Shackled to the sofa breastfeeding a tiny baby who is always hungry, watching the dregs of Netflix, surrounded by piles of washing and dust covered surfaces, you feel trapped, desperate to get your life back.
“It gets easier,” they say.
“It goes by in a flash,” they say. “Treasure every moment.”
Except you don’t want to treasure every moment because the moments drag on endlessly. The days feel never ending, night times don’t exist for you and the only evidence that this insatiable baby is eating anything at all is the pile of out-grown clothes you have yet to sort through that have taken up residence in the corner of the room, but alas, there is no time.
The new baby days are hard, and they are right it does get easier. Feeds spread out, naps spread out, babies grow, and sit and don’t need you as much anymore. You are released from the sofa even if you are still confined to a small section of the living room; you can relax.
Until they start crawling everywhere,
…start cruising on the furniture,
…they start biting other children,
…they start school,
…they become teenagers….
actually maybe it doesn’t get easier at all. It is still challenging in some way or another. Or maybe I’m doing it all wrong. Am I failing at motherhood? Or is it just not meeting my expectations?
In the beginning, I know my expectation of what parenting would be like and the reality were very different, in fact there are still huge differences even in this stage. You would think after having one child, I might have a more accurate expectation, but I don’t. It seems having two children is an entirely different reality.
My children are almost 4 years old, and 20 months old and there are expectations I had of this stage of parenting, as well as societal expectations, that weigh on my mind. Expectations that were wrong.
“Are you back to work?” people often say to me when I am with my children. “Yes, kind of…” I say, although I am not properly, I’m not working in the same way I was. It’s Thursday morning, Carol, I am here with you, of course I am not back to work. But the expectation is that I should be. The acceptable answer would be that, no these aren’t my children, I am the childminder.
Then there is the expectation we should have it together by now, yet most days I struggle with my troublesome two. I probably do have it more together than I have done. A year ago, I barely left the house with the two of them, and now we have a more solid routine, groups to go to, more hours in nursery, but on the afternoons where their behaviour is challenging, I often doubt my parenting ability, I doubt that I am doing anything right.
I thought I would be able to go out more without them, by now. I thought I would be able to see friends and that I could have a social life. I can, in that no children are breastfed anymore, they don’t need me specifically. I am free. The reality is though, that it is tricky. Firstly, some of my friends are juggling small children as well and all the sickness bugs that an autumn in nursery brings - plans are often made only to be cancelled, and secondly, our availabilities don’t align anymore. If I go into London in the evening, to join after work drinks, I will likely arrive just before people will be wanting to leave. Then, on weekends I might make plans but I am available to work, so plans are often tentative and paid work becomes the priority.
I thought I would get more alone time. When I was pregnant with my first son, I joked with my partner that he could take our son to football Saturday mornings, leaving me to soak in the bath or read a magazine. Yet, spare time is precious and whilst I long for self-care, I know that there are hundreds of other things that have to be done: cleaning the house, sorting childcare invoices, never ending piles of washing, sorting through old clothes and toys to take to the charity shop. There isn’t enough time and I really expected that, especially if I were to become a stay-at-home Mum for most of the week, I really expected there to be more time.
I imagined we would be able to have date nights, too. My partner and I going to a restaurant together, alone, has become a distant memory. The opportunity only arises if we are in Dublin, or his parents are over. It seems too indulgent to pay £10 an hour to a baby sitter, whilst we hop on a bus down to McDonald’s but perhaps we should. The closest we get to a date on a regular evening might be enjoying the same television programme rather than both sinking into separate sofas and scrolling through our phones. I miss the days I would text him from work and spontaneously invite him for a Nando’s. I miss the freedom we had.
I thought I could have it all: the job, the love life, the friends, the children - but I can’t. It is a life we were mis-sold.
I don’t know where these expectations have come from. Perhaps it’s social media, again. The Insta-mums; the mums who have it all (or seem to - such is the danger of curation). Sure we have kids but we can still go out, see friends, attend that spa holiday, hop on the plane to Malaga with the hens, write the book and oh, look how happy our children are.
I know I am guilty of comparing myself to others, when I don’t know their whole situation. I assume, probably out of laziness, that they have the same set up as us, yet they can do all the things, but the reality is they have selfless Grandparents in tow, or a kind and patient Mother-in-law who they leave the children with on alternate weekends. They have close family and a support network, one stronger and further reaching than our own.
The expectations I have had of parenting and motherhood have been unachievable for me, and yet because of the expectations, I feel like I have failed somehow; that the situation is less than ideal. But things are okay. It might be nice if we saw friends more often or had more alone time, or more of a love life, or opportunities to escape but that’s a “nice to have”, it is impossible, it seems, for us to have it all.
One of my epiphanies in parenting is that I have to lower my expectations. I have done this in things such as the cleanliness of the house so I don’t feel compelled to clean it as often. I have learned to live with a reasonable amount of mess, I have relearned what a tidy house is and therefore lessened my disappointment of not having time to clean, of living in a mess. Lowering expectations is the key, I think, for feeling more successful in parenting.
In Mo Gawdat’s equation for happiness, outlined in Solve for Happy, his international bestseller, (quoted here from Elizabeth Day’s Failosophy) he explains that “happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events in your life, minus your expectation of how life should be… If you expect nothing, you can’t be disappointed. Whereas if you expect too much, you’ll always feel dissatisfied.”
It stands to reason that this would be the case. No expectation = no disappointment, no expectation = no failure.
Elizabeth Day explains later in her book, Failosophy, that many of her guests on the How to Fail podcast think that they failed at their twenties. A time when you are meant to be having the time of your life, your prime years. They are destined to be a failure as the expectation and reality are often very different. Perhaps it is the same with parenting. We hang on to those words from more experienced parents in the early days, the promises that things will get easier, so of course we are disappointed when they don’t. We build the future up in our head only for it to not map out how we imagine, setting ourselves up for failure.
Whilst reading a recent post by
Getting it Wrong in Motherhood, I thought of the expectations of those early months. With my first son, I followed a book or two in which I read and reread about sleep: When will this baby sleep through? I found there is an expected time frame, as with any milestone, and when he didn’t meet that expectation, we felt like we had failed. Much like Lauren said, we felt that it was us who had done something wrong: the wrong nap times, the wrong routine, the wrong set up. Similarly with my second son, we assumed that our experience with him in terms of sleep would be the same as our first son, we did everything the same way (aside from him being breastfed) and he took even longer to sleep through. I would say overall he was a more challenging baby, but that is based on our expectation that he would be the same as our first and of course he isn’t.Conversely I found the Gentle Sleep Book by Sarah Ockwell-Smith was actually quite realistic at managing my expectations of sleep, ensuring parents that actually at say 9 months, when lots of babies can sleep through, a large percentage will still not be able to and I found belonging in the statistics knowing we were not alone.
These first years are hard but perhaps lowering our expectations of what parenting will be like will help it all feel a little less shit and hopefully we can feel like we are doing a better job.
And maybe too we need to use that phrase sparingly, to the new mums in our lives. Yes, it will get easier in some ways, but it’s going to get harder too.
If it doesn’t feel easier, you are not doing anything wrong, you do not have a “naughty” baby. It just is hard, but we are in this together.
Did your experience of parenting meet your expectations?
Were there any big surprises or disappointments?
Come join me in the comments, I’d love to hear your stories.
I have, enjoyed might not be the right word, but appreciated the 4 articles of yours I have read. They are very well written, and enlightening. While I feel my wife and I have a very good relationship, your writing has made quite clear that our perspectives are very different, and we should have more check ins. Thanks for writing, I look forward to reading more!
The gap between expectation and reality can be enormous in parenting. It has helped me to read about other women who are feeling the same as me (so this post is wonderful). The other thing is that it does get harder because we are more and more depleted, in the early years the sleep deprivation stacks up so when you are four years in to broken nights that is going to feel very difficult. Whereas in the newborn stage, yes you are probably getting even less sleep but your sleep debt doesn’t really exist yet.