Motherhood mojo

I've noticed lately that I'm a very different parent to F than I was when O was his age, and I'm not really sure if that's down to how different they are (and they really are VERY different) or the fact that I've kind of found my motherhood mojo.

I mean, the thing is that everything was so much worse than I expected when F was born. I expected it to be hard having two children. I expected that I would struggle to get them up and ready and out of the door in time to get O to playgroup four mornings a week, but I really didn't expect what actually happened. I didn't expect the morning breastfeed to take two and a half hours or to never sleep or to feel every single day like I was going fucking crazy. If I managed to get through a day without crying, it was a genuine miracle. There was none of that swan-on-the-water stuff, no illusion of calm or of me having my shit together; it was all panic all the time.

BUT F had his reasons for being a nightmare and none of them were his fault. He wasn't waking me up 300 times a night just to be an asshole, and things got better. Which, actually, kind of happened without me noticing. It didn't particularly occur to me at any point that I wasn't juggling anymore. The "bedtime hour" just suddenly stopped being awful and settled into a routine of being occasionally challenging. And it really helped when F started sleeping through the night, because after that I was still exhausted a lot of the time, but I wasn't OMG I'M SO TIRED KILL ME PLEASE exhausted anymore.

I've never really had much confidence as a parent, and there are a few reasons for this. Firstly - and I think a lot of parents probably feel like this - half the time I'm not even sure I know what the fuck I'm doing. But aside from that, most of my anxiety around going out alone with my kids comes from the fact that I look much younger than I am. In a couple of months I will be 29 years old, but I'm only five feet tall and I have the physique of a pre-pubescent girl. So people who don't know me look at me and I can SEE them thinking "teen pregnancy". Like, somebody actually asked me when I was pregnant with O if I knew how it had happened. No shit. And then there's the fact that I have quite a lot of tattoos and some of them are very visible. So, once I take my coat off, I can then see the OMG SHE MUST ONLY BE ABOUT 18 folks thinking "and she's trashy as fuck with it." So why does this make me feel more anxious? Because, in my mind, these people have already decided that I am a terrible, inadequate mother (notice how I said "in my mind", meaning I am aware of the fact that it might not actually be true), so if my kids don't behave impeccably, they will be vindicated. And, to be perfectly honest, I already think that about myself a lot of the time, so I really don't need a whole bunch of other people thinking it too. And sure, I know they're strangers and I'll probably never see them again, but I will have to sit through a meal or finish my shopping knowing exactly how hard they think I'm failing.

Nevertheless, O actually was a difficult child to take out and about. It wasn't just me being a nervous first-time parent; he genuinely was a nightmare a lot of the time. Before he could walk, he dangled over the side of his pushchair and grabbed at stuff as we walked by in a shop. He once trashed a whole card display in Clintons at Christmas while a bunch of employees glared at me and I muttered mortified apologies and tried to pick everything up. When he started walking, he would shake off my hand, wriggle out of his wrist strap and run off. I probably should have bought some reins, but I've always felt vaguely uncomfortable with how much they make it look like you're taking your kid for a walk. And once he was big enough to sit up at the table with everyone else, the mealtime fidgeting began. Taking him out on errands was exhausting and fraught with grumpy strops and tantrums. But going out with F is easy. A couple of weeks ago, I had to go into town to get a birthday present for my brother-in-law while O was at playgroup and my husband was at work. So we stopped off at Sainsbury's cafe first for a coffee and a snack. F sat in his high chair, chattered nonsense at me, munched a rice cake and generally behaved perfectly. On the walk into town, he pointed at everything and waved at people. To be honest, were it not for the fact that I was pushing a stroller, I probably would have forgotten he was with me.

I'm not saying that it will always be like that. In fact, sometimes he gets pissed off and shouts just like every other kid. Sometimes he throws his cup on the floor, and he is an expert at planking if he doesn't want to get back into his pushchair/car seat. But, to all intents and purposes, he is a super easy child. After how hard everything was with him when he was a baby, some hopeful and very buried part of me always figured that maybe he would be. And as for O, he's probably just going through a bit of a threenager stage right now. He was a great sleeper and feeder as a baby, and since I was only 25 when he came along, I'm really very grateful for that. 

Maybe none of this really has anything to do with how obliging or otherwise my children are; maybe what it's actually about is the fact that I feel more equipped to deal with the unpredictability of parenting young children. I feel like I can cope if my kids start acting batshit crazy while we're out somewhere. I still find it hard to cope with the inevitable judgement of others, but I accept the fact that it is exactly that; inevitable. There's not much I can do to convince anyone that I'm actually an okay parent if they've already decided that I'm not. And does it actually fucking matter what anybody else thinks anyway? Yes, sometimes people will see my parenting fail moments and they will assume things about my parenting in general based on that one snapshot of my life. But they don't know me and they don't know my children. I'm only just starting to figure out that their opinions are not important.

The "Motherhood Challenge"

Today I am taking on the "Motherhood Challenge". And by taking on, I do NOT mean taking part. I'm not on Facebook, so I've only heard about this new fad through other people and my husband has shown me what it entails. For those of you who don't know, the Motherhood Challenge consists of picking the pictures of you and/or your children that you feel best sum up why you love being a mother. Cute, right? But then you're supposed to tag a bunch of your mummy friends who you think are doing an awesome job at motherhood, and that's a little less cute.

So, let's break this down. First of all, there's a good chance you'll forget to tag one of your mummy friends (or maybe you won't tag her on purpose because you think she's doing a shitty job), and when she sees your Motherhood Challenge and realises that you left her out of your "awesome mummy" list, she's probably going to feel really bad. I mean, she might not care at all. But if she's having a fucking awful day and feeling really emotionally fragile, seeing that you left her out might just make her feel a whole lot worse.

Then there's this: Some mothers out there are struggling. I don't mean that they're just having a difficult day and maybe the kids were late to school this morning. We all have those days. I'm talking about the mums out there who are battling mental health issues, like post-natal depression, and feeling really fucking alone and inadequate. Maybe it takes a mother who has experienced that mental struggle to identify this seemingly harmless "challenge" as potentially triggering, but surely then that further underlines the distinct lack of education around the issue. Surely things like the Motherhood Challenge only serve to widen the chasm and perpetuate the shame culture even more.

Last January, I was struggling. I felt like the worst mother in the world. I wanted to run away, and do you know what made it worse? Breastfeeding selfies, because the #brelfie was a huge thing at the time and it wasn't happening for us (which is not the only reason I was having a hard time; that story can be found here). I felt like such a failure and, worse than that, I felt totally isolated by my catastrophic lack of success because everywhere I looked I saw calm, beautiful pictures of mothers breastfeeding their little babies. It wasn't that I couldn't be happy for those women and their babies, it was that I was in such a dark, horrible little place that I just couldn't cope. I compared myself to those mothers and found myself entirely lacking, so much so that I was convinced my children would be better off without me.

I'm not telling you that you shouldn't post breastfeeding selfies or take part in the Motherhood Challenge, I'm just reaching out to you in the hope that you might take a moment to consider if any of your mummy friends might be struggling before you post your pictures. Right now, the odds are that you know someone who thinks she's a crap mother and that every single other woman in the world is doing a better job of motherhood than she is. And the worst part is that she probably isn't talking about it because she feels ashamed. So, maybe instead of posting photos of your most perfect moments, perhaps you need to let your friends know that you're there for them and that they have your support and not your judgement. Which is not to say that I think you are judging them, but mental health issues can change our perceptions, and depression is the darkest, coldest, loneliest little mountaintop in the world and the view is of everyone else doing better and being happier than you ever could.

I'm not trying to preach to you. That's not why I'm here. I'm here because motherhood is fucking hard sometimes, and I feel like we need to make sure that we don't alienate the mums who are struggling by pushing them further into the mental confines of their own shame. Most of all, I want you to know that if you're struggling, you are not alone.

Becoming Your Parents

Something I’ve been ruminating on for a few years now: Are children bound to repeat their parents’ mistakes? I think about this on and off because my mother made two very defining mistakes in her life and I have gone on to repeat both of them.

The first mistake she made was my father, who died of pneumonia when I was very young. I remember nothing of him and I am not sorry. What I do know about him is that he was a functional alcoholic (one of the handful of reasons why I do not drink) and he was abusive. Growing up without him has not, in my eyes, had any detrimental effect upon my wellbeing. However, I do recall that I had a bit of an identity crisis when I was about 17 because I’ve always known that I look very much like my father and yet I know so very little about who he really was. The bad things were whispered secrets and cautionary tales told throughout my teenage years. The good things seemed less important, less real, when put beside them. The end result is that I have never felt any worse off for not having him around and I will not forgive him.

The difference between my mother’s mistake and mine is that she didn’t know that there was trouble ahead at the start and I most definitely did. I had the good sense to be cautious, if not outright afraid, from the very beginning. I knew that I was throwing myself to the wolves. But the other thing about me back then was that I was reckless and I believed that I could be the change, that the sheer force of my will and strength of my love would be enough. I turned a blind eye to bad behaviour, cut off friends who tried to tell me things I didn’t want to hear and when the violence started, I convinced myself that it wasn’t really happening at all. Every time I picked myself back up and went back for more. I tried to leave, but we were like magnets left just that little bit too close together; we always found our way back to one another. We were so intent on destroying ourselves, and if not ourselves than at least each other. We were going down and we were damned if we were going to do it alone. When I finally severed the ties it was awful. It was bitter and angry and the fallout went on for years. It has taken me nearly a decade to get to a point where I can hope that he is doing okay and that he has found happiness, and part of me thinks that that is only because he is far away now. I wouldn’t still be walking these streets if he was too, but I will never get too far from him.

The point is that, before him, I always told myself I would never put up with what my mother had. The first time would be the last time. But when it’s a shove into a wall rather than a punch or a kick, somehow the lines feel blurry. From the outside it can be crystal clear, but in the eye of the storm the perspective is a little different.

The other mistake my mother made was the decision not to go to university, and it was for the same reasons that I chose not to. At 18, she didn’t really know what she wanted to do with the rest of her life and neither did I. And I didn’t want to get myself into debt in the process of trying to figure it out. I told myself that I had plenty of time, that I was young and that I would find my place in the world eventually. That was ten years ago and I am still no closer to knowing. I’m starting to realise that this is probably it for me, and I am trying very hard to be okay with that. But that doesn’t change the ever-growing inadequacy complex that feeds on the knowledge of my peers’ successes, which is not to say that I begrudge them those triumphs. No, it’s not that. It’s the fact that I feel like nothing and no one in comparison.

Growing up I remember my mother doing a lot of different jobs to make ends meet. The cruel irony was that she had given up a very good job to have children, then when my father died there was a steep drop in income and she had to go back to work. But by that time the job she had left required a whole new set of qualifications and she had no way back in. So, until her retirement at the end of October this year, she had spent over 20 years doing bit-part jobs to pay the bills. And she, like me, was smart enough to do better.

These are mistakes that I don’t want my children to make because I want what all parents want; I want my children to be happy. Abusive relationships don’t make anybody happy, and men can be victims too. Hopefully by the time my sons are grown up there will be less shame attached to being a male victim of domestic abuse and more transparency about how big the issue really is. And it’s not that I think my children need to go to university to be happy, but I feel like the exploration and reaching of one’s potential plays an integral role in future happiness. Because if you always feel like you could have been “more”, how can you ever be satisfied with falling short of your own expectations?

I don’t want them to end up like me; always damaged and always wondering “is this all I will ever be?” Because once they are grown up and I have fulfilled my active role in their development as individuals, just exactly what does that leave me with?

This too shall pass.

The Week In Worries

I am a worrier. I worry about everything all the time. If I can't find anything to worry about then I worry myself about that instead. Do you ever do that thing where you've been cold-sweat obsessing about something all day, then you're just dropping off to sleep - having kinda forgotten about it - and you remember that you were worried about something earlier and then wrack your brains to remember what it was so you can continue worrying about it? I do. I do it all the fucking time. It's really no great mystery why I don't sleep well. And it's always stupid, small shit that doesn't even actually matter at all. Like I forgot to buy something that I don't really need or didn't wash up the stuff from dinner.

We have one of those Elf on the Shelf things this year. Do you know how fucking stressful they are? It was sent to us as a gift by my relatives in the US and Toddler Taylor loves it (which is all that matters and makes me incredibly grateful to my family for sending it as I don't imagine I would have thought to buy one myself). Every night the elf is supposed to fly back to the North Pole and report the day's events to Santa, then he will return to our home and find himself a new spot. Of course, that means it is my parental responsibility to find him a new place to sit in each day. So far he has perched in the Christmas tree, clung to the wreath in the hallway (where he had to have a safety rope because I found him on the floor when I came downstairs and can only imagine the horror that would have ensued if it had been Toddler Taylor who made the grim discovery rather than me), poked his head out of a box of Ready Brek, and today he is swinging, Miley style, from a glass bauble in the kitchen. He has also sat on a few shelves too, just to keep things traditional - and easy, if I'm being completely honest. But the point is that every night when the kids have gone to bed, I wander around the house, elf in hand, looking for a new spot for him. I worry that Toddler Taylor won't be able to find him. I worry that he will fall to his death from whatever lofty perch I have chosen. Mostly I worry that I will forget to move him at all. This has happened more than once and resulted in a sudden bolt-awake incident in the middle of the night, accompanied by frantic thoughts of, "The elf the elf oh my fucking god I didn't move the fucking elf!" So yeah. I worry about that cursed elf a lot.

I worry about Baby Taylor a ridiculous amount too. There's the fact that, at 14 months, he shows no interest in independently walking. I know that this is my fault because I have babied him because he is the last baby I will ever have (but that's a story for another day). I also worry about his proclivity for injuring himself. Because Baby Taylor may not be able to walk, but the kid is a fucking mountain goat when it comes to climbing. However, unlike a mountain goat, he often falls off the stuff that he has climbed and hurts himself. Yesterday he climbed up into the high chair and then onto the table. About half an hour ago he climbed onto this huge, soft cube he has that plays songs about shapes and, predictably, the thing tipped over and he fell off it. I can't even go to the bathroom anymore unless I take him with me because he WILL climb something, fall off it and probably give himself concussion. It's a nightmare.

I also worry about my house. My husband takes a philosophical stance on the issue of cleaning and tidying. "It will be better when the kids are older," he intones with a resigned sigh. I, on the other hand, regularly explode into hysteria over the state of our house: "If we don't fucking keep on top of cleaning the fucking house then it will be so fucking dirty by the time the kids are "older" that we will never actually be able to make it look clean again!" I hiss emphatically, windmilling my arms frantically in the general direction of the various detritus strewn about the place with gay abandon. For most of my adult life I have lived in the midst of other people's mess. First it was the boyfriend who never cleaned up after himself to such an extent that I gave up too. Then, after living in a few very cramped flats with no storage space and a three month suitcase-living stint in the US, I had to put up with my brother's negligent approach to basic cleanliness for six months. But in between there was this one flat I had with cavernous storage and plenty of living space and I kept that place immaculate. That flat stands as a monument to how I would live if I didn't have to deal with everyone else's shit being everywhere. At the present time, the ironing pile is so damned huge that I fear Baby Taylor may soon decide to climb it. I find myself panic stricken over the sheer volume of stuff there is to tidy away and clean sometimes. Like right at this moment my heart feels a little strangled by it all.

Money. Who doesn't worry about money, especially at this time of year? At the moment we are okay, but I know that soon we are going to need to send Toddler Taylor to playgroup for full days and I just don't know where that money is going to come from. I could work more, but that seems self-defeating because then I would need someone to look after Baby Taylor. So sometimes I look at the lives of my peers who have good jobs and are making good money and I wish that I had done more with my life. Of course, being a pragmatist, when I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with my life at 18 I decided to put university on the back burner and work instead. And if I hadn't done that then I probably wouldn't be who I am today. But just every now and again I feel like I could be so much more, like I had so much potential and I just threw it all away. I guess there's more than one worry here, but they're so intrinsically tied up with each other - and both have such a huge bearing on my self-worth - that it's impossible for me to mention one without thinking of the other. Maybe what I should really be worrying about is why either of these things actually bother me so much in the first place.

Here's something else I worry about: Am I not enjoying this as much as I should be? Am I spending too much time worrying about stuff and not enough time just being with my children? Is it normal to worry this much about mess and finances and milestones and fucking elves? Will I look back on this one day and realise that I worried so much about the things that didn't matter that I missed out on getting the most out of the things that do? But the thing that I keep hearing from the older generation is that this is just how it is. This is just motherhood and parenting and that I will find all of the joy that I lost out on to worry when I have grandchildren someday. To me that feels a little bleak, so instead of thinking about that I keep bringing myself back to an afternoon I had with Toddler Taylor a couple of months ago. We went up into the woods and balanced along the trunks of fallen trees and threw piles of leaves into the air and ran along the twisting little paths and listened for an owl hooting in the canopy above us and we had the best fucking time just being together. 

That's what I always dreamed of when I thought about having children. That's what makes me happier than anything else in the world ever, and I get so excited when I think about being able to do these things with both of my children next year.

And the best part? I wasn't worried about a thing.

Last Christmas

On Tuesday night my husband and I decorated our house for Christmas, and as I walked around and around the tree getting my feet tangled up in the power cord for the lights and occasionally muttering “for fucksake” under my breath, he reminded me of  how unpleasant this activity was last year. He remembered how I swore and shouted at him for not helping, then completely exploded when he finally got up, picked up a bead chain and started doing it all wrong. Because last year, decorating the house for Christmas was like a metaphor for my entire life in that I just couldn’t fucking cope with it. I couldn’t figure out how to get the lights onto the tree without getting them into a vast and unsolvable knot. I didn’t have enough bead chain, so I started being less liberal with it and then I had far too much. My colour scheme wasn’t working. The ornaments looked all jumbled and wrong. It took me hours, I wouldn’t let anybody else help and I hated every minute of it. And when I was finally done, I announced loudly, “Christmas can FUCK OFF!” and stormed upstairs to bed in a very un-festive strop.

This is the part where I have to be brutally honest and hope that it’s less uncomfortable for you than it probably will be for me... Last Christmas was fucking awful. Awful. I have this really clear memory of sitting on the stairs at my parents-in-law's house on Christmas Eve, nervously feeding Baby Taylor a bottle while thinking, “Well, at least he’s drinking it and not screaming and making me look like the worst mother in the world for once.” That one snapshot pretty much sums up the whole festive period for me. Every minute of it pivoted around whether Baby Taylor was feeding (sometimes) or sleeping (NOPE). On Christmas Day itself, he didn’t do much of either. When my husband and I went to bed at the end of that day, we turned to each other and said, “Next year will be better.” We had to think like that, that what we were going through right at that moment wasn’t terminal. But at the same time, I think that was the moment when we really knew that something wasn’t right and that somehow it had to change.

Fast forward almost 12 months: Baby Taylor eats and sleeps in a manner fairly typical of a child his age. It’s easy for me to pretend that all the stuff in the middle didn’t happen. It would be really convenient for me to forget how hard I found it to bond with him and how desperately I wanted to run away from him sometimes, but the truth is that it wasn’t until I had to spend time away from him while he was in the hospital that I finally started to feel an emotional connection with him. I remember going to see him on the ward one evening after I’d been home to spend a little time with Toddler Taylor and eat some dinner. He’d been asleep when I left, but by the time I got back he was awake and sitting in a pushchair out on the main ward with the nurses. The huge smile he gave me when he saw me walking up the corridor squeezed my heart, and I knew right then that everything was going to be okay.

Baby Taylor rushes to see me when I get home from work and climbs all over me for cuddles, just like his big brother. He cries at the front door when I leave, even when he’s just waved me off. Those dark days in the first few months of his life feel very far away from the place we find ourselves in now, but it wouldn’t seem right to allow this Christmas to pass without acknowledging their existence. They will always be a part of our history, but I’m finally starting to feel hopeful that they won’t have anything to do with our future. The truth is that this time last year, I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t imagine a time when I would be able to feed Baby Taylor without feeling anxious, or a night when I wouldn’t have to get up 12 times to settle him. That’s just how it was; that was our normal.

Now our “normal” finally feels actually normal. This year I am looking forward to Christmas with my family. Whatever challenges we have to face over the next 12 months, we will be alright. We had a difficult start to the year, as documented here, but I feel very different to the way I felt back then. For example, I used to dread my husband going to work and leaving me to battle with the children on my own. I would hope and pray that a family member would text and offer me some help bathing the kids and getting them to bed, just so I could have contact with another adult and share the burden with someone else. I felt so much more able to cope when there was someone else around – at least until I stopped coping entirely – and I constantly questioned my ability as a mother. Now I don’t think twice about juggling my kids as I get them both ready for bed. In comparison to how things used to be, it’s easy. It’s just another part of normal family life. There’s that word again; Normal. I’ve never really had much of an affection for normality as a concept, but when you apply it to the routines of life with children it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. When you compare it to what used to be normal for us, it is all I ever wanted.

So... I think that just for once, I get to sit here at my computer and type one small sentence that couldn't have felt further from the truth this time last year: It’s going to be alright.

Mama Guilt

I don’t know if this is the case for most mothers, but I suffer with a constant feeling of complete inadequacy. When I get around to cleaning our house – which, if I’m honest, doesn’t happen as often as it should – I find myself wondering if every other mother on the planet has a cleaner house than mine. Do they all manage to keep their houses immaculate in spite of their mess-creating offspring? I try really hard to keep our house clean and tidy, but sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes the kids need more attention from me than usual, or something else is going on that precludes me from being able to make cleaning a priority. Sometimes I’m just too fucking tired, and then I go to bed feeling guilty for the two hours I spent sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall with the TV on in the background. I feel like I should have spent those two hours being productive and I get pissed off with myself for wasting them.

 The other thing is that I often feel completely inadequate as a mother. I read a lot on Twitter and blogs and message boards about all of the exciting adventures that mums have been on with their kids, or the crafty stuff that they spent an afternoon doing (most likely without almost coming out in hives over the mess), or even just the little walk they took... and I compare myself to these women and my kids’ lives to their kids’ lives and I feel like a hopeless case of parenting failure. I worry that my sons are bored or miserable – or both – and that I am ruining their lives by not being pro-active enough. Is literally every other mother out there doing a better job than I am at the full spectrum of parenting? Some afternoons when my husband is at work, Toddler Taylor is bored and destructive and Baby Taylor is cranky, I take them out for a ramble around where we live and I always feel this overwhelming sense of achievement that I managed to get them both out of the house on my own. How totally fucking ridiculous is that? I feel like giving myself a slow hand-clap just writing it.

This guilt/inadequacy complex often gets me thinking about Baby Taylor and the problems he has faced over the first 12 months of his life. A lot of the time I wonder if his reflux is somehow my fault. I was so sick during the early part of my pregnancy that I stopped taking my supplements because they seemed to make it worse. I've scoured the Internet, literally spent hours trying to implicate myself in his condition, and try as I might I can't find a link between the two. But then I also can't seem to accept that sometimes things just happen, especially not when it comes to my babies. I must have done something wrong during my pregnancy. Maybe it was that time I cleaned the bathroom with a bleach spray and didn’t wear gloves or open the window. Or perhaps it was that day I spent out in the garden using an electric sander on a couple of chairs; maybe the vibrations did something to him. Could I have rolled on my bump one too many times in the night and caused it? All of these ruminations are equally ludicrous and unlikely, but I will ponder over them for hours and convince myself that it is all my fault.

Sometimes I think about the breastfeeding thing too. Fucking breastfeeding. It's the most wonderful thing in the world when it goes well. It's a horror show when it doesn't. But I'll often catch myself wondering if I really tried hard enough. It was a nine week battle. I think. Who knows? It felt like fucking eternity. The idea of trying to battle through another three weeks, struggling to get him to latch on at all for a reluctant feed and otherwise pumping every hour... I felt like I'd lose my mind if I had to keep going. When I talk about it with other people, I'll say, "I tried SO hard, but he just wouldn't have it" and even as I'm saying it I'll be thinking But did I really try hard enough? Could I have done more? Was I really just doing something wrong the whole time? I think I've more or less accepted now that I'll never completely rid myself of the guilt, shame and, yes, feeling of utter fucking inadequacy... But it would be nice to forgive myself for it someday.

Being a mother is kind of all about being neurotic about stuff. I mean, when you have your first baby you’ll catch yourself staring at them while they’re sleeping, irrationally terrified that they might suddenly forget how to breathe. If you breastfeed you panic that they’re not getting enough, and if you don’t then you worry that it’ll have some catastrophic detrimental effect on them. You freak out over how they compare to their peers and spend countless hours Googling BABY MILESTONES  to try and figure out if they’re “normal”. It’s endless and constant and really fucking lonely sometimes because men just don’t seem to feel the same way, and it’s almost impossible to talk to other mothers about it in case you pick the wrong confidante and she turns out to be someone who does that awful “my baby could talk, walk and recite Shakepseare by the time s/he was six months old” one-upmanship bullshit. I hate those women. What happened to sisterhood and solidarity? Is that not a thing anymore?

I read this article once about how comparing ourselves and our lives to the people around us is ultimately really damaging, and the fact is that we probably aren’t even making an accurate comparison. Most people don’t go around telling everyone who will listen about the times they’ve fucked things up; they present us with the version of themselves that they want us to see. The same is true with motherhood, I imagine. We all have good days and bad days, but we tend to talk up the good days and gloss over the bad ones. My kids probably aren’t going to remember the boring days when we stayed inside and did nothing much of anything because mummy’s brain was numb from lack of sleep, but they will remember the days when we went on adventures and spent hours running around the garden and jumping on the trampoline. They’ll remember the afternoon when we read twenty stories in an hour and covered every inch of the floor in jigsaw puzzles. They’ll remember the day we planted the rockery, all four of us out in the sunshine together. If I judged my mothering skills by how happy my children are then I would probably be a lot kinder to myself, but I suppose that at least my constant worrying is also a constant force driving me to be a better mother and a better version of myself every day.

Stop Beating Yourself Up

There’s this thing mothers do that I also do, but don’t actually understand: We beat ourselves up for every tiny parenting mistake we make and convince ourselves that because we don’t get this crazy little thing called motherhood right 100% of the time, we must just be fucking terrible at it. There’s this constant running commentary in our heads that sounds something like this:

“He just asked me to play trains with him and I told him I was busy, what if he never asks me again? And he actually hung his head. HUNG HIS HEAD. I can’t believe I made my child feel like that. I’m the worst mother on the planet. And I yelled at him this morning because his room was a mess. And we haven’t read stories for three nights because he’s been so bloody horrendously naughty at bedtime. I don’t deserve to be a mother. I’m so awful.”

And then we do something  completely fatal; we promise ourselves that it will never happen again. And no one can live up to that. NO ONE. Because we will be too busy to play trains again. We will shout about the mess in the playroom again. We will refuse to read stories again because bedtime naughtiness actually just isn’t acceptable. So we create this vicious cycle of self-deprecation that might actually keep us up at night. It keeps me up sometimes. There are days when I cannot accept anyone telling me that I am a good mother, because all I can think about is all of the things they don’t know. These people don’t know how desperately I wanted to scream at my ten month-old when he knocked the spoon out of my hand for the millionth time in one meal. They don’t know that I shut my three year-old in the garden for two minutes when he was having a shrieking tantrum over nothing right in the middle of his brother’s afternoon nap. Would they think less of me if they did? I don’t know, but I absolutely convince myself that they would.

Here’s the strangest part in all of this, though: We are hugely uncomfortable with the idea of allowing a fellow mother to feel like she is not doing an amazing job. We can berate ourselves until the cows come home, but when somebody else does the same thing, all we want to do is offer our support and tell her that, in all likelihood, she is doing an amazing job. We all fuck up sometimes. We all shout at our kids when we’re tired and then hate ourselves for it. We all swear in their earshot at the end of a hard day and then worry that it might be the next word out of their mouths. We all lose sight of why we decided to become mothers in the first place during the tough times and the crippling sleep-deprivation and the absolute fucking lack of any consistent advice on any given topic related to child-rearing. And you know what? IT’S OKAY. We are not perfect and our children are not perfect and that is okay too.

Sometimes my friends with kids will ask me for parenting advice and it’s something I just dread. Not because I don’t want to help, but because I know that parenting isn’t a one-size-fits-all outfit. I actually really do want to help, but there is so much that I just don’t know about how to be a good mother and how to help my children do this or that that I don’t feel like it’s fair for me to offer any kind of wisdom to anybody else if it might not actually help them in the end anyway. Potty training is a glaring example of this. When I was trying to potty train Toddler Taylor I read every article and every thread I could possibly find related to the topic. I probably read 90% of what the internet has to offer when it comes to How To Potty Train Your Child. There was advice about using sticker charts, letting your child pick out their own underwear, having a potty in every room of the house, waiting until they tell you they’re actually ready... The list goes on forever. What actually worked in the end was giving up. Seriously. After I’d cleaned up the thousandth puddle of pee and washed the hundredth pair of shitty Thomas The Tank Engine pants, I sighed, sat Toddler Taylor down and said, “baby, I don’t think you’re ready for this yet and I don’t want to make you unhappy about it anymore. Let’s try again soon.” The next day, Toddler Taylor went off to playgroup and actually asked the play workers if he could use the toilet. Then he came home and did his first ever poo in the potty. And that was it; POTTY TRAINING COMPLETE. So I literally have no advice on that subject at all. I tell myself it was easy, but it wasn’t. When he decided he wanted to do it, then it was easy. Before that it was an unmitigated fucking nightmare and I can’t even really bring myself to remember it. But that doesn’t mean that your experience of potty training will be the same, and that’s why my advice probably isn’t often helpful to anybody else. Kids are unique little beings and they all have different needs and development levels and all you can really do is embrace that and try to figure them out as you go along.

The catalyst for this post is a post by another mother that I read earlier this week. All I wanted to do as I read that post was give the writer a hug because she reminded me so much of myself, and yet sometimes I have felt so alone in my belief that I am getting so many things wrong on this journey. I’m not going to say that it made me feel better to know that someone else was struggling, because it didn’t and that’s a fucking awful way to think. But it did make me feel like I am probably in pretty good company when it comes to the whole self-deprecation thing. And it also made me feel like maybe the best mothers are the ones who don’t get it right all the time, but who make mistakes and learn from them. If you have a meltdown in front of your kids and you don’t acknowledge how bad it made you feel for them to see you like that then maybe you haven’t realised that it probably isn’t something you should be doing all that often. But, at the same time, most mothers have to accept that it will happen every now and again. Your kids might remember it depending on their age, but kids aren’t judgemental creatures and they love you. They will forgive you for not being perfect, probably a whole lot quicker than you will forgive yourself.

I’m not here to give advice. My parting shot is this: Be kind to yourself, as kind as you would be to another mother who felt like a failure over something. All you can do when it comes to raising children is your best, and if you know that you are doing your best then you can stop asking impossible things of yourself – endless patience being top of that list in my case – and focus less on being “PERFECT” and more on being “GOOD ENOUGH”. When you think about it, who decided on the perfect way to be a mother? A bunch of random people who you’ve never met and who don’t know your children, so if you look at it like that... What the fuck do they know about what it takes to be “perfect” anyway?

Post-Pregnancy Self-Esteem

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the pretty poor self-image I’ve had since Baby Taylor was born. In all honesty, I’ve never had a great relationship with my own body and there has always been a long list of things that I would change, but I had a much better relationship with myself after Toddler Taylor was born than I do now that I’ve been through a second pregnancy. My first pregnancy didn’t really change me much. I lost my boobs completely after I was done breastfeeding, but it’s hard to mourn what was never really there in the first place. Otherwise I remained largely unchanged. I remember with startling clarity the cold sweat of horror I felt during my second pregnancy when I spotted stretch marks for the first time. Once they appeared my husband was categorically not allowed to see me naked, or even in underwear. I think I probably let him see them once in low lighting and when he said “they’re not that bad” I believe I swore at him and shut myself in the bathroom. I have such a huge amount of admiration for women who can just accept stretch marks and wear them like battle scars when I’m so ashamed of mine that literally nobody is allowed to see them.

It seems kind of odd when I look at it like that. I have scars literally all over my body and I never really give them much thought. Sometimes I’ll look at them and think that I would probably look a whole lot better without them, but they don’t bother me particularly, and that’s probably because I caused them in the first place so at least I had control over them. Back when I’d just had Baby Taylor and I was still feeling really raw about the stretch marks, I posted a photo of them on instagram because I hoped it might be liberating. A few people commented to say “But you got a beautiful baby from them!” and while I was so hugely grateful to them for trying to make me feel better about myself, all I could really think at the time was “I know that. But it doesn’t help.”

Thinking about it, some of my self-image issues were probably started, inadvertently, by my mother. When I got to about the age of 11, I remember her telling me “I don’t think you’ll ever be pretty so much as just attractive. You’ve got very strong features.” At the time I don’t think I really had much of an understanding of what constituted for physical attractiveness, but it was something that stuck nevertheless. As a result of that one off-hand remark, I developed a bit of a thing about my nose. I convinced myself that it was the “strong” feature she had referred to and decided, all on my own, that “strong” was obviously a euphemism for “gi-fucking-normous”. I’m not playing the blame game here, and I’d certainly never say to her “it’s all your fault; I’m fucked up because of you” because that wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be true. My many, various and often colourful neuroses are a direct by-product of my own poor decisions, and I think probably a lot of my self-image stuff is tied up with that too. However, the fact that I will never accept any human being on the planet telling me I’m “pretty” is very probably down to my mother. But who even likes the word pretty anyway? It’s all frills and pinkness and it doesn’t suit me, so that’s okay.

I think the phrase “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” is particularly apt when I look back on how frustrated I used to feel about my body when there was really nothing wrong with it at all. I can’t honestly remember what I looked like before I had babies because there are no photographs of it. My self-esteem was so cripplingly low that I never allowed anyone to take photos of me in a bikini – and I certainly have no fear of “revenge porn” ever happening to me because the idea of me sending risqué pictures to anyone is, frankly, laughable -, but I do know that, actually, I was pretty much okay really. After I had Toddler Taylor and realised that I’d come out of the other side of pregnancy relatively unscathed, I actually started to appreciate my body. I learnt to ignore the parts I hated and celebrate the rest. There are photographs of me in my back garden wearing a bikini about a year after Toddler Taylor was born. So I finally felt kind of okay about my physical attributes... And then I had another baby. And I came out of the other side of that pregnancy feeling cringingly ashamed every time I looked in the mirror.

This is another one of those things that mothers just don’t talk about, and I do understand why. I know that hating a body that has given me two beautiful babies makes me feel guilty and ungrateful. I also know that feeling like that actually creates this self-perpetuating cycle of feeling shitty about my body and then feeling shittier about feeling shitty about it because feeling shitty about it in the first place makes me a shitty person. But shouldn’t it really be okay to be honest if stretch marks feel more like bad luck than a badge of honour? I know from looking through dozens of different forums on the subject that sometimes mothers do try to talk about this, to seek solace in the words of other women, and more often than not the replies are the same: “Just look at your beautiful baby and realise how wonderful your body is and how lucky you are.” So there are mothers out there who have tried to reach out and they’ve pretty much all hit the same brick wall of stoic put-up-and-shut-up responses. But we’re not all the same, and for me throughout my relationship history, I’ve never really been able to understand why anybody would be attracted to me and I’ve always tried to hide that behind being witty and vaguely sarcastic. So now I just try to believe my husband when he tells me that he doesn’t notice the stretch marks and other myriad imperfections, turn them into a bit of a joke, when actually I’m thinking “how do so many other woman manage to just shrug this shit off?”