Procrastinate

Last night, all three girls stayed at my parents, a glorious child free night where I remembered that when you sleep for a long time, you have to wash sleep crusts from the corners of your eyes. I’d forgotten that that happened but then it hasn’t happened for many months, there have been a handful of nights when I’ve slept for more than four hours.

Anyway, I had grand plans. I have to rewrite the first three chapters of the book to send it off again, new and improved and obviously going to get an agent this time, I need to write another one. I wanted to blog here. Do the ironing. Paint my hallway.

I did an 1000 piece puzzle.

Ate a family bag of popcorn and slept for eight hours.

But here’s the thing. Is the act of doing a puzzle an act in itself or is it a procrastination and not really a thing at all? This evening I cleaned my make up brushes and finished reading a book I’ve loved. Again, procrastination or justified evening activity?

I then fell asleep on the sofa and was woken by Grace being sick so my night of relaxation seems very far away now as it doesn’t look like I’ll be sleeping tonight.

Might start a puzzle…..

As a Mother

When I was newly pregnant with the girls, one of my staff told me that becoming a mother would change everything. The way I felt about things, the way I experienced things, everything. I was indignant, almost furious, and I can remember snapping back that it wouldn’t change me fundamentally, I’d be the same person I’d always been, just with children.

At first, it didn’t change me. I adored my new babies, of course, but whether it was because there were two of them, it felt very much like a job. An amazing job, don’t get me wrong, one I was delighted to do but a job nonetheless. I still wrote myself jobs lists, still allocated time frames to things, planned tasks and activities, the girls were on a military schedule, and I noted down everything, how much they’d eaten and when, how many nappies they went through in a day and what was in them. There was very little room for feelings, for emotion to bubble up anywhere near the surface, let alone froth over and become anything significant.

“Let them be little”

Then things started to change, they started sleeping so I did too. They started smiling and laughing and loving me back and suddenly, the feelings were very much there. I remember once, off the back of a row, a row I forget now, I laid in bed and just thought about my two girls and I cried. It was astonishing, the almost visceral love I felt for them and it was all I could do to stop myself going to them and waking them up just to feel their arms around my neck.

As they have got older, those feelings have intensified and as they have grown more independent, both physically at nursery and psychologically with their own thoughts and opinions on any number of things, I have wanted more and more to tuck them away and keep them little. Yet, I can’t wait to see them get older, see what type of girls they will become.

“It’s like a piece of your heart walking around outside of your body”

With Poppy, it’s been different. I don’t love her anymore or any differently really, but this time I’ve been far more aware of the passing of time. With your first child (ren), you are eager for the next step, eager to see your child roll over for the first time, sit up, hear their first word, see their first steps, and you are less aware that once that’s been done or achieved, whatever it might be, you can’t do it again. So with P, I’ve slowed down. If I have to sit up until 1.30am with her frog like on my chest, the place she’s most comfortable being soothed by my heartbeat, then so be it. If I don’t get the washing in because she is hanging out on my knees while I blow raspberries to make her smile, then so be it. She will be this small for the blink of an eye and I don’t intend to forget any of it.

I do find myself starting sentences with ‘as a mother’. I do find myself thinking about things differently. Seeing those awful pictures of those children and their mothers being separated in America at the moment, I would defy anyone to not feel anything but utter despair and heartache, parent or not, but is there an added layer if you look at the pictures while cradling your own newborn, an added nuance when you can picture your own toddler when you read a description of a two year old curled up in a ball scared out of her mind.

I don’t know. How can you ever know? I can’t remember how I felt before I was a mother, just like when I see my timehop updates these days, my first thought is wondering where Poppy is, your brain shifts to a new normal and it’s hard to shift it back.

I’d like to tell that woman now, the person who told me that I would change almost five years ago, in my store, my little beans safely ensconced in my tummy, that I have changed. I have become a mother. I have changed.

I can tell you that now, as a mother.

 

 

Vessel

I find many things about parenting difficult. The constant narrative of what children eat, how much exercise they get, how much time they spend in front of a screen. Most days, my two eat their five a day but sometimes they don’t and I can work myself into a frenzy wondering if there had been an opportunity to fit a banana into them. They exercise all the time, too much probably, they are string beans, never still. The TV is on a lot, but it’s rarely watched, I think frequently that I wish that they would perhaps watch a whole film, or even an entire episode of Paw Patrol, so that I could do something with the time.

I know that I am a good parent in many ways. My children are happy and healthy, bright and funny. They will grow to be good people.

But…

The thing that I worry about most, the thing that can lead me into a blind panic at 3am when I’ve woken up with Poppy, is that I have to fill them with knowledge, with experiences, with life so that they can wring their own lives dry, so that they can truly be the absolute best that they can be. Poppy has made it worse if anything, she is brand new and I have so much to do, so much expectation on me to do the right thing, be the right parent, be a parent that, when they are older, they will think well of.

There is an element of luck. I know this with my very own personality experiment, identical twins, they were born two minutes apart, raised in the same house by the same parents, and yet they are entirely different. Most of Poppy’s personality is set already, how sporty she is, if she is good at drawing, if she’ll want to write like me or take photos like her dad.

I feel guilty that I can count on one hand the amount of times the girls have gone swimming. They have never been to a birthday party that hasn’t been hosted by a member of their own family. They haven’t started Brownies, or ballet, or karate. They went to a free tennis class a month ago and I haven’t taken them back. They don’t know of any of the almost endless things that they could be doing, could be participating in, and for that I feel the guiltiest of all.

Tomorrow, I will take all three girls to Storytime at the library. They will love it, they will chat to other kids, they will participate fully and Poppy will drink it all in too. They’ll then fly along the seafront on their scooters and possibly have an ice cream and they will love that too. There will be no interaction with a class teacher or other parents and my own anxiety about that is grateful but am I failing them? Am I whisking them away as soon as the stories end, whisking myself away from potential conversations, is that doing damage?

On the other hand, they are little, they have each other, and they have me. I will read stories, they will be outside, they’ll have fun. They will be fine. They are fine.

I don’t know what to do. I never imagined that I would develop some sort of parental anxiety that would lead me to being terrified of anyone I didn’t know, even parents at nursery, and I never imagined that it would mean that my kids are somehow stifled.

Are they?!

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.