baby

In which F turns two

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Tomorrow is a big day.

Tomorrow my little one, my baby, turns two.

There are two things about this that I find strange.

The first is directly linked to how very, painfully clearly I remember the first few days and months after we brought him home. I suffered hard with the “baby blues” about three days after he was born. The sleep deprivation was catching up with me and I was just so fucking tired. I couldn’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t be just exhausted.

Then the other stuff came. The reflux. The flat refusal to feed at 1am. The vomit-soaked sheets at 3am. The endless crying through the night. By the time F was two months old I was bewilderedly wondering what the fuck I’d done to my life by deciding to have a second child.

It felt like it would never, ever end.

You know the story. We got help. We got it via A&E on a dismal Sunday afternoon and we left without our son in the early hours of the following morning, but we got help. Things got better, slowly at first and then with gathering momentum. The cute, heart-melting moments gradually began to outstrip the moments of panic and strangulating fear.

By F’s first birthday, I was more in love with him than I could ever have imagined in those early, awful months.

That love has only grown as I’ve watched him change and develop. He has a cheeky wit and a fierce stubbornness that both amuses and infuriates me in equal measure. I love him. I love the life out of him, the very bones of him, every little thing that makes him who he is.

But a part of me also feels sad tonight, which brings me to the other strange thing:

The fact that my youngest child is now two.

By this milestone in his brother’s life, I was halfway through my second pregnancy. And I know that I’m not going to have any more babies. Which means that all of the cute things that F is doing now, all of the first times, the hilariously mispronounced words, the post-nap snuggles… all of those things are gradually going to stop. And then I’ll have to navigate life with older boys, who don’t want to cuddle me so much, who don’t need me to reassure them when they go someplace new, and who won’t tell me, “I yoooooooove yoooooo!” with reckless abandon.

And I know I can’t stop them from growing up. I don’t want to stop them; I want them to go ahead and become whoever it is that they’re going to be, because they will be brilliant no matter what.

But…

Can we just stop? Just for a tiny, little while? Can we keep these moments for just a little longer?

My mom used to tell me, “I wish that I could pickle these cuddles and keep them in a jar.” I always thought she was so weird when she said that.

Now I know exactly what she meant.

Happy birthday, F. You wonderful, brave, strong and very special little boy, you.

Come September

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Dear O,

I don’t write about you as much as I should, but the truth is that you’ve never given me a whole lot of trouble. You were a textbook baby and now you’re a wilful, determined and joyful four-year-old. Sometimes I wonder if your tantrums and your pickiness about food are normal or if I’m actually a really terrible mother, but most of the time I know that you’re doing okay.

Only… now you’re starting school. And I’ve watched the kids from up the street heading off to school with their parents and siblings a thousand times from our kitchen window, but I never really thought about the day when you would join them.

When we moved here, you were less than two months old. I scrubbed and painted this house with you growing and kicking inside me. Those children seemed lightyears away from the tiny baby I rocked and bathed and tickled and loved in our little cocoon. That you should be on the cusp of becoming one of them is unfathomable to me.

Sometimes I look at you and I watch you playing and I listen to the stories you make up as you play and I think… How did we get here? How do you know those words? Where did that wild imagination come from? And when did you get to be so big?

People tell you that the years go fast, but they don’t tell you how fast. They don’t tell you that one day you’ll be grimacing your way through another poonami and the next you’ll be saying goodbye at the school gates for the first time. They don’t tell you that your children will be a tiny bit different every single day and you won’t even notice until you look back at the old photos and videos.

They also didn’t tell me how choked up I would get when I think about you starting school. Because I want so much for you to grow and learn and discover new things and have wonderful adventures, but my heart feels just a little bit too full sometimes when I picture the boy you already are and the man you will one day become.

I remember your first proper day at playgroup and how hard I found it to leave you that morning. You were only two and looked so tiny compared to the other children. You found a tractor and sat yourself at a table with it, holding it out to show me. My heart felt strangled by the confused look on your face when I told you it was time for me to go and that I would see you at lunchtime. In fact, just thinking about that moment makes me tearful. As I walked out to the gate with your daddy, I turned to him and said “I can’t believe I left him” with tears streaming down my face. I’d never trusted anyone except family to look after you, and I knew you didn’t understand why I wasn’t staying with you. It broke my heart, but it was a moment that all parents have to go through as they help their children to navigate the world.

I wish I could tell you that I won’t cry when I leave you at your classroom for the first time in September. You won’t know, of course, whether or not I do because I will not let you see. I will not let you see how hard it is sometimes to know that you are growing up. That you are not mine anymore in the same way that you used to be. That you have only ever been on loan to me, when all is said and done.

I hope that you will love your school. I hope that you will find good friends and delight in learning new things. I hope that you will come home and tell me breathless, emphatic stories about your day.

I love you, O. More than I could ever tell you. Enough to stand aside and allow you grow up. Enough to let you go.

If I can just have you back for the odd cuddle every now and again, of course.

Mummy

X

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From baby to big boy, I don’t know how we got here.

Keep Calm and Carry On Linking Sunday

Sometimes

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Most of the time I look at F and I think that you’d never know he’d ever struggled. You’d never know that there was a time when he spent whole days just screaming in pain. You’d never know that his weight had ever started to nosedive down the centiles. You’d never know that he had to sleep in a swaddling bag for the first year of his life just to feel comforted.

But every now and again, I see glimpses of the things that reflux has left behind.

F has a sensitive gag reflex. So sensitive that he gags on most foods apart from yoghurt. Sometimes he still throws up, especially if he isn’t keen on the taste of the food to begin with.

He also still seeks out the comfort of that swaddling bag sometimes by pulling his arms into his sleepsack, particularly when he’s not feeling well.

F is clearly thriving and, despite a very slight developmental delay caused by his reflux, most of the time he eats well. But mealtimes are when his past battles show their most obvious scars. Most of his meals are still puréed at 21 months old. He will eat finger foods – breadsticks, fruit, rice cakes – quite happily, but offer him baked beans or scrambled egg and he will try it, gag on it and refuse to have anything further to do with it. It means that I am often the subject of judgemental stares and scathing stage whispers when I take my children out for a meal. I’ve learnt to block it out for the most part, but sometimes one of those comments still gets through. Sometimes I still feel those stares.

“Why is he still eating baby food? He must be almost two?”

“Why is she still trying to get her kid to eat? He’s crying. He’s obviously not hungry.”

“How come the other kid is eating normally?”

There are days when I wish the ground would just swallow me up during these outings. But there are other days when I want to get up, walk over to these people and ask them why the fuck they think they have a right to judge my parenting when they don’t know a damned thing about my child.

hungry baby

Here’s the thing: sometimes this is hard for all of us. Sometimes I lie awake and I worry about the future. I wonder if there will ever be such a thing as a “normal” meal for F and I worry. He didn’t start to get teeth until he was over a year old – which was a good thing, because if he had gotten them earlier they would have been ruined by stomach acid -, but people don’t know that. They don’t know that he isn’t the same as his brother. They don’t know how hard some days are for him, and that’s the point: this is hard for him.

Yes, the stares and the whispers are horrible for me. But it’s not myself I feel the hurt and the anger for; I feel it for him. I feel it because I wish that he didn’t have the legacy of this condition to deal with. I feel it because I want to protect him from that judgement. And I feel it because I love my children more than anything on this Earth and I don’t want them to find out how cruel people can be just yet.

The truth is that I don’t really know whether or not these things are permanent, and I wish that there was something I could do to fix it. But I think this is just what we’ve been left with, and it’s okay really. It feels like a long time since I would stagger out of bed at 1AM, 2AM, 3:30AM and so on just to sit in the dark beside his cot and whisper that it would be okay while he struggled to sleep and grizzled through the discomfort.

I know that we’ve come a long way and that F will continue to get better, and I know that we will keep finding our way as we go.

That’s just what we do.

Keep Calm and Carry On Linking Sunday

I will do better

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Last week we went on our first family holiday. We were supposed to go to Penrith last year, but F was still waking up a gazillion times a night and I didn’t think I could cope with doing all the driving (because, between you and me, N is a pretty shabby driver) and being awake most of every night. So that brings us to this year. If you’re interested, we stayed at a beautiful cabin called Larchwood Lodge right on the edge of Greystoke Forest. We were visited every day by red squirrels and great spotted woodpeckers and the path at the bottom of the garden literally led straight into the trees… and if I’m not selling this to you by now then just go ahead and look at the website.

I’m not going to relate the blow-by-blow minutiae of the whole week because, to be frank, you’d be bored shitless by the end of the first paragraph. So I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll include links to the places we visited at the end of this post in case you’re ever in Cumbria and stuck for something to do.

Family holiday

A montage of our week in the Lake District

The thing is, what I really found myself thinking on the last night of our holiday as I watched my children playing at the edge of the forest through the kitchen window was this: They’re never going to be this age again. O turned four while we were away and I couldn’t help but wonder where those four years have gone. I mean, I hate myself for even typing that because how unbearably cliché do I want to be? But it’s true. Four years ago he was a tiny, helpless baby and I was just getting to grips with motherhood, crying a lot and swearing every time he latched onto my chapped, bleeding nipples for a feed. Now he’s answering back and refusing to go to bed and driving me up the fucking wall half the time, but he’s also this amazing, proper little person and it’s hard to imagine that he was ever that tiny.

happy birthday

Happy birthday to my big boy, O

Then I looked at F and I felt that all too familiar tug in my gut that happens every time I remember how much of his babyhood I missed out on due to worry and stress, sleep-deprivation and god awful mental illness. And I thought that as much as I possibly can, I will try to savour these moments. So I stood there at the window and I just watched my babies play with flowerpots and sticks and dirt. I watched them delight in every moment of this simplicity and I forgot that I should be calling them in for a bath because it was already long past bedtime. I forgot that I still had stuff to pack for the journey home. I forgot that anything outside of that little snapshot of time actually mattered at all.

Bear cubs

Bear cubs in their natural habitat

I worry so much about the little things, about their routines and what they’re eating. I worry about keeping the house clean and getting the laundry done. And I worry what people think of me when they walk through my front door and see the detritus of family life strewn throughout every room. And I know that it doesn’t really fucking matter what anybody else thinks, but I worry anyway. So I lose these moments to worry sometimes. I don’t stop for long enough to notice the little things half the time. But this holiday has been good for me, because it has shown me what life could be like with my children if I put my worry aside sometimes. If I let F cuddle me for as long as he wants to instead of freaking out about everything that I need to do. If I read O just one more story before bed rather than panic that it’s half past bedtime and he still needs to brush his teeth. This week I’ve learnt that if I put off my worries for just a few more minutes, the whole world really won’t fall on my head.

These are lessons that I will forget as often as I remember them, I’m sure. But the point is that now I know and I will try. I will try to do and be better, for myself as much as my children. So I won’t regret the moments I missed when my children are grown up.

The day after we came back from our holiday was our 5th wedding anniversary, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the people we used to be and who we are now. When we got married, we had only been together for a couple of years. We were just two kids in love and we thought we had it all figured out. We thought we could conquer the world, just the two of us, with the force of that love. I look back on that boundless optimism now and I realise how naïve we really were. Because the truth is that what has kept us together for the last five years has been hard work and determination. We have been determined not to forget, but sometimes we have anyway. Sometimes we’ve screamed at each other to “just fuck off already!” at the end of a hard day – or the beginning of one after a long night. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to imagine who we were when we first met, but I know that I was a fragile, heartbroken thing. I know that I was a flight risk, and I know that N put up with a lot. I know that it took strength and guts for him to resist every one of my attempts to push him away. I know that he loved me a lot, and I know that I loved him enough in return to let him in. To give him the chance to hurt me. And I’m not going to dress this up; there have been shitty times and yes, he has hurt me. More than once. But that street has gone both ways sometimes and the bottom line is the only one that really matters in the end, which is this:

He is my co-pilot. We navigate this journey together. And, when all is said and done, there isn’t anybody I’d rather have in the cockpit with me when all of the lights start flashing at once.

Five years is wood. We are not going to be wooden.

We are going to be God damn TREES.

Wedding

04.06.2011

Mirehouse & Gardens

Bank Mill Visitor Centre

Brockhole

Whinlatter

Walby Farm Park

Keep Calm and Carry On Linking Sunday

F’s story

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

I’ve been so overwhelmed by the response to my last post, Looks like we made it, that I wanted to share F’s story. The full story. But I want to make one thing very clear before I get started, and that is this: I owe every breakthrough, every hour of extra sleep and every tiny ounce of peace of mind to the wonderful doctors and nurses who took care of F during his hospital stay last January. It’s true that F is my hero, but if he is mine then those medical bods are definitely his. Without them, we would not be where we are today.

In hindsight, I knew that there was something wrong with F from him being about two weeks old. He was a snacky, fidgety feeder and he would often throw up an entire feed just minutes after finishing it. The vomiting probably distressed me more than it did him, but he was clearly uncomfortable most of the time and I tried everything to persuade him to feed. I administered gallons of Infacol and gripe water, rocked him until he was almost asleep so he would take the bottle more willingly, tried every milk on the market once I’d realised that breastfeeding just wasn’t an option anymore… You name it, I tried it. But nothing worked. Alongside this, F did nothing but cry. He would cry and cry for hours and there was nothing I could do to comfort him. And he wouldn’t sleep. When he woke up in the night for a feed, there was often nothing I could do to get him to go back to sleep. Once, after trying for two hours to settle him in his Moses basket, I told N I couldn’t cope anymore, got in my car and drove up into the forestry where I slept in the passenger seat under a blanket for a couple of hours.

I took F to see a doctor, who said he probably had reflux and sent him home with a box of infant Gaviscon. That worked for less than 24 hours. Another doctor gave him a prescription for Ranitidine, but neglected to tell us that the dosage would change with his weight or follow up the appointment with his promised referral to a paediatric consultant, so that worked for a week or so, then we were back to square one. Nobody seemed to want to help us.

Things finally came to a head when I had spent a whole day failing to feed F or get him to sleep. N was at work and my mom came round to find me clinging to O and sobbing my heart out while F screamed in his cot upstairs. I said some awful things that day. Things like I wished somebody would just come and take him away, or that I wanted to leave him somewhere and drive away because I simply couldn’t cope with him anymore. I said I didn’t love him, didn’t want him, wished I’d never had him. I can forgive myself for these things now because I know that I was mentally ill at the time from all of the stress and the crippling lack of sleep. But saying them made me feel sick. Saying them made me hate myself.

My mom had no idea what to do, so she called 111 and they decided to send an ambulance. When the paramedics arrived, they asked me some questions and I tried to explain that whatever was wrong with F was also, in another way entirely, what was wrong with me too. They decided to take both of us in, and as they left me in the A&E waiting room, I remember one of them saying to me “Because you’ve come in with us, they have to check you both out properly. It’s going to be alright.” We were quickly taken into an assessment room where a triage nurse took our details and checked F over, then we were left alone for a while until a doctor came to see us. When he asked me how we had ended up in A&E, I explained every tiny detail of F’s issues and symptoms right up to the uncontrollable crying that had finally led us here. I was honest about the fact that I no longer felt able to cope, which was when he asked me “have you ever thought about hurting your son?” I replied, “No, but I can empathise with a person who gets to the end of their rope and shakes their baby.” I knew it would be a red flag. I knew exactly what would happen next, but I’d reached a point where I had to be honest. A point where I knew we needed help, whatever the personal cost.

After that, I wasn’t allowed to be alone with F. Even when N arrived, the door to the room had to be left open. Then another nurse came and took him away to the children’s ward. I was told that I wasn’t allowed to stay with him, but that someone would come to see me when he’d been assessed and take me down to the ward so I could see him and say goodbye to him. I was in shock. I couldn’t even cry. I’d known what would happen, but I felt like a monster. Even though I knew that I would never do anything to hurt my child, in my mind I was already a criminal.

A crisis meeting was arranged for that night, so we hung around at the hospital once we’d seen F and been assured by the staff on the paediatric ward that they couldn’t feed him either and that they didn’t believe for one minute that I was a risk to my son.  The doctor on the ward told me that she felt it was very brave of me to admit to feeling so helpless and out of control, but all I could feel was shame and disgust. It was, and still is, the darkest night of my life.

The social worker who came to assess me said he felt it was ridiculous to keep me at the hospital well into the night when it was clearly obvious that what I really needed was to sleep. I shrugged, told him we’d all seen the horror stories about shaken babies and children beaten to death by those who were supposed to protect them. I understood why I was there, why it was necessary. I answered his questions honestly and he told me that he thought I was probably depressed, but that he in no way believed I would harm either of my children. I was finally allowed to say goodbye to F, given a strong sleeping pill and sent home.

F was kept in the hospital for four nights. During that time, N and I had a meeting with the team who were looking after him. One of the nurses in that meeting asked me why I had struggled with him for so long, essentially on my own. Not really knowing what she expected me to say, I replied “I didn’t think I had a choice.” I explained that I had spent the last three months feeling like a complete failure, like I just wasn’t up to the job of being F’s mother, and an amazing thing happened; a whole roomful of medical professionals told me that they all thought the fact that I had somehow managed to feed F and do a pretty decent job of keeping his weight up in light of the severity of his reflux was nothing short of a miracle. They told me they thought I was remarkable.

Later that week I was also psychiatrically assessed and diagnosed as being borderline depressed, but it was suggested that that was largely due to the stress of F’s condition rather than anything that would require medication. Also, I was assured that there was no question of me being considered a danger to my children. Looking back, I don’t think anyone ever really believed that I was, but I know that it was necessary for them to check me out and I found that I was incredibly grateful to them for doing the best job they could to protect my son. For a while we got extra help with childcare so I could get some rest, and everyone in our families finally knew what we’d been going through. I’m not going to dress it up; it was a shitty time. Having Social Services involved was terrifying, but it was something we had to go through to get the help that we needed.

What I took away from the experience – aside from the fact that I am not, in fact, Wonder Woman – was that mothers don’t talk about this stuff enough. We all pretend that we can cope with anything. Who knows; maybe there are some women out there who can. But I’m not one of them, yet I pretended for months that I was fine even though I felt like I was drowning. And what I’ve realised, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, is that it’s actually really dangerous to internalise parenting problems. It might seem like every other mother you know is sailing through on a sea of endless patience, but I can almost guarantee you that that isn’t the case. If just one mother who feels like she isn’t coping reads this post and opens up to a relative, friend or health visitor – anyone – then my work is done. Being a parent is hard and being a mother can be very lonely. Don’t make it worse by pretending you’re okay if you’re really, really not. Believe it or not (and I certainly wouldn’t have a year ago) no one is going to think you’re a monster if you admit that you’re struggling.

And I want to say thank you to every single person who read my last post and left me a lovely comment. It’s because of you that I have felt brave enough to post this story today.

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Just look at you now, F!

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Keep Calm and Carry On Linking Sunday
Cuddle Fairy
 themumproject

Looks like we made it

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Dear F,

It’s been a long road, hasn’t it? There are so many things I remember from the last 18 months.

I remember sitting on a vinyl sofa at a soft play centre, cradling you in my arms as you slept, knowing exactly what was wrong with you and being terrified of the journey that it could take us on.

I remember feeding you in the middle of the night only to have you throw the whole lot back up again five minutes later. I lost count of the number of times I blearily changed bedding in the unholy hours between 11pm and 6am.

I remember how many doctors told me that you were fine and what the hell was I even worrying about because you were clearly getting food into your system. I always wanted to tell them that the only reason you fed at all was because I rocked you – sometimes for hours – until you fell asleep, then switched your dummy out for a bottle when I hoped you wouldn’t notice. But I was too exhausted to think straight and I felt like no one really cared anyway.

I remember spending whole days listening to you cry, knowing there was nothing I could do to comfort you and wishing it would all just go away.

I remember feeling like I had failed you in the worst possible way when I had to admit to myself that I could no longer produce enough milk to keep expressing for you. You were nine weeks old and I cried on my bedroom floor until
I was sick.

I remember our Sunday afternoon in A&E, which ended with me going home without you in the early hours of the following morning and under investigation by Social Services. I remember how, as black as that day was, I finally felt like there was some hope for you. And I no longer cared what happened to me.

I remember when things started to get better. How my heart felt like it would burst the first time you took a bottle without any fussing or crying. You may not have cried, but I did that day.

I remember that sometimes we would have setbacks and I would feel terribly afraid for you, that I wouldn’t be able to help you or that the doctors wouldn’t listen to me all over again. But you had a consultant by then and he was on your side every step of the way. I will never be able to thank him enough for what he did for you, and for us as a family.

Before you were born, I used to think that it mattered whether or not I did something spectacular with my life, like I would have wasted some God-given opportunity if I didn’t. There was always a voice in the back of my mind whispering, “You’re meant for more than this”. But sometimes it turns out that destiny doesn’t look a thing you thought it would. Here’s one thing I know for sure: For the first year of your life, being your mother was the hardest job I’ve ever done. In fact, the same little voice that had once told me I was meant for more began to sneer, “You’re not cut out for this”. There were times along the way when I believed that voice and I felt like I absolutely, definitely wasn’t good enough for you. Because even on the hardest days, I knew that there was something really special about you, and I knew that you deserved better than me at my best, let alone my worst.

Despite everything you’ve been through, you are the happiest, most sociable child I have ever known. You love everyone and everything. Your smile lights a fire in my heart every single time I see it. When you climb into my lap, lay your head on my shoulder and sigh, everything in the world suddenly becomes very quiet. It feels like forgiveness, even though I know you don’t remember the times I sat on the floor in your room and cried with you because I didn’t know what to do anymore. I know you don’t remember the day I asked your daddy, “Why did we think it was a good idea to have another baby?” I know you don’t doubt for one second that I love you – and you shouldn’t. Because I do. So much.

Why am I writing this for you today? Because yesterday we saw your consultant and he told us what we already knew; we are nearing the end of this journey. Everything about you suggests that you are getting better. We’ve spent the last six months weaning you off one of your medications and now we have the green light to start reducing the other. The bottom line is this: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.

Do you know what my worst fear was? I was afraid that you would have to deal with this for the rest of your life. I was afraid that you were going to be dogged by this condition forever. Yesterday I finally felt like it was safe for me to hope that your future will have nothing to do with the battle you fought for so many months. Here we are, standing on the other side and I can’t believe how far we’ve come.

So it doesn’t matter how many people try to trivialise reflux. I’ve stopped listening. I saw what you went through and there’s just one thing I want you to know:

YOU ARE MY HERO.

Thank you for teaching me how to be your mother. I thought I knew how to handle motherhood before I had you. I thought I’d learnt everything I needed to know from your brother, but you threw me a curveball and you will never know how grateful I really am for that. No, it hasn’t been an easy 18 months… But I wouldn’t change it – or you – for the world.

I’M SO TIRED

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

I feel like parents definitely need a designated couple of hours each day for napping. Most days when I’m not working and O is at playgroup, I very hopefully leave the bed unmade when I get up and tell myself I’ll have a nap while F is having his post-lunch snooze. But then the guilt creeps in and Ironing Mountain starts whispering to me from the kitchen while the floors scream in protest over not having been cleaned for two days and I know that mama is not having a nap today.

Adult nap time feels like it should be just something that you do when you become a parent. I’m not talking about going to bed with your significant other and making annoyed noises at him for an hour while he pesters you for nookie, which is what the phrase “adult nap time” seems to unintentionally imply. Like it’s some kind of euphemism for something else. No. I’m talking about climbing back into bed at 10am (or, frankly, any time of the day you get chance) when your small person or people are sleeping/at playgroup, nursery or school, ignoring the house as it hollers for the attention of a duster and Mr Sheen and falling blissfully unconscious for an hour or two. That’s the stuff that dreams are made of.

I remember when I first had O everyone took great delight in telling me that I should sleep when he slept, but the thing about newborns is that they’re pretty constant when they’re awake. They need feeding or changing or soothing pretty much all the time. And as they get a little older and start to take an interest in things, they need you to help them stay interested in a toy or a picture book because that’s your job. That’s what you do. So when they’re sleeping, sometimes it’s nice to do something for yourself, like reading a book or having a bath or spending a few minutes actually putting on make-up lest you should forget how. I read a lot of books while O was tiny and I was recovering from the discomfort of child birth. It was my escape from the total head fuckery of suddenly being wholly responsible for a tiny human and not being quite sure how I was going to manage that for the next 18 years without going crazy from worry. But what I didn’t do was sleep.

You make a lot of sacrifices when you decide to become a parent. As a mother, you’ve already sacrificed your once taut abdomen, probably your breasts for a good few months of feeding your baby and the ability to sneeze without crossing your legs and hoping for the best. Sleep is just another one of those sacrifices. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a guilt-free nap every day, a Bernard’s Watch* like two hours of blissful slumber while the world around you stopped completely and actually allowed you to tend to your ever-increasing sleep deprivation.

The thing I hear more than anything else when I talk to other parents about having children is how fucking tired we all are. At O’s playgroup I have regular chats with one of the dads about sleep deprivation. A few weeks ago I was just passing him on my way out from drop-off while he was talking to one of the play workers. “You know all about being tired too, don’t you?” He said, somewhat desperately, as I stopped beside him to let another mum in with her daughter. “Eurgh, God. YES,” I replied, feeling an immediate connection to and deep sympathy for this other sleep-deprived human. It’s a kind of parental joke, isn’t it? “How are you?” “Ugh. I’m so TIRED. The baby was wide awake at half three and I haven’t slept since.” “Oh, I know. I put my pants on with my eyes closed this morning. I was THAT TIRED. They’re probably inside out. In fact, I’m not even sure that they’re my pants, to be honest with you.” But being tired really isn’t all that funny. It’s actually a scientific fact – apparently – that you will die from lack of sleep before you die from starvation, which probably goes some way to explaining why all parents at some point feel so thoroughly exhausted and utterly drained that they genuinely come to believe they might be dying of some mysterious illness. That’s not just me, is it?

In the parenting world, we can disagree with each other about a lot of things. Schedules, feeding, co-sleeping… But tiredness is a unifying thing. Because we are all blundering around in a state of almost constant weariness. There are parents out there who will wax lyrical about Cherishing Every Moment. Cleaning up a porridge-plastered toddler? Joyous. Fishing shit out of the bath with bare hands? Wondrous. Cracked, sore, BLEEDING nipples? Fabulous. But if you ask them, “But are you TIRED?” they sort of shrug and say (with a smile that looks more like a grimace), “It’s just part of being a parent, isn’t it?” Because nobody likes being tired. Nobody feels like exhaustion is joyous, wondrous or fabulous. Being tired is fucking awful. Being tired while looking after children who never seem to be tired until they’re so far beyond tired that they melt down because you put them in the wrong pyjamas at bed time is nothing short of horrific. It’s like being asleep at the wheel of a tank; bad things will happen in moments of extreme sleep-deprivation because children have an amazing ability to destroy EVERYTHING when not adequately supervised.

I feel like we talk about being tired a lot. It sort of underpins every conversation we have with other parents. But we talk about it like it’s okay and we’re okay with it, because we know that it really is just part of being a parent. I used to think I knew what tiredness was. Sometimes I would go to work after not sleeping very well, sit at my desk (because I had a desk then) and think that I was tired. I was tired. But I wasn’t TIRED. Now I can’t really imagine not being tired. I can’t imagine waking up and bouncing out of bed and thinking how awake and alert I feel.

I think it’s probably okay to wish that I could just not be tired. I can desperately daydream about having more sleep and feeling less mind-numbingly exhausted and that’s fine. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love my children; it just means that I acknowledge how detrimental they are to my sleep and accept that I still have a lot of being tired ahead of me. Because hearing “MUUUUMMMMYYYYY!” at 6am after a particularly restless night is truly a horrible, terrible alarm clock. And, unlike an alarm clock, my children have no snooze button and no grasp of the fact that some mornings were made for staying in bed.

I think it’s time for coffee.

*Bernard’s Watch was a TV show I watched as a child about a kid called Bernard who had a magic watch that could stop time. His parents weren’t supposed to know about it, but I bet they secretly stole it sometimes and used it to have a nice, long nap.

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Wicked Wednesday!

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

It’s Wicked Wednesday again and this week we’ve been to the beach. We go to the beach quite often, seeing as it’s only a ten minute drive away, but F is only just starting to appreciate it now that he can walk.

It’s been one of those mornings when I just couldn’t handle the idea of being stuck inside, even with the weather forecast being a little unsettled. So the kids donned their waterproofs and I packed the rain cover for the push chair into the car and off we went.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I never remember to check the tide times before I set off. I just go and hope for the best and have a half-baked alternative lined up just in case there is no sand. Luckily, the tide was all the way out and we had miles of beach to run around on. So I liberated F from the pushchair and he and O promptly ran/staggered off across the sand in search of half-dug holes and abandoned sandcastles (because I also tend to forget buckets and spades and it looked like it might piss it down at any moment).

The boys chased each other around for about an hour, F didn’t eat any sand for once and O managed not to knock him over too many times. They had fun – I think -, but F’s little legs were getting tired and the black clouds were rolling in, so I called them both back and we beat a hasty retreat back to the car. I’d just got both kids, the pushchair and myself inside when the rain started and I was relieved that I hadn’t had to wrestle the rain cover onto the push chair while O refused to have his hood up and then wailed about being wet (this has happened before. More than once).

Anyway, I think this photo sums up our morning at the beach pretty well:

 

“What’s dis, mumma?”

Have a lovely week, everyone!

Dear Jamie Oliver

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

I can’t let the week pass without writing a post about the Jamie Oliver breastfeeding debacle (article here)*. Obviously I have something to say about it. Not least that Jamie Oliver isn’t, in fact, a mother – or even a woman, come to that – and so has absolutely no right to comment on how easy breastfeeding is and how baffling he finds it that more mothers aren’t doing it. But that’s not why I simply have to write about this. It has nothing to do with feminism and I have no agenda; I just want to tell the truth.

Oh, I want this to be flippant. I want it to follow the same path of DGAF as the majority of my posts… But that’s not how I feel about it, and it never will be. And I promised to be honest. I breastfed both of my children. O was exclusively – and easily – breastfed for 12 weeks. After that, I wasn’t making a huge amount of milk (we bought a new house when I was heavily pregnant and I spent the final weeks of my pregnancy and the first two months of O’s life trying to sort the place out and make it habitable) and, although it broke my heart, I had to introduce some formula. I still breastfed him every day until my milk finally dried up when he was five months old. It was a very sad day, but I knew I had done my best for him and I managed to find peace with it.

I had the best intentions when F was born. I was going to breastfeed him for at least six months, I was going to be braver about feeding in public, it was all going to be perfect. But it wasn’t. He latched and he fed… for a week. After that he latched and fed on one side, then screamed and screamed with hunger (and, I later found out, pain) until I gave up and offered him expressed milk instead. Night feeds took hours. In the corner of our bedroom, we kept a cool bag of expressed milk, two sterilised bottles and a bottle warmer. When F woke for a feed, I tried to latch him on as quickly as possible before he got too fussy and wouldn’t feed at all, then I warmed a bottle and fed him expressed milk while I faffed with the breast pump.

This went on for nine weeks. I can’t tell you how many times I cried over my repeated failures in those nine weeks. I went to some dark, dark places during those night feeds. And every-fucking-where I looked were the posters and the adverts and the leaflets: BREAST IS BEST. And so I kept trying. I kept trying because I loved my baby and because I felt like those words were directed at me, telling me not to give up. That if I did, I would be letting my baby down. I kept trying because I couldn’t bear the idea that someone might tell me that I hadn’t tried hard enough.

The last actual breastfeed I ever had with F was lovely and I will remember it forever. He was dozing in my lap and I thought “why not try just one more time?” He latched perfectly, fed peacefully and then fell asleep. I cried. I’m crying now as I write this. Because it was a wonderful end to a terrible journey, but it was also a snapshot of what we could have had. What we should have had. What I have felt robbed of ever since.

A feed from the early days with F

Tell me it doesn’t matter. Tell me my youngest son is obviously fine and healthy and not fundamentally damaged by it. Tell me that sometimes, even with the best will in the world, things just don’t work out. Tell me all of those things and know that I know you are right. But it won’t change how desperately I wish things could have been different for us. I didn’t mind waking up in a puddle of milk in the middle of the night or feeling like my nipple was being put through a meat grinder or the disapproving tutting of old men who wanted to tell me that “women in my day never fed the baby outside of the house”. None of it mattered; I just wanted to feed my baby.

I couldn’t.

Don’t ever, ever let anyone tell you that breastfeeding is “easy” or make you feel like you failed because you couldn’t do it or just didn’t fucking want to.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

*I do not read The Daily Mail; this was the easiest article to find.