You Can't Get Motherhood Right
(Originally published on Medium in August 2021)
Recently, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for a while. She had read a piece of my writing. She told me it had made her cry, not just a momentary weep at a particularly powerful and emotional paragraph (I wish!) but for a whole evening and then the next day as well. All the relentlessness and resentment I had described, juggling children and an attempt at a career, was her life now. I realised I had taken away her hope. In the midst of trying to hold down a job plus coping with the challenging attitudes and behaviours of pre-schoolers, all she could see was another ten years of misery and guilt ahead of her and then she’d be out the other side like me, reminiscing about regrets and on to the next phase of dealing with complicated teenagers.
It was what she said next though that floored me. “But, your girls have turned out so well. You obviously did it right”. She believed she was currently failing. She had decided she wasn’t getting it right.
But I need her to know what I know now - there is no right.
Every time I pass a woman wheeling a double buggy, I shiver. It could be an involuntary response to the reminder of all the exhausting years I spent pushing one, over and over again, up and down, round and round the same streets. But I also wonder is she ok - that tired woman with the tiny newborn on one side, the toddler on the other, maybe a third child strapped to the handle? Is she enjoying this motherhood thing? Because most of the time, I wasn’t.
I hated everything about the double buggy. It encapsulated the narrowing of possibilities, the limitations of my world. Our house was too small for it. There was never anywhere suitable to park it. The dining room had to be re-purposed to store it, it blocked the hall. We had to climb over it to answer the front door. Trips out revolved around navigating doorways it would fit through. I walked more on the road than the pavement. When I went to story-time at the library (what a mind-numbing experience that was) there was no room left for the circle of kids. In the end, I let the children get wet rather than battle unsuccessfully any longer with the rain cover. Most days, I’d push it into the playground and hang over it in miserable silence, contemplating the three hours to kill until dinner. In 2009, I sold it with much delight to grateful new owners, only to discover a few weeks later, I was unexpectedly pregnant again. And so, double buggy version 2.0 came into my life. Still, many years later, it will click with people who I am - “Oh I remember you - you had the double buggy and the four little girls”.
And along with the arrival of double buggy version 2.0, I had one over-riding thought - maybe I could get it right this time. I believed I hadn’t yet managed to. I hadn’t quite got to grips with motherhood. It was all too messy and boring and tedious. I preferred being at work. Maybe, it would be fourth time lucky for me. I wasn’t a bad mother, I loved my children very much. I just wanted to enjoy it more.
N.B. For reference, here is a list of all the things I didn’t enjoy:
Pre-leaving the house in the morning time
Teatime
Bath time
Bedtime
The park
Bike rides
Soft play areas
CBeebies (especially 5am - 6am)
Birthday parties
Glitter, glue, stickers (all the artsy, crafty stuff)
Sylvanian families
Other people’s children
I felt like all pleasure had been zapped from my life. I was often a nervous wreck. I could not take my eyes off them for one second or they might disappear, fall over, be stolen, attack each other. I lived permanently on the edge yet simultaneously in the same endless cycle. My coping mechanism was two G&Ts, a bowl of peanuts and Now magazine on a Friday evening! Really, my favourite part of motherhood was watching them sleep because then I could (briefly) relax.
I have no doubt there were moments of joy - looking back, there are photographs that seem to capture some semblance of fun and celebration but I know they don’t capture the realities of the anxiety going on behind the camera.
I am not ready yet but soon I will write about how that drive for perfection and overwhelming desire to get it right led me into delayed postnatal depression and the blackest of times. What led me back out again was professional support and the revelation that I didn’t have to get it right, that I was striving for something that didn’t exist. I had to let that go or it would continue to drag me under.
We are woefully under-prepared for the impact of motherhood. Antenatal classes only take us as far as exiting that hospital door. The health visitor only calls for so long. We are bombarded with images of perfect motherhood. We don’t talk enough about not enjoying it. We often put on a smile and a front. There is a term ‘matresence’ coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael which refers to the process of becoming a mother. It’s used to describe the physical, psychological, and emotional changes women go through during the monumental and ongoing transformation into motherhood. We need to better acknowledge the process of matresence and promise to talk to each other so much more openly about it.
And so to anyone who has cried because of what I have written, I want to give you back some hope. Yes, there were years of relentless resentment but I actually wouldn’t change it. That ongoing transformational process of motherhood has taught me so much and gifted me so much. I realise now that it is like building the deepest of foundations, and you may not see the fruits of those labours until your children break the surface of adulthood and you watch them leave. Most importantly, it has also given me eyes that are always on the look-out for other women like me, those who are finding it hard and who need to talk about it.
I definitely did not get it right and I am still not getting it right. To observers, my daughters may look like they have turned out vaguely ok but we all have our public persona. Visit us in private and you will see a different story. It’s messy. Anyone who encountered us on our recent trip to London can attest to the kicking and hair-pulling!
I am always keen to know if a subject resonates but this one is particularly close to my heart so please do get in touch, if there is anything you would like to talk about.
This piece was originally published on Medium in August 2021.