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Being a mum is hard

Now before you jump on me I’ve already written a post about being a dad being hard so you’ll have to scroll and find it, but it’s true that being a mum is hard.

Being a mum has probably always been hard. Let’s face it the physically hard part hasn’t got harder, maybe it’s actually got easier with all the gadgets we have to help us. But maybe, just maybe the mental side has got harder. Bare with me…

Physically, carrying a baby often sucks. Sickness, nausea, heartburn, sore back, sore hips, sore tummy, sore boobs, needing to go to the toilet all the time….I don’t think I need to go much further!

THEN there’s HAVING a baby. I only did labour to a certain point. Admittedly that certain point took 37 but both boys were csections so the pain I recognise to do with child birth is probably quite different to others BUT it still physically hurt!

THEN there’s breastfeeding. Anyone who tells you it’ll only hurt if you’re doing it wrong is lying to you. Nipples suddenly being used to feed for almost 180hours in 30 days are going to hurt. The most important thing you need to know is if you keep going chances are it won’t hurt as much or at all!

But all those things will always have hurt. What I’m contemplating is whether being a mum has maybe got more mentally and emotionally hard?

Mentally and emotionally mum’s face a world that is bigger and more in your face than ever before because of the internet and social media. Now don’t me wrong this has MASSIVE benefits. We ask google for advice (Top tip: never google medical problems! Dr Google is unlikely to ever be right!!), we can join forums with mum’s who are due at the same time or have children same age or who wean in the same way or who are as ecologically minded as we are and we find ideas for activities for our kids (read put on iplayer/netflix/amazon video).

BUT this often comes at an emotional or mental price. You browse facebook and see all these mum’s who’ve done crazy crafts, baked cakes with children who are still smiling (because when you bake either you or the toddler end up crying), built towers, had lovely days out or whose houses/children/cars look immaculate and if you’re not careful you are lead to compare, to feel guilty or to feel like you *should* be able to be doing the same.

Firstly there’s the matter of *should* to be dealt with. Should creates instant pressure and instant guilt. It makes many people feel like a failure before they’ve even climbed out of bed because they *should* be happy, they *should* go out or they *should achieve something because Jane Smith on Facebook managed it and she’s got THREE children and her youngest is only 1 month old whilst you’ve *only* got 2 children and your youngest is 5 month. As an aside as Christian mothers the bible tells us there’s no condemnation in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1) and so therefore *should* is actually quite a distructive thought process and one we *should* probably be handing over to God regularly.  I think *should* often stops us from asking for help because we *should* be able to cope, we *should* be enjoying being a mum and we *should* be able because every other mother on Facebook seems to be able to.

The key word in that sentence is SEEMS. On Facebook we create a different reality. I don’t think we do it on purpose but it certainly happens. No one really wants to see my toddler and baby screaming but the true reality, particularly with the smallest one, is that often what he’s doing. I post pictures of them smiling and cheerful and often want to write a “by  the way most of my day they’ve cried but they’re so cute when they smile”

In a world of Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram it’s incredibly easy to be overcome with inadequacies but worse than that we create the notion for parents, and particularly mums to be, that this parenthood thing is easy and clean and predictable and pain free and something we all take in our stride. Of course no mum to be really wants to know what’s really coming and actually often you don’t really understand what it’s like till you’re actually in depth of it but maybe its worth a little more reality, a little more of an accurate perspective with those we know how are having children and with those mum’s we spend the most time with.

Perhaps that extra honesty will relieve one mum’s feeling of being overwhelmed, of being a failure, of not being as good as the person next door and allow them to better enjoy the reality of this challenging but oh so rewarding, messy but oh so worth it experience.

I also think that sometimes we take being a mum for granted in those moments of despair. There have been many times, as a direct result of having struggled with infertility I suspect, that in my lowest and most frustrating times I have turned to these little people who cause my world to run in chaos and been overwhelmed with gratitude that they are here to cause my chaos. Being a mum is hard. Wanting to be a mum when it isn’t happen is just as hard, if not harder and to anyone in that situation reading this I sending you such a huge love and grieve with you your monthly disappointment at not being the mum you long to be. xx

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Bittersweet

Have you come across the idea of bittersweet? The idea is that we need the bitter to grow and to make the sweet, feel sweet.
“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. When life is bitter, say thank you and grow.” Shauna Niequist

It’s hard to imagine being thankful for the experience of a parent dying. In fact, it’s ridiculous to imagine it BUT actually the practice of living a bittersweet life allows you to look at the circumstances around the situation and be thankfully for what it reveals. Friends who are there; cry with you, step up when you just can’t go on, who help in emotional and physical ways, are revealed in the bittersweet of the circumstances. It’s easy to see this in the early days of grief.

What’s taken longer is the bittersweet thankfulness of what God is doing in my mum death in me. God is using the experience, the vulnerability, the passion for keeping her name alive, to grow me as a woman, a mother, a daughter, a wife, a writer, a creative spirit but most importantly a child of God.

When mum suddenly died it was like her light suddenly went out but as I reflect now I see that she leaves behind a legacy of lights in her husband, her children, her friends and family to keep her faith alive. Particularly for me and my husband we are trying to keep her presence real with our boys so that they know the faith Granny Sue had (she was grandma when she was alive but Zac was getting confused with his other grandma!) and how much love she would have shown them!

As I explore what it means to be a part of Mum’s legacy and all God has called me to be I’m praying God will guide my path.

Please understand I’m certainly not saying I am grateful my mum is gone. I miss her daily, sometimes hourly. I miss her part in my adventure and I hate that she is gone. I do not believe she was taken to teach me a lesson or that somehow her death was a positive thing but I have to believe in a God who deals with the bitter and can show me the sweet around it. I’m not sure I explain myself very well on this topic!!

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1 year on – who was Sue? Her faith

I find it really hard to think of Mum as a woman of faith because although she was and I knew she was, it’s only really since her death that I’ve recognised the things she did in the name of her faith.

  • Sue believed in an active, real, present, speaking, healing, powerful, life changing God.
  • She believed that he knew what He was doing with her life – she often used the phrase ‘God knows’ when talking to people about uncertainty.
  • Sue was generous with all that she had, particularly her gifts and her time and where she could her money.
  • She believed that reading his word helped have more a relationship with Him
  • She was committed to church even when the people drove her NUTS (thankfully it had been a good few years since this had been the case!)
  • She put others before herself, particularly children and us as teenagers taking on our youth group to ensure we were taught despite hating doing it
  • She was faithful
  • She was grateful
  • She rarely moaned

 

And the crazy thing is that when you look back over the years of illness and much time bed bound or HUGELY limited in what she could do and how long she could do it, of moving around churches when she was settled and happy for Dad’s worth and for loss that she had to deal with in her life she STILL had the faith listed above and probably more that I’ve yet to even think of.

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1 year on – who was Sue? – Mum

I’ve been thinking about my memories of my mum quite a bit as I’ve been processing the anniversary of her death. As I’ve been doing that I’ve realised that many of my memories of her divid into different groups. Her as my mum, as grandma to Zac, as she was to everyone else and as a woman of faith. I suspect the last two can’t really be divided up but there’s thoughts I’ve decided to try and write down and it’s easiest to breakdown the thoughts. So these are my memories of her as my mum.

It’s been a year since my mum, Sue, died. It was very quickly after her death that who she was started to change as people shared their memories and thoughts about her. She became a different woman. BUT I have also tried to remember how she was to me. I’ve not wanted to have rose tinted glasses in my memory of her. I want to remember her as real. As how our relationship was to me not how it was to others.

The simple fact of the matter was that for MANY years my mum drove me mad! Bear with me on this. It’s not that I didn’t love her and I look back now and see what she was doing and can appreciate much of it more now that I am a mum BUT she drove me mad.

As a child I remember finding it hard that she wasn’t well. That wasn’t her fault and I do remember appreciating that she was around in the school holidays and when I wasn’t well. I can think of many occasions when I lay on her bed with my head on stomach when I was ill listening to her tummy gurgle and finding it funny! I also remember hating being different because it was dad that took me to school and not my mum like everyone else. It wasn’t her fault but as a child that’s not the way you see it.

Mum wanted to know my friends and would hang around with me and them – I particularly remember this from summer camps when I’d lament that she wouldn’t just spend time with her friends! I often felt that I didn’t have the space to be me when she was around. Who knows if that was because the me I wanted to be in those days wasn’t a mum appropriate me or if it was just that it wasn’t a me I wanted to share with her?! But that wasn’t her fault.

I look back now and I so appreciated all that she did for our wedding but at the time I remember feeling like I just wanted to buy a dress not have one made by mum. I just wanted a wedding cake that was order and not made by mum. I think it went back to having a lot of mum-made things when I was younger and it linking in with knowing we had no money and being bullied at school (even if it wasn’t specifically for the things she made). It’s funny how our brains link things together and it’s only when we look back that we can see things clearly and that the hours she put into our wedding were a massive sacrifice for her.

Don’t get me started on when I was pregnant, one day she put her hand on my bump, something no one but Ross had ever done, and I don’t remember what I said but i remember her response being about it being her Grandchild and me saying it’s my body. I think because years of infertility had sometimes been made harder because of her stories about other peoples babies or people becoming grandparents I shut down to her at times. That makes me sad.

I’ve often thought that things started to get better when I had Zac but actually it was about 9 months before that when she came to stay while Dad was away and helped me paint our bedroom. I don’t know why things started to change but they did. -I probably grew up a bit!!

For the 18 months between Zac being born and mum dying things vastly improved. It would often be her that reassured me after Zac hadn’t gained weight properly and who pointed out that they left me to ‘cry it out’ did I remember it?! She helped with me going back to work for my 3 months notice period, ALWAYS followed Zac’s routine knowing that I had the best understanding of Zac and just generally encouraged and helped.

So for me, my memories of her as a mum are so mixed. There are a lot of happy memories mixed in with a lot of frustrations as I was growing up. But my memories end on a positive. Mum was a mum who wanted to know her children and wanted to help. She said to me the last time I saw her that she wished she was one of those mums who could do more, particularly financial but actually in the last 18 months of her life, I can see just what a good mum she was and as I look back over the whole of my life I can see it was there just unappreciated.