Five Minute Friday, plus OMG, She’s Alive!

So it’s been a while… *crickets*

Life has been crazy, beautiful, amazing, scary and busy since the move to Cape Town. I promise to write a little more about that later.

For now, I am once again linking up with Gypsy Mama, Lisa-Jo Baker (who often makes me cry and always makes me think), for her Five Minute Friday prompt. The idea is that you write for five minutes without editing or worrying about what others will think. You just write what’s on your heart. This week’s prompt was Song. Here goes:

 

I sing the body electric. My body. This electric body.

Electric with dizziness and nausea. Electric with heat and cravings and the need to pee again and again and again. Electric with emotion.

Electric with new life.

A new song in my heart. This new almost person. This new adventure for a small family of ‘us’. Us becoming bigger. Us becoming more. As my body becomes bigger and more.

Like the beat of African drums the beat beat beat of a new heart. It is early days, the song is quiet still. But soon it will grow louder. The song swells as my body does, but the ‘us’ melody remains. The band is growing. As is the joy and the praise and the wonder.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow: Holding on to the moments

Yesterday:

I remember how chubby my son’s fingers once were. I remember counting those tiny fingers over and over again as I sat in awe of the perfect little person that I had helped create and bring into this world. I remember how toothless his grin was, and how I worried that he was so late in teething. I remember how short and chubby his legs and arms were as he first crawled and then toddled around the garden. I remember the adorable sound of his gurgles and giggles; his squeals of delight when his Dad blew raspberries on his tummy. And I remember the way he used to be content to sit snuggled in my arms, just looking at me while I stared adoringly at him.

Today:

He is a little boy. His hands and feet are bigger and show the signs of riding bikes, playing in the dirt and kung fu fighting with the dog. His arms and legs have lengthened and are now sturdy and strong – able to support him as he leaps across the couch and stretches to reach the sweets on the top shelf. They show the signs of run-ins with paved drives and tarred roads. No longer do I hear gurgles and sighs, but a constant stream of chatter and questions. And he is certainly far too busy exploring (and climbing) his world to want to sit cuddled up with Mom.

Mom and Dad are there for hugs when he is hurt or sad or scared, but most of the time he does pretty well on his own. He wants to run and climb and jump and Mom just slows him down.

Tomorrow:

He will be a bigger boy. Then he will be a teenager. Until, one day, he will be grown and I will be an old woman – proud of the man that my son has become. He will have his own child with chubby fingers and toothless grins to enjoy and wonder over.

And I will still remember the baby that he once was.

Help! I’m a working mother!

I’ve started writing this post about ten times and have never finished it. (Hopefully tonight’s the night.) Partly because I can never really decide what I think or feel abut the topic and partly because I Just Never Have the Time. You see, 3 months ago I rejoined the workforce. I Am Exhausted! I’ve been through many difficult times in my life, but there have been very few occasions on which I have felt so physically and emotionally drained.

I thought I was prepared for how difficult it would be to go back to work, but as usual I was living in La La Land.

I expected it to be hard for the entire family. I expected E to need an adjustment period to get used to Mommy not being at home all day, dedicated to meeting his every need. I explained to him that I was going back to work and discussed how he felt about it. I spent extra quality time with him and told him that, even though I was going back to work, I would still make sure that I spent time with him. I spoke to his teacher so that she knew to expect a few rough weeks because that’s how long I thought it would take for him to settle. Two months at most. I thought I had all the bases covered. Wrong!

It turns out that what I should have expected was for my usually sweet and gentle child to be replaced by a fire-breathing, tantrum-throwing, non-sleeping, never-eating doppelgänger. (Ok, so the sleep thing isn’t really new. It just got much worse.) Seriously, there have been days where I haven’t recognised my child At All. And that just feels awful, because I miss my baby boy.

I miss him more than words can express. I miss being there for every high-and low in his day, the big and the small events that are important to him. I feel disconnected from his life and this is soul destroying. I miss knowing, without a shadow of doubt, how he is doing and what he is feeling. I know that he is in good hands, as I’ve hired someone to be with him during the day and because we are lucky enough that – because he works from home – J can spend a fair amount of time with him.

But this is just another thing for me to feel guilty about. J has had to seriously adjust his work patterns and habits to accommodate the fact that I can no longer be the one to drive E to and from school, take him to play dates or to his weekly visit with his gran. This has been hard for J, and he has soldiered through with a calm that I didn’t always manage as a stay at home mom. I am so proud of both of them. Of J. But that doesn’t make it any easier to walk out the door every morning and leave my child behind.

 When I am with him, I try to make the most of it, but I am so tired and going through my own stuff. Trying to settle into a new job after 3 years off the market is hard hard hard. I doubt myself and my abilities professionally and now I doubt my parenting abilities because my child seems to be deeply traumatised. Sometimes I think it would have been better if I had gone back to work when he was just a baby and this would all be normal for him.

I predicted that I would need time to adjust to working and to feeling a fair amount of guilt about leaving my precious child in the care of another. But nothing, Nothing could have prepared me for the waves of maternal guilt that have sometimes brought me to my knees. My child has been beyond difficult and I have just been too exhausted to cope with it. I had completely forgotten how draining it can be to work.

I went into this thinking of all the wonderful things that I had missed about work for so long – the adult interaction, the intellectual stimulation, the validation, the self-esteem that comes from doing a job and doing it well. Of course, what I forgot to factor in was the fact that I had never been a working mother. A working girlfriend, a working wife, but not a working Mom. And let me tell you, its a whole different ball game.

There have been times when my child has begged and pleaded with me to stay home with him. And nothing on Earth can compare to how incredibly crap that makes me feel. There have been times when I have walked in the door after a long, hard day of work and all I wanted to do is crawl into a hot bath followed by bed. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t an option because there’s a little man that has been waiting all day to tell me what he did at school, at great length. And even though I really do want to hear about it, sometimes I just can’t summon up the energy to get excited about his news. Oh the guilt!

I wish I had been more realistic with myself. I wish that I had foreseen how difficult it would be for Me to adjust and get used to being back in the working world. But I didn’t and man alive has it been hard.

There have also been things that just came at me out of left field. Like the fact that when you’re a working mum you have pretty much zero time for yourself. Because there is always someone making demands on your time. At work, its your boss and clients; at home its your child, husband and friends. So you never, ever get time to be alone and do the things that are important to you (like update your blog).

And the dear old hubby presents a whole host of issues that I never would have expected. From the minute I said that I wanted to go back to work, J has been amazingly supportive. And he has followed through on that support in the most incredible way. He has taken over the bulk of the child care,and I know that it is really hard for him because E wants to be with him all the time since I’m not home; which is making His work so much harder. He makes sure he’s cared for and manages the nanny. All while doing a full day’s work and starting a business. This cannot be easy and I am enormously grateful for all of his efforts.

Unfortunately, me going back to work has taken a serious toll on our marriage. Because as supportive as J is, he also has needs. Needs that it had been really easy and simple for me to meet for the last three years, because I was a stay-at-home mum. Taking care of my family was my main and only priority. These days, I can’t just drop what I’m doing and meet him for lunch. I have to work. Most days I can’t even take the time to have a real conversation with him, because I am attending to a child that has missed me and that I have missed just as much. And by the time I’m done with being mommy for the evening I am just too exhausted to do anything but fall into bed. And even if I do manage to stay awake, I’m stressed out and grumpy and all I want to do is watch an episode of Glee before passing out.

Plus, in many ways I am having to play referee to two stubborn males who want All of my attention. There are days when I walk in the front door and both of them start speaking at me at the same time. And both of them deserve to be heard. I Want to hear both of them. But I really can’t split myself in two, as much as I would like to. I never expected this to be so hard on my relationship. Which is crazy, when I think about it, because I should have expected J to need as much time as E and I to adjust. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

When I was a stay-at-home mom, I was the first to lament how difficult it is and how hard it is to handle the judgement from many working moms who think that stay-at-home mothers have it easy. I’d get really angry when I heard that opinion voiced and I still do to a large extent because it Isn’t easy. But I’m really starting to think that being a working mom is just that little bit harder. Because you have to deal with all the same stuff as a stay-at-home mother, with the added stress of work. And yes, the pay is better, but you really do work for that money. At home and at the office.

I wish I knew whether I’ve made the right decision in going back to work but I really don’t. Sometimes things go really well and I feel so fulfilled – I am doing what I love and regaining much of the confidence and self-respect that I had lost during my journey through post-natal depression and as an at-home mom. At other times, I feel like the worst mother and wife in the world – I have abandoned my husband and child and am the most selfish person around.

I wish I knew how to find a balance so that I felt content with my choices but I’m really starting to think that it may not be possible. And that scares the crap out of me. 

I Want to Break Free: The Secret Musings of a Bad Mother

Lately, I have been feeling like a really bad mother and wife. I’d like to pretend that this is because there is so much pressure on me to be a superwoman and perfect wife/mother/friend, but the truth is that I’m feeling more than a little depressed, lazy and disconnected. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about escape – both passive and active. This is not a good combination for effective parenting.

Since I’ve been sick for the last couple of days, I’ve been spending a lot of time lying on the couch feeling like a cruddy mom, so I’ve also had a lot of time to think about what actually makes a bad mother, well, Bad. I’m not much closer to a definition because there seem to be so many and yet so few definitive character traits.

What I can definitely point to are the things that have me feeling like I deserve the title of world’s worst mother and wife.

1.The little guy recently slept over at his aunt’s house so that J and I could have an entire night to ourselves. We got dressed up. We went to a friend’s 40th birthday party. I drank too much. It was awesome. It reminded me of my salad years. This was not what had me feeling guilty though. What made me feel like a terrible mum is the fact that, the next morning, I felt no desire to rush off and collect my son. In fact, all I could think was, “Just a few more days. Just a few more”.

I really miss being young and free with limited responsibilities. I miss spontaneity. I miss romance. I miss sleeping late, reading my book in bed and having midday sex. I miss my friends. I miss my husband. I miss me. I’m not sure if I’m the only one who feels this way, but whether I am or not, I feel really guilty for it.

Strike one for the bad mother.

2.I haven’t cleaned the house, done the laundry or cooked a meal in a week. Anyone who knows me also knows how much I hate housework but I can usually bring myself to load the dishwasher, tidy up a little, make sure everyone has clean underwear and serve at least one moderately nutritious meal a day.

Not so lately. I cannot bear the thought of spending another moment in that kitchen, whether it is to load the dishwasher, cook a meal or wash a pot. I just can’t face it. Because I know that no matter what I do, I’m just going to need to do it again in less than 24 hours. I also know that even if I trudge through the house collecting all of the dirty clothes that have been left on the floor and draped over various pieces of furniture, I will just have to do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that.

As a result of my housework hiatus, poor J has had to work, clean the house, do the laundry and organise meals. Sometimes I cannot fathom why this man stays with me or what I did to deserve such a keeper.

Strike 2 for the bad mother and wife.

3.I am beside myself with boredom. So much so that I can think of nothing worse than spending another month as a SAH mother. When I think of it I want to weep and sob. I am frustrated and grumpy and this makes me feel so guilty because, despite how amazing they are, I snap and shout at J and E all the time.

I know that I should feel grateful that I get to spend time with my child. I know that I should be making the most of these moments. But knowing and living are two very different things for me at the moment.

Right now, the reality is that I really don’t want to do another puzzle, read another book or admire another unrecognisable drawing. The thought fills me with an inexplicable sort of rage. This makes me feel worse.

Strike three for the bad mother.

I think that means that I’m out.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my husband and son dearly. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t I want to run away and escape this whole parenting and marriage business by having a glorious, spontaneous – and most of all, solo – adventure.

At the same time, I want to cuddle them, go on holiday and share adventures with them. I want to never let them out of my sight for fear that I miss some precious and important moment.

I want to lie on the couch and watch season 2 of Glee back to back until my vision blurs. But I also want to be an involved mother. I want to paint and spend time crafting with my son, I want to chase him around the park and lie in bed playing tickle games with him.

I want to spend wonderfully romantic alone time with my husband, but I also want to be left alone on an island with nothing and no-one but a small chalet, a few good books and a barman to keep the Mojito’s topped up.

What kind of parent and partner feels this way? What kind of mother and wife wants to run away? Surely only the very very worst sort? Maybe not.

Maybe, every now and then, we all want to get away from it all. Want to recapture our care-free youth. Want to be responsible for no-one but ourselves. Want to not care about whether there is clean underwear because going commando is so much more fun anyway.

But if its normal to feel like this sometimes, why the hell didn’t anyone warn me?

Then again, maybe it isn’t normal at all and you’re all quietly gasping in horror as you read this. Let me know.

The business of being a stay at home mum – its not for wimps!

A little while ago, I read an article about ‘high functioning women’ and their propensity to burn out. In many ways I agreed with the article, because I know loads of women who feel that they have to do and be it all – have a successful career, be a hands-on mother, an attentive wife and a good friend with an active social life. I understand that this can be exhausting and leave one feeling spread way too thin.

What I didn’t appreciate though, was the implication that women who choose to be stay at home mothers are any less susceptible to the same feelings of burnout. Sure, we may not have to haul our weary selves to an office every day, but that’s only because our offices follow us Everywhere We Go.

I’m sure that many of the ‘Do It All’ mothers – or DIA mums – would scoff at the idea of equating being a captain of industry with being a stay at home mum (SAH mum), without realising that its no walk in the park. Even when you’re walking in the park.

In my experience, DIA mums tend to have a lot of help and support – partly because they can and do pay for it and partly because there is a general recognition that what they are doing is difficult. They even get articles written about them.

SAH mums, on the other hand, are expected to cope with limited resources and help because, after all, all they do is sit at home all day. This is unfair on so many levels. First of all, I have never met a more harried and hurried group of people than SAH moms.

Imagine, if you will, being responsible for every single aspect of your teams/employees’ lives. You need to feed, dress and bath them. You have to make sure that they know how to go to the toilet and then ensure that they actually go before disaster strikes. On top of that, you have to entertain and educate, as well as take sole responsibility for their intellectual stimulation and development. Your team will not help in making your task any easier. In fact, you will need to repeat each request for action at least 3 times.

In addition to managing all team members, you are also responsible for all office facilities. You need to manage and direct the cleaning and ground staff (should you be lucky enough to have any on the payroll). You are responsible for any and all disaster management, from equipment failures to emotional crises. You need to ensure that all buying is done, as well as manage and man the cafeteria. You are the main point of contact for client (read: family and friend) relationship management and, as such, are the PA to all team members – fielding calls, taking messages and managing their diaries.

Now imagine doing all of this while physically exhausted, because your team members don’t sleep very well and wake up at least 3 times in the middle of the night – needing you to sit with them until they fall asleep again. Or insist on climbing into your bed for a story and cuddle.

You will have a business partner who will also require attention. You may not have to ensure that he dresses himself, but you will need to make sure that all clothing and sustenance is prepared, clean and easy to find. If not, you will have to find and place it in a pre-arranged place. Then you will have to inform your partner of where that is. Repeatedly. You will need to provide emotional support to your partner. You will also have to organise relationship-building exercises with said partner on a regular basis, arranging for team members to be otherwise occupied. This will not happen as often as you or your partner would like and will sometimes leave you feeling like your connection (and reason for going into business in the first place) is a distant memory. This memory, however, will have to be enough to sustain you through the rough times such as recessions, new ventures and the arrival and induction of new team members.

If you are lucky you will have a partner who is happy to take sole responsibility for the major issues like generating revenue. If you are super lucky he will also help with minor ones such as getting team members to school on time in the morning. Despite your luck, you will feel guilty for relying on this partner for assistance because you have been trained and conditioned to believe that the minor issues do not fall into his job specification and that any requests for help indicate a failure to achieve on your part.

You will sacrifice and subvert many of your own needs in favour of the greater good of the team.

Imagine how you would feel if you did this job with no feedback or job review mechanisms in place. There will be no performance bonus, because – even though the world at large feels comfortable sitting in judgement of your performance – there is no equation to measure your results. So you never know if you are doing a good job or not. As a result, you will always have the sneaking suspicion that you are not, in fact, doing very well. You will think that team members are under-stimulated and under-educated because you can’t spend enough time reading to them/playing with them/arranging interesting and educational activities for them. You will feel that you are adversely affecting their long-term health by not feeding them the right types of food 6 times a day.

Stretch yourself and imagine that, despite doing your job to the best of your ability, you will feel guilty All The Time. You will feel guilt for not contributing to the businesses revenue. You will feel guilty for wanting to abandon your team members to the care of another so that you can go out into the workplace (and add to the businesses revenue stream). You will feel guilty because sometimes, just sometimes, you want to escape to a quiet corner and do something for and by yourself. If you do carve out time for yourself by arranging an activity for team members and your partner that doesn’t include you, the guilt will most likely quadruple.

As with anyone who isn’t receiving feedback, you will experience fear. You will fear that you are undermining the businesses goals and mission by not contributing more. You will fear failure. You will fear what will happen in the event that your partner leaves this mortal coil. You will attempt to manage this fear and guilt on your own, because the popular opinion is that SAH moms have it easy. Very few people will stand up for you and other SAH mums and try to refute this belief.

Imagine that, even though society will tell you that you do one of the most important jobs on Earth, very few will ever congratulate you on a job well done or offer to help. There will be very, very few articles about how strong/awesome/deserving of accolades you are. In fact, you will face judgement for your choices and field hurtful assumptions that you are a SAH mum because you have nothing better to do/never had much a of a career anyway/are too lazy to get a job. No-one will even consider that just as working mums sacrifice the joy of being at home with their kids, so you sacrifice the joys of working. The stimulation, the lack of boredom and repetitive routine, the interaction with other adults, the validation.

Finally, imagine how much it would piss you off to have it implied that you are not susceptible to burn out because you do not qualify for the high-functioning women’s club.

Of Post-Natal Depression and Parenting

I have a son. A son who I absolutely adore. Seriously, if you had told me three years ago that it was possible to love someone this much, this selflessly, this unconditionally; I wouldn’t have believed you. Even though I’ve always been lucky enough to have A Lot of love in my life. I really do believe that it is impossible to understand the depth of emotion involved in loving a child until you actually have one.

Unfortunately, being a parent isn’t all sunshine and daisies. Yes, there are moments of perfect joy and pride. But that’s what they are. Moments. And the rest of the time its really, really hard work.

I wish that someone could have warned me about this. And I say ‘could’ because I am the first to admit that many people did try – I just wasn’t capable of hearing them at the time.

Because I am who I am, I read every parenting book that I could get my hands on. I spent hours on the internet researching what it would be like and how to care for my new arrival. Many of the books, blogs and parenting websites that I discovered, dealt with the topic with honesty and poignancy. So I felt armed with knowledge and understanding. After all, people would have been completely open on those forums, wouldn’t they?

So I started the parenting trip with extremely high expectations of myself and the entire experience, as is my wont when embarking on most new ventures. I expected to fall in love with my baby the minute he was born. I expected some sort of mystical maternal instinct to kick in and to know what I was doing. I expected to be good at this mothering business. I expected to enjoy every single aspect of caring for a new baby. I expected it to be perfect. I would be the perfect mother, with the perfect child. I expected so much, not realising that what I Should have expected was to be exhausted, confused, completely unequipped and to have a child that clearly hadn’t read any of the parenting books because he just refused to conform.

It all started with the birth. I had planned a completely natural water birth in the nearest birthing centre – no clinical hospital environments or drugs for me! My body was designed to do this. Centuries of evolution made me the perfect birth-giving machine. Unfortunately, the little one didn’t get the memo. He never engaged in my pelvis and I had to have a caesarean. I responded badly to the anaesthetic – my blood pressure just kept dropping – and all in all it was a fairly unpleasant experience.

When they put E on my chest, all I could think was “Oh god, I’m gonna hurl on this baby if they don’t take him away right this second. I wish they would move him. He’s been around for less than five minutes and I’m already a terrible mother.” For the record they did move him. And I did throw up.

Thankfully, the recovery room was a little easier to deal with. E had to be placed in an incubator because his breathing wasn’t perfect – but that only lasted about half an hour until we were taken back to our room. Where I was left with him. With no clue what to do. My mother-in-law’s primary memory of that day is arriving to see her new grandson and being horrified because he hadn’t been dressed yet and was really cold. Another point against me in my fragile state of mind.

In the hospital, I couldn’t sleep. Like, ever. I had just been through major surgery and was on some fairly hard-core pain killers and yet sleep eluded me. I wandered the maternity ward like a ghost and refused all offers from the nurses to place my baby in the nursery so that I could get some sleep. This continued once I got home.

Breastfeeding didn’t even come close to the earth mother experience I was expecting. In the three days that I spent in the hospital my breasts were manhandled by complete strangers more often than I care to remember. It certainly didn’t come naturally. Eventually, it was established that E wasn’t getting enough milk (or colostrum in this case) and the nurses begged me to let them give him a formula ‘top-up’ feed. Big mistake. The mere suggestion had me hysterical, with my husband bewildered and desperate to calm me down. Eventually I allowed the formula and was grateful to find my baby much happier and calmer for it. But in my mind, this was just another example of how I was failing as a mother before I even got to take my baby home. My doctor was generous and kind, and warned me that I may need to seek help for post-natal depression. I ignored her and convinced myself that I was fine. I just needed to get home, where I could adjust in privacy.

Those first six months at home were hellishly difficult. My husband had to go back to work and I was left alone with this tiny person who I knew I loved, yet felt no real emotional connection to. Right from the start, E was a really calm and happy baby. He slept relatively well (oh, to return to those days), he fed well, he never had colic or any of the other things that can make a new born really difficult. Yet I constantly felt as though it was all too much for me. I still wasn’t sleeping and wandered around the apartment at all hours of the day and night trying to find things to fill my time. I couldn’t read, because I couldn’t concentrate for any length of time. I couldn’t watch TV because I was terrified of waking the baby.

I was exhausted and overcome by fear. The biggest was that something would happen to my baby, so I spent hours just watching him sleep and making sure that he was breathing. I was also terrified that I had become a boring woman who would never be able to keep her husband’s interest as he continued to go out into the world, meeting new people and doing interesting things. I mean, he had actual conversations with grown up and world events. All I could talk about was how much the baby had eaten, how much he had slept, how much he had poo’d. To top it off, I was a howling disaster by the time he got home and just needed to hand the baby over. Plus, I felt the size of a house. Everyone told me that breastfeeding would help me shed the baby weight, but the exact opposite happened. I was always hungry and because I was at home bored and depressed; food became a major source of comfort. I did a lot of baking then. How could this fat, unstable, weeping mess of a person be what he wanted to come home to? Especially when I was a stay at home mother who couldn’t wait for her husband to get home so I could just get away from my child. Only to feel guilty about it.

I was controlling and wouldn’t let anyone do anything for E. I wouldn’t even let my friends or family hold him. He was mine and, piss-poor mother or not, I wasn’t letting him go. My own mother and father were far away, having moved to New Zealand years before. I felt like I had no resources or support system. Something I later realised was completely untrue as I have an amazing set of friends and adoptive family. My mother-in-law and sister were particularly amazing. My sister fielded calls at all hours and my mom-in-law was supportive and so gracious even though I was pretty much the new mother from hell.

I don’t remember many details from that time, but one memory does stand out and illustrate my state of mind. I remember spending an inordinate amount of time sitting on my balcony with my baby in my arms as I tried to sing to him to soothe us both and instead sobbed – hoping that the neighbours wouldn’t hear me. I can’t imagine how hard it was for Jay, as he received calls almost every hour, saying that he had to come home because I just couldn’t take any more. He was amazing. How he survived being a new parent and living with a woman who had essentially gone crazy is still beyond me.

Eventually, after six months of feeling completely out of control and filled with grief and guilt, I agreed to see a psychiatrist. In my first session with her I tried to convince her that things weren’t that bad. That I was fine. I laid the bullshit on thick. Thankfully, she saw right through me. But I was still determined to deal with this naturally, without any medication. I was still breastfeeding and it was bad enough that (in my mind, at least) I was a shocking mother in every other way, I wasn’t going to introduce toxins into my baby’s body to compound his ‘raw deal’. It took about four more sessions and failed attempts at relieving the depression with diet and exercise before she managed to convince me to take the meds.

Just agreeing to take that step was a watershed moment for me. I finally started to concede that maybe I wasn’t a bad mother. Maybe I was just a mother dealing with a really shitty chemical and hormonal imbalance.

I’d like to say that things got better immediately, but they didn’t. I was still controlling. I started having anxiety attacks, particularly while driving with Jay. I jut couldn’t handle the loss of control that being a passenger in a car entailed and was convinced that we were going to crash and kill my baby.

But eventually, things did start to get better. I joined a mommy’s group with other stay at home mothers who didn’t have PND and realised that – even though I looked at them and saw perfect mothers who had it all together – they all thought that they could be doing better too. We all felt lost and alone sometimes. None of us really knew if we were doing the right thing and were just muddling along, doing our best in trying circumstances. Those women probably helped save my sanity and I am grateful to still have a core group of them in my life.

About a two years after E was born, I weaned myself off the anti-depressants. It was rough, but I survived. I still have moments where I wonder whether I am completely messing up but, for the most part, I am comfortable with the fact that I am a good enough mother. Not perfect. Probably not the best. But good enough. And if I ever doubt that, I need only look at my son who is a happy, bright, confident and adventurous little person. And so cool. I don’t know where he gets that from, with his geeky parents.

I’m starting to realise that, while I might be here to guide and help shape him, he is and always will be his own person. That takes a bit of the pressure off. And allows me to relinquish some of the control. Because really, if this family survived that first year, we’re probably going to be able to handle whatever life throws at us.