I had my first child in 2008. I was 26, only a year into my marriage and a couple more into my career.
Twenty-six is the age of self-discovery, or as we call it these days, adulting. I wasn’t very good at it. I had barely figured out how to be responsible for myself and I certainly wasn’t ready to take care of this whole other very needy human being.
Most of my peers were focused on charting a path to ad agency stardom or busy writing career-making news stories.
I had a whole plan laid out for my life but everything changed once the baby arrived. A month after returning to work from maternity leave, I found myself walking away from my career and choosing the often lonely journey of a stay-home mom.
Having a baby was nothing like I imagined it to be. In my mind, my days would be spent cuddling a super chill, happy baby whose smile would light up my world.
What I had instead was a baby who hated sleep and life with equal measure. He cried a lot for no reason, took forever to fall asleep and didn’t seem to understand the basics of how being a baby works.
In short, we had such a wonderful experience with our first child that over the next eight years, we went and had four more. I can’t fully explain this decision but I’ll put it down to two things: a severe case of But-Babies-Are-So-Cute and an unusual ability to suppress traumatic memories.
Instead of stopping me, my husband was making fatherhood look effortless and being all like, “Yeah! Let’s have another one of these babies!”
At 38, I’m now done having kids. My youngest turns four this year and there’s still a ways to go in this journey, but I’m also approaching the point where I’m starting to catch a glimpse of where this road ends. Knowing that I won’t be having another newborn to hold makes me a little wistful so I’ve since turned my attention to making sure my kids are on board with having their own babies eventually, which is the next best thing.
After 12 years, five kids, and more parenting mistakes than I can count, I’ve learnt a thing or two about being a mom.
Get all the parenting advice…and then freestyle
Getting parenting advice is a lot like reading manuals designed for other outdated models of baby, which makes the information good to know but ultimately useless when you’re dealing with your own baby.
As a new mom, I was obsessed about gathering information from books, magazines, google, forums, YouTube. I would spend hours watching videos on “How to get your baby to sleep”. I tried them all and I can tell you what didn’t work:
The mesmeric hand pass technique? Garbage.
The forehead stroke? A complete waste of time.
Eye fixation? Useless.
The tissue face swipe? I can’t believe I even tried this, but it made my baby really angry.
There’s also the side hold, belly hold, swaddling, massaging, essential oiling, rocking, singing, shushing—all had limited success.
Parenting is the art of freestyle. With a decent sample size of five kids, I can tell you that there is no one-size-fits-all magic solution. Each baby required a customised approach and in fact, what works one day may not the next.
Once, I managed to get Truett to fall asleep by putting him in his cot and leaning over to kiss him on the cheek. He stopped crying after five kisses, so I kept going. It took me 200 kisses till he closed his eyes and fell asleep. It never worked again after that, but my larger point is: try something new, it might just work for your baby.
Go Easy On Yourself
I didn’t understand Mom Guilt—I used to think that it was being unnecessarily dramatic and a way of fishing for compliments—until I became one, and then it hit me right in the gut and hasn’t let up since.
I quickly learnt that being a good mom is an impossible task. Yell less but be firm and maintain discipline; be fully present but also take lots of pictures; motivate them to excel while letting them learn at their own pace; cook nutritious food that is also pretty and delicious; get the chores done but spend quality time bonding with your baby; reduce screen time and somehow find time for yourself because self-care is important.
The day I stopped trying to be a perfect mom was a liberating one. I knew I had to learn to cope with the Mom Guilt, so I took a long, hard look at all the things I could live with: a moderate amount of screen time, pizza for dinner, piled-up laundry, and the occasional yelling.
I had to let some of this guilt go because there’s going to be plenty of guilt to go around during the really big mess ups.
Like the time I lost Theo in Disney World. I took my eye off him for a moment and he was gone. By the time we found him, he was crying so loud, a small, judgemental crowd had gathered around him.
Or the time, on my watch, when Finn ended up with his right eyebrow split open and I had to press down on his exposed flesh to stop the bleeding till we got to the A&E.
When I get to the end of each day, I ask myself one question: “Did my kids feel loved today?”
And if they did, I think we’re okay.
You can have the best husband in the world and there will still be moments where you want to stab him in his sleep
Numerous studies on marriage and babies all point towards the same thing: marital satisfaction plummets with the arrival of a new baby, with around 67 per cent of couples reporting a decline in relationship satisfaction.
I question the reliability of these studies because that means there must be 33 per cent of married people who are all like, “Our marriage got so much easier and better when we had kids!”
ALL LIES.
Having a child puts tremendous strain on the relationship, and how could it not? Your life used to be a whirlwind of spontaneous adventure and amazing sex and all the sleep you could care to have. But overnight, it turns into a soul-sucking nightmare with no visible end.
Things got really bad when Kirsten, our second baby arrived. For the first four months of her life, she would be inconsolable from the hours of 7 to 11pm. I grew to dread nightfall and on every single one of those nights, I would hold her and pace the room in pitch darkness for hours as she screamed till she threw up and went right back to screaming.
Late one evening, my husband returned home from work shortly after my delightful baby had let out her final screech for the night and slumped over to sleep.
“Hey babe! Ooh, it’s so quiet, must have been an easy night tonight. I see you managed to get some rest,” he remarked casually as he walked in the door. “Any leftover dinner? I’m starving.”
I had just been cried at for four hours straight. I hadn’t eaten nor showered nor sat my tired ass down the entire night and, no, there wasn’t any dinner. For a fleeting moment, I stood there and thought of all the ways I would murder this man.
Sometimes marriage is about stealing kisses under the stars and sometimes it’s about fighting the urge to bludgeon your true love with a candlestick in the conservatory.
Don’t even try to enjoy every moment, but take the time to bask in the really good ones
If you’re a mom, chances are that someone has told you to enjoy every moment of motherhood. That’s shitty advice.
When the kids were younger and parenting was so emotionally and physically punishing, my only motivation for each day was to make it till they were all in bed so I could lie down and spend an hour alone watching Gossip Girl.
And then I’d guilt out about enjoying TV more than hanging out with my kids, which is crazy because have you tried watching a baby all day? They’re really boring. They don’t know any words and it takes them 20 minutes to try and lift their own head. Between that and watching teen drama unfold on the Upper East Side, there’s really no contest.
Instead of trying to enjoy every parenting moment, I’ve learnt to just go for the really good ones.
One time, Finn handed me a stack of torn up scraps of paper with the word “hug” scribbled on it. “Whenever you need a hug, just give me one paper and you can redeem it,” he said. That was a moment where I did some serious basking.
During bed time recently, Hayley has been grabbing my face and saying, “LOOK AT ME, MOM! You need to hug me super tight with both hands and kiss me all night.” I tried to play it all coy but she knows I’m up for it.
Sometimes when we’re out, my almost-teenagers will slip their arms around mine as we walk and it makes me feel like the luckiest girl in the world.
So when you get to these moments, stop for a moment and bask. Drink it in. Savour it like fine wine and imprint those memories in your brain because they’re what gets you through all of the rough ones.
