Motherhood

Stoned

Mental health, Motherhood

A few days ago, I sat in the garden, washing and drying stones with one of my sons. We rinsed and rinsed again with the hose, watching as the cloudy pool of water eventually turned clear. Methodically, we lay the stones out one by one, examining and then carefully drying them.

The previous hour had been spent collecting the stones in the field out the back of our house. It had been diverting; all three of my children were enthusiastic, each searching for the ‘best’ stones. Anything that keeps them busy during this lock-down is a boon. Zoom meetings and video learning do not work. They are too young. They jostle for space in front of the screen, they press random buttons, they become fascinated with their own image on the camera as opposed to listening to whoever is talking to them (like most adults, I guess).

So on this day, with my creative capacity to amuse them waning, we turned to stones. By the time we came to washing and drying them, the youngest and the eldest had drifted off to more pressing tasks. The eldest, to whisper stories to himself as he walked around the garden; the youngest to ruthlessly poke woodlice under the crumbling pink bench by the gate. The middle child remained still, lifting each stone, studying it and lovingly wiping it with a towel. I did it with him. He was content, absorbed, in the moment. I was too. Tending to those stones was kind of wonderful.

For the half hour it took to do them, I stopped worrying about the future. Whether I’d die if I caught Covid 19. How my body, which ably houses a rare underlying health condition, would fight it off. And I think we all feel that way. Yes, the best thing is to avoid getting it at all. Take all the proper and necessary precautions that we can.

We also have to live our lives, and ideally not under a black cloud of fear and worry. Mine has got out of control recently, so I must rein it in. I can’t live in such acute fear. It’s too much. And you can worry about anything if you set your mind to it. That battered old warhorse of a phrase you could get run over by a bus tomorrow is genuinely useful here. We have to just live day to day, with our families, or on our own, however we find ourselves.

That’s why the stone-washing day was so damn pleasant. There was a task, it needed to be done, it was done.

Worry didn’t come into it.

Sunny side

Friendship, Motherhood

It’s ok to feel grateful for certain things in your life right now. It doesn’t negate the horror and the fear. Gratitude and horror can co-exist.

I know I’m not the only parent who feels they were run ragged before the pandemic, sort of blindly running around like the proverbial hamster on the wheel. I read a thread on Twitter yesterday; a mum saying let’s not create the fantasy that parenting before the pandemic was in any way easier. This mum is now, like so many, juggling a full-time job at home with her two young children. She’s finding it tough, she says, but nothing like before when she rose at 5.30am to whizz around getting stuff done, before wrestling her children into the car to drop them to creche, before her long commute and workday, before picking them up again, to get back into the car, shovel down dinner and snatch 15 minutes of ‘quality play time’ before bed, then collapsing into bed herself, to repeat until suddenly her kids had grown up and left home.

I left my job last summer for various reasons. It was time, my childminder needed to leave and it proved hard to replace her. But the real reason was, look, I just wanted to spend more time with my children. I’m acutely aware that this is a luxury and many people can’t do it. Yet somehow in this desire to ‘spend more time with the kids’ I got myself in a right tangle. A couple of things. Even though I was flat out looking after the boys I felt that because I’d left my job I should ‘finally write that novel.’ Now, if one is going to write a novel, it will get written whether you have all 24 hours in the day or just a few snippets of each one. You do the stuff you need to do if you really want to do it.

Then, I enrolled my two older boys in a load of extra-curricular activities – swimming, music, hurling, gymnastics, ballet, street dance, football, drama. Most of my day, after the school and pre-school pick-ups, was spent in the car with boys who didn’t even realise how unhappy they were and how unnatural it was to be strapped into a car and lugged from one enriching activity to the next, each taking around 45 minutes. Even if the class was full of movement, they would then have to sit strapped in for ages afterwards, glumly looking out at the traffic while we inched our way home.

My baby, not long turned two, has bloomed. I now see how frustrated he was with his previous life: strapped into the car, shoved out and in, waiting for his brothers, cranky, wheeled around a grim car-park while his brothers did their class, or a phone shoved in his face to watch something while I sat in the car with him, thinking ‘well this is just what we good mothers do, we take them to classes, it’s so good for them.’

Eh – no it’s not. I cannot quite believe how good ‘lock-down’ has been for the mental health of my boys, aged 6, 4 and 2. The four year old is wobbly, out of his routine, but overall – hours and hours of free play have really cemented his bond with his big brother, and he is thrilled about that. I haven’t ‘home-schooled’ – watch this space for how backwards my children might seem in September. I doubt they will be though. They don’t even need the TV switched on, not really. I only ever switch it on for my benefit. They play and play. And play some more. Then they play, then before bed and in bed, they play. They just play. That’s obviously what children do, and I’m embarrassed to say I needed reminding of it. They also love having both parents around. It makes them feel very secure.

So I do feel grateful. Yes, and horror, fear, terror, sorrow, worry. Awareness, that other families are struggling. But I will continue to honour my life with its multitude of tiny triumphs. I think it’s necessary to do that, especially now.

When the wind blows wild

Motherhood

Yesterday I got so angry with my sweet four-year-old I broke the dustpan from the dustpan and brush set in half, right there in front of him.

His crime was to point-blank refuse to do a simple thing that I’d asked him to do. I can’t even remember what that was now, but at a guess it was something like getting dressed, putting on his shoes, going outside, brushing his teeth, or eating. If this child doesn’t want to do something, he just says ‘no’ and nothing reasonable will make him change his mind. Mostly, I manage just fine with this.

It’s his personality. Ways can be found to move around his stalwart immutability. Imaginative crumbs can be scattered around to encourage him to do what it is I want him to do. He can be coaxed; straight-up bribery with a lollipop works, obviously. Making things into ‘a game’, in that perky pre-school teacher way, works.

Some days though, I just can’t deal with the endless repetition of NOs. I get tip-toe-y about my plans. The question of whether NO will arise (er, yes) precedes everything I plan for the boys, plans which are limited anyway in these long lockdown days. Let’s go out on our bikes. Let’s scoot around the square. Let’s get dressed. Let’s have lunch. Let’s draw. Let’s watch this particular programme on TV. No, no, no NO! Things get spoiled for the other boys, normal things like: let’s go out and play. NO.

On certain days, occasionally, there will be a no that crosses a line for me. It will be nothing to do with the task he’s saying no to, it is the ‘no’ itself. There has been one ‘no’ too many. I lose it. Anger erupts, crazy wild gusts of anger, hurtling through my body. My brain goes offline, words come out of my mouth that are ridiculous. Recently I ranted ‘I will send you to boarding school!’ – something I actually dreamed of being sent off to as a child, midnight feasts and all. Now it had emerged from my subconscious as a dark threat. On this occasion, breaking the dustpan was the thing.

A fine demonstration, to my four-year-old, of how to hold my temper. How can he, I reflected later, learn to control his temper tantrums with this kind of appalling, unrestrained example from a grown up? Of course, he can’t.

He fluttered upstairs to his bedroom, curled up on his bed. The anger dissolved as quickly as it had erupted, the horror of breaking something so cleanly tempering my brute red reaction. What is wrong with me anyway? I thought. He just said no to getting dressed. Again.

That’s not ok mummy did that, I told him upstairs, crouched beside his bed. Mummy should have taken a deep breath and thought of a better way to react. It must have been a bit scary to see that, I said. ‘Yeh!’ his face lit up. ‘It was really scary.’ He curled his face into my neck. ‘Mummy I want to get dressed now.’

Sure, I said. Let’s go get dressed. Shall we go outside then, go play hide and seek?

No.

Hooked

Motherhood

I’ve had lots of #parentingfails this week, more than I’ve had in the last few months at least. I’ve outdone myself, in fact.

I didn’t realise I was quite so stressed until these last few tense days of not being able to cope with anything small child related. Oh, they’re just doing their usual ‘I want it chopped up’ then ‘No, I said I didn’t want it chopped up’, or the first one taking off their shoes and socks by the time I’ve laced up the last one’s shoes and socks, thus initiating an endless cycle of shoving feet into shoes and finding discarded socks while impotent rage ebbs and flows through me. The little one has started saying ‘Reeve me ARONE’ like Scooby Doo without his Shaggy and the other two spend a lot of time trailing me, demanding that we order stuff online. Any stuff. Stuff that comes in boxes, most days, containing stuff inside to alleviate the heavy stuff that is happening right now outside of this house.

I’m not going to list the anti-Mary Poppins ways I’ve conducted myself as a mother recently, although that would be of tremendous confessional relief, albeit fleeting. What I am going to say is that I’ve forgiven myself. Because I have no choice. Every day, I have to forgive myself for the ridiculous things I do, even though I am an adult. For the times my beastly side beats my saintly side into submission and tramples all over my life for a day or two. Forgive, forgive, forgive.

You really couldn’t parent unless you let yourself off the hook for all the ways you have demonstrated how not to react, or behave, or sound, or just be on a bad day. You actually have to, as COO extraordinaire Sheryl Sandberg would say, lean in. You have to just go with who you are because your kids don’t have anyone else. You are their parent, for better or for worse.

Daily life has shrunk and I live in a small terraced house. That heady rush of doing is simply out of the equation right now. So everything else is magnified, including stress. Things seem several thousand times worse than they are. There is the hum of world stress in the background, and then your family – on some days – slides into a microcosm of these fears and worries.

It’s amazing really. For me, this existential terror hides itself among the ordinary, tiny things of everyday life and it pretends: this is what you are annoyed about. And so trying to piece together a carelessly chopped lasagna for a demanding four year old becomes monumental, a task which makes me shout and clang and bang unnecessarily.

The kids will always forgive you. You are everything to them. They trust you totally. But you have to let yourself off that sticky jam hook of parenting and keep going. Do better the next day, fall down again, get up again, then keep marching forward. Be the pillar of their childhood. Do the best you can. Forgive yourself.

Amigos

Mental health, Motherhood

I’d thought that the ever-present stress that is the pandemic hadn’t affected my children at all. Yes, they had to wash their hands a lot more often; they saw me glued to the news for stretches of time, whereas before I’d diligently hidden my furtive information gathering, worried that the mere sight of a phone in my hand might somehow harm them.

[An aside – I’m writing this while my youngest, two, is lying on the floor yelling chocyat NOW, chocyat NOW! because we are on holidays in Wexford and I’ve been less precious about what they put in their mouths. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

Now that they are allowed more freedom to play in the park they come back with garbled stories – did I know that all rabbits had coronavirus? Did I know what would happen if coronavirus killed all the adults and all the children took over the world? (They’d rob banks and be allowed to drink coca-cola, that’s what). Did I know they weren’t really bothered about coronavirus apart from – apart from – we don’t want YOU to die Mama.

Yet something has changed for them. It is particularly noticeable with the eldest, who is six. He has a new friend, called Fang.

Fang is a big cuddly owl and my son has formed a strong attachment to him. He puts him down for naps. He feeds him at each mealtime, from his own plate: a forkful for him, a forkful for Fang. He cuddles him during TV time. He talks to him a lot, whispering stories about castles and ninjas and battles and storms. He sometimes talks through him, too: Mum, Fang wants a cuddle. Mum, Fang is tired now, he wants to sleep. Mum, Fang’s feeling sad right now.

[An aside – the chocyat chanting toddler is now hanging from my neck, perched at the top of my back, whispering rhythmically in my ear: bwing me chocyat, bwing me chocyat. Perhaps he’s hoping this gentler approach might work. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

My son won’t go to bed without Fang. He won’t go in the car without Fang. He takes such good care of him. Maybe inspired by their brother, the other two have found similar friends, and though the relationship isn’t quite as intense, it is there. The four-year-old has a dragon, called Peak, and the chocolate terrorist has a baby bull, called I. Where I see my three boys at home, I usually see Fang, Peak and I in tow, either under their little arms, or nearby, strewn on the floor but distinctly not lost.

I had always wondered about the cuddly toy thing, because no matter what stuffed toy I gave them previously – rabbit, teddy, lamb, dog, kangaroo – they had shown no interest whatsoever, even a sociopathic coldness towards them. I actually tried to force them to bond with plush, soft things – look! Here’s your teddy, aw, night night teddy but they would just look at me blankly, turning their backs as the sweetly staring creatures fell idly to the floor.

Now, and only since the pandemic hit, these three stuffed toys have shot to the top of the toy hierarchy. My eldest son cannot do without his new friend, who is providing something no-one else can. His ardent commitment to this relationship is no coincidence but a direct result of worry he’s absorbed about Covid-19. All three of them, even the two year old, have needed this extra crutch.

[An aside – my youngest, not short of attention all morning and the recipient of a fine big lunch, has resorted to hitting me. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

They are so smart, these kids. They know stuff, just like we do. They can’t fully express it or really explain about how they are feeling but they absorb the mood around them. They bathe in the world, and they soak in stress. They can hear you when you complain. They internalise it. They piece together snippets of adult conversation. They hear bits of grim news, maybe on the radio when you are turning the dial to a different channel. They can tell something is wrong by the look on your face.

Only now, and specifically with the meteoric rise of Fang in the household (an owl to whom even I have become attached), can I see that this shift in the world’s axis has had a monumental affect on my three small boys. They have changed. They are different.

Exodus

Motherhood

Lately leaving the house seems like such a Herculean task I have, on occasion, not been able to do it. There is nowhere to go, sure (oh GOD let’s not get into that), but with three small children you have to ‘go’ somewhere, even if it is standing on your own doorstep, even if it is pacing your backyard, or in our case, tramping resolutely in laps around the square where we live. Or around the small playing field, which is also square, behind our house.

Today I couldn’t do it. Not because I’m depressed, no; nothing like that. No, it is because it’s too hard to get everybody’s socks and shoes on. I’ve written here before about trying to find matching socks but it’s not even that. It’s so much more than that. It is one son screaming and screeching on the floor because the material in his trousers isn’t fluffy enough, while the other soulfully opines about how the heel of this particular sock will not sit well in his shoe and therefore another must be found. It is the youngest, sticking out his sweet bottom lip in a sulky look of toddler defiance and yelling I’M NOT DOEING ANYWHEH that would be pure comedy if I did not have the other two wallowing in their doleful duet of despair over their socks and shoes and the impossibility of them ever being the right combination at the right time.

It’s not just the socks and shoes. It’s their coats too. The eldest won’t wear one, not even in the rain or freezing cold. He wants to be seen without a jacket because he has noted an older kid in the street mooching in just a sweater, which to him is the epitome of cool. The middle one will only wear a fluffy coat but the rules change on this hourly, so he might mean a flat fluffy one or a more puffy fluffy one or by fluffy he may actually mean velvety. The youngest will do as they do, so he will wriggle out of the coat I have sausage-wrapped him into, always as I have turned my back to fiddle with yet another sock, shoe or shoelace and always at my breaking point, the volcanic apex forty-five minutes into the whole operation when my mind has simultaneously contracted and expanded in wonder at how, how, it can take nearly an hour to leave the house for an outing that no matter how long we stretch it out for, will only take fifteen minutes.

I will do this dance most days because we must all get out. Yet on occasion, I opt for peace. Barefoot in the house, skidding down the stairs, rolling on the floor in their jam-stained T-shirts in the deep and dusky winter I watch them as I sigh and potter contentedly around the house, not a sock to be seen in sight.

The ‘now’ principle

Life

Life works on the principle of now, someone wise reminded me yesterday. It doesn’t work on the past principle and it does not work on the future principle, he said. It works on the now principle.

So far, so obvious. And yet glimpse inside your head – now – and what the hell is going on? For my part, I am treading in a near-constant mire of the past. When I escape from that, cleaning down the slicks of thick memory mud stuck on my boots, I seek respite in the future.

Sometimes, it is grim, and a voice tells me there is tragedy down the line. (Note: Of course there is tragedy down the line. Duh.) At other times, it’s a blur of joy. A kaleidoscope of intoxicating experience, soundtracked to the hum of my favourite Joni Mitchell line from her 1971 song, Carey: ‘Come on down to the Mermaid Cafe and I will buy you a bottle of wine/And we’ll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down.’ There are heady conversations, lingering hugs. There is laughter, good food eaten with people I love. There are books to be written, mountains to be climbed. There is the sweet salt of the sea to be felt on my skin, the joyful screams of children living and laughing in the background. There is sun pouring into my eager cells, roasting my luxuriating body as I giggle and sip a fizzy slurp of something delicious, squinting up into the brilliant blue sky. There is heart-bursting pride as I watch the souls that I gave birth to become who they are and bathe in all the gifts that they have been born with.

But that is not now. What is now? For me, it’s listening to this man-and-boy chatter outside the window: ‘Get your wellie boots on/Whose boots are these?/All mine, don’t touch it!/Dada those are mine!/Heee-eey!/Don’t kick me!/I’m gettin’ ready…/You are getting ready by doing what – standing there?’

The sun streams through the window, the day is bursting with beauty. My sons and husband are planting flowers in the garden below. My fingers tap on this keyboard. My stomach growls. I am hungry. I am happy. I am alive.

Obligations

Creativity, Motherhood

If left to his own devices, my eldest son – sociable, wonderful – would lock himself away upstairs to ‘tell himself stories’. Of late, he wants woken up early to make sure he has time to tell himself a story before the freneticism of the day slaps him in the face.

After school, he drops his bag and shoes in the hallway and sprints up, picking up the story where he left off that morning. He can’t really write or ‘read to level’ yet (what level? The world level of eight year olds? Damn it, I hate levels) but he tells himself intricate tales of dragons and moons, bears and knights, mountains and spaceships each day, creating magical worlds where his imagination is clearly having the time of its life.

Recently, when he would not comply with one of my strict diktats (some such earthly thing as pick up your shoes, or don’t shout at your brother, or we will have to wash your hair before bedtime) I said to him ‘Ok, that’s it, I’m going to take away your storytelling privileges.’

Ok-kaaaaaaaaay, I thought straight after, wondering how I could roll back from this one. I’m going to take away one of the most basic things that makes you human? I’m going to take away this most beautiful and nourishing thing you have all to yourself? I’m going to put limits on this magical and sacred entity, this swirling amalgam of your soul and the mental snapshots you have taken of the world so far, this vortex which syncs with other peoples’ creative innards, this – this intangible gift that all of us have for ourselves, to share with others?

Right. He began to moan, please, please never do that, but I stopped him as quickly as he started, telling him that, holy jeepers good god above, of course no-one could ever take away his ‘story-telling privileges’ from him, and it was wrong of me to say so.

The part of parenting I hate the most is that frustrated, futile ‘I’ve got nowhere to go now’ feeling I get when I can’t get my children to do basic things. I detest my current method of ‘If you don’t do X, then you can’t have ‘Y’, but I don’t have a more sophisticated one in play at the moment, mostly because I am just a limited human being myself.

‘That’s a blackmail,’ I’ve heard them recently telling each other, poor little mittens that they are because that is now what they have learned works as a quicker way to get things done. (If you don’t let me play with your Lego, I’m going to tell mummy – that’s a blackmail. If you don’t give me one of your jellies, I’m not going to let you play with my fart Ninja – that’s a blackmail).

Is everything a blackmail? Is life itself a blackmail, or quid pro quo? If you don’t go and tidy the mess you left downstairs then I’m taking away your storytelling privileges (refer above). If you don’t go to GAA this morning then you won’t be able to watch TV this evening. If you don’t eat your vegetables with dinner then you won’t be allowed an ice-pop for dessert. If you don’t do your homework then you won’t be able to go out and play with your friends.

Ugh. As they get older, and they are so tiny still, I see them start to drown in obligation. Obligations that I put on them and obligations that society puts on them.

Do you want to know a secret? I’d love to just let my eldest tell himself stories all day long. Soon enough, I know, he won’t be doing it and he will be scrolling through his phone or whatever. I’d love to let my middle child paint all day long, as his wont. And my youngest? I’d like to let him loose on the kitchen. Allow him to tip all his ‘ingredients’ into a bowl, on the floor; smoosh the butter through his hands, mix the strawberries with the grated cheese as he did yesterday when he insisted on making himself lunch.

I’d like not to wrestle them into clothes every day, force them out of the house before they feel ready to leave, make them go to football training in the freezing, petulant drizzle when they would rather snuggle up with a book, make them wear coats to keep them warm, make them eat three different kinds of vegetables or make sure their reading is getting up to ‘level’. (Again: what level?)

I’d like to go rogue, go feral. Hell, smear myself in Nutella, run around the house with them and call that a good day.

Sigh. I won’t though. Neither will they.

Rocketship

Motherhood

Mum tan we get astronaut dog food and astronaut human food and space shoots and catch a rocketship and fly to the moon?

I am distracted. I am shooing the dog from the dishwasher where he’s gorging on the leftover sauce dripping down the metal front as I throw the dishes in. Behind me stands my little boy, who is now four. I flit around and smile briefly, ‘Mmmm-hmmm,’ and he wanders off, satisfied. Life spins on; there is screaming for milk and honey at bed-time, wrestling, boys pulling down curtain rails, their dad pleading ‘Boys! Will you please stop?’ I tug some laundry out of the tumble-dryer, simultaneously berating myself for not being better and hanging it out on the line, which has been broken anyway since the boys swung on it.

The next morning comes. One has peed the bed, one ‘has broken his leg’ over-night, one needs to ‘tell himself a story’, lost in his imagination and reluctant to pull on the practical armour of the day: clothes, shoes, school bag and breakfast in his tummy. A whirl of wet sheets in my hand, I carry the one with the broken leg downstairs, running back up because the youngest likes to ‘get the bus’ down, which involves an exchange of pretend money and a bum shuffle down the stairs with him perched on my lap.

Coffee bubbles on, I stuff half a banana into my mouth, they eat, they shout, I dress them, we step outside into the cold morning and the moon is still up. The youngest points at it.

Mum. Tan we get astronaut dog food and astronaut human dog food no wait astronaut human food and buy space shoots from the shop and get on a rocketship and fly to the moon? That moon, there? (He points).

I turn around to look at him. ‘What is a space chute? Like a tunnel to the moon?’ ‘No, mum,’ says his older brother sternly. He means space suits. Can you get some space suits and dog food that works in space and food for humans in space and get on a rocketship and take him to the moon?’ The younger one nods solemnly.

I hustle them into the car and put their seatbelts on, only to start the engine and see we will be going nowhere until I get out, run into the kitchen and get some water to de-ice the screen. We are late. I make a frustrated grunting sound. We drive to school, they go in and then I enter into the slipstream of daytime task fulfilment, a flurry of stuffing more washing in, lifting shoes and socks and placing them down again in another spot, trying to focus on a few paragraphs of a book I’m reviewing, cleaning up the morning mess, running to the supermarket, packing snacks and dashing back to pick up the youngest from preschool and then his two brothers. I’ve missed them, I haven’t missed them, I don’t know, it’s only been a few hours.

Why do they grow so fast but time is then so slow? Why does time swallow up years in gulps and suddenly they are not babies anymore? Why can’t I haul it back and choose the moments I want to keep, spinning them out like silk to stroke their exquisite perfection? And hang on, why aren’t those moments ever perfect right while they are happening?

In short, why is my mind always somewhere else? Tumbling, turning, whirling, yelling, loving, hugging, sliding through the days, I forget – this is my life. Am I living it or simply being dragged along by the tail of the hurricane?

We’re home. I bundle them out of the car, shoes fly everywhere as we stumble into the hallway. The dog hurls himself at us and yaps; I make my way to the kitchen ignoring the trail of destruction, just for a moment. Shoes. At. The. Door. Pick. Up. Your. Coats. Keep. Your. Socks. On. I’ll say it out loud in a moment.

I open the dishwasher, start to unload it. My youngest, whose favourite thing right now is to bolt upstairs to change into his fluffy Batman onesie so he can be so tosy patters up behind me, holding a green furry dragon by the tail.

Mum. Tan I have yong, yong, hug? (Of course) And mum? Tan we go to the moon on a rocketship in our space shoots with astronaut dog food and astronaut human food and we’ll go there together? Please? Please Mum?

I stop. I get one of those rare out-of-time moments and I really look at him. I marvel at him. I look out of the window, the moon rising in the early dusk, and I look back at my child. He is earnest. He has only just turned four. The two of us going to the shop to buy space suits and get astronaut food for ourselves and for the dog is a real possibility for him. He is asking me with all of his heart, can we do this together? Can you make it happen mum?

We are still hugging. I am not going to pull away from the yong yong hug to unload the dishwasher or tramp to the fridge to forage for this evening’s dinner. I am going to hug him and tell him that, yes, absolutely yes, we will go to the moon together in our space suits, and no, we won’t forget the dog food or the human food. I drape us both in the sweet silk of the moment and it flutters in the breeze of infinity, a portal into time and memory where anything is possible, even impromptu trips to the moon.

You, reflected back

Motherhood

As soon as I got out of the fog of early motherhood, something struck me with such clarity that the thought itself instigated almost instant change.

Your children reflect back who you are.

They are mirrors of your own upbringing, your beliefs, the past you allow to dictate your present. How they behave is who you are. As a parent, you are mountainous to them. As your children, they are the earth to you. You can replant, sow new seeds, water them daily. You can build a whole new garden. In fact, if you do not want to pass on habits that have hindered you in life, you have no choice. You have to do it.

A good friend reminded me of this last night over dinner. She said: ‘Your children are only ever going to love themselves as much as you do. Your children are only ever going to forgive themselves as you can do. Your children are only ever going to be as kind to themselves as you are.’

They are powerful words, simple and true.

So what is it like inside your mind? If it’s full of weeds, if that garden is so wild and so neglected that you don’t even know where to start – if you can’t get digging for yourself, start doing it for your children.

They deserve it. And so do you.