motherhoodirl

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.

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.

“I don’t want a haircut, mummy!”

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Until I became a mother, I never realised how intrinsically linked a child's hair is to their gender identity. I had no idea that a boy wouldn't know he was a boy if he had long hair. It never occurred to me that not forcing a regular haircut on a boy could be somehow fundamentally damaging to him/cause him to grow up to be gay.

In case you were wondering, I'm being sarcastic.

Back story:

I have two children. They are both boys. They both like to get dirty, play with cars, beat seven shades of shit out of each other and watch superhero cartoons. They are both free to choose their own clothing (they usually choose dinosaurs and other such "boy" things) and pick out their own shoes. There is only one proviso to this arrangement: They must be happy and comfortable wearing whatever they choose.

The big one, O, likes to keep his hair short. He asks for a haircut about every six weeks or so. The little one, F, will not entertain the idea of having his hair cut and, as a result, it is quite long. Long enough to tie back.

And that seems to be a massive problem for some people.

We go to the park and something like this happens:

Stranger: "Oh, what a beautiful little girl! What's her name?"
Me: "He's a boy and his name is Finnegan."
Stranger: (to F) "When is your mummy going to get your hair cut?"
F: "No! I don't want a hair cut!"
Me: "He doesn't want to have his hair cut right now. I'm waiting until he tells me he's ready."
Stranger: "Oh… But… But…"
Me: *walks away*

Okay, so I come across as kinda rude here, but just imagine if this happened to you multiple times every week. Imagine how fed up you'd get with having the same conversation and standing under the same cloud of judgement. Can you imagine that? Yeah. You'd probably be pretty rude too.

With the way some strangers have reacted to my son's hair, you'd think they were accusing me of negligence or abuse. But it is not child abuse. I could argue that something pretty close to child abuse might be forcing your child into something they don't want and haven't consented to, to which there is no benefit outside of the cosmetic. But then most parents have this romanticised vision of their child's first haircut and I certainly wouldn't want to accuse them of abusing their children. At worst, they conform to a patented parenting script which many others have read before them, and that's fine. There is no malicious intent to be found in that and I have never suggested otherwise. I've just taken a different approach with my children and I feel like that should be okay too.

There's an alternative version of this conversation, of course, which happens far less frequently:

Stranger: "Oh, what a beautiful little girl! What's her name?"
Me: "He's a boy and his name is Finnegan."
Stranger: (to F) "Oh, I'm so sorry! He has such a pretty face, and I love his little ponytail!"
Me: "Thank you. So does he!"

I like these people. Not because they agree with the way I've chosen to raise my children; because they respect my son's right to make his own decisions.

Of course, I can't bring this up without giving a special mention to the hypocrisy of it all. You see, as boys grow up, they are encouraged to view the likes of footballers as role models (although I can't for the life of me imagine why when you consider how often some of them end up in the news for unpleasant reasons). Have you watched football lately? Have you noticed the growing trend that is the Man Bun? A trend which nobody under the age of 60 sees as being remotely odd in any way. It's just the fashion right now and it looks kinda cool, right?

So, hold on a second… a grown man can shave half his hair off, stick the rest up in a topknot and give it a special little name like "man bun" and that's totally fine, yet my son can't wear his hair in a ponytail without my entire approach to parenting being called into question?

Can somebody please explain this to me? Because I just don't get it.

I shouldn't have to defend my parenting while I stand up for my son and his god given right to have autonomy over what happens to his body. Amidst all this feminist ranting we are surrounded by on social media, it's interesting to me that very few people have looked at the other side of this. I'm not going to argue that there isn't still some gender inequality going on – hello, BBC wage gap -, but what's interesting to me is that a little girl can wear her hair however she chooses. She can have it long or short, braided or loose and nobody gives a shit. But when a little boy walks into the park with his hair tied up in a ponytail, the pointing and the whispering starts up. And it's not the kids; it's the parents. The kids couldn't care less. It doesn't even occur to them that they should see anything odd in a little boy wearing his hair in a ponytail.

There are hashtags such as #letclothesbeclothes and #lettoysbetoys which seek to remove the boy/girl divide when it comes to clothing and toys. Brilliant idea. But it has to go both ways. I see a lot of tweets using these hashtags which point out how uncool it is that apparently girls aren't supposed to like dinosaurs or want to be astronauts, and they are absolutely correct. Totally uncool. However, I see far less bemoaning the fact that none of the T-shirts in the "boy" section have unicorns on them or that all of the princess colouring books are with the "girly" stuff.

It just seems to lack… balance.

I'm not saying that all boys should dress up in unicorns and glitter and aspire to be princesses. I'm just saying that it should be perfectly fine if they do. It's not going to damage them or "make them gay" (just DON'T).

And as for long hair? If it bothers you so much that a little boy wants to grow his hair long, well… maybe that says more about you than it does about him or his parents.

While you think about that, I'll be over here playing cars and dollies with my boys.

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.

Awaiting judgment

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

One of the hardest things about being a mother, I’ve found, is the certain knowledge that someone somewhere is judging you and finding you wanting. In the age of social media, where our actions and interactions are scrutinised daily by random strangers, there will always be somebody waiting in the wings to tear you down. To tell you that your kids aren’t eating the right things, that they should be sleeping more – or less -, that you shouldn’t let them do this or have that and why the hell are/aren’t you still breastfeeding them? It goes on and on and round and round. They’re sitting at their keyboards right now just itching to make you feel like shit because they don’t like your choices.

And this isn’t confined to the Internet either. This happens in real life too. I’m sure it’s probably happened to every mother at one time or another. It’s the people who tut in your direction when your kids won’t behave themselves in a restaurant. It’s that person who shook their head at you when you stood just a little apart from your toddler and let them have the tantrum they’ve been threatening to have all the way around the supermarket. It’s the mother with older children who tells you, when you dare to confess that you’re tired because your kids just won’t fucking sleep, “oh, my children were such Angels. They slept 12 hours a night right from being a few weeks old.” Especially her, actually. She can piss off.

I know that one day somebody will stop by my blog, read my post and dish out some judgement. I’d like to say that I’m prepared for it because I’d like to think that I am, but I know that I probably won’t feel very prepared on the day it finally happens. But the thing that I’ve discovered is this: Judging people is easy. When you only see a snapshot of somebody’s life, it’s easy to assume that you know what the bigger picture looks like. When a child runs out in front of your car while a mother looks on in terrified horror, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that she hasn’t taught her child how to be safe around roads. Who knows? Maybe she hasn’t. Or maybe, just maybe, she’s having a really fucking awful day and her child is being a total brat (because kids are sometimes, aren’t they?) and made a break for the road out of sheer bloody mindedness. Hell, I’ve spent a lot of time teaching O about not crossing the road without an adult, waiting for the green man and never running off when we’re in a busy car park. Guess what? He hasn’t always listened to me and sometimes I’ve had to run after him. Does that make me a bad mother?

I spend a lot of my time as a mother feeling guilty about stuff. Not taking my kids out enough, losing my temper with them, not being able to persuade O to eat green stuff. That’s just the tip of the guilty iceberg. I judge myself harshly enough that I really don’t need anybody else to throw their judgement into the ring too. In fact, I spend so much time beating myself up for my failures and worrying about how everyone else perceives my parenting that I don’t really dedicate any time to celebrating my successes. Actually, nobody likes it when mothers succeed at stuff. Everybody just loves to tear down a successful mother. We just can’t win sometimes, can we?

But do you know what I’ve found? Since I started blogging I’ve found this wonderful community of parents who DON’T judge each other. These women – and men – have been there with a virtual high five during a particularly shitty morning of pissy children and festering sleep-deprivation. They have given me the strength and confidence to be honest in my writing, to admit to having made huge, glaring mistakes in my parenting and not worry about being judged. Blogging has provided me with a safe space to write about the worst challenges that motherhood has thrown my way with the knowledge that somebody I’ve never even met will nod along in sympathy somewhere and leave an uplifting comment for me.

So do you know what I’ve decided? Thank fuck for the bloggers and the people who stumble on my blog, read a few posts and have something nice to say. Thank fuck for them. Without them, I don’t think I’d still be bothering to put my words out into the world.

A Mum Track Mind
Keep Calm and Carry On Linking Sunday
R is for Hoppit

The troubling world of children’s television

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Do you ever watch a kids TV show and feel really troubled by some aspect of it? I do. All the time. Here’s a rundown of the ones that worry me the most.

Sarah and Duck

Now I love Sarah and Duck. I actually watch it sometimes when the boys aren’t around because I think it’s that bloody good. BUT. There’s some really weird shit going down here. For a start… WHERE are Sarah’s parents? I mean, I reckon she’s about, what? Eight years old? And she lives in a house with only a duck for company and NO parental supervision. Except for maybe Scarf Lady, who checks up on Sarah every now and again, appears to have the early signs of dementia and is mostly looked after by her knitting bag (unless she leaves it on the bus, which she has done once or twice). None of Sarah’s friends have parents either. One of them has a flamingo as a pet/companion, another one is weirdly obsessed with plates and there are mostly mute twin girls living in the house next door. And Sarah is pretty chummy with the moon too, FYI. There are adults around, mostly doing jobs (baker, crayon shopkeeper, etc), but none of the kids in the show appear to belong to them. At first I thought I was missing something, like maybe it was a Charlie and Lola kind of set up where there ARE parents, you just don’t ever see them. But no. No parents. And that troubles me.

Bing

While we’re on the subject of absent parents… BING! Where are his bunny family at? Bing is looked after by a brown sack thing called Flop, who has endless patience for all of Bing’s infuriating habits and struggles to reach the front door handle without a stepladder. Some help he’d be in a house fire. Flop basically keeps Bing’s moral compass on track and looks after his equally irritating friends every now and again (when they’re not being looked after by a sack elephant called Ama at playschool). Flop even has baby photos of Bing, but there are no parents anywhere to be seen in any of them. Did Flop snatch Bing from his crib in the night? Who knows?! I suspect he probably wanders around the house swearing a lot after Bing has gone to bed though. And I have to wonder, since there are no adult animals anywhere to be seen and only weird sack creatures doing anything responsible… Is there a rather horrifying transformation in Bing’s future, or is he doomed to live in some kind of perpetual state of toddlerhood forever?

In The Night Garden

God, this show is creepy. For a start, Mr and Mrs Pontipine need to get a handle on their parenting. They never fucking know where their kids are. I mean, I don’t know if there’s some alcoholism going on behind that red door or what, but somebody needs to do something about that. Aside from the troubling parental issues, there’s Makka Pakka and his cleaning OCD, Upsy Daisy and her frankly terrifying singing and possessed bed, and three funky little critters called Tombliboos who play ghastly music and lose their trousers far more often than is strictly necessary. Then there are the Ninky Nonk and Pinky Ponk, both of which regularly try to annihilate all inhabitants of and visitors to the garden with their crazy upside down, head-on collision antics respectively. And then. Then there’s Iggle Piggle, the Night Garden overlord himself. That thing is nightmare fuel. Enough said.

Nelly and Nora

I might be missing something here, but I don’t think these kids go to school. They live on a caravan site and kind of run around doing not very much and most episodes seem to have something to do with the weather. Maybe they’re homeschooled? I don’t know, but I suppose at least these children have parents, even if those parents do abandon them on a hot beach in one episode while they go frolic in the sea. Not that I’m being judgy, but who does that? Pack your kids some fucking flip-flops in the beach bag FFS.

Mr Bloom

There isn’t anything wrong with this unless you overthink it. Which, of course, I have. This show is basically about vegetables. Singing vegetables with names and personalities. And that’s sort of where this becomes problematic for me. Because I really want my kids to eat vegetables, but I worry that this show might cause them to empathise with their butternut squash risotto. So far, O has not made the connection between Margaret the cabbage and co and anything he’s seen in the fruit and veg aisles at Sainsbury’s. But O is nothing if not observant and he will make that connection one day. The best part is, I haven’t got a fucking clue what I’m going to say to him. I am prepared for the Peppa Pig/bacon debacle, but anthropomorphised vegetables is another matter entirely.

Tree Fu Tom

Where do Tom’s parents think he goes when he’s actually gadding about in Treetopolis? I’m a little concerned that they let him go raking about in the woods by himself in the first place, if I’m completely honest. But then he pushes the boundaries that bit more by doing his magic shrinky thing and disappearing off to a magical land. What if something happened to him there and he didn’t make it back in time for tea? His poor parents would be doomed to spend the rest of their lives searching for him in vain and making ever more desperate TV appeals whilst cursing themselves for letting him play in the woods by himself to begin with. What a thoroughly depressing series that would be.

What about you? Have I missed any shows that give you the willies? I must confess that we only really watch CBeebies in our house, so there could be all kinds of freaky stuff going on over on Nick Jr that I’m not even aware of! Let me know in the comments or via Twitter/Facebook.

image
image

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.

image

Just look at you now, F!

image

image

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.

Worries!

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

As a mother, my worries are abundant. And most of them link back to my children in one way or another, even if the journey is a little – or a lot – convoluted sometimes. With that in mind, here are 12 things I’m worrying about at the moment:

1. Tantrums. How long is this “threenager” thing going to last? Because I am getting really tired of yelling “NO!” And “STOP!” And “WHY did you just do that?!” at O All. The. Time. He’s going to be four soon and this is showing no signs of abating whatsoever. So maybe he’s actually just going to be a tiny tyrant forever? I don’t know.

2. Feeding F. In particular, I am concerning myself with when he is going to understand the difference between “food” and “stuff to play with/throw on the floor/squash into a gooey paste/stuff that should NEVER be eaten”. I mean, he tried to eat a fucking BANANA SKIN the other day. And not only that, but he actually seemed to like it. Is it okay for him to eat banana skin?! Does anybody know?!

3. Fracking. Is it going to happen on the enormous scale that I’m afraid it might, and if it does is my house going to fall down and are my children’s children going to be born with six eyes and 13 toes? Is it going to be like that scene from The Simpsons movie when the lake turns black and all of the animals start mutating? Seriously. It’s terrifying.

4. Fleas. Specifically, do I have them living in my house? I have two cats who spend a lot of their time sprinting around outside, chasing leaves and catching things that aren’t leaves (like the mouse from last Sunday). Every so often – maybe once a month – I will notice that I have a flea on my arm or my hand or something and I will freak out and instantly bypass any reasonable solution to this and go straight to the extreme mental headspace of I MUST BURN THE HOUSE DOWN IMMEDIATELY. Yes, I treat them every four weeks. Yes, the flea-on-the-arm incidents tend to coincide with treatments. And YES; I am definitely neurotic. I don’t really know why this bothers me so much, to be honest; I’m pretty sure there are shitloads of critters living in my house courtesy of my cats and I’ll bet most of them are a whole lot bigger than fleas.

5. Potty training. This is something I panicked about semi-regularly before we started the whole process with O and then abruptly stopped worrying over once we’d had a few dry weeks on the bounce. But F is 18 months old now and I know I’m going to be starting all over again within the next year or so. Will it be easy? Will he be at all interested in using the potty? And will I need a new rug in my lounge when it’s all over? So. Much. WORRY.

6. School. Last Monday we found out which school O will be going to in September and I am over the bloody moon that he got into our first choice. That’s not the issue. The issue is that when he first started playgroup, he cried every time I dropped him off for months. MONTHS. And it was fucking awful. Are we going to have to go through that trauma all over again? Cue panic. And will the other kids judge him if he does cry? Panicpanicpanic.

7. Stomach bugs. Everybody seems to have them at the moment – along with coughs, colds and chest infections – and I am terrified that one of the kids is going to bring one home and infect the whole house. Watching kids battling with profuse diarrhoea and vomiting is awful in any case, but when you throw emetophobia (fear of puking) into the mix it suddenly gets a whole lot worse.

8. Feeling rubbish all the time. I think I’ve been sick with one thing or another for at least the last FOREVER. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I felt anything other than vaguely terrible. Maybe during one of my two days of sort of ish wellness last week? But then I got a migraine, so that feeling didn’t last long. Seriously though; am I dying?!

9. My house and how I never actually feel as though it is clean. I find cat food and abandoned Fruit Shoots and other detritus all over the place all the time and I think the cloths from my steam mop are actually starting to wear out from overuse. It’s like trying to hold back the advancing tide with a leaky bucket. Or attempting to nail jelly to a tree. Or pretty much any other analogy ever used to describe the words “pointless” and “impossible”. I suppose the only upside is that F thinks cat food is actually human food (maybe this explains the banana skin thing), so he just wanders through the house picking up the stray bits and munching them down. Every cloud.

10. Money. I think the only people who don’t worry about money are the fortunate few with an abundance of it. The rest of us are regularly battling with financial freak-outs and, let’s be honest, the immediate post-budget period is usually a pretty troubling and uncomfortable time for most of us. And isn’t it bloody awful when everyone has birthdays and anniversaries around the same time? People are so inconsiderate sometimes.

11. Child-friendly activities. Am I doing enough with my children? Do they enjoy our country walks and mini-adventures or is it only me who’s getting anything out of just not being bored in my messy, dirty house all day? Do they wonder why I keep dragging them out and promising, in a slightly manic tone, that “it will be super fun!”? Surely they must be wondering by now, given how our days out have a tendency to err on the side of disaster, what actually even constitutes for fun anyway and if they should perhaps be a little wary of it.

12. Tiredness. Some days I wonder if there will ever come a time when I am no longer constantly tired. Will I finally wake up one morning and think “wow, I actually feel like I’ve been to sleep!”? I can’t actually remember the last time that happened and I am so fucking tired. My child-free friends drive me crazy when they moan to me about being tired. They don’t understand, bless them, that their tired and my tired exist in completely different dimensions and do not belong in the same room with each other because I will lose my shit if you think you have a right to complain about tiredness when you stayed out until 5am and don’t have small humans jumping on your head half an hour later.

My worries change on a regular basis, but these are the ones that seem to be the most prevalent. Of course, I worry about milestones quite a lot too, which has been made rather a lot worse by a poster I saw during a yoga class a month or so ago informing me that F should be saying 20 words by now. But I find those worries much easier to rationalise these days because I have been a parent long enough to know that every kid is different and they all do things at their own pace and in their own time. And it’s not like F doesn’t say anything; it’s just that a lot of what he says isn’t actual words. Or maybe it’s just not English…

I’d love to hear about your worries or if any of these apply to you too!

image

image

O & his OCD

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Is it me or do all children have some degree of OCD? I used to think that O must have some kind of genuine condition because everything had to be done in a certain way or in a particular order. For example, when he first started to take an actual interest in the process of getting dressed – and by “take an interest”, I really mean “decide it was an aspect of his daily routine that he had to have absolute control over” – the entire morning would descend into tantrum-filled chaos at the mere suggestion that he put his pants on before his socks – because, let’s face it, socks before pants is just weird. But if I just got sick of the whole messing about of getting dressed every morning, pinned him down and forced him into his clothes in an order of which he did not approve, I would find him five minutes later standing naked in his room screaming bloody murder. Like, sorry I ruined your day, but we’ve been at this for hours and you’re still only wearing one fucking sock.

Usually these things come and go in phases. We’ve had the “I want to do it!” phase where O threw one of those impressive facedown-on-the-carpet tantrums if I dared to close his curtains for him or put the toothpaste onto the toothbrush without his input. Shortly after that was the aforementioned daily clothing debacle, which meant that getting dressed could, realistically, take about a week. Now we have this thing where he has to win at everything.

If I was late for work in a life before children, I would run like buggery down the stairs and hare out of the front door, throwing myself dramatically behind the wheel of my car and tearing out of the driveway. But these days I have to allow O to go down the stairs in front of me while I work myself up into a state of complete internal panic because if I don’t then he will have an utter fucking meltdown about the fact that he didn’t “win”. This also goes for the following situations:

Finishing a meal first.
Putting F in the bath first.
Walking into any room in the house first.
Getting ready for bed first.

Basically

Doing absolutely anything first.

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

I remember my mother telling me once that my brother went through a stage shortly after potty training when he had to use every toilet he came across, which apparently had something to do with the fact that coloured bathroom suites were A Thing back then. This frankly weird obsession very nearly led to a terribly awkward situation in the bathroom section of B&Q. What a great blog post that would have made, eh? So when O throws me another OCD curveball, I just try to remind myself of that and thank every possible deity out there that nothing that mortifyingly fucking awful has happened to us… Yet.

The thing is though, sometimes I still have absolutely no idea how to deal with these OCD phases. The whole winning thing at the moment is particularly trying because, realistically, I cannot always let him “win”. There are many nights when I’ve given O every possible opportunity to get undressed and into the bath before his brother and he’s still running maniacally around the house, riding his rocking horse naked and generally doing everything he can to evade capture, meanwhile I just want to get both children bathed and into bed so I can collapse on the sofa and stare at the wall for the rest of the night. I also kind of want to explain to him that there will be times when he will not win and that he will find life very disappointing if he believes that winning is everything. And that, in fact, it’s really okay not to win all the time. But I rationalise it by assuming that it’s just a phase and will pass eventually like all the other phases (even though this particular one has been going on forever). Knowing that doesn’t always make it easy to deal with though, and sometimes I am just really fucking late to work and need to get down the stairs first, so I have to leave poor N to deal with the epic tantrum that ensues when the door slams behind me and the screaming is lost in the screech of tyres as I gun the engine out of the gates.

So I’m just kind of wondering… Is it just us, or do you have a small person who insists on turning out the light every night and hates being the last one down the stairs?

image

image