15 Lessons Of Motherhood Nobody Ever Tells You

Motherhood has been the most difficult, wonderful, painful and unexpected learning curve for me – and I can’t imagine it ever stopping. There is not a part of my being that thinks I will reach either an age or level of maturity that, when faced with a fresh parenting dilemma, allows me to go ‘Hold my drink… I’ve got this!’ Because raising humans is complicated in ways I could never have imagined.

On the evening I write this, a rare cocktail sat in front of me balanced on a rock my son gave me, I have been a mum for nearly sixteen years… 30 years with the ages of my four children combined. Yet at least once a day, something arises that stops me in my tracks and reminds me that I really have no idea what I am doing!

 

But I have learnt a few things. Admittedly largely *entirely* through trial and error, but now these lessons are a part of me. So I thought I would share them:

Not because I am in a position to teach you anything, but because feeling alone in motherhood can cause a dull ache in the pit of a woman’s stomach, and there is nothing quite like realising that we are, most definitely, a tribe. Grab a cuppa (or pick your poison) it’s going to be a long one.

Motherhood has taught me –

 

1. That it’s rarely a ‘good day’ or a ‘bad day’, but instead, from sun up to sun down, a patchwork of wonderful and horrendous moments.

Admittedly some days I stroke the hair from my children’s foreheads to kiss them delicately, and other days I look at the clock and wonder whether 4pm is too early to start the bedtime routine (true story) but in hindsight, I don’t think I have ever had a ‘good’ day without any bad moments, or a ‘bad’ day without any good ones. Today I went to nine different shops looking for the specific fit of school trousers my 11 year old had requested, my toddlers fought the whole time, at one point one actually bit the other’s tongue (if you can fathom how that was allowed to happen then you’re a better person than me) but my toddler also interrupted is bedtime story to tell me that I’m his best friend, so it’s learning to end each day able to remember both. Mind you, I’m also aware that he said exactly the same to his father this morning… traitor.

 

2. That I will love someone so fiercely that I find myself in them.

Now, most of us have had relationships, whether with friends or partners, where we have lost ourselves. Nobody ever told me that in creating a person and watching them grow, and in having the right relationship, I would meet a whole new version of myself. That isn’t to say that I can always sit and self-reflect (with all of that time we parents have for self reflection…) only to be filled with the realisation that I am utterly flawless, quite the contrary. I like that I know myself so well because of my children. They push me to the brink of insanity, but I found an inner peace in motherhood. So much of youth is an identity crisis… it’s trying to find a path, to be defined, to be something. Being a mother eventually allowed me to shake off any labels attached to my character, whether I attached them myself or they were put there by others, and live very comfortably in the knowledge that I care, and little else matters.

 

3. That I would never settle into motherhood until I learned to forgive myself.

Whether it be for one or a hundred things, possibly even a thousand, I have made mistakes. Some of them on the silly side, little things like swearing at a car who just cut me up at a roundabout and hearing a little voice repeat my colourful choice of words with perfect clarity, some of them bigger. But motherhood is hard, being a human is hard, and as long as I am honest about those mistakes I have learned to forgive myself for them, for the most part. I have had to, otherwise I couldn’t possibly hold a little hand and trust myself to guide them. I suspect that most reading this understand that, and I also suspect that anybody who doesn’t hasn’t learnt to be honest with themselves.

 

 

4. That being comfortable with saying ‘I’m sorry’ to my children is actually more important than saying ‘I love you’.

We should tell our children we love them often, we should tell our children they are important constantly. We should tell them they are valued every day, we should tell our children we respect them when they need to understand that. In my eyes, none of that compares to being able to tell our children that we are humans who will make mistakes, who do make mistakes, and who regret making them. It feels more important to me because it isn’t about how we feel about them, it’s about how they will grow to feel about themselves.

As a child, my dad was always softly spoken but firmly unapologetic, whereas my lovely mum was considerably more emotional and frequently apologised to me. I think previous generations were of the school of thought that parents who wanted their children’s respect should never show weakness, but I know which of the approaches my parents took has allowed me to know that I am not a bad mother for having a bad day.

My eleven year old is so beautifully full of compassion and accepts apologies with such grace that it’s a parenting decision I feel a great deal of conviction about.

5. That something capable of making me incomparably vulnerable has also forced me to be stronger than I thought possible.

There was no playing it cool – the moment each of those red, wet, screaming little bodies were delivered onto my chest, I knew I would do anything for them. Morality be damned, if they needed a body buried, I would be digging a hole. I would have ordered a shovel from the recovery ward in the hospital, had I not been too busy recognising faces I had met only moments before but felt like I had known forever. A lifetime of wonderful, complicated times ahead of us – together.

I assumed that overwhelming love would fail to surprise me by my forth baby, but I was knocked just as breathless by my connection to my last baby as I was my first. It’s beautiful, but for those lucky enough for feel that bond instantly… it’s also a little frightening. They are my weakness. But the intensity of that love has also given me more strength than I ever knew I was capable of. Realising that really changed my perspective and gave me purpose. If there is ever a zombie apocalypse, I will be the human shield in front of them.

 

6. That showing up really does mean more than getting it right.

Will my children remember that the house wasn’t always tidy, that sometimes I shouted as they bounced off the walls, that I occasionally did the school run in slippers or that I fell asleep breastfeeding a newborn while trying to homeschool my 10 year old in a lockdown? No. Will they remember that I was there every single day of their lives, from the very first day they can remember, holding their hand and feeling like home? Yes.

It really is that simple.

 

 

7. That my body deserves my respect, not my hatred. 

Whether you grew your child with your body or adopted them, delivered with a push or surgeons lifted them from a cut in your abdomen (For the record, I have done both of those and neither is the soft option, believe me!) fed a baby from your breast, spent hours expressing or slaved over sterilising bottles and mixing feeds, a mother’s body deserves appreciation. Studies show that, in the first two years of a child’s life, the average parent loses six months of sleep. SIX MONTHS.

Mothers rock and shhh their babies for hours, days, months, years of their lives. We are human climbing frames. We suffer the blows of tantrums and sleep regressions (I vividly remember my younger son throwing a wooden cow at my face during his 18 month sleep regression) forgo meals because our identical plate looked so much more appetising for reasons unbeknown to us, or simply because we were so in demand we forgot to eat. Our bodies go without the proper care of nourishment, exercise and often medical checks (hands up if you have ever booked a dentist appointment for your children but completely forgot to book one for yourself…) for years.

Society and especially the media tell us that we should be looking like nothing happened to our bodies hours after giving birth, praising women like Kate Middleton for being paraded for the public looking glamourous seven seconds after she was stitched up. I couldn’t have more appreciation for the women publicly saying

‘Something happened here, and healing does not mean I have to look the same as I did before I raised children.’

Our bodies give us, our partners and our children so much, and they deserve genuine love and respect for that. Even on the days when we are making our toddler laugh by throwing him onto the best and our jeans button pops off. I’m working on it.

 

8. That I can hurt in ways that I never expected.

Much to my husband’s confusion, I will occasionally cry when I realise that my sweet, innocent, chubby thighed children will one day have their hearts broken. They will one day discover, amongst the good, that some people aren’t who they say they are. They may even realise that working hard doesn’t always make dreams come true. it’s an awful thought, and it makes my heart hurt.

 

9. The importance of being able to sit in the present.

Something that I really struggle with so have to be mindful of. I found this much easier as a young mum with my first two children, and I’m not sure having the perspective of just how fast time slips away is good for my mental health. I struggle to compartmentalise, so often spend my days falling victim to an internal battle between things that need doing (the age old laundry-work-cooking-cleaning-repeat) and wanting to soak up these sweet days with my children. One thing I have noticed is that I never end a day with any regret when I have just hung out with the kids, reading books, feeding the ducks, being a robot or playing stuck in the mud. If I go to bed with a spotless house but I haven’t spent enough time just existing in the same space as them and noticing their details, I fall into an uneasy sleep. If my gravestone reads ‘She always wiped down the kitchen sides and worked efficiently to a deadline’ I imagine I will be resting uneasily below that, as well.

 

10. That I have to make my world smaller to allow them to discover how big it is.

Essentially, I have to distance myself from the news from periods of time. I think this weighs heavily on us as a military family, but I see the impact it has on friends as well. While I don’t believe that we should turn our backs on happenings around the world, I do struggle with the amount of negative news that is thrown in our faces 24/7, and constantly being flooded with anxiety and empathy leaves me drained. I start to feel like the world is a terrible place, that there is no sense of community in our modern world, that large corporations shape society more than the people and that it’s too dangerous to allow the children the independence I would like. While I do believe in exercising caution, I find that muting my news app, not listening to political commentators and taking deep breaths for a week really helps. Lying in the grass at the park while the children fall about in fits of giggles pretending I’m a donkey brings me back to centre.

11. That what Susie says about Sally really does say a great deal about Susie and nothing whatsoever about Sally, because Susie is so busy firmly blowing her own trumpet and telling everybody else how badly they play theirs, that nobody can stand listening to the trumpet anymore. 

Get a piano.

 

12.That motherhood is the most impossible love.

I, as a woman, have been biologically designed to love my children so hard that maternal instinct trumps survival instinct. That thunderbolt of love that hit me the moment they were born has only grown as I have watched them grow, seen their personalities develop, heard how full to the brim with good intentions their words are and fallen more in love with them with each year that passes. Yet my purpose as a mother is to help them grow in independence so that they will on day be prepared to leave. That day will fill me with pride, but the heartbreak will be audible.

 

 

13. That it’s normal to sometimes resent having to be constantly selfless.

I find it really odd that I was so ashamed of this for so many years. There is a strange notion floating about that occasionally resenting (or sometimes a hundred times a day… it really depends on the day!) means that you aren’t grateful for your children and clearly don’t love them as much as women who are martyrs to motherhood. It’s utter nonsense. As is that fact that the majority of us feel the need to preface any comment about how incredibly difficult parenting is with ‘I love my children more than anything, but…’

Of course we love our children. I know you love your children.

That doesn’t mean that you have to exhaustedly stand there singing a lullaby, rocking a screaming one-year-old while they smack you repeatedly in your cracked nipple screaming ‘NO MUMMY NO’ because they’re overtired while their sibling is treating every object in the vicinity as a percussion instrument, thinking how lucky you are. The pressure to enjoy every single moment of motherhood is certainly a consequence of social networking.

It is human nature to have our own needs, and motherhood prevents them being met for the most part, and definitely in those early years (…the first 18, for example.) It doesn’t mean that I resent my children. Actually, I do sometimes resent my children. That doesn’t mean that I would change having them for the world, it means that I am a human being with feelings.

 

14. That I am an entirely different person after a good night sleep and a shower.

15. That comparison is the thief of joy, yet serves no purpose. 

This is one that is often blamed on social networking, but I don’t buy it. Mothers have been breaking their backs to keep up with one another long before Facebook appeared on the scene. I certainly think it’s a tool that exacerbates the problem – it’s hard to not look at Karen from college’s highlight reel and compare it to the moment you have collapsed on the sofa for a quick scroll after scrubbing the bathroom. But, I distinctly remember mothers grouped in corners of the playground discussing these things between themselves when I was a child. The moment that stopped me in my tracks thankfully came quite early in motherhood for me – in a world mercifully free of smart phones that keep us all over-connected. Fourteen years ago, in fact. I lived in my own little two bedroom flat without a garden on a newbuild estate, just the two of us in a place I really didn’t want to be. I had finally got my daughter down for a nap, ignored the pile of dirty dishes (awful, I know) and popped a DVD of Desperate Housewives in to sit down and indulge in a rare moment of peace before my night shift.

One of the characters, Lynette, a mum of four, was overwhelmed by motherhood. She ran out of her house, threw her children at her neighbour declaring that she couldn’t do it anymore, and drove away to sit in a field and sob. Her friends came to find her, one of whom was the ‘perfect’ mother – making her own furniture and serving seven course meals to her ‘perfect’ family daily. Lynette says ‘I love my kids so much… I’m so sorry they have me as a mother. I’m so tired of feeling like a failure, it’s humiliating. Other mums make it look so easy.’ Her friends tell her that when their children were babies, they were often out of their minds, and would use their nap times to cry. Lynette cries and asks why they never told her, and they reply that nobody likes to admit that they can’t handle the pressure… that it’s easier to keep it all in.

That scene meant more to me that all of the conversations I had had with other mums in my two years since I became a mother. Corners of social networking may be polished for aesthetic, and I don’t see anything wrong with that – because it also started conversations. Instagram especially has provided a platform for women to connect and feel no shame in openly admitting that they need help, that it’s hard. I still fall victim to comparison sometimes, so I look up the scene ‘Desperate Housewives, Lynette Cries’ and watch it eight or so times with tears rolling down my face.

The fact that you are worrying about being a good enough mother, means you already are. 

 

If you made it to the end (I will assume that you started reading in your late twenties and now resemble Rose at the end of Titanic) I would love a conversation about this in the comments. What has motherhood taught you?

Love,

Helen