Yesterday we celebrated Henry's birthday and, as ever on his birthday, I consider it a bit of a personal milestone, too. It’s now seven years since I became a mother and embarked on the downhill-with-no-brakes, treadmill-set-too-fast lifestyle that today is threatening to be my undoing.
I told Henry recently that his birth was the happiest moment of my life. (Not the actual birth, you understand, just the occasion.) And I meant it. I vividly remember the night after he was born, waking up and looking over to him asleep in the hospital cot - about six hours old - and having a sweeping sense of all-consuming joy and giddy anticipation. I was so excited about what was to come - about being a mother, about all the adventures we were going to have as a three, guiding this little guy through his early years.
And it has been everything I thought it would be, by and large. I’ve got used to surviving on far less sleep than I ever thought possible, I’ve accepted I’ll never finish a sentence again, and I’m fully accustomed to being fifth in the queue when it comes to priorities. But that’s what I signed up for and I’m absolutely fine with that.
However seven years on, and three children in, the day-to-day reality is - of course - nothing like I expected parenthood to be.
In many ways I’m hugely relaxed as a mother. I don’t panic when Xander eats dog food (last week). Or rather a lot of chocolate ice cream (also last week). When he head-butted the railings outside our house and got a bloody lip (also last week) I wasn’t massively concerned. I’ve been there and got the T-shirt, the matching hoodie and the bumbag.
But I’m also letting things that I should pay more attention to slide.
Henry has become Xander’s third parent, bribed to amuse his brother because I don’t have time. Instead of reading Bella a bedtime story myself, she is lulled to sleep by Andrew Sachs on the only audio book CD we have left that’s not scratched beyond all recognition.
I know I’m letting my standards slip and yet I can’t seem to do anything about it. I’m torn between staying up for a full 24 hours at some point just to catch up on all my work and personal admin (though within three days it would all have regenerated and I'd be back where I started, only more knackered), trying to pedal just a tiny bit faster and hoping I can get on top of everything (though I’m not convinced I have anything left in the tank) and just thinking f*ck it and checking out of everything that happens outside these four walls.
I’m standing by and watching many of my friendships wither - birthdays are marked by cards that are only posted on the day, WhatsApps go unanswered for 10 days at a time, news about hospital appointments/sick parents/concerns about a child’s health aren’t followed up, conversations are had and completely forgotten. If my friends don’t use Instagram I don’t know anything at all about the past year of their lives.
I always seem to have two dozen uncompleted tasks floating around my head and can't focus on anything with any real depth. It’s like when you read a story to your kids (not that I do now, of course) and by the end are amazed by your ability to read the words, with some level of coherence and even expression, while thinking about next week’s meal plan, an email you’ve forgotten to send, a difficult conversation you need to have or the items you still have to add to the online food shop before 11pm that night.
I’ve developed the attention span of a dung beetle, the patience of an irritable pensioner in a heatwave, the energy levels of a hungover sloth and the joie de vivre of a 103 year old woman who has been living in a nursing home for 25 years, outlived every single person she knows and been trying to die since 1998 but just can’t get the bloody job done.
And it definitely all began to unravel not long after I optimistically had a third child. More precisely, in the run up to last Christmas. One of the wheels felt decidedly clunky in mid-December and by New Year it had fallen off entirely. We limped along like that till March 23rd when I started trying to crack the work-homeschool-parenting conundrum, then within a few days we were down to two - cruising along ok but only if no one wobbled the cart. Now, though, I think one of the wheels has a slow puncture, but if I stop to try and fix it the whole thing will fall apart.
Yesterday I gave in to my mother’s insistence she take some laundry away every week and bring it back washed and ironed. This is the woman who has put in 40 years of parenting and should be enjoying her retirement without feeling like she has to do her bit to keep her son-in-law in clean pants. But I do like that I’ve given her renewed cause to wax lyrical about why proper bannisters are so wonderful for drying bedding - I’ve spent the last five years convincing her I don’t consider our lack of open bannisters a real downside to our home.
Nonetheless, as we enter our final full week of The Juggle, I can enjoy living in hope that once the big kids are back in school and Xander is (finally) enrolled in childcare three days a week, I will be able to start getting back on track - dedicating those 18 hours a week of childfree time to work, and then paying some half decent attention to my lovely little people when they come home bursting with incoherent drivel relating to their day at school.
But in all this there is an underlying layer of anxiety as I accept that I may yet need to face up to the (very likely) reality that nothing actually changes and I’m destined to live this chaotic sh*tshow for another decade or so, smashing any notion I had of being the parent I was so sure I was going to be in the early hours of 24th August 2013.
So Happy Birthday Henry, my beautiful boy. I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you are so easy going, optimistic, enthusiastic and forgiving of the amount I work and the amount I shout. In amongst all this madness you make it easy to be a mum and I hope that, very soon, I can resume something resembling a normal service once again. Preferably before another seven years has whipped by.
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