Better

Instagram, the platform for the perfect photo, the sponsored post that only becomes clear at the end, the heavily filtered selfie that represents a heavily filtered life, the place where celebrities post a picture with a strawberry on their child’s face, would show that I am a good parent. There are many thousands of pictures of my girls at all stages of their lives and in every single one, you would see that they are happy and healthy, well dressed and clean, articulate and funny. And I could accept pats on the back for the role that I’ve played in that. Even on my instastories, a disappearing snapshot of the days, where I am a little more honest about things that I might be finding difficult, you would still see me as an active, engaged parent.

In truth, I am bordering on average. I am impatient, I rise quickly to anger and I shout at them more than I should. I put them on time out if necessary and though I try to do all the right things, explaining calmly what they have done and why I am cross, I don’t always and they reel away from me, a bit bewildered eager for cuddles and kisses once they have counted to twenty in the time out spot in the hall. Yes, I also praise them extravagantly, I scoop them up for kisses and tell them over and over how much I love them. Today, I told Grace that she was spectacular and you have never seen a more proud little girl. Spectacular! What a big word.

And she is. They both are. They are true miracles, the start of a family that I never thought I’d have and I would step in front of a train for them. But they are hard work, exhausting and frustrating and I struggle sometimes, often with the overwhelming feeling that I am somehow failing. Failing them mostly but also failing at the only job that actually really matters to me.

Until Poppy. I was worried, as I’m sure most second (third) time mums are, that I wouldn’t cope, that it would be too hard, that I’d end up in a heap in the corner, three kids running rings around me. But the truth is vastly different. The baby makes me feel competent, and that competence seeps into my parenting of my big girls. I feel able to compartmentalise what I have to do, to be calmer and more understanding, to not obsess over the fact that Grace had three accidents yesterday or that Isla seems to have forgotten how to speak at a normal volume.

Babies require confident, regular care. They require you to be on top of jobs, have the right amount of bottles ready for the night feeds, have a stash of nappies close by so your tiny infant isn’t left flailing on the changing mat waving their scrawny chicken legs as you run from room to room collecting the things you need. They also like cuddles and to stare at you for hours but that is the fun stuff, the bit that I didn’t get with my twins and the bit that I’m savouring now.

Older children require emotion. They require consistency and rules but those rules must be delivered compassionately, never changing, never shifting, even just slightly, even if they desperately want those rules changed.

I never imagined that the introduction of another child would make me a better parent. I imagined myself stretched more thinly, stressed and emotional at the thought of what I had put my girls through, the disruption that a baby had bought to their lives. But it isn’t the case. I am a better parent for having Poppy, a better parent for my big girls and the best parent for her.

Just better.

A Moment

I’ve been following closely the dreadful aftermath of Simon Thomas’ wife dying so suddenly of cancer last November. He has documented far more eloquently than I could ever hope his true desperation at carrying on without her and raising their son and I have been struck mostly at how everything can change in the blink of an eye. I knew this, of course, we all do, but it has been something that has almost plagued me for the past little while.

Yesterday, Isla tripped over her own feet and fell into our back step. We were on her way out and my sister scooped her up to hand her to me, and she was holding her hands up in front of her face. For a moment, I thought she’d broken her arm, it was the way she was holding it but as I cuddled her, I realised that she’d bashed her chin. It swelled up almost immediately and I applied some arnica and she had some calpol and whilst she was a little dramatic, it must have hurt, she was absolutely fine. But it was a moment. She could have fallen the other way, she could have hit the back of her head, she could have had concussion, she could have actually broken her arm, we could have spent the afternoon in A&E, not Asda.

It was a moment when J accepted this job and we shelved our plans to move to Yorkshire. It was a moment when this baby was conceived and changed everything again. It was that moment that led to this moment where I try to make a go of writing and accept that I won’t be working in retail for another few years. These are good moments, of course, but still seconds of time that change the direction of a life.

I moan at J at the way he slurps his coffee, it drives me slightly bonkers that he drinks it practically cold but there is something now that stops me. Because if something happens to him, would that be something that I wanted to remember, nagging him over soemthing so unbelievably petty. With my girls, now just seven months off starting school, and a mere eleven weeks from having their lives changed by a new baby, I am trying very hard to analyse when I say no and why I’m saying it. Why am I saying no to them getting a train track out an hour before bed? Does it matter that it will take three or four minutes to tidy it away? Of course it doesn’t.

For myself too, the girls stayed overnight last night at my parents and we painted their bedroom. It’s needed doing for a while and last night, we finally did it. They won’t be home until teatime and I am trying hard to just relax, not tear around like I do, trying really hard to just mooch. I might go and get a coffee soon, I might not. I might make a sandwich, I might not. I might even read my book instead of sorting through the girls toys (another job that really needs doing) but we are on the final countdown now and I should relax.

Shouldn’t I?

The Difference

Isla, our eldest twin, has/had plagiocephaly. It is commonly known, though it is not at all commonly known, as flat head syndrome. She was born with it, it is fairly common in twins, she was engaged at 32 weeks, her head wedged into my pelvis, her soft head just slowly going from round to well, another shape entirely. Nobody noticed, it was noted with amusement when we had scans, that Twin 1, as she was known, had her sister sitting on top of her, but now, though I place no blame, I don’t find it funny at all.

I noticed it at around 11 weeks old. I was slowly emerging from the twin fog and it was apparent that she looked different to Grace. I made a doctors appointment and was dismissed largely, it took going back again to secure a referral to a consultant at Bexhill Hospital. I don’t remember the time line exactly, it isn’t necessary to know but I am angry most at the complete lack of information. No midwife brought it up as a possibility, no health visitor checked either of the girls at any of the checks before being discharged from their service. Doctors didn’t know, and frankly still don’t, I have had to explain it several times to several GP’s and most recently, to eye specialists as we negotiate potential glasses for Isla.

I researched obsessively, of course I did, I do with everything, it’s both a blessing and a curse and J despairs of me. Just last night, I was googling why our in-utero baby had stopped moving as much. She’s tired, he said, just sleeping, and she was, waking up and flip flopping for an hour at 5am this morning. But anyway, in this case, it was needed and when I insisted on a further referral to a specialist after two fruitless visits to Bexhill, I got what we needed. I was told over and over that heads were rarely round, J’s head was felt and declared slightly asymmetrical and we were supposed to accept this. Yet, her eyes were in different places! One side of her little face protruded further than the other. My big girl. My baby.

We went to Great Ormond Street and we were listened to. We were acknowledged and validated and it felt good. It did not feel good to give your less than a year old an MRI scan, or go into a studio and have your baby photographed for progress checks like a science experiment. But it felt good to have a diagnosis and an action plan. We took her to see a wonderful osteopath who sorted out her misaligned neck, within two sessions, her face looked straighter, we had pillows that she slept on in her cot and different ones for the buggy, both designed to make sure that she didn’t gravitate to the more comfortable flat side. We changed her nappy so that she had to lay on the round side to see the TV or whatever book we were showing her. I don’t remember all of the details now, it is only very recently that J has stopped putting on her bedtime nappy with her head facing the ‘good’ way.

We went to a private clinic to ask about a helmet. This is a hugely controversial subject within the plagio community and I will only touch on what I think. If the plagio is mild and you catch it early then helmet your child. If your child, as ours had, has been seen at a world leading Children’s Hospital and has a diagnosis and a prognosis that her head will never be totally round, then don’t. I view Isla’s condition as a medical one, not something to be sorted by throwing money at it. It divided us, that helmet, J and me. He was for it and I wasn’t, for months afterwards he would ask if we had made the right decision and I would cry, as I did in the car the day we saw that no good, money grabbing salesman. Sorry, I’m sure that there are some good eggs out there, genuinely wanting to help babies get better but this man does not fall into that category.

Her plagio has led to eyesight problems, we think, though that could be coincidental. We know that Isla needs glasses, we are just waiting for a prescription. But most importantly, it has led to her looking different to her identical twin sister. Not in a bad way, I like it, in fact, that they look slightly different. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell, on first meeting them, no one can, but they do look different. Grace has a rounder face than Isla and Isla is a little more angular. You no longer see wonkiness, I can now put her hair in bunches or french plaits and they will fall evenly on both sides, she can now wear sunglasses as her ears are in the same place on both sides of her head.

She will never know anything more than what we choose to tell her. We will use medical terminology and tell her how brave she was, her big trips to London by herself while Gracie stayed at home.

A dent in a tennis ball is bigger than a dent in a football.

That is the plagio mantra, that her head may well be as wonky as it ever was when she was three months old but it won’t look like that. I repeated it over and over to people who asked why we weren’t helmetting her, what we were doing in osteopath appointments and with a physio. I believed that it would be OK in the end.

And it was.

The Next Little While

I enjoyed being pregnant for about a day. I looked on one website to see how far along I’d be based on my dates but I largely tried to ignore it. I knew the statistics, I was over 35 and I genuinely believed that I would be one of the many, many women who miscarry. I miscarried once about eleven years ago and although not the least bit traumatised by that experience, it did remind me of the details of it.

I went to the doctor, got referred to a midwife, did all the things I was supposed to do and I didn’t tell a soul. J and I didn’t talk about it, just occasionally if I was feeling sick, which I did a bit, and when I was overly emotional which I was a lot. We certainly didn’t make any plans, talk about names or anything like that.

I bled twice, both times a microscopic amount, no more than a stain and I had a lot of cramping. Both times, I thought the worst, cried and then it went away. Truth be told, I was almost relieved that it might be ending, the turmoil that I was putting myself through didn’t seem worth it for a thing the size of a grape, a thing I had no idea was developing or not.

I was offered an early scan because I had had multiples and I went alone, saw just one heartbeat and still, it wasn’t real. I was very glad that there weren’t two and if that sounds ungrateful, then spend a day looking after baby twins and come back to me with your thoughts. I favourited a website on my phone that worked out your risk of miscarriage as the days progressed and I read that once a heartbeat was seen, the risk plummeted but still, it was going to happen to me, of course it was, I didn’t deserve this baby, had never believed that we would conceive this baby.

J came to the 12 week scan, which became the 13 week scan as I’d apparently miscalculated my dates and it did then seem as if this might be happening. Still we kept it to ourselves, there was the Downs test to get through, more risk to be calculated and more potential decisions to be made. We have a niece with Down Syndrome, and this complicated rather than simplified things. Fortunately, the letter came quickly and the risk was tiny yet a secret it remained.

We told people at 18 weeks. When it was starting to get hard to hide, when it felt as if we’d hurt people’s feelings if we kept it a secret any longer. But the truth was, and is, that I’d have kept it a secret the whole way through if that was at all possible. My twin pregnancy was a medical one, scans and appointments every two weeks, then every two days towards the end. An induction, an epidural, constant monitoring and then a middle of the night c-section when Grace was in distress. This is MY pregnancy, one to relax and enjoy, one to savour, though I hope to have one more baby after this.

I am trying desperately to savour it. I wake routinely at 2-3am and I lay for a while feeling my baby, my littlest girl, flip flop about in my tummy. I want to sob when Izzy Biz pulls up my top to kiss her baby sister, to tell me how cute she’s going to be, and I look in amazement at the app that tells me there’s now 82 days until she is due.

There is still a risk, always a risk but I am trying to relax.

 

Borrowed Time

When I was twenty five, my brother died.

This isn’t said starkly to garner sympathy or to make a huge impact, it just is what it is. It’s something that I don’t think about that often to be honest, sometimes I am truly taken aback that it happened at all, it’ll hit me like a ton of bricks in the middle of the night or if I hear a particular song, grief is weird like that. You patch the hole in your heart but sometimes the stitches twitch and the hole is not quite exposed again, but jiggled, like the rain would make a long mended broken bone ache

When I was thirty one, my boyfriend dumped me.

I’ve mentioned this before and now, a number of years later, it is one of those things that I view as very minor in my life, a necessary thing and the thing that led me to J and to my life now but at the time. It was like losing a family member all over again. We had been friends since we were nineteen, best friends that turned into something more, and I know, as sure as the sun will set each night, that friends is absolutely what we should have stayed. But we didn’t and the break up was traumatic and drawn out, hurtful when it didn’t need to be, things said in anger and what felt like heart break but wasn’t.

There are a million and one things in between those things and now that take a swab at your heart. Your children being unwell, a missed opportunity, a job offer that never comes, your jeans not fitting, things that are tiny and huge but always a little heart breaking in their own way.

My thirties have been infinitely better than my twenties. Would I go back to my twenties if offered? Not in a million years. If I could take J and my girls with me, have longer with them, have all the time in the world, then yes, but it doesn’t work like that.

Time is always borrowed, have this time but then your children will start school. Enjoy this time, it’s the last time you’ll have a January Tuesday in the rain with nothing to do but watch Paw Patrol and make a space rocket out of tissue paper. Enjoy the feeling of a baby squirming inside you because this might be your last baby.

Don’t take time for granted.

 

 

Success

I’m loathe to divide my life into pre and post kids but it does sometimes feel like the easiest distinction. It is slightly easier in my case, as I didn’t return to my job after my girls were born, so the division could very easily be before and after work. Not that what I do now isn’t work of course, but the perception of my life is and I think you’ll understand what I mean.

In my work life, I was averagely successful. I made a lifestyle choice when I met J, I could have continued on with my career as a retail manager, running bigger and more successful stores but all of those stores were much further away and, truth be told, I liked finishing work and hopping on the train, knowing that I had a good three or four hours each evening to relax and enjoy my home and my relationship. There were times within my career when I could have really gone places, really developed and there were times when things were really quite ropey, so I think, on the whole, it all balances out.

I loved my last job. I worked for a well known lingerie company that sold other bits and bobs,which I won’t name but you don’t need to be Agatha Christie to work it out. I had a fantastic team of people that I genuinely considered to be friends and it was a challenge. My job was added to and enhanced and I felt supported and excited by my bosses, it was a fun job, not different every day but different enough that I nearly always wanted to go to work. Telling my friends there that I was pregnant and then that there were two babies is genuinely one of the highlights of my life.

I regret often not going back. Not because I have ever regretted being with my girls, not at all, but because there is no barometer to success when you don’t work outside of the house. Nobody cares if your toddler is potty trained or when, there’s no performance related bonus, there’s far too much time and not enough time in equal measure, time spent staring at the walls in silence wondering if your babies are deeply enough asleep to risk turning the telly on, while you’re pushing your children in the pram along the seafront in an attempt to pass even a little time in an interminable day, the days when you realise that it’s two o’clock in the afternoon and you’ve not only missed breakfast, but lunch too.

The idea of talking to a stranger now fills me with dread now. I ramble to strangers if I d find myself needing to talk to someone, yet i crave having a conversation with someone new. I’d love to have just a little of my old self back for a few minutes, I’d like to briefly remember what it feels like to be respected and listened to. I wonder how I’ll feel next year, after the baby is born and old enough to go to my sister and to nursery and I do have to return to work, what will I say in an interview, that for four years, I have loved my children beyond measure, that I am more patient and grounded than I have ever been, that I will bring a level of maturity to a role that I simply did not have before.

Most likely I’ll say the wrong words and get laughed at.

Hey ho!

Worry

I saw the midwife this morning. It was a totally routine appointment and I should be just getting on with my day, eating lunch and getting ready to go and get the girls from nursery in the rain. Except I’m not. I’ve just sat here with my notes beside me, googling all the results and worrying.

The baby’s heartrate is slightly down from the last time. Still perfeectly normal, the midwife said that she was a chilled out baby but I googled that. My blood pressure was slightly higher than last time, I googled that. My ferritin is slightly low, I googled that.My heamoglobin is excellent, didn’t google that. The baby has had a growth spurt, is now measuring a week ahead, I googled that.

And now I want to cry. I won’t, as I’ve just done my make-up again as I had a half hour walk home in the driving rain, but I’d like to.

Can I be brutally honest? I don’t want to prepare for this baby becuase I am convinced that she won’t be OK,  that there won’t be a baby to bring home. Last time, with twins, I was monitored really closely, scans every two weeks, a consultant appointment every two weeks, midwives on top of all that, a planned induction, an epidural, the whole works. This time, in this unremarkable normal pregnancy, there’s none of that. The baby gets measured in a rudimentary way every four weeks but that’s all, I’m asked how I’m feeling and my word is taken. Its so odd. I just think to myself that in April, when it’s all gone wrong, we can move on with our lives, take the girls away, move house maybe, do seomthing spectacular to counteract the devastation. I can’t picture giving birth, I can’t picture holding a baby, a baby living in this house with us, I can’t picture any of it.

She is kicking away right now as I write this. My littlest girl. I have no idea of her personality or if she looks like her sisters, but I want to. I desperately want to know her, to hold her. Izzy Biz asked me yesterday if she cried in my tummy. I want to see her with her sisters. I want that more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

I’m crying now. Bugger.