Is It Just Me?

I’m looking at women’s magazines today after a conversation I had about them with my husband last night. There might be a bit of my usual parenting content, but it’s mostly just muted outrage.

Let’s start with Mother & Baby, since I always intended for this to be *mostly* a parenting blog. Giles Coren used to write a column for M&B called “dadvice”, which usually consisted of him moaning about something that only a parent with a lot of money could moan about. Like how awful it is taking children on long-haul flights. But one day he took it too far and his column was basically a page-long rant about how his wife needed to get her act together and lose the baby weight. You know, when you disrespect the post-partum body of your wife - and mother of your children - in a column for a magazine aimed at pregnant and post-partum women... Yeah, you can pretty much just get fucked, to be honest. The wife in question was pretty gracious about it on her Twitter account and M&B said it was all about encouraging debate or whatever, but I think all it did was make a whole lot of women wonder if their partners secretly felt the same. So I briefly fell out with M&B over that one, but I'm over it now. Coren has taken his #dadvice elsewhere (probably Twitter) and M&B is undoubtedly better off without it.

I used to read a sleazy little publication called MORE (does it still exist? Does anyone know?), up until about four years ago when it advised me to crash my boyfriend's office Christmas party in order to show him how much I loved him. I'm not even kidding. I mean... What the fuck?! Male readers, if women are crazy then that's probably due in large part to the shit they keep in their magazine rack and how seriously they take the “advice” therein. 

One other trend in women's magazines is the mandatory "Sex move that will change your life" article. Every. Single. Month there is an article like this. First of all, whenever I read these articles I usually find myself wondering who can be bothered with this?! Secondly, doesn't anyone have any imagination anymore? What are you going to do? Start the whole process off and then, at some crucial point or another, yelp "STOP! STOP! I need to consult the magazine article because I can't remember what comes next!"? Are you really going to do that? No. You don't need a magazine to tell you how to have sex. Just go forth and multiply. Or take the appropriate precautions. Whatever. But please don't rely on some complicated hand-tongue-big toe combination (I'm making this up) from an over-hyped double page spread to make it memorable.

This month on the cover of the only women’s magazine I still sort of read we have: 388 Style Upgrades (that you probably can’t afford); 89 Genius Health Hacks (what?); 17 Ways to Score Tons of Free Stuff (I’m afraid to ask); She changed her Tinder to ‘women only’. OF COURSE it got interesting (she slept with a woman. Shocker. NOBODY saw that coming); THE SEX GAME CHANGER you haven’t tried (which turns out to be lube. Who hasn’t tried using fucking lube?!) and then the usual celebrity stuff. I also tend to find that there are a lot of articles about getting ahead at work, generally with the assumption that “work” takes place in an office environment and goes by the name of “a career”. We’ve already covered the fact that I don’t actually have a career (despite several people over the last three and a half years trying to tell me “but motherhood IS a career!” It really isn’t. Trust me), so whenever I read these magazines, between the career stuff and the sex stuff that assumes I don’t actually know what I’m doing at all and the talk of Tinder (which I don’t fucking understand; what is it for?!), I usually end up feeling only one thing: I don’t belong here. These are not my people.

Which brings us back to parenting magazines, but you know what? They’re not really my people either, because they assume certain things about my life too. Like that I can afford to go on expensive holidays every year (nope) and that my children don’t sleep very well (sometimes). I’m starting to feel like I’m either incredibly awkward and should just pipe down or that maybe I need to stop trying to find a magazine written by and for “my people” (and I’m not even really sure who they are myself, to be honest) and stick to books, blogs and the occasional internet article.

Alternatively, I could go get myself a career, some lube and a Tinder account.

The Birth of Baby Taylor

Tomorrow is Baby Taylor’s first birthday. My baby, my tiny little burrito bean, is turning one. I don’t even know how we got here. The first three months felt like an endless battle. I thought we would never get to this point. I thought I would have long since lost my mind by the time this day came around. This is all coming out in broken, staccato sentences, but the truth is that that is how I feel about it. When I think about everything we’ve been through over the last 52 weeks, I can hardly form a coherent thought in my head. So, instead of writing a blog about tomorrow, I’m going to write a blog about the day Baby Taylor came into the world.

It was a Thursday and it was my due date. I can’t remember what the weather was like. I can remember that I was tired and huge and fed up. I’d had SPD for about four weeks by this point and I was sick of being in pain and collapsing in public. I felt cumbersome and awkward and completely fucking ridiculous.

That morning we took Toddler Taylor to a soft play centre and I will never forget the look on the face of a father relaxing at one of the nearby tables when I landed at the bottom of the huge, bumpy slide right in front of him. He was clearly, hilariously horrified. I remember that I wanted to laugh and joke with him, “Don’t worry; nothing is happening today!” How wrong I was.

On the way home, we decided to get cake ingredients and bake cupcakes, but it was time for Toddler Taylor’s nap by the time we got back and my husband left for work not long after. About half an hour after he left and just before I was due to get Toddler Taylor up from his nap, I had my first contraction. I didn’t think that was actually what it was, so I ignored it and went to wake up Toddler Taylor. As I was changing his nappy on his bedroom floor, I had another contraction and started to wonder if I might actually be going into labour. So I set up the contraction timer app on my phone and settled down in a kneeling position on the floor with my forearms resting on the sofa. I had about six contractions in this position before I realised it was probably time to call for reinforcements, so I rang my mother, still not entirely convinced that I was actually in labour and not wanting to bring my husband home from work for no reason.

By the time she arrived, I had moved from the sofa to the birthing ball and was rocking backwards and forwards on my knees, still using the timer app and trying to breathe calmly through the contractions and not scare Toddler Taylor, who had no fucking idea what was going on and kept bringing me cuddly toys to make me feel better. Bless him. After about half an hour, my mum insisted that she call my husband while I called the labour ward. They didn’t actually believe that I was very far along, but they told me to go in anyway and my husband arrived home shortly afterwards, grabbed my bag from upstairs and helped me into the car.

The drive was awful. I’m a dreadful passenger at the best of times, but that was made so much worse by being in labour and being in the passenger seat of my own car. Between contractions I texted my mother-in-law (who works as a discharge liaison nurse) saying we were on our way in. I can’t even remember if I told her why. I think she probably guessed. My husband dropped me off at the main entrance and as I hobbled towards the doors, I had a huge contraction that had me clinging to the lamp post right next to the bus stop. I may have startled a few people, but even then it struck me as odd that none of them offered to help when I was clearly in labour and needed physical support in getting through the fucking doors. Anyway. I made it and my mother-in-law found me clinging to a wall and ran to get me a wheelchair.

Most of what happened afterwards is a blur. A few things stood out though.

I hated the room I was in. It was bright and sterile and I wanted to move around but I was wired up to a fucking monitor and no one would let me. It was a stark contrast to the peaceful, holistic birth experience I’d  had with Toddler Taylor.

The midwife didn’t believe that I knew my own body. I told her the baby was coming soon, more or less right after she broke my waters. She said I hadn’t been in labour for long enough and that I could expect at least another couple of hours of it before Baby Taylor was born. On that basis, when she offered me pain relief, I’m ashamed to say that I took it. I was in so much pain and I was exhausted from looking after a rambunctious toddler all day. But I should have known in the 15 minutes that she was out of the room preparing my shot of pethidine that she was wrong. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t say anything. I suppose I was just in the zone, I was focused on the labour. I don’t say much of anything when I’m in labour. I certainly don’t shout and swear. I've never felt like it would be helpful.

Weirdly, the midwife came back, injected me and then said, “I don’t think that’s going to have time to work before you push him out. Do you feel like you need to push?” I nodded and tried to roll over onto my front so I could get up on all fours, but I’d torn a muscle in my abdomen quite early in the pregnancy and it had never had chance to heal, so I couldn’t do it on my own. My husband could see that I wanted to change position and he could see that no one was helping, so he shouted, “Will you please help me here? She obviously wants to turn over!” By this point there was another midwife in the room and they all helped me get into the position I wanted to be in, then I didn’t even have to try to push because my body did it all for me. Baby Taylor made his entrance within five minutes, but because of the pethidine he didn’t want to breathe for himself, so the midwives gave him some oxygen after I’d had a quick cuddle with him and then I snuggled down in the bed with him and he latched straight on for a feed.

We were allowed to go home that same night and everything seemed to be perfect until his problems began to become apparent when he was around two weeks old. And, to be perfectly honest, most of that is a blur now too. It feels like it happened a lifetime ago, or like it happened to somebody else.

All things considered, it hasn’t been a bad year. It has been a privilege to watch him grow and turn into this beautiful, happy little boy who is full of mischief and character. I am unendingly proud of him for how adaptable and strong and brave he has been. He is truly and honestly my hero.

So I don’t know how we got here... But I wouldn’t change it for the world.

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.

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?”