life

Why is it still a secret?

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the thoroughly bizarre attitude the vast majority of employers seem to have towards mental health disorders. This doesn’t mean that they are lacking in empathy or willingness to help afflicted employees, but I have found that a kind of panic appears to set in when the phrase “suicidally depressed” is mentioned.

It’s not that I don’t understand why; it’s the fact that, truthfully, knowing that this will be the default reaction makes it even harder to pluck up the courage to be honest. It makes it easier to say, “I’m just a bit down at the moment”, even if you were thinking of killing yourself a few hours ago. It’s not the fear that anyone will recoil in horror; it’s the knowledge that because there is still such a stigma and a taboo surrounding mental health, and because many employers are putting a lot of effort into tackling that in the workplace, as soon as you own up to the fact that you’re struggling, it becomes A Big Deal.

I’m very in tune with my mental health. I’ve been ill on and off for almost half my life. I accepted that I needed to ask for help. I’ve been in therapy for nine months. I knew when it was time to start medication and I am confident that I will know when it’s time to stop. I know that saying, “I have depression” is not the same as saying, “I have a cold”, but I don’t want to be treated differently. I just want the fact of my illness to be out there so it’s not stuck in here with me.

And then there’s this:

Why do we have this culture whereby we treat mental health issues like they’re something that needs to be kept quiet? If you call into work and say, “I can’t make it in today because I’ve broken my leg” that’s something that it’s okay for everyone to know about. But if you make the same call and say, “I can’t make it in today because I’m basically catatonic with depression”, suddenly the whole dynamic changes. This is something that needs to be hushed up. Enquiring colleagues will be told, “She’s just not feeling very well” or something similarly vague.

Why? Is it because my body and my brain have nothing to do with each other? I’m pretty sure they do.

Is it because falling down the stairs and breaking my leg would be an accident, whereas depression is what? It’s not exactly something anyone gets bogged down in on purpose.

It just is.

Like a broken leg.

Admittedly, the healing will probably take longer than a fracture. But the fact that I have depression does not fundamentally change who I am, because it’s not something I am; it’s something I have. I’m not ashamed of it and I’m not afraid of people finding out about it.

Why would I be?

I am not broken, although I may sometimes feel that I am. I am not fragile, but perhaps I am a little less robust than usual. And I am not a grenade; I do not need to be handled with care. I don’t require my responsibilities to be stripped away, leaving me feeling useless and incapable. I don’t need praise for getting out of bed in the morning and going on with my life.

I am still me. I have not changed.

We need to stop this. We need to stop separating mental health and physical health from one another. We need to stop making depression, anxiety and the plethora of other mental health disorders feel like dirty little secrets. They are not; they are just illnesses like any other. They are complex and nuanced and vary wildly from person to person, but they are not a source of shame. Or, at least, they wouldn’t be if we threw open the doors and allowed them to become as readily acceptable – both in the workplace and the wider world – as a broken leg.

So where do we start? Well, I’m going to start with talking about the anti-depressants I take daily as though they were antibiotics. Yes, I need them for my brain rather than my body, but aside from that they are no different. I am going to approach this illness as I would any other; with the attitude that I am not well at the moment, but I am going to get better. And, most importantly, I am not going to make this into A Thing by keeping it a jealously guarded secret.

My name is Davina and I have depression.

It’s really not all that hard, is it?

Am I a failure?

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

I don’t often feel compelled to write here anymore. I used to enjoy sharing my parenting failures and having someone else leave a comment or tweet me saying OMG ME TOO, but then the minor failures seemed to get bigger somehow. They became the focal point of my day.

Suddenly forgetting spare clothes on a trip to the beach wasn’t just a laugh-and-facepalm moment but an actual monumental and unfixable error.

Ah, anxiety. Good times.

Anyway, what brings me back to this now somewhat unfamiliar corner of my online world is an event that took place last week.

Parent’s Evening.

Cue menacing music, possibly something akin to the theme from Jaws.

Except I was feeling relatively blasé about the whole thing because, sure, I might not be winning any Mum of the Year awards anytime soon, but I’d never actually had a bad parent’s evening.

You just know how this is going to end, don’t you?

I’ll skip the part where the teacher was pissed because we went to the wrong door – HOW THE FUCK WAS I TO KNOW THAT THE CLASSROOM HAS TWO DOORS? – and N had to leave because we were now running late, but actually I probably should have seen that as a sign of what was to come.

I didn’t, of course, so when I walked into the room and sat down expectantly, I was in for a really nasty surprise.

“Well, academically, he’s doing fine,” Said the teacher. “But he could apply himself a little more.”

“Yes, we’ve been told this before,” I replied, still blissfully unaware that anything was amiss.

“And, to be honest with you, he needs to start listening and doing as he’s told,” She continued, barely pausing for breath. “He thinks he’s in charge. He tells the other children what to do. He tells *me* what to do. Quite frankly, he’s disruptive.”

“Oh.”

I have no recollection of my responses after that, although I suspect they could be best described as “monosyllabic”.

So. Here’s the mother who thinks that forgetting spare clothes on a trip to the beach (it happened once, by the way) makes her the epitome of parental failure, and she’s just heard that most loaded of words in the parenting world – “disruptive” – in connection with her own child.

And now you can see where this is going. I reacted badly. I shouted when I got home, which arguably makes me even more of a parenting failure than the fact of the disruptive child or the forgotten beach clothes, but one of my many failings is that I am emotionally driven and impulsive.

After shouting I cried. And after crying I failed to sleep. And after failing to sleep I cried a bit more while I cleaned the kitchen the next morning and then I wrote a letter to O’s teacher.

It was a good letter. It asked all the right questions – “Why didn’t I know about this before?” “Why haven’t you followed through with the school’s disciplinary procedure?” – and was delivered to the school reception before lunch time.

Turns out? Well, maybe the teacher was tired. Maybe she was in a bad mood. Maybe she’d just had a shitty day. Who knows? But my kid has actually only displayed this disruptive behaviour over a short period and he now has a “behaviour book” to chart his progress and encourage him to do as he’s told.

I’m going to be honest here; I would rather not have had to deal with this. In the grand scheme of things, it was absolutely the last thing I needed. No mother wants to be told that their kid is getting up to all manner of fuckery at school, especially on parent’s evening when they weren’t expecting it.

But.

Well, I could have buried my head in the sand, couldn’t I? I didn’t; I dealt with it, despite the fact that I spent most of that first night wondering how I’d managed to fuck up so badly and not even realise and if my kids might actually be better off without me in their lives (I don’t mean dead; I just mean “not here”).

So, I guess what I’m really trying to say is that we can all have a shitty parent’s evening, and we can all go home afterwards and examine the minutiae of everything we might ever have done wrong over the course of our parenting journey and *that is okay*. I’d go so far as to say that it is probably perfectly normal to wonder where the fuck it all went wrong and find yourself wondering if you’ve got the beginnings of a juvenile delinquent living in your house.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Today’s boys; tomorrow’s men

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

I’ve always assumed that raising girls would be hard. Not for one moment have I ever thought that parents of daughters have it easy. Sure, I know there are tonnes of gender stereotypes out there about girls being quieter and more particular about personal hygiene, etc, but I genuinely don’t believe that that can be true of all – if any – of them. I’m fairly certain there are some girls out there who have never heard of an “inside voice” and who have to regularly be reminded to brush their teeth and wash their hands. Hell, maybe their parents have to yell “WIPE!” on a daily basis too. Because they are CHILDREN; not GENDER.

So, no; I have never thought that girls were in any way easy to raise. But I have always believed that the teenage years with a girl would be tougher than with a boy, and that is not only naive, but it’s also kinda sexist.

See, once a girl gets into her teen years I reckon it’s fairly natural for parents to worry about their daughters being mugged or raped if they’re walking home a bit late in the evening from the bus stop one night. It shouldn’t be natural, of course, because nobody should have to worry about that shit. But, nonetheless, this is the messed up world we live in right now and these things do happen. So I’d imagine that all mothers and fathers worry from time to time about such atrocities befalling their daughters and I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying that must be.

But I have the opposite problem. Because I have boys, and boys grow up to be men and men are more often than not the perpetrators of mugging and rape. So I have to raise them in such a way that they know unequivocally that those behaviours are wrong and unacceptable. And how will I know if I’m doing a good job? Should I be worried if one of them slyly thwacks the other when he thinks I’m not watching? Should I be concerned that sometimes they climb on me when I’ve told them no? Should I stress myself about the fact that [every so] often they lie about who ate the last Smartie?

These things sound trivial, but I often catch myself worrying about the bigger picture they could add up to. So when people say to me, “Ah, boys are challenging when they’re little, but so much easier than girls when they’re older” I have to wonder if maybe those people just aren’t worrying quite as much as I am about who their kids are going to grow up to be.

Let’s get one thing straight:

I don’t care about my boys’ sexuality.

I don’t care about how they look.

I don’t care whether they decide to go to university or not.

I don’t care what jobs they do.

But I do care about who they turn out to be inside. Because I want them to be empathetic and compassionate. I want them to stand up for the less fortunate and be the voices of the voiceless. I want them to be good people who do good things. I want them to be in touch with their emotions and know how to express them appropriately whilst also knowing that those emotions do not make them “weak” or “girly”.

Only…

Well, I’m not sure if I’m doing an adequate job. And, of course, that job is not made any easier by the men we regularly see in the media. Donald Trump. Harvey Weinstein. Powerful men in powerful positions who treat women with an appalling lack of decency and, in the case of the former at least, get away with it. When a man can “joke” about “grabbing [women] by the pussy” and go on to become the president of the most powerful country in the world, what hope is there for our children? What hope is there for instilling in them the moral fibre to treat women – or individuals from different cultures who practice different religions, for that matter – with respect and compassion?

It goes without saying that I will not give up. I will always strive to raise my sons to be good people. I will teach them about boundaries, about respecting the word “no” and their right to use it themselves. I will continue to teach them that we all have the right to decide what happens to our bodies and who gets to touch them. But even I must accept that there will come a day when my influence on them is overtaken by the influence of their peers, and when that time comes I can only hope that I have taught them well and that they choose their friends wisely.

An embarrassing pregnancy story

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Despite often being associated with such words as “glowing” and “blooming” (and lots of others which also conjure up images of sunshine and flowers), pregnancy is also pretty awful sometimes.

My experiences included:

Constant nausea and unpredictable vomiting.

Being knackered all the time.

Random aches and pains.

Occasionally feeling as though I was being stabbed in the vagina (seriously, what *is* that?!).

Needing to pee every five minutes.

A decreased sense of spatial awareness.

So, basically, I spent nine months staggering around feeling tired and sick, resisting the urge to yelp and clutch my nether regions at impromptu moments, needing to be constantly aware of the location of the nearest toilet and walking into things that didn’t appear to be anywhere near me.

But by far the worst side-effect of pregnancy for me was constipation.

About halfway through my second pregnancy, my body basically decided that the end result of the digestive process was unnecessary. Bowel evacuation? Nope. We need to hang onto *everything*. You never know when it might come in useful!

As you might imagine, this made me kinda touchy. And irrational. But I didn’t say anything about it until one day N and I were arguing about something stupid and he simply said, “You’re so full of shit.” It was at that point that I finally decided to acknowledge my predicament by retaliating, somewhat hysterically, with, “AND THAT IS THE PROBLEM!”

By this stage I had lost hours of my life just weeping on the toilet in frustration, so I booked an appointment to see a doctor. It obviously wasn’t going to get better by itself and all the bran flakes in the world weren’t going to help.

On merit of the fact that life is a dickhead sometimes, the doctor I ended up seeing was both young and ridiculously attractive. I might be married, but I am not blind. He was hot. And not only was I the size of small whale, but I also needed to tell him that I hadn’t actually been able to have a poo for over a week.

The conversation went something like this:

Dr: “So, what can I help you with?”

Me: “I… uh… well, I’m pregnant…”

Dr: *patiently* “Yes, I can see that.”

Me: “Right. Er… the thing is… I… *whispers* I haven’t had a poo for a week.”

Dr: “Are you constipated?”

Me: *dying inside* “Um… I mean, I guess…”

Dr: “I can prescribe you something to help with that.”

Me: “Oh thank God.”

Dr: “Is there anything else you need?”

Me: “Aside from a full body cast for my dignity? No, thank you.”

He told me, of course, that he had seen it all before. They always tell you that, don’t they? But the thing is, I’m pretty sure he hadn’t. I’m pretty sure that at no point in his [relatively new] medical career had he had to sit through the painstaking process of watching a very embarrassed pregnant woman mumble in barely coherent tones about needing a poo. Weirdly enough, that one conversation was far more embarrassing than throwing off all of my clothing in front of a bunch of strangers four months later when I went through the process of actually giving birth. What is it about labour and birth that makes you just not give a shit (if you’ll pardon the expression)?

So, y’know, pregnancy might *look* glamorous sometimes with the stylish maternity wear and cute baby bumps, but underneath that lustrous pregnancy hair and beautifully clear pregnancy skin, there may well be a woman who would give anything to finally just have a bloody poo.

A case of Mum Guilt

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

I've come down with a bad case of mum guilt today.

Today is my day off. At the moment, I get two days off a week. This week, today is one of them.

Usually I try to do something fun with the kids when I'm not working. A nature walk. The beach. A playground or two. That kind of thing. Except that this morning I looked around my house and I got this dreadful, twitchy feeling

My house, to put it bluntly, is a fucking shit tip.

There is random crap all over the place. There's probably even actual crap somewhere. Everybody is running out of clean clothes and everything feels just a bit… sticky.

The only trouble is, I can't clean the house AND do something fun with the kids. So today I feel guilty because if I take the kids out I'm neglecting the house, and if I clean the house I'm neglecting the kids.

What I need is the ability to split myself into useful, house-cleaning mum and fun, child-wrangling mum. Or a cleaner.

I probably need a cleaner.

Also on the list of things I feel guilty about today:

Literally shoving N out of the door this morning.

The fact that I've shouted at my kids at least twice to leave each other alone.

Inadvertently thwacking O around the head with the vacuum cleaner nozzle.

Turning on CBeebies.

Feeling secretly glad that it has rained and is therefore too wet to go to a playground right now.

Sitting here writing this and drinking a cup of tea.

Being tired.

I'll probably also feel guilty about whatever I feed the kids for lunch soon because it's unlikely to be either imaginative or particularly nutritionally balanced.

It can't be just me, can it? I mean, I open up Instagram and I see tonnes of posts featuring a day out with the kids or a crafty afternoon at the kitchen table and nobody else's house ever looks a mess. Nobody else ever has that haunted look of a person who knows their home resembles the aftermath of nuclear warfare whilst they sit on a picnic rug and enjoy quality time with their offspring.

Some days I feel like I'm just not cut out for the job of being a Person In The World.

One more light

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Suicide and depression never seem to be far from the news bulletins these days. This year more than 6000 suicides have been recorded in the U.K. and ROI collectively. But suicide itself isn't an isolated event as a general rule; it is most often the culmination of a gruelling battle with declining or fluctuating mental health, which is arguably less well-documented than the devastating final act.

Here's the thing about depression: it's not YOU. Depression is selfish, inherently so. It doesn't care about your family or your friends. It certainly doesn't care about you. It's the weight dragging you down every day. It's the sense of failure in everything you do. It's the feeling of panic sitting on your chest as you think to yourself, "I just can't do this anymore". It has no type, no preference and no agenda except to leave you with a pervading sense that there is nothing left worth staying for, or that everyone around you would be better off without you. It will take you to the edge over and over again and leave you standing there, trembling, as you stare into that gaping maw. And it won't give a shit if you fall. It will rage against every small victory, whispering into your beleaguered mind, "But what about tomorrow?" It will keep you up through the night and try to pin you down in your bed when morning comes. Some days, you will let it. Some days, the Herculean effort required to pull yourself from that pit just won't be worth it. But everybody else? They might think that it is you being selfish and not your depression, simply because one belongs to the other, although which of you has ownership of the other at any given point is debatable.

Recent high profile suicides such as those of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington have once again thrust depression into social consciousness. Scathing comments about how those men could be so selfish as to leave behind their children have highlighted how misunderstood an illness depression is, even now. Even as huge efforts are being made to de-stigmatise the condition, this rhetoric remains common. There is little consideration given to the path that leads to the end result and too much emphasis upon that end result itself.

Consider, for example, what it must take to arrive at the conclusion that you are better off dead. Imagine how catastrophic the thoughts must be, how the fear of living must outgrow the fear of dying. How long does a person have to battle before their personal war becomes insurmountable? And if they had reached out, if you had known what was coming, would you have been there? Or would you have sighed, rolled your eyes and told them to "man up"? How many times have you accused a family member or friend of being dramatic over a seemingly minor thing, without considering that that minor thing might be just one component in a long list of things that have left that person flailing in the dark with nothing to hold onto?

I'm not accusing you of being insensitive, nor am I trying to express the very particular path of your journey through this illness. These are my experiences of my own mental health battles. The fact that I ascribe depression an identity of its own is how I live with – and outside of – it; how I remind myself that who I am when I am struggling and who I am the rest of the time are not the same person. And those are the times when depression takes ownership of me, rather than the other way around. Sometimes it's a temporary dip, a short period of low mood and internalised catastrophising. Other times, bad days bleed into bad months. Depression does not conform to a specific formula; it is nuanced, which is probably why treating it is so difficult. But for me, my lock-ins with this so-called black dog are almost always triggered by a series of small events, stacking up on one another like tumbling dominoes. Dominoes which must all be picked up and set right before I can go on again as normal.

I'll stand on that lonely cliff edge again. I'll look down into that angry, churning water and I'll force myself to back away. I'll talk. Cry. Scream. Do anything not to let it take me over. I'll hold my children tight and remember my promise to them. I'll allow the people I love to reach out and accept their efforts and their comfort. I won't let this crouching thing inside of me take me away from myself.

But does this personal determination mean that I don't understand how it must feel to finally grow tired of the fight?

No. And honestly? We should all try a little harder to find our empathy sometimes.

I need to take a break

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

If you follow me on twitter or Instagram, you probably already know what this post is about. You’ve probably seen me agonising over making the “right” choice, wondering aloud if I should take a step back. Turn my back on this for a while. Regroup and maybe come back when I am stronger.

There are a lot of reasons why I’ve enjoyed blogging over the last two years, the most notable of which being the connections I’ve made along the way. The moments when someone has reached out and said, “me too”. And I don’t set out to make anyone cry when I write, but when you tell me that one of my posts choked you up, well… that’s a powerful thing.

Those things have made my blogging journey worthwhile.

But blogging has a murky underbelly, and I’ve seen that too.

I’d like to tell you that I haven’t kept half an eye on my stats, but that would be a lie. At times, I have been unhealthily obsessed with them, and when they’ve fallen below a certain daily number I have felt something close to bereft. Which is stupid, because who gives a shit? I didn’t start doing this for anybody other than myself.

I did this for me.

But my inner critic is a dickhead, and she doesn’t think I should be here anymore. She’s seen other bloggers amass a huge following in a matter of months. She’s watched those other bloggers win awards and accolades and she feels… irrelevant.

Which is to say that I feel irrelevant.

Then there’s this:

Whatever mettle I’m made of is probably more of a kittens and rainbows composition than it is rhinos and sass. I’d like to pretend that your words don’t hurt me, but the truth is that sometimes they do and I can’t control that. When you tell me to pull myself together and stop being so negative, it stings. Because here I am, baring my soul, trusting strangers with my words and having it thrown back in my face.

Here I am being told that my feelings on any particular subject are not legitimate. They don’t matter; I just need to stop whining about it.

I don’t want to care about this. I don’t want to lie awake, wondering how I could have phrased things differently to avoid this reaction. I don’t want to be angry with myself for giving anything approaching a flying fuck about what anyone else thinks.

But I’ll tell you this for nothing: more than once I have opened a notification from WordPress or Twitter and I have read the words of a stranger with a pounding heart and shaking hands. I have felt diminished. I have cried over words written by people I’ll never meet, who don’t know me and don’t give a shit about how those words have made me feel.

And the inconvenient truth is that I’m just not strong enough for that right now. I’m not brave enough to read those words and face seeing myself through those eyes.

Certainly I was naive to believe that I could put my thoughts and feelings up for public scrutiny and get away with it, but I just wanted to write.

And write I will.

Just not on this platform for a while.

For my sons 

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Dear O and F,

Lately I’ve realised that I didn’t bring you into the world that I thought I had. I had so much hope when you were both born, but then things seemed to change. Or maybe the changes were already happening and I hadn’t noticed. Either way, I want you to know that I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that there is so much hatred and division in the world. I’m sorry that most of the stories you see glimpses of on the news are stories of war and misery. I’m sorry that the sea levels are rising and the ice caps are melting. Most of all, I’m sorry that the burden of fixing our broken society – and planet – is going to fall upon the shoulders of your generation.

But there is still a little glimmer of hope alive inside me, and that is because of you. Because I am going to do the very best I can to raise you to be tolerant and inclusive and brave. You are both surrounded by people of different colours and faiths and that is a wonderful thing. You are already learning that those people have exactly the same value as you do in the world, without even being taught. And why should you need to be taught? The only thing you need to know is this: That under our clothes and beneath our skin, no matter which god we answer to – or don’t – we are all the same inside.

Gandhi said that we must be the change we wish to see in the world, but as your mother I have a unique opportunity to go beyond that. I have the opportunity to raise you to also be that change. To teach you to challenge inequality and discrimination. To show you how to make better choices for our planet. To help you to find your voices and use them to speak up for those who have no voice of their own.

I look at you, I see your innocence and your joy and I feel afraid for you. And more than that, I feel guilt. Because there will come a day when I can no longer protect you from the storm happening around you, when I will have to let you see the extent of the damage. I don’t know what the world will look like when you are grown up, but as it stands there is a man in the White House who doesn’t believe in climate change and our own country is on the brink of leaving the European Union. Neither of these facts makes me feel encouraged about the shape of things to come.

But when I look at you, I also see how strong you are. I see how fiercely you love your family and your friends – and, perhaps most importantly, each other -, and I know that you have so much to give to the world. Being with you is exhausting, but it is also healing and rejuvenating. And I know that’s not just because you are children and you are predisposed to be wonderful; it is because of who you are. It’s because you’re funny and smart and kind, and you make me feel hopeful about the future.

So I’m sorry that the world you will inherit is a bit of a mess, but I know that it will be safe in your hands and I’m not going to stop trying to tidy it up in the meantime.

You already are and are going to be amazing.

I love you,

Mum

This is real life

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

I can’t quite believe that it is November already. It doesn’t feel like more than five minutes have passed since we were last here, gearing up for Christmas and hiding the Argos catalogue from our children.

Our year has passed in a blur of breakthroughs and setbacks, from the triumph of watching O settle gradually into school after a rocky start, to the misery of seeing F continue with his food struggles. This is the nature of family life, of parenting children with different personalities and issues. O can suffer from social anxiety. F may well feel the reverberations of his battle with reflux for the rest of his life. But we do the best we can. As parents, I believe we all repeat the same mantra to ourselves at irregular intervals: It will get better. We tell ourselves that nothing can be challenging or worrying or downright shit forever.

When O clung to me, sobbing, as we walked through the school gates at the beginning of his third week, his anxiety and sadness unchanged from the previous two, I told myself: It will get better. And it did. Now he runs to join his friends with barely a backward glance. He’s part of a trio of boys who are all mischievous, buoyant and sharp as tacks. He is learning to read and write, he brings home artwork and stories of the games he has played and new skills he has learnt. He is happy and settled in his new school, and I am content to have become a background character in this chapter of his life.

It got better.

When I finally realised that F was vomiting during mealtimes not because he couldn’t stop himself, but because he didn’t want the food I had put in front of him, I told myself – through my horror that a child would do such a thing to himself – It will get better. And it has. Ish. Mealtimes are still a battleground and my victories are few, but that there are any victories at all is progress itself. Once there was nothing I could do to persuade him that food was not his enemy. Now he will try new things. Last week he finally started eating porridge and I felt elated. At last, a good start to the day! It was such a small thing. It was the biggest thing in the world.

It is getting better.

Life with children is a kaleidoscope; colourful and changeable in equal measure. There are blissful moments, snapshots of our expectations as parents. A Sunday morning cuddle in bed with both kids, both cats and nobody fighting. A walk through the woods, kicking up the Autumn leaves and collecting conkers to be preserved in a jar as a physical reminder of a magical afternoon. A peaceful hour as my children play happily together while I claw back some time to put the house in order or catch up on laundry. In these moments, we could be a family from a photograph in a magazine. In these moments, we are the family I always imagined I would have.

Our autumn adventures

Then there are the other moments, far less blissful and, currently, much more numerous. My kids rolling around on the floor, beating the shit out of each other as my attempts to referee fall on deaf ears. An epic tantrum in the middle of Sainsbury’s over who gets to carry the receipt back to the car. The flooded bathroom floor. Again. These moments often happen all in the same day and leave me exhausted and wondering if I’m really cut out for this whole motherhood thing. But these moments are also totally eclipsed by the love I feel for and joy I find in my children.

The truth is that I probably recite my mantra at least a few times a day, every single day. Sometimes it is not easy. Sometimes as I close their bedroom doors at the end of a long day, I breathe a sigh of relief. Sometimes I just wish they would stop fucking winding each other up all the time.

But they are still so little. Their emotions and ability to handle life’s complications are still developing. For them right now, being given something different for breakfast than what they were expecting is a big deal. For them, it’s not unreasonable to throw a blistering wobbly because they got Rice Crispies when they blatantly asked for Coco Pops.

This is life with young children.

There will be bad days.

It will get – and is getting – better.

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.