The toddler years are when you truly become a mum.
It’s easy to love a newborn in all their squishy helplessness. And it’s easy to love a baby, with those big bright smiles, those pudgy, clapping hands, and those delighted gurgles every time you walk in the room.
A toddler is … a challenge. A toddler tests you every day to see how far your love can be stretched.
How far? The answer is: to the moon and back. Because your love is greater than anything a toddler can throw at you.
Even when she’s kicking and screaming, and you’re wishing she was still the happy, clappy baby you used to know, your love won’t lessen. You might even love her more.
You pass the test every day, even when you lose your cool and want to hitchhike to Byron Bay and become a street performer for spare cash. Even when you climb into the laundry cupboard and call your mum to sob about how horrible your child is. Even when you lose all sense of reason and scream at your beloved child, only to be felled by the tidal wave of guilt as soon as the words leave your mouth. You just keep passing the test. Your love never fades.
Because toddlers are life—from their crazy bed hair down to their stubbornly bare feet. Toddlers are at the very edge of becoming people and they’ll reflect everything that’s right and wrong with the world in the space of an afternoon.
You’ll never feel more like a mum than when you have a toddler. From the moment they wake you up to the moment they finally pass out, they’ll keep you on your toes with pure joy, guaranteed chaos and endless laughs.
You’ll spend the day kissing imaginary injuries, conversing with stuffed animals, negotiating hostage situations, teaching manners, singing songs, wiping bottoms, drying tears, picking food up off the floor, enforcing rules, witnessing new skills, clapping impromptu dance recitals, chasing runaways, commentating your own poo break, trying to say no in creative, non-confrontational ways, and hugging. Lots of hugging.
Some days will be sunshine from start to finish. Some days will be mass panic and confusion.
They’ll push and push until you’re falling to the rocks below, and then they’ll do something so loveable, so brilliant, so irresistible that you’ll float.
So you keep showing up. You keep loving this child of yours. You are the best mum you can be, every damn day, because you wouldn’t want to do anything else.
True love isn’t when you love someone for all their good qualities; it’s when you love them despite their bad.
Even if you didn’t have to, even though it’s hard, you’d still choose to be a mum. And that, right there, is unconditional love.