Missing the bucket list

The delectable Betty is expecting her first baby.  Her recent blog posts are about a) thinking about what she will miss about her pre baby life when the baby arrives, and b) a bucket list of things to do before the baby arrives.

She has invited comments on her blog, but I have been intrigued by her posts and know my comments will inevitably be long and rambling, so thought I would blog instead.

Firstly I shall tackle the things I miss.

With many years of hindsight I am extremely grateful to say that actually there are not many things I miss about my pre baby life.  There are a few.  I am sure it will be no surprise to you to know that I would love more sleep when I actually want it.  I also look back with fondness on a life that didn’t figure wiping arses quite so frequently, and I sometimes miss the fact that I could afford to be significantly less organised than I am now.

On the other hand, what I have come to a realisation of, is how much time I had before babies that I wasted.  I was so lazy in so many ways. I thought that there would always be time to do this, or time to do that, which invariably meant that I didn’t do this or that.

The fact is that I have actually done significantly more things with my life since I had babies.  Having them was a wake up call that life wasn’t going to wait for me to get my act together.  If I wanted to do things I really needed to get off my arse and do them.

When I only had one baby I didn’t let it stop me doing much at all.  The only places I didn’t go with such regularity were theatres and cinemas, which are not really places one can take small babies.  To combat this, my then husband and I made a pact that we would go out together at least once a week, without our baby, and while we were out we would not talk about baby things.  It worked well for us.  Everything else we did with her.  We took her to art galleries and museums, restaurants etc. I didn’t really do many mums and tots type clubs ever. I didn’t need to. She was fitting in to our life.

I have done this with all three of my children, and I have to say that for the most part they are socialised and well behaved in public. I can take them pretty much anywhere and they will behave themselves.  There are times when it all goes a bit wrong, but they are few and far between and you cannot expect miracles.  It has meant that I have never really had much cause to feel cheated or resentful that I am not living my life.

We try to balance what we want to do as adults with fun stuff for them.  It is no hardship to take them round a National Trust property that we want to see and then spend twenty minutes in a playground, or running round the grounds so that they enjoy themselves too.  Although most of the time they enjoy the grown up things as well.

Jason and I also take turns at stuff. This way there is no resentment. We both get lie ins when they are available, or naps when we feel we need them. We both have time when we have the children on our own so the other one can go and do something they want to do.  We make sure we have time for each other, time for ourselves and time for our children.  It works pretty well.  We still love each other madly.  We still have things to talk about with each other and other people that don’t revolve around our children.  We still love our children.

I will say that it is something you have to work at. You do have to be organised about how you plan your time.  You cannot have the spontaneity you did without children, particularly when they are very small, and need a lot more from you.  We are finding that as our children are getting older we can have some of that spontaneity back.  We just include them in it.

So, having children has made me less idle, more focused and has made me do a lot more than I ever would have before I had them, mainly, I have to say, because I could see how easy it was to get sucked into not doing anything and losing myself completely, and that frightened the living shit out of me.

It also forced me to look at what was important to me, and what wasn’t.  I don’t miss getting blind drunk and waking up to a day when I can do nothing but vomit and moan and am rendered fairly useless. I don’t miss partying all night at all.  I don’t miss seeing people who I only knew a little bit but filled empty hours socialising with.  It has made me grab what is important and eject the rest.  I spend time with people I love, doing things I want to do.  It’s good.

There are always sacrifices to make.  You can’t do everything. You can’t be everywhere. There are times when you would really rather be doing something other than tending a vomiting child, for example.  But there are times in everyone’s life like this, regardless of whether they have children or not.

And really, despite my cynicism about children and the whole parenting malarkey, children bring you way, way more than they take away from you (particularly head lice I have found).

I think I was very lucky in that I am a terribly impatient woman who is not prepared to spend a lot of time doing things I loathe and making myself miserable, all in the name of self sacrifice.  Once I had figured this out, I ditched a lot of the more traditional stuff that you are supposed to do with children, on the grounds that it was driving me completely mad and I would eventually shoot either myself, or someone else. Consequently I had to find a way to amuse them and not drive myself round the bend as well, which spurred me on quite a bit to be more creative about selling my children the idea that they loved the things I love too.

For the most part they have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.  It is one of the reasons I can truly say that in all my years of parenting, I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of times I have been in a Wacky Warehouse.

I admit that the first six months with Tilly were tough. Not just because I had just had Tilly, I have to say.  My aunt, who I was extremely close to, died while I was in hospital with Tilly, which unravelled me rather.  I was very ill indeed after the birth and it took me weeks to recover.  When I did, I realised that all my dreams of being the perfect earth mother were exactly that, dreams.  I was absolutely terrible at pretty much everything I had expected to be good at, and I went through a massive crisis of faith about my fitness as a mother, and as a person in general.

I got some counselling from an absolutely wonderful woman who gave me an invaluable piece of advice. She said to me that you should never stop your life for your child.  You should include your child in your life.  She reminded me that it is how you go about what you do that makes the difference.  A child will help you with chores and errands if you make them fun. You can do the things you need and want to do if you just find ways to include your child. Bringing up a child in this way means that they are also learning valuable lessons all the time without even knowing it, and you are not always waiting for them to go away so that your own life can continue.

It also means that you are building a real family, and not creating the illusion that a child is so special that it is going to be waited on hand and foot all its life, and have every whim pandered to.  This makes for an emotionally healthier and less demanding child and a less resentful family as a whole, I think.

She was a genius.  Ever since then I have stuck to those ideas tenaciously, and as a result I can honestly say that with the odd hiccup here and there, I have actually grown more as an individual with and because of my children than I ever did before.

As for the bucket list.  If I had a do over, which I don’t,  I would simply make sure that I spent the time before I had my baby doing whatever made me happiest from moment to moment.

Which would probably involve biscuits.

And trying to get more sleep.