Talking about how hard parenthood is, somehow makes it less hard

Before I had my first baby I imagined that being a parent was exactly how Hollywood shows it – lots of ice-cream and laughing and a montage of scenes with me being a fantastic mum – baking, growing vegetables, making clothes and endlessly playing with happily smiling babies.

For some reason I thought that having a baby would automatically turn me into the kind of person who can do all these things – and enjoy them. It didn’t.

The discovery that I was not going to be the kind of mother that Hollywood tells me I should be was a terrible shock. I hate vegetables. I can’t cook or sew. Playing with babies is really boring – even when they’re my own. And it turns out that babies don’t smile happily all the time. I also found that nothing I had ever done before prepared me for how tired I would be. And irritable. And I hated being covered in poo and milk. And my baby cried. And there were no breaks. Ever. And if I had the flu, I couldn’t stay in bed.

But Hollywood mothers don’t ever need breaks, they find poo cute, their babies never cry, they don’t want to stay in bed and they love being mothers, so I knew I was doing something wrong – but what? So I read books. All of them. And they very helpfully pointed out all the ways that I was sucking at motherhood. I was giving too many hugs; I was giving too few hugs; I was feeding too much; I wasn’t feeding enough; I needed to play more, but not too much or they’d be over stimulated; I needed to ignore it when they cried; I needed to react quicker to the cries.

Even though it was all contradictory, it boiled down to one core message – I was doing everything wrong and under no circumstances was I to trust my own instincts, which would almost certainly be completely wrong too.

Parenting is really, really hard. It changes every aspect of your life, your body, your feelings, your relationships and even your house (wrecked forever – accept it and move on). However, harder even than all of those things is the subtle message everywhere that it’s not supposed to be hard and you should love every minute of it.

It is that message that is the most damaging part, because it makes it almost impossible to talk about it with anyone – because all the other parents are also trying to keep up the façade of happy parenthood. It is very lonely to feel like you are the only one that finds it hard and who doesn’t love every second.

Eight years, a second baby, two bouts of post-natal depression and a LOT of counselling on and, thankfully, I’m learning to see and do things a little differently.

The biggest change for me came about when I finally started talking about how hard I found it all. To my profound relief, my children weren’t taken away and actually, most parents agreed whole heartedly. It is really hard. We make mistakes all the time. We get frustrated. We shout. We are impatient. We say things we don’t mean. We get crushed by guilt. We do our best. We mess up again. We try again. Because we are human. And that’s okay.

Once you start to talk to other parents, and share your 1am puke-in-your-hair filled stories, something miraculous happens. You will still be puked on at 1am and your child will still loudly melt down in Dunnes – but being able to talk about how awful it is, makes it, somehow, less awful.

So I’ve never learned to cook – but as often as I can, I make kick-ass Rice Crispy buns and call it baking. I don’t grow my own vegetables or sew my own clothes – that’s what Lidl, Pennys and Wondaweb are for. I give myself lots of breaks and time away and fun with my friends because I noticed that when I was having fun myself – I was able to have more fun with my kids.

I’ve started to trust my instincts – because the people who wrote those books have never met my kids. I take every opportunity I can to talk to other parents about how difficult it is, how much I worry about making mistakes, how guilty I feel sometimes – because every time I do and they agree and share their own stories and we laugh about vomit and poo and tantrums and mistakes, it reminds me that I am part of a community of parents all feeling the exact same and then, somehow, miraculously, it’s not so hard anymore.