had been such a miracle meant she felt it would simply never be okay to have a moan, despite the fact that, like every other baby, said miracle was sometimes a complete pain in the arse. I knew this mum had perspective, I knew she had thankfulness by the bucket load and, in that moment, I also knew that, however grateful you are, it doesn’t make you immune to the odd groan.
I joke about DIY SOS and the like but, genuinely, when I’ve witnessed the hardships that some of these families have had to face I find myself pledging to think of their heartbreaking situations the next time I feel compelled to start complaining about my trivial concerns.
In reality, this perspective – however impactful – is only ever momentary. Before long I find myself holding a screaming baby while going into battle with a toddler who has refused to put his pants on for the seventy-sixth time. Before long, the madness and frustration of looking after small people gets the better of me and, all of a sudden, without any regard for perspective, I find I’ve written a blog post jam-packed with whingeing and sent James a ranty WhatsApp message about being ‘so fucking fed up’ (sorry, James). I just can’t seem to hold back the ranting.
Not once have I woken up and thought, I fancy a right good moan today about how much my kids are doing my head in and how it turns out parenting wasn’t for me after all. LOL.
That is not how it is.
So I stand shoulder to shoulder with the parents who have sent me ranty messages, and I don’t regret my own moany posts, even the one about jacking in the ‘job’, because that was how I felt at the time. I felt angry and frustrated and bored and guilty all rolled into one. Momentarily, I wanted out. Momentarily, I wanted my old life back; the life where I could make it through ten minutes without somebody crying, where I could wee in peace, where I could actually hear the breaking news because the telly wasn’t being drowned out by the noise coming from some demonic electronic toy.
In reality, even if handing in my notice had been a legitimate option that day, as soon as I had spied the boys’ empty beds I would have found myself on my hands and knees begging for my job back. I moan about them not because I am ungrateful but because they drive me to the depths of despair.
Now that I’ve had more time to digest the critical comments, I’ve decided that the ‘Why have kids at all if you’re just going to moan about them?’ argument is a stupid one. It’s a bit like saying, ‘Well, you chose that job in Recruitment, so you can’t ever tell me you’ve had a shitty day because you chose to work in Recruitment.’
Imagine you were offered your dream job: dream position (Tom Hardy’s PA), dream firm, dream salary. It is the job you have chosen. But rather than working Monday to Friday, 8.30 to 5.30, you work all day every day with no sleep and no unaccompanied loo breaks. You would be forgiven for thinking, ‘Holy Mother of God, I want a break from this shit’ by Wednesday teatime, no? That’s parenting. Some days, it’s fantastic and I’m so pleased I took the job. Some days, it’s hideous and I want my old job back.
Yes, I did decide to have children. I decided this twice. I’m never going to hand my children over to somebody else and nor would I want to, but I’m still allowed to say, ‘Fuck this!’ every so often. We all are. Not be
cause we don’t appreciate our children or because we are ungrateful for all that is good in our lives but because, sometimes, we will simply feel shitty about a shitty day and, even though our feelings aren’t those of loss, trauma or acute anxiety, they are still valid feelings.
Perspective is a wonderful and powerful tool, but it can’t always make everything better and it certainly can’t improve the witching hour (or two) before bed. I rarely count a crying baby lobbing food from his highchair and a toddler refusing to cooperate on any level as a blessing. There is no obligation to treasure every moment and you should not be made to feel guilty for occasionally opening the whinge gates.
This chapter has felt like therapy. I started it feeling slightly scolded by the ‘you don’t know how lucky you are’ comments, but I now feel inspired to address all members of the Thou Shalt Not Moan party with one measured and very dignified response.
Dear Thou Shalt Not Moan Enforcers,
Thank you for registering your disapproval of my moaning and for trying to make me feel a bit more shit about my inability to love every second of parenthood.
I have, however, decided to ignore your comments. I don’t need you to tell me how lucky I am. I know I am tremendously blessed to have two smashing boys. You might be surprised to find my love for them is actually quite well documented amidst the expletive-heavy rantings.
The Unmumsy Mum Page 19