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.

Having kids will change your life

There's nothing that has the power to change your life quite so much as becoming a parent. Whatever life was like before you had kids, I can guarantee you that you won't even recognise it once they arrive. The short list of things that having a baby changes is:

EVERYTHING.

The slightly more in-depth list consists of:

Sleep

How much you sleep will change DRAMATICALLY overnight. Literally. Because yesterday you didn't have a baby and today you do. It's just like that. How much you value sleep will change too. Before you had kids, sleep was just something you did at the end of every day because your body told you that you had to. You probably didn't really give it that much thought, did you? But now your sleep is precious. Now four uninterrupted hours on the bounce is the Holy Grail. A whole night? Are you out of your fucking mind? That's not happening for a long time yet. I am yet to meet a parent with young children  - mother or father - who does not feel nostalgic about sleep. Oh, and those Sunday morning lie-ins you used to have? Yeah. I think you can see where this is going.

Freedom

When you don't have to plan every outing around the needs of a small child, you take your freedom for granted. Why wouldn't you? Before you have kids you don't have to think about packing a changing bag and having spare nappies and wipes in the car. You don't have to worry about whether or not you can breastfeed in the outfit you're wearing or if there'll be somewhere to heat up a bottle. You need to go out, so you go out. But once children come along, you can't do that anymore. You either have to plan the outing with military precision and accept the fact that your baby will probably unleash a poonami the second you sit down on the bus/start the car engine OR you need to find somebody to babysit. Somebody your child is familiar and comfortable with - and I really can't stress that part enough. Still feel like going out? Nah. Maybe tomorrow, eh?

Worry

It is ASTOUNDING how much parents worry about their kids. When they're babies, you worry if they're eating, shitting and sleeping enough (probably; undoubtedly more; and NO). When they get a little older, you start to worry about those dreaded milestones. And everybody else is worrying about them too (or being smug about them, which is pretty much the same thing), so they're THE topic of discussion at every playgroup, play date and clinic. Inescapable. After that comes behaviour (toddler tyranny is normal; anybody who says otherwise is lying) and thereafter it's a constant snowball of worry until you die. I mean, that sounds bleak, but apparently it's true. So get comfy and settle in for the ride.

Social Life

Okay, this one is tough. But the truth is, you might lose some friends after you have kids. As far as your friends with kids go, you're probably safe. When you cancel on them because you're too fucking mind-bogglingly exhausted to leave the house after 7:30pm, they will more than likely understand and feel secretly relieved. But when the same thing happens with your friends who don't have kids, they might not have quite the same level of understanding. That's not their fault, by the way, and they're not doing it to be assholes; they just have no personal experience of how knackering it can be to stagger through the bath and bedtime routine and then have to drag yourself into the shower and attempt to make yourself look something like human. So be prepared for some changes in your social circle; it's normal and it will be okay.

Your Home

After almost four years of motherhood, I honestly cannot remember what it was like to live in a home that wasn't full of toys and nappies and bottles. I used to have ornamental shit all over the place and laundry that was actually done and ironed and put away before it took on laundryzilla status. Now... Well, now I spend a lot of time trying to come up with ingenious toy storage solutions and despairing over laundry. None of my kitchen cupboards open without adult intervention and there's a lock on the OUTSIDE of my bathroom door to stop small people letting even smaller people in to rifle through the bin and unravel all the toilet roll. Sometimes, when I forget to put that lock on after I leave the bathroom, I find shampoo bottles and sponges down the toilet. Oh, and O actually pushed one of the knots in the floorboards all the way through earlier this week, so I had to call a joiner for advice about how to bung it up and fill it in. Such fun!

Honestly, reading this has probably made you think that parenthood is just an endless nightmare with no redeeming features, but that's not true. There are a lot of shitty moments when you have young children. Literally and figuratively. But there are really great moments too. There are the first moments of the morning when your kids are inexplicably ecstatic to see you. There are the moments when they climb into your lap with a book on a rainy afternoon. There are kisses and cuddles and I love you's and there is the simple fact that you are one of their absolute favourite people in the world. All of that is pretty cool really, and it's more than worth all the other stuff.

Valentine's Day with kids = ZERO ROMANCE

Valentine's Day becomes a totally different animal when you have kids, doesn't it? If I'm completely honest, I've forgotten what the last few were like, but I do remember the first one.

My husband (then boyfriend) was incredibly excited (I don't know) and woke me up at crazy o'clock in the morning to try and convince me to open my card and present. I - perhaps somewhat ungratefully - said no and told him to wake me up at a more sociable hour. I can't remember what time he woke me up again in the end, but there was a cup of tea and a card and a present and it was all very cute. There's a good chance there was sex at some point too, although I honestly can't remember. But I remember it being a nice day.

This year I was woken by an exuberant three year-old at 8am (it's really not fair that anyone gets to be that full of life and energy before 10am), who then proceeded to steal my phone and shout at me about Fruit Ninja while I was trying to take a shower. Then there were about ten minutes of alternately shouting at and throwing stuff in the direction of my husband (at one point I sprayed his bare foot with dry shampoo in utter frustration that he wouldn't just get the fuck out of bed) before he stumbled out of the room and went to get F, who was rampaging around his cot in a sleeping bag like a giant, hungry maggot.

I wanted to take the kids to the beach because the sun was kind of shining on and off and I'm working all week next week, so outdoor family time felt like a good idea. It stopped feeling like a good idea sometime between not being able to find my wellies and F emptying the entire fucking shoe cupboard all over the hallway. By the time we fell out of the house and into the car, I was pretty much done with the whole thing, but we got to the beach, parked and got out of the car and it was fucking freezing. Not only that, I'd neglected to put hats or gloves on either of the kids, my husband was wearing the thinnest jacket in the world and I'd left my earmuffs at home. Total mum fail.

We gallantly battled our way through the sub-zero wind chill and all piled onto the beach. Obviously it was far too cold for digging in the sand or any of the stuff that you normally do at the beach, so O and I ran off in the general direction of the sea and he dragged me into the surf. Which was fine for him because he was wearing a puddle suit and wellies, but my TU Converse knock-offs were quickly waterlogged and my jeans weren't faring much better. Still, we ran in and out of the sea for a while, then we headed back to my husband and F, liberated F from the pushchair and watched him plop straight down on the sand and shovel a handful into his mouth. After another half hour of general mucking about on the sand, we headed back to the car (it really was fucking cold - it SNOWED later) and O had a tantrum about the fact that I pressed the button at the pedestrian crossing. F fell asleep on the way home.

When we got home, everybody had lunch and grandma came to visit. My husband disappeared outside to clear a bunch of crap out of the garage in the snow and I flicked through a copy of Glamour. O ran maniacally around the house making a cacophony of random noises - after several failed attempts at playing board games - while F napped, then, after the kids had had their tea things got really romantic.

I went upstairs to clean the en suite shower room. It took me over an hour because, to be brutally honest, I haven't done it properly for a really long time. By the time I came back downstairs, it was bath time and O was already tearing about in his Batman pyjamas (complete with cape). F was doing anything but co-operate with the process of getting undressed and into the bath. Once in the bath he played happily for a few minutes before turning on the cold tap and scaring the shit out of himself. Story time was noisy and I don't think anybody was really listening. O cried when he went to bed. He does this almost every night at the moment the door closes and nobody knows why. F threw his bear at me three times.

Now my husband is cooking bruschetta and I'm sort of watching The Big Bang Theory in my unicorn joggers and a jumper I probably really need to put through the wash, which goes to show how much effort I can be bothered to go to after a whole day of constant questions and crying.

So, it hasn't really been a particularly romantic day, and it won't end with champagne and strawberries or sizzling sex. But I'm okay with this. If Valentine's Day is about being with and appreciating the people you love (and, for the sake of argument, we can pretend that it's not really about extravagant gifts and nookie), then I've had a pretty good day. And I don't actually like champagne anyway. 

The Great Conjuntivitis Epidemic

Sometimes I wonder if I have ever done one single thing right in my whole life. I know that sounds melodramatic, but I seem to spend a lot of my time second guessing myself – particularly when it comes to parenting – and I always feel like I’m making the wrong decision in the end anyway. So, this week I’ve been really sick and I spent one whole day in bed and honestly don’t really know how I got through the other days. But aside from that, Toddler Taylor (or “O”, as he will be known from now on) picked up conjunctivitis at the beginning of the week and I really didn’t know what to do. My husband diligently took him to the chemist and got some eye drops for him on Tuesday while I was out of action and started treating him right away, but I had no clue what I was supposed to do about sending him to paygroup the next day.

So I did research. Obviously I know that it’s contagious, and I’ve had it a few times myself so I know it’s also really fucking itchy. Itchy = Rubbing. Rubbing = Spreading Infection. Very basic formula. But O wasn’t really rubbing at his eyes after he started on the drops, so I thought we might be okay. I emailed his playgroup and asked them what they wanted me to do and they replied saying it was fine for him to go if he wasn’t rubbing or scratching his eyes. The next morning, aside from me having to physically sit on him to administer the drops (calm down; I only weigh 4 stone more than he does), he seemed generally quite well and he said that his eyes were not itchy or sore. And, on that basis, I took him to playgroup and that was that.

At home we did everything we could think of to stop anyone else in the house catching it. We gave O his own hand towel and I made a kind of strangled screech every time he reached for the wrong towel after he’d washed his hands, which was probably pretty weird and disconcerting, but it did the trick. And we made sure he washed his hands if he’d been touching his eyes and told him not to share his cuddly toys with his brother. Infection control is almost completely impossible with small people, and they really don’t understand what you’re losing your shit about if they pick up the wrong towel or why you scream "WASH YOUR HANDS!" at them every time they touch their eyes, but we did our best.

Yesterday it seemed like Baby Taylor (or F, as he will be known from now on) had quite gooey eyes, so we decided he had probably caught the dreaded pink eye too. So we kind of sighed and were like OF COURSE, but other than that we just figured it was pretty inevitable, what with kids being essentially quite grubby creatures. 

And then. 

Then I took O to playgroup and we bumped into Tired Dad on the way in (remember Tired Dad from my post about adult naptime?) and the conversation went something like this:

Tired Dad: Morning! How are you?
Me: I’m good thanks. How about you?
TD: Eurgh. Big one has conjunctivitis and little one has conjunctivitis AND an abscess on his eyelid.
Me: *awkwardly* Oh no, are they okay?
O:*mumbles* I had that. Mummy sat on me and gave me drops.
TD: ?
Me: Er, yeah, he had it too. Beginning of the week. Er... Sorry. It might be our fault.

He was actually pretty much okay about it and we grimace-laughed about how fucking impossible it is to put drops in the eyes of young children, then O and I went inside and were greeted by a gaggle of parents standing just inside the door. So then, in a moment that will be forever known as the Playgroup Witch Hunt, this happened:

Playgroup Worker: Morning O! Your eyes look much better today!
Me: Er, yeah. He’s doing great.
Mum 1. Oh, has he had conjunctivitis? I think my daughter has that.
Mum 2. Yeah, mine was rubbing at her eyes last night too.
PW: Somebody else just called up and said their child isn’t coming because she has it too.
EVERYONE LOOKS AT ME
Me: *desperately* I’m sorry! I sent an email! He wasn’t scratching! I’m so sorry!
O: MUMMY SAT ON ME AND PUT DROPS IN MY EYES!
EVERYONE STARES AT ME IN OBVIOUS HORROR
Me: Um...

Then I faffed around with O’s coat for way too long because I was embarrassed and kept fumbling the zip while everyone else just kind of stared at me a bit and made it ten times worse. I literally couldn’t get out of there quick enough.

At lunchtime pick-up I laughed about it with Tired Dad and he told me it probably wasn’t O’s fault at all, but there was this little voice in my head the whole time that was like, it’s just one more fucking thing for me to feel bad about. I researched, I double-checked with the playgroup, I enforced strict infection control procedures and I still messed up. That’s so me.

I suppose at least there’s this one thing: I can actually give you some solid advice for once, which is this: If your kid has conjunctivitis, ignore what PHE says and just don’t fucking send them to playgroup or whatever, because it’s really just not worth it to end up being the person everyone glares at for the rest of the week. I mean, if you just don’t give a shit about being glared at then, seriously, good for you; I wish I could be more like you. Anyway, I suppose it’s not so bad; it’s half-term next week and everyone will probably have forgotten about it by the time the kids go back... Or all of the parents will be wearing dark glasses because they’ve caught it too...

A post in favour of routines

Before I had kids, I didn’t realise that routines were such a controversial, touchy subject. But apparently they are, so I’m going to out myself in this post as a routine aficionado. I love routines. I’m a routine junkie. “What’s happening next, Davina?” “I know! I know! I have a ROUTINE.” I actually didn’t start out on the parenting journey thinking I am going to have a routine. It just kind of happened, and it actually happened because, like a lot of babies, Toddler Taylor was extremely fussy from around 5pm every day. He would have a breastfeed on the sofa at 5ish and usually fall asleep when he was done. But he wouldn’t stay asleep for more than about half an hour, then he would wake up crabby and he didn’t want to do anything. Everything made him cross. Except, inexplicably, watching In The Night Garden (which I fucking hate because come on; what is it even about, really?). So we would watch that and then I would muffle him up (even though it wasn’t that cold because it was, I think, August), stick him in the pram and I would walk to the next village and back and he would usually sleep a bit. Then when we got home he’d have a bath, a bottle and go to bed. Eventually, he naturally started to happily stay awake after his 5pm feed and I could put him straight to bed at 7pm, which is what time he still goes to bed now.

 

He also had a nap schedule which was adjusted as he grew and his sleep needs changed, but I can’t really remember what it was. Which is weird because it wasn’t all that long ago, but there it is. I’m really tired. I don’t remember much of anything these days. It broke the day up into manageable chunks so I could get other stuff done while he was napping, and it also meant that he knew what was coming next. Baby Taylor also has a nap schedule, which is largely modelled on what I can remember of Toddler Taylor’s schedule, but his medication makes him very tired sometimes and so I think he naps a little more than his brother did at the same age. He knows when it’s time for his nap and will often go and stand at the bottom of the stairs, waiting to be taken up to bed (even if he does thrash like a seizing shark when we actually enter his bedroom and he realises this shit’s for real).

 

All that being said, I wouldn’t want you to think that I enforce this routine with an iron fist. Because I don’t. I know my children and I can read their behaviour. If Baby Taylor doesn’t look tired when he’s due for his nap, he stays up until he starts rubbing his eyes and grizzling. As soon as he does that, I whisk him off to bed and he’s asleep before I’ve even left the room. Similarly, if he’s already exhibiting sleepy behaviour before his usual nap time, I don’t make him stay up until he’s screaming the house down with exhaustion. And, contrary to the belief held by one particular member of my family with whom I no longer have a relationship (for reasons unrelated to this issue), the fact that my kids have a routine does not stop me from getting out and doing stuff with them. It simply means that I plan ahead a bit so I know what little adjustments to make during the rest of the day to avoid a bedtime meltdown in the evening. Because that’s no fun for anybody.

 

I don’t have these routines to make life easy for myself, although it does sometimes help to know that I have pockets of time during the day in which to get boring, necessary shit like cleaning and ironing done. The reason I’ve stuck to the idea of having a schedule for my children is so that they know what’s coming next. The thing about kids is that they don’t have any concept of time, so Baby Taylor’s nap schedule has been particularly handy in helping Toddler Taylor to understand the layout of the day a little better. For example, right now he loves to play board games, and he has an impressive stack of them. Board games have lots of pieces and they are often quite small. You can see where I’m going with this. Board games simply cannot be played while Baby Taylor is awake and likely to, at best, steal and lose the pieces and, at worst, steal and choke on them. Most afternoons Toddler Taylor will ask me “mummy, can we play a game?” and I will reply “yes, when your brother has gone to bed we can play a game.” So he then knows that he is going to get some one-on-one time with me to play board games while his brother is sleeping. He knows that it is a certainty, a “when” rather than an “if”. And I feel like that’s important for kids, for them to know what to expect from their day. It’s jarring enough being small and not having much control over your emotions without people surprising you all the time.

 

However, none of the above is to say that I think there is anything at all wrong with not having a routine or a nap schedule or whatever. It doesn’t work for everyone, just like co-sleeping or baby-led weaning. All of these things are choices that we make with our specific – and very individual – children in mind. For my part, both of my children are largely very happy and sociable little people. They thrive on their routine and we all work better as a family because of it. When anybody else looks after our children, we can tell them what time they usually nap and eat and nobody has to play the tired-or-teething game with Baby Taylor. My husband works different shifts every week, so in the midst of that chaos, having a routine for my children helps me to at least have control over one aspect of our life as a family unit. It helps me to plan. It works for me and it works for my family. I am pro-routine, but I am also pro-doing-whatever-works-for-your-family. So my one teeny little bit of advice here, at the close of this post, is to parent your children in a way that takes care of all of your best interests and not give a toss what anybody else thinks. Mother (and father) knows best!

Christmas > Sleep

Sleep. When you think about it, sleep is amazing, isn't it? I mean, you pass endless hours of your life just lying in a bed, completely unaware of everything around you, inanimate, dreaming... What a clever thing sleep is. But sleep is a bit like money; if you have it you're not fussed about it, and if you don't have it then you're always worrying about it.

Similarly, in relationships between co-parenting individuals, sleep can be used as currency. Gone are the days when you would barter with promises of sexual favours; now it's sleep. Sleep is your trump card, your Ace, your guarantee of getting whatever you want. All you have to say is "I'll let you sleep in tomorrow if you'll..." and it's yours. Clean the bathroom? Sure. Do all of the ironing and put it away? Absolutely. Hunt down and capture a pink fucking unicorn? Consider it done. I will do pretty much anything you want if you dangle the offer of sleep in front of me. Maybe I wouldn't kill anybody, but then again if they were morally reprehensible and completely irredeemable and you promised me a whole day in bed... Fuck it. Probably.

Sleep is completely unappreciated by the people who have nothing and no one regularly interrupting it. But for me, sleep is the unobtainable holy grail. I fantasise about sleep. When I dream, I dream about sleeping somewhere other than where I am actually sleeping. Desert island with warm, white sand and gently lapping waves? Hell, I'll sleep in a pit full of vipers on a bed of nails if you just promise me no one will wake me up for 8 hours. 

Children don't like sleep. They seem to think that they might miss something or that there are abundant other things they could be doing that are much better than sleeping. But they also tend to fall almost completely unconscious when they sleep. Ever tried to wake a sleeping child who doesn't want to be woken? Not easy and definitely NOT wise. And do you know when children really, REALLY do not like sleep? Christmas. Tonight I fully expect Toddler Taylor to be so emphatically excited that he will tear around the house singing snippets of various carols in a sort of festive, tuneless mash-up and then absolutely REFUSE to go to sleep. And it won't matter how many times I say "Santa won't come if you don't go to sleep" because he won't believe me because Santa ALWAYS comes. Kids are smart; they figure that one out really quickly.

Tomorrow morning he will wake unreasonably early, sprint up the stairs - possibly waking Baby Taylor, who has no fucking idea what's going on or why there is a tree IN THE HOUSE - and declare loudly and with boundless enthusiasm "IT'S CHRISTMAS!!!" before leaping onto the bed and possibly breaking several of my ribs. But here's the thing; I love sleep, but I love my babies ever so much more than sleep. And I love Christmas. And Christmas with my babies is the epitome of wonderful for me. Tomorrow morning it won't matter how little sleep I've had and how bone-achingly exhausted I am, I will still find the energy to sob quietly all the way through the process of watching Toddler Taylor tear open his presents while Baby Taylor eats the wrapping paper off his. It's a parental rite of passage to cry at Christmas. Because another Christmas means that your babies are another year older and so much different and more grown-up than the year before, and lack of restorative sleep makes the whole thing feel, like, TOTES EMOSH. Parents of the world, go ahead and weep with joy (and a little bit because you're so tired and it's so early); you deserve it. You're all bloody heroes to me.

Merry Christmas everyone. May Santa leave a sackful of sleeping dust under your trees to sprinkle liberally over your children on Christmas night.

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.

Parenting Experience: NEW SKILL UNLOCKED

Sometimes I feel that parenting is a bit like one of those games like WoW or D&D, because a lot of the time it's random chance. You roll the right number or meet the right player (I once had a boyfriend who was OBSESSED with WoW, but I actually still don't really understand it, so forgive me if this analogy sucks/is inaccurate) or you... Well, sometimes you don't. The thing about parenting experience is that it's fluid, which is not to say that it's smooth and pleasing to the eye, but that rather like water, if there is a gap or a crack it will find its way through and leave you feeling drained and like you don't know what the fuck to do now.

So today I'm going to share some parenting level-ups and experience points with you, because maybe it'll make us all feel a little better about the bad days.

Sleeping through the night: NEW SKILL UNLOCKED
For one glorious week. Under-eye bags are diminishing, elixir of life is returning, you're about to attend your coronation as the monarch of parenting... Oh wait... Is that?... Yeah. It's still the middle of the night and the baby is definitely NOT still asleep. FFS.

Teething: EXPERIENCE POINTS +5
The struggle. The tears. The unadulterated anguish. And then... POP. It's all over. But don't get excited; you've got 19 more to go. Time to restock the Calpol and grit your own 32 pearly whites.

Unswaddling: LEVEL UP
After an hour of watching your baby struggle on the video monitor, they've finally passed out sprawled awkwardly across the cot with their arms flung wide. Quite why this is such a pivotal parenting moment is beyond me, but the joy of it is almost unrivalled. Y'know, except for the nagging worry that they might wake up at any moment and beg you through the medium of screaming to be bound back into the swaddle again. They stayed asleep? LEVEL UP, MAMA.

Weaning: EXPERIENCE POINTS +10
That's 10 points for every food offered that doesn't end up in your hair. Or theirs. Or the cat's. Another 10 points if you remain calm in the face of an upside-down-bowl-on-the-carpet incident. More experience points are on offer for the discovery of successful distraction techniques when trying to feed a teething/tired/sick baby. And if you don't cry the first time your baby spits out the food they loved last week which you have lovingly steamed, blended and stored shitloads of in a huge Tupperware container ... Well, then you're a Weaning Warlock.

Potty training: LEVEL UP/NEW SKILL UNLOCKED
You've just stepped in your third puddle of pee of the day and you're pretty sure there's a poo somewhere around here too. What do you do? Sigh and locate the poo whilst mopping up the pee, say "never mind; it's just an accident" and kit your child out with new pants and a subtle reminder of where the potty is and how to use it? +5 Experience points for you. First pee in the potty earns you a level up, as does the first poo. And on the glorious day when puddles and secret poos become a thing of the past: NEW SKILL UNLOCKED. I bet you feel like a parenting paragon, don't you? As well you should.

Public tantrums: EXPERIENCE POINTS/LEVEL UP
A screaming toddler is a force to be reckoned with at the best of times. In the middle of a busy supermarket it's just about the Worst Thing Ever. To be honest, I don't think there's a wrong or right way to deal with a public tantrum. I've tried most things, like getting down to my child's level and talking calmly to him about why he is unhappy. I've also tried ignoring him and walking slowly away in the hope that he will get up and follow me. Bribery has even been attempted once or twice, as has the threat of not buying him the magazine I promised I would at the end of the trip. It depends what kind of mood he's in. If he's tired, NOTHING works. I've always wanted to be one of those mothers who has The Answer to diffusing every tantrum... But I'm not. If you are, LEVEL UP for you. I'll be down here building up my experience points.

Disapproval from older generation: EXPERIENCE POINTS/NEW SKILL UNLOCKED
You're out in public with your baby/child, minding your own business and trying to get on with your day. You hear an older person make a rude comment about your parenting style/child's behaviour. How do you respond? This tends to be very heavily dependent on your level of sleep-deprivation. The worse it is, the more likely you are to explode or cry. Or both simultaneously. Since it's generally a comment such as "children in my day were seen and not heard/didn't have dummies/never cried in public", you can actually just fucking ignore it. This happened to me at a funeral tea earlier this year when an elderly and distant relative made an observation about "young mothers these days sticking dummies in their babies mouths the minute they make a noise" while watching me try to comfort a tired and refluxing Baby Taylor with his dummy. In hindsight I wish I'd asked her to repeat herself, since she wasn't actually talking to me directly, and then questioned her about why she felt that it was her place to comment. I didn't. Experience points for me. Not giving a shit what anybody else thinks about how you parent your children? NEW SKILL UNLOCKED. You know what? You can get a LEVEL UP for that too. You deserve it.

The thing about parenting is that no matter how you handle any given situation, you will probably always wonder if you could have handled it better. Some evenings I will sit on the sofa after the kids have gone to bed and go over every little thing I think I did wrong with them that day, but being a parent is a live-action experience; it’s happening right now and you have to think on your feet. It’s hard work and it’s exhausting and, no matter what anybody says to the contrary, there is absolutely no way that you can “cherish every second of it”. For every moment with my kids that I wish I could bottle, there’s another one that I just want to forget about. I suppose the only take-home message I have for any parent is this: We’re all at the rookie stage in one way or another and we are all just doing the best we can. The most important thing you can do for your kids is to love them and be there for them. Everything else you do, you do because of that.

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.

Toddler OCD

Is it me or do all children have some degree of OCD? I used to think that Toddler Taylor must have some kind of genuine condition because everything had to be done in a certain way or in a particular order. For example, when he first started to take an actual interest in the process of getting dressed – and by interest, I really mean decided it was an aspect of his daily routine that he had to have absolute control over – the entire morning would descend into tantrum filled chaos if I dared to suggest that he put his pants on before his socks. Like, if I just got sick of the whole messing about of getting dressed every morning, pinned him down and forced him into his clothes in an order of which he did not approve, I would find him five minutes later standing naked in his room screaming bloody murder.

Usually these things come and go in phases. We’ve had the “I want to do it!” phase where Toddler Taylor behaved like I’d just committed the most heinous crime imaginable if I dared to close his curtains for him or put the toothpaste onto the toothbrush without his input. Shortly after that was the aforementioned daily clothing debacle. Now we have this thing where he has to win at everything. If I was late for work in a life before children, I would run like buggery down the stairs and hare out of the front door, throwing myself dramatically behind the wheel of my car and tearing out of the driveway. But these days I have to allow Toddler Taylor to go down the stairs in front of me while I work myself up into a state of complete internal panic because if I don’t then he will have an utter fucking meltdown about the fact that he didn’t “win”. This also goes for the following situations:

Finishing a meal first.
Putting Baby Taylor in the bath first.
Walking into any room in the house first.
Getting ready for bed first.
Doing absolutely anything first.

Seriously. If I sneeze first then I’ve overstepped the boundaries because Toddler Taylor wanted to sneeze first. I really fucking hope this phase ends soon. I’d like to win at something in life again someday.

I remember my mother telling me once that my brother went through a stage shortly after potty training when he had to use every toilet he came across, which very nearly led to a terribly awkward situation in B&Q. So when Toddler Taylor throws me another OCD curveball, I just try to remind myself of that and thank every possible deity out there that nothing that bad has happened to us... Yet.

The thing is though, sometimes I still have absolutely no idea how to deal with these OCD phases. The whole winning thing at the moment is particularly trying because, realistically, I cannot always let him “win”. There are many nights when I’ve given Toddler Taylor every possible opportunity to get undressed and into the bath before his brother and he’s still running maniacally around the house and I just want to get both children bathed and into bed so I can collapse on the sofa and stare at the wall for the rest of the night. I also kind of want to explain to him that there will be times when he will not win and that he will find life very disappointing if he believes that winning is everything, but I rationalise it by assuming that it’s just a phase and will pass eventually like all the other phases. But knowing that doesn’t always make it easy to deal with and sometimes I am just really fucking late to work and need to get down the stairs first, so I have to leave my poor husband to deal with the epic tantrum that ensues when the door slams behind me and the screaming is lost in the screech of tyres as I gun the engine out of the gates. Sorry, husband. This too shall pass!

Mummy V Food

Isn’t it amazing the lengths parents will go to just to get their kids to eat? I have two crappy eaters. One of them has been a crappy eater since he was about a year old and the other one can’t really help it because, you know, reflux and stuff. But I realised today that I spend huge swathes of my time trying to persuade my kids to eat. Like, I’ve probably clocked up weeks – if not months – of time over the last two years trying to persuade small people to just eat.

It’s probably worth mentioning here that neither of my kids got teeth early. Or, actually, on time. Toddler Taylor cut his first tooth at ten months. Baby Taylor is coming up eleven months old now and he still has no teeth. He doesn’t even have the suggestion of teeth. So whenever I talk about my crappy eaters with other mothers and I hear “ooooh, have you tried baby-led weaning?” I want to fucking scream my head off. Or just scream “FUCK OFF!” if we’re being completely honest. Because I can’t let my baby lead the weaning process when he has NO FUCKING TEETH. That’s not really how it works. BUT I have tried pretty much everything else.

“Keep offering the same foods X amount of times to give your child a chance to develop a taste for them.” Yup. Done that. But, you know, there’s only so many times I can wash mushed up spinach out of my hair before I reach the conclusion that my kids just don’t fucking like spinach. I don’t blame them; I didn’t have much affection for spinach before I was in my 20’s and went vegetarian.

“Try adding milk to your baby’s food for a familiar flavour and gradually reduce the amount until you don’t add any milk at all.” I had limited success using this technique with Toddler Taylor, and adding milk to vegetables just seems gross. With Baby Taylor? Well, he’s on PurAmino formula, and as formulas go... I’ll be blunt here; PurAmino tastes like ass. I don’t know how he actually brings himself to drink it, because the few times I’ve tasted it have left me traumatised by the fact that anything supposedly edible could taste that bad. So adding it to his food seems like something that would just ruin the whole concept of food for him forever.

We could go on. There are a plethora of “expert” techniques out there, and I have tried most of them. I love experts... Do any of them have kids? Sometimes I wonder. Anyway, watching me actually trying to get my kids to eat can be a little like watching a poorly scripted sitcom. With Toddler Taylor, it goes like this:

“I’m a giant, mummy!”
“That’s awesome, baby. I made you broccoli pasta.”
“I don’t like broccoli, mummy.”
“I thought you were a giant? Eat your tiny trees.”

With Baby Taylor, I sing, pull faces, tap out a beat on his tray with one had while I wield a spoon with the other. Basically, anything to get him to open his mouth for long enough so I can shovel another spoon in. My husband finds it all completely ridiculous, but at least it usually works. If I'm trying to persuade him to finish his bottle of disgusting milk, it's like "You know what? If ripping out a chunk of my hair helps you focus on your milk then fine; keep yanking on it. It'll grow back." No kidding here; there's not much I won't put up with to get him to just drink his damned milk three times a day.

Here’s the thing though: Why do I worry about this so much? Seriously. Is it likely that either of my kids are going to starve to death if they don’t eat their broccoli pasta or mushed up orange stuff? No. Are picky children rare? No. Will my children always be picky? Probably not. I mean, if they end up being vegetarians someday like their father and me (which I actually kind of hope they will), they’ll probably eat pretty much anything that wasn’t previously sentient like we do. But right now I just dread mealtimes, and I find myself hoping it won’t always be like that. I hope that maybe one day we will all sit around the table together and I won’t have to keep reminding my kids to eat and refusing them dessert when they don’t. Because it always makes me feel so sad when I have to tell Toddler Taylor that he can’t have his favourite yoghurt because he didn’t eat his pasta/veggies/fish fingers. I really try not to make mealtimes a battleground because I know that doesn’t help, but I just fucking want my kids to eat so I can have one less thing to wake up in the middle of the night and worry about.

By all accounts, I was a picky eater as a child. Actually, I was quite picky for a long time. Long after I grew up and moved out, in fact. I used to drive my mother crazy with it. But did it have any detrimental effect on my health? No. I’m short, but I had short parents and was therefore predisposed to be short anyway. Otherwise I’m pretty healthy and I now try new foods all the time. It’s not something that I’m still struggling with and I’m sure the same will be true for my children. I think probably it’s my attitude that needs to change. Like, I can probably trust my kids not to starve themselves and me being neurotic about getting them to eat is just going to make them feel like eating is something to be neurotic about.

Why Hypothetical Baby = Actual NO

Before we get started: I am ever so very grateful for my two beautiful, wonderful children. Okay? Pease don’t forget that and feel the need to remind me about it because I AM.

Sometimes I’ll be driving along and I’ll start thinking that maybe we actually could cope with another baby, and I’ll wonder if perhaps we might even get a girl. I’ll start going over the dialogue in my head, how I would present the idea to my husband and I’ll think about the possible reaction I might get and how I would feel if he flat out rejected it. Then it hits me with a sickening lurch that seems to knock me sideways; another baby isn’t an option for us anymore. And it really doesn’t matter how many times I forget and subsequently remember that fact, the force of the impact never seems to be any less devastating. But we decided this. We looked at our options and we made this choice. And, truthfully, there are a lot of reasons why it was the right decision to make. Logical, sensible reasons with strong foundations in the reality that is our life together. But there are a lot of reasons why it was the totally fucking wrong decision too, and some days I find that I really resent my husband for how easy he found the whole thing. I know that’s really unreasonable. I’m self-aware enough to realise that. But here’s the thing about me; sometimes I am really unreasonable. And illogical too, a character trait for which this precise situation is a case in point.

Here’s a list of the things that would have to change for my husband and I to have another baby. It’s not a short list. In fact, it’s a list that falls just short of EVERYTHING.

I would need a new car. Probably some hideous people carrier effort with shitloads of seats and cavernous boot space for all the crap that I would need to cart around all the time. A new car would be expensive, and I just bought one that I really like and which suits our current family perfectly. I don’t want a people carrier.

We would have to move house. About six weeks ago we had a new bathroom fitted. It is a bathroom that I have been lusting after since ever we bought this house and the bloody awful bathroom that came with it three years ago. I like this house a lot, and there are a whole bunch of reasons why I wouldn’t want to move out of it. It’s not all about the bathroom. But right now, a lot of it is about the bathroom.

We would need more money, which means that I would need to think about taking on some evening work as well as my day job. And it might sound selfish, but I kind of value my quality of life over a hypothetical baby right now considering how hard everything has been during Baby Taylor’s first year and how sleep-deprived I still am. That’s just how it is right now, and how it will probably be for some time to come.

Okay, so actually laid out like that, it’s not a long list. But if you expand on the repercussions of just one of those things, the whole concept kind of takes on supernova status and suddenly I WANT ANOTHER BABY doesn’t really seem to hold much weight or make a whole lot of sense. Then there’s all of the stuff that wouldn’t so much change as change back.

Night feeds. Show of hands for everyone who hates night feeds as much as me? Yeah. Thought so. They’re shit, aren’t they? Particularly when bad experiences with Baby Taylor’s night feeds would mean a constant inner monologue of, “I wonder if s/he will actually go back to sleep when s/he is done...” I can’t even tell you how much I am done with night feeds.

Alongside night feeds... Explosive nappies in the middle of the night that get all over the bed and then the whole bed needs to be changed as well as the baby and the baby has shit in his/her hair and I have no fucking idea how it got there or what I’m supposed to do about it at 4AM and... NO. JUST NO.

The What The Fuck Is Wrong With You And Why Won’t You Sleep/Stop Crying/Eat guessing game. Because now Baby Taylor and I sort of understand each other well enough that most of the time he can find a way to tell me what he needs without screaming the house down about it and I usually figure out what he’s getting at pretty quickly. When he was a baby? Nope. And it was the same with Toddler Taylor, made even harder by the fact that he was my first baby and I had no bloody idea what I was actually doing.

Immunisations every four weeks. Absolutely necessary, of course. But “please don’t cuddle your baby until we’ve given both jabs”? Seriously... Fuck off with that right now.

Weight Clinic. Does anybody else come out in a cold sweat of panic every time they have to take a newish baby to weight clinic? Like, what if s/he’s not gaining enough weight? What if they tell me I’m doing something wrong? What if someone says FAILURE TO THRIVE? This has only become less of an issue for me since I bought my own set of scales to alleviate the fear of nasty surprises. I actually wish I was kidding about that, but HI. I’M NEUROTIC.

You know how people always tell you to “weigh up the pros and cons” whenever you’re feeling a bit on-the-fence about something? That’s my Could We Have Another New Baby cons list. Oh, and there’s one more: MY HUSBAND HAD A VASECTOMY IN MARCH AND WE CAN’T HAVE BABIES TOGETHER ANYWAY. I always somehow forget that one. It gets lost in the myriad of other cons, but then it always seems to be the one that flies back up and smacks me in the face because it’s the only one that really matters in the end. And a lot of the time I can see this for what it really is, rather than what my conscious mind would like me to believe it is. What I think this is actually about is how much I just did not enjoy Baby Taylor’s first few months, how guilty I feel about wishing that time away and how much I wish I could go back and find a way to not hate every second of it. It’s about me wanting to “fix” myself, and I think I always knew that I would feel that way. So my pros list would probably look something like this:

I could exorcise my I’m A Shitty Mother demons by doing an absolutely perfect job of nurturing and breastfeeding (I can’t even. It still kills me) and bonding with my new baby, then I might start feeling better about myself and stop obsessing over all of the things I regret that I can’t fucking change because it’s too late.

 But my selfish desire to not feel totally shit about the whole experience forever is not a good enough reason to bring another child into the world. Not at all. And it wouldn’t actually work anyway. I was going to do a better job of a lot of things with Baby Taylor than I did with Toddler Taylor and look how that turned out; I got thrown a curveball and that whole notion went to hell. If we’re going to start looking at it like that – and we shouldn’t, because I know it wasn’t my fault – the chances are it probably wouldn’t be any better or easier next time either. So it’s really a good thing that we can’t have more children, otherwise I might just end up forgetting all that and convince myself that it would be a smart idea to try again.

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?

Job Wars

I keep having this argument with my husband every couple of weeks at the moment and I’m starting to go batshit crazy about it, even though I’m pretty sure it’s an argument that all parents have with each other on a semi-regular basis. The argument is this: WHO HAS THE HARDEST JOB? You see, my husband and I both have two jobs. One of them is the job we do out of necessity; the one that brings in the money to pay the mortgage and feed our family. The other one is the job we chose together back in 2011 when we decided to try for a baby. My husband goes out to work five days out of the week, stays home alone with the kids one day a week and co-parents with me on the other day. I go out to work two days a week (unless I have to fill in for someone somewhere), stay home alone with the kids four days a week and co-parent with my husband on the other day. So who has the harder job? Well, hereabouts I need to put some things into perspective.

You all know the story of Baby Taylor, which means that you all know that I haven’t slept more than five hours a night in about nine and a half months (because now, of course, Baby Taylor is finally kinda sorta sleeping through the night. Halle-fucking-lujah!). So for nine and a half months I have been sleep-deprived. My husband is a “modern man” in a lot of ways (I use quotations marks here because I really don’t get why for some men, the willingness and ability to change a nappy should earn them some kind of badge of honour among their womenfolk), but he has never shared the burden of the night shift with me. When I was breastfeeding, his rationale was that he couldn’t really do a whole lot to help, so he might as well just sleep through it. When I had to switch Baby Taylor to formula – reflux, blah, blah; you’ve heard it already – he still somehow figured that it wasn’t his job to ever be awake in the night. And now he just shrugs and says, “I don’t hear him wake up and you do, so you might as well go”. So, yeah, I’ve spent quite a few months feeling on-the-brink-of-insanity tired. On top of this, I went back to work two months ago. So on some of those nights when I hadn’t actually managed more than a few hours' sleep between trips back and forth to settle Baby Taylor, I then had to get up and go to work and try to remember how to do my job when I wasn’t actually sure if my pants were even on the right way out because I was Just. That. TIRED.

And then there are the days when it’s just me on my own with the kids from just after two in the afternoon until bedtime. And that’s probably fine with one child – even accounting for sleep-deprivation -, but with two it’s... Well, sometimes it’s not. Because I love spending time with my children. Of course I do. BUT – collective sharp intake of breath from non-parent readership – sometimes looking after children is exhausting and wearing and actually really fucking hard work. Sometimes I would actually rather be at work than trying to occupy a boisterous three year-old while his ten month-old brother disappears under the coffee table for the umpteenth time because he just hasn’t figured out how to crawl in the right direction quite yet. Sometimes I’d like to be able to get on with some cleaning or laundry without worrying what the ominous crash in the playroom just now was all about and if Baby Taylor was also involved in the disaster. Because that’s what parenting is like. It’s none stop. And then it’s bath time and both kids are crying because the big one is tired and also cross that he has to stop playing and the little one is hungry and crabby. Coaxing Toddler Taylor into pyjamas whilst trying to persuade Baby Taylor to finish his milk sometimes feels like the most insurmountable task in the world. But finally they’re in bed and now I can sit and vegetate in front of the TV for a couple of hours... But wait! There’s still that huge pile of ironing to do and all three of the laundry bins in the house are overflowing, even though I’m sure I literally did a load of washing like, two days ago. So I’ll do that first, and then suddenly it’s 11PM and I need to go to bed RIGHT FUCKING NOW otherwise I will not be able to make it up the stairs.

I’m really lucky. Both sets of grandparents are on hand most of the time, standing by for an emergency . Mostly because they’ve already seen what happens when I go into meltdown and nobody wants to deal with that ever again, ever. But even grandparental aid poses its own unique set of problems, because Toddler Taylor gets excited when grandma or nana turn up around bath time and he metamorphoses from a knackered out little boy into... Well, remember Hurryup from Stopit and Tidyup? Yeah. Pretty much that. And then I have to become Shouty Mummy and threaten him with NO STORIES and NO FRIENDS IN BED and I actually just fucking hate being Shouty Mummy because it’s a really shit way to end the day. But without help from grandma and nana, some nights I really don’t know how I would cope. I know I would, but probably not well.

So who has the hardest job? Maybe it’s not so much about that as it is about whoever goes out to paid work – because feminism – accepting and acknowledging that whoever gets left at home with the small people is probably having a pretty hard time too. There are always moments throughout the day when your children are both/all being lovely at the same time and you can’t imagine for a second that you would ever want to be anywhere other than right here with them. But those moments are just that; MOMENTS. If they happened all the time they wouldn’t be nearly so precious. The rest of time, being a parent is hard work. It’s the hardest job you’ll ever do, which is not to say that it isn’t worth it because it absolutely is. But when you’re the primary care-giver, the job you do is shaping a little person into a grown-up human and helping them find their way through the first years of their life, and that is a MONUMENTAL undertaking. My husband defers to me all decisions to do with the kids, which means that on some level, he must recognise that I am better equipped to make those decisions than he is. Why, then, is my job as a parent any less challenging than his job as the main earner?