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?!

Canterbury

He wasn’t married. And nothing happened. Not physically at least. But I think that my heart was broken.

When I was questioned in the lift as to the status of my relationship with Kenny; I was actually on my way to my room to talk to another man. Another manager. One who had totally captured my heart. I thought he was spectacular, older than me, good looking and oh, we could talk for hours. And we did, we’d get to work early and speak on the phone, a cup of tea in hand, the jobs of the day sometimes talked about, sometimes it was our lives.

He told me once that he wished he’d have met me first. Not his girlfriend. He had a girlfriend, a very long term settled girlfriend. They lived together in a Kent town. I don’t remember her name. He told me he loved her but wasn’t necessarily in love with her. The distinction doesn’t matter. There was never any possibility of him leaving her.

We had a team meal in London once and we walked through the park in the dark, a group of us but everyone knew that it was us two. We were obviously a pair. I think we might have held hands for a bit, a tipsy slip up from the professional status quo.

My area manager confronted me about him in my office. I played dumb and told her that we were friends. I have no doubt that she didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have believed me. I think, now looking back, she was looking out for me, not him. I did not think that at the time.

I was looking at a flat with my mum. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. My phone rang as we left and I stood on the sunny street as a mutual friend told me that he’d married her on a beach in Mauritius whilst on holiday. A holiday he’d told me he was dreading. Just a few days before.

It was all a lie or none of it was. He maybe was dreading it. He maybe wasn’t. It may well have been the happiest day of his life. It certainly should have been. My wedding day will be mine. He maybe was in love with me too. There’s a part of me that thinks he might have been.

He was an education. A learning curve. I hope he’s happy wherever he is now

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.

Adding A Third

Izzy Biz and Doodle are thick as thieves. Of course they are. They spend almost every minute of every day together, separated occasionally when we remember that it’s important, and mostly, they love that time. They get ratty with each other, obviously, and they wind each other up, the giggling and the hysteria drive me absolutely bonkers but when they snuggle up together, Izzy’s hand on Doodle’s knee, Doodle’s head on Izzy’s shoulder, you cannot imagine them ever not being this close.

I was lucky enough to grow up with sisters and I was clear that I wanted the same for them. People would patronisingly explain that they had each other, but I didn’t mean that, I meant the experience of a younger sibling, I had a picture in my head of one of my big girls cuddling a baby, a gaggle of kids running ahead of us as we walked to the park. The idea of the twins and no more was not at all what I had pictured for my family.

I didn’t factor in fourteen months of trying to conceive said third baby but that is another story for another day. When I did the pregnancy test and it was positive, I was delighted, J was his usual nonchalant self and we didn’t say a thing to the girls before we had had a scan and all was well. Doodle wondered if the baby might be a horse instead and Izzy still wonders if she can have a brother. But they are excited largely and their understanding is growing as to what might actually be about to happen.

But then I worry. Worry that the new little one will be left out, will be excluded either because there is a four year gap between them or because they are twins. Worry that the little one will be lonely with her big sisters at school, just hanging out with me, doing all the things that I did with the girls but by herself. Is this a twin mum thing? At the moment, I can’t imagine babies coming as one, just one baby, how is this possible? I’m imagining a relationship with one baby that I simply didn’t have with the girls, able to have a cuddle because I, or she, wants one not because I have to console a screaming baby or she wants feeding or winding or rocking to sleep.

The girls will be our focus after she is born. She will require a level of looking after that is physical, to be fed and changed and cuddled but emotionally, the girls are going to be the priority. Three weeks after she’d born, my parents are taking them on holiday and I’m delighted that they are going, it’ll be just what they need and the timing should be spot on, long enough after she’s born that they won’t feel as if they’re being sent away and exactly when they’ll need that one-on-two attention.

A third baby (or second in most cases) is a curious and unusual thing.