Instamums

It started with a pack of baby wipes.

An innocent scroll through Instagram, done in the dead of night or in those early mornings when you’re zoned out as your children want to wake up at least an hour before you do, and you’re confronted with the dreaded #ad. On this occasion the product was an expensive brand of baby wipes, 99.9% water apparently, I don’t know and neither will I ever know as they cost £2.70 a packet. Almost £3 for something that wipes your baby’s bum. Now if you can afford that, great, carry on but as I glanced at the cube in the living room that contained my daughters changing bits and bobs, all I could see were the Huggies I’d bought on offer.

I will add at this point that my daughter, my third daughter, is almost nine months old and has had one sore bum. I researched and bought some metanium and it cleared up within 24 hours. My twins are almost five and they rarely did, save for the dreaded teething nappies that the internet says are myth and I can guarantee that nothing costing £3 went near their bottoms. I used Lush dream cream aka magic on anything untoward and that stuff is £11 but I would have it up there with arnica cream as a must have with children. I’m on tub 3 and it will be in my fridge for the rest of time.

This is not the point. The point is ads. The point is vulnerable women, new mums, thinking that they are doing their children a disservice at best and harm at worst for not using a product advertised by their favourite instamum. Nappies are the product at the moment, I have seen several YouTube videos in the last few weeks promoting a certain brand of nappy. Well, I can tell you now that Lidl’s Lupilu nappies are a complete dupe for that brand. The wipes are awful though, don’t go there, trust me.

I am thirty eight, Poppy is my third child, I know largely what I’m doing and what works. She is different to her sisters in many ways but in terms of care, we use what is on offer and olive oil cream that my parents bought us from Greece. I won’t be swayed or influenced by what a mum says on Instagram but I do worry about the implications not only on people’s finances if they are so influenced. And the mental health of a young mum who can’t afford the posh nappies or the admittedly beautiful nursery funded entirely by a furniture website.

What angers me further is that all of these people can afford all of the above themselves. All of it. Maybe they do gift it without us seeing, maybe they make a donation to a foodbank or a womens shelter, but they certainly don’t show that. There is a wonderful blogger trying to change this, but starting with the brands and the companies themselves and I hope it works, it needs to change, the idea of Instagram funding a family, a whole life, a really good life is nuts in itself but at least, this would go some way to making the whole thing a little more transparent.

But baby wipes. Use whatever. The economy ones from Waitrose are excellent, the others are just fine, the expensive ones that are entirely water are good too. It’s your baby and you know them best.

And put it on Instagram. After all, you paid for it!

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.

Mother’s Day

Five years ago, I went out for a meal with J and his family. His sister-in-law bought her mum and grandma and I can remember almost all of it. Presents were given to all the Mum’s in the group and I can remember sitting there, Ruby (our then two year old niece) in my lap and feeling as miserable as I can remember ever feeling. Of course, a year later, I was about to have my girls, but I didn’t know that then, how could I, we were months off even trying, and the feeling of isolation was utterly devastating.

I always knew I wanted to be a mother. I was probably the most maternal of all of us three sisters, I did some child minding in my early twenties while I was (briefly) at University but then I discovered a career and that was that. I was resolutely single for a long time, worked stupidly hard, there was a lot going on as well during that time, and my thoughts about being a mother were pushed firmly to one side. Both my sisters had all of their children before I had mine and their children are the light of my life, particularly my oldest nephew as I lived with him and my sister for a while.

I know full well that I would not have children if I had stayed with my ex. I probably knew that then, but pretended that I didn’t. I can barely imagine how I’d feel if I was with him now, very nearly 38, and no children. No prospect of children. A career, yes but just the two of us. It chills me, if I’m honest.

Ironically, I could imagine having a life without kids with J. We have huge fun together, have lots of plans for after our girls are grown and I sometimes crave time with him, just the two of us. Having said that, I am so glad that I do have children with him. He’s a wonderful father, and he makes me a better mother. We’re very different in our parenting styles but on the same page where we need to be, in the way we are raising our girls morally, ethically, and to be the people we would love them to be.

So Mother’s Day. In the UK, it was today and I received a handmade card that each of my girls made me at nursery. Nothing else. No gift, no shop bought card. I had a lie-in until 8.20am (a serious luxury) and the girls went to their grandparents for a couple of hours so we could have some lunch. And it was the best day. I watched the girls play in the garden for a bit in just t-shirts, a sign that we might actually get some nice weather at some point and I made them laugh in the car by singing songs from Beauty and the Beast. No commercialisation. No money spent. The best.

I dislike Mother’s Day anyway. It strikes me as a holiday that makes people feel awful. People who want to be mothers and can’t, people who have lost children, people who have lost mothers. I hate the way that Instagram becomes one big ad in the week or so running up to the day itself and then the way that the vast majority of instagrammers spend the day showing us what they have been gifted. There is the odd beautiful post within all that, the lovely posts where people talk about their feelings about being a mother, a daughter, a niece or nephew, about being someone who doesn’t have children on this day of all days, they are poignant and heartfelt and not at all curated. I have enjoyed those very much, but I have not posted about it today. I didn’t post on Valentines Day. Or International Women’s Day. I have posted around these days, my girls as normal and my instastories are the usual mix of moaning about how little sleep I get and watching my girls say silly things in my messy house. And soft play. Lots and lots of soft play!

Tomorrow will be Monday. No different to today but for a huge number of people, it will come as a blessed relief, and I will leave this with that. I hope that you all had a wonderful Sunday, a Mother’s Day if you are in the UK, and that you snuggled with your babies.

 

Privacy

Blogging should be a completely honest process. Should be. It should be a place where you can be entirely open and honest, be able to express your true feelings and maybe sort through some things in your head that you maybe haven’t articulated to people that know you in real life. This is fine at the start, when the blog gets absolutely no views and when you aren’t putting any posts on your social media. Then you decide to, because it’s nice for people to read your things and suddenly you have to censor yourself a little bit.

There is a situation that I would love to write about and I probably could as the likelihood is that the people concerned will never read anything about it, but what if they did. I know that feelings would be hurt and perhaps rightfully so, and the very thought of that makes me feel a little bit sick. There are more general things that I’d love to write about but again, these are real people in my life and I have to respect and understand that.

What’s the answer? Password protected posts? I see the attraction but ultimately I don’t see the point. Maybe one day. It’s a bit like private Twitter, something I respect if it’s your thing, but I can’t see myself ever doing it. I like the interaction I have there and on my very favourite Instagram, and it isn’t a medium for me that I want to have private in any way.

In a way, this blog is a bit of a love letter to my family. I was absolutely hopeless with baby books and memory boxes with the girls, I meant to do them, I have them but I couldn’t tell you which one of them cut their first tooth or the exact age they were when they first walked. It matters but doesn’t matter really. I feel awful about it sometimes but mostly it’s just something that happened that I can do nothing about. I like timehop for the little daily updates, it’s lovely to find a little reminder everyday of a particular day or a holiday that you’d forgotten the exact date of. I’d rather write about Isla talking all day long or being a bossy knickers, Grace telling me she’s missed me when she’s been away from me for about a minute, or the way that J and I met, the way that our relationship developed. I’d love them to read about themselves in years to come, see how much they were loved and will continue to be loved.

So I will continue in the vein of telling my own story, my own complicated story of juggling a lot of balls, navigating this part of my life while reminiscing about things that have happened previously. I will talk about my family, J and my girls, the new baby and how that will affect all of our lives. But not, perhaps, anyone else. I don’t want to talk about this blog with anyone I know, it can be read, of course, but I don’t need to know who is reading it and what they are thinking. I will continue to journal but in a way that means I can’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

Is that fair?

(Sorry, this is another stream of consciousness post, I don’t generally read back what I’ve written before I hit publish. Sometimes it shows more than it should!)