What you don’t need in your life is condescending older mums who are super fond of saying things like ‘Just you wait!’ and ‘It gets worse!’ and, my favourite, ‘Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems’. Ugh, eat a bag of willies, Tina! Thanks for letting me know there’s absolutely no light at the end of this tunnel and the next fifteen years of my life are going to suck. Super useful info, thanks!
They might even say something incredibly unhelpful like ‘Cherish this while it lasts’, which is the last thing you want to hear when you’re counting down the days until your kid can wake up, dress himself and deliver a hot coffee to you in bed.
What these women mean is: ‘I miss when my child thought I was her whole world because right now she barely looks at me.’ Which is fair enough, but what they forget is that when their kids’ worlds revolved around them, it was because their kids needed them every second of the day. And every second of the night. And every time they were on the toilet or trying to eat dinner or talking on the phone or trying to form one single coherent thought above the screaming.
They forget every bad, hard, exhausting part of parenthood. And even if they don’t forget, it seems easy in hindsight because they’ve been there, done that, and earned the ‘Baby’ patch on their parenting merit sash.
Older parents have done the training, you see. They’ve built up their parenting stamina—which they certainly didn’t have when they started out.
Because parenting is like running, and when you first become a parent you are a lard-filled sloth person who’s just been told to get up and sprint for 200 metres.
If you’ve never moved your body before, that’s going to be really hard, if not impossible. You’re just not built to do it.
In that first race, there’ll be some people who’ll struggle to make it to the finish line. They’ll stop at the halfway mark, vomit their guts up, limp over the line and pass out. DONE.
Some people will cope better because they have more favourable conditions. They might have a nice tailwind picking them up and carrying them forward. And just so we don’t get too confused here, when I say ‘tailwind’, I mean a kid who loves to sleep and eat. You know, an egg baby who lets you rest and generally enjoy life.
Eventually, after doing the 200-metre sprint all day, every day, for months on end, it’ll start to become easier and you’ll begin to feel almost competent.
But then your child will go through a leap or a regression or something—they’re always going through something—and suddenly, you’re not doing the 200 metres anymore. Now you need to run 1500 metres.
That will feel impossible. You’ll cry, ‘But what about the 200 metres? I can do the 200 metres, no problem!’ And all of a sudden, that 200-metre sprint will look like a leisurely stroll.
Over the years the distance will get longer and longer, and every time it changes, it’ll feel impossible, but with training, your fitness will improve and you’ll find you can cope.
Eventually, you’ll find yourself dealing with a sixteen year old who’s facing the assault of high school and just generally being a teenager and it’s draining for your whole family.
Congratulations! You are now running the marathon.
It’s exhausting, it’s gruelling, and you feel spent at the end of every day, but you’re okay because you’re fit and your body can do it. But when you hear people complaining about the 200-metre sprint, you’ll want to smack their ignorant, naive little faces.
Which is pretty bloody unfair. By the time your kid is a teen you will have been training for years, while poor old 200-metre mum over there is a bowl of jelly on legs. She’s just starting out and it’s going to take her just as long as it took you to build up her strength.
If you have two or three kids, and fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years of experience under your belt, you’re a professional athlete, my friend. And if you’ve got kids with a large age gap between them, you’re basically a CrossFit athlete, doing the marathon and the sprints at the same time because you’re a goddamn champ.
So please remember this when you tell a 200-metre sprinter she shouldn’t complain because her race is so much easier than yours.
There are, of course, some really gracious marathon runners out there. They’ll freely admit that sprinting and marathon-running are actually very different, and they’re pretty open about the fact that they wouldn’t go back to sprinting if you paid them.
They’ll tell you that yes, marathon running is hard but it’s not the same as the intense, full-body, all-consuming, lung-busting sprint. They don’t miss it, but they’ll cheer on the sprinters while hard-passing on ever stepping back onto the short-course track.
Those marathon runners are beautiful people and we need to treasure them and thank them for having the perspective and graciousness to acknowledge that people at different stages of parenting can cope with different levels of intensity.
Then there are the retired runners who don’t run anymore but they sit on the sidelines and call out such encouragement as: ‘Enjoy that run! Cherish it! It goes so fast!’
They’re sitting there reminiscing about their heyday on the track, remembering the wind in their face and the strength in their legs, and they want to know why the younger runners don’t embrace the joy of running like they used to. They’ve forgotten the gruelling training, the injuries to the body and the bone-crushing fatigue of the never-ending race.
The longer you go through it, the fitter you get, and the easier it all looks in hindsight.
So, when you’ve got yourself some miles on the track, please don’t compare your fitness to someone who’s just strapping on the running shoes. Remember how hard it was when you were going through it. New mums will thank you for it.