DAY 19 - Material (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 19th instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

My daughter didn’t sleep all night through until she was way over two, and my son, over two, is nowhere near doing that. There have been ok nights where one of them only wakes me up once, or when I have a child in bed with me that doesn’t wriggle too much and I get 4 straight hours between kicks or someone asking for a glass of water. There have been horrendous nights when I was waking up to feed a baby every hour then looking after her all day, or trying to get her to go back to sleep from 3am-5.30am then waking at 6.30am to go to work before doing it all again the next night, and the next. 

There are many nights somewhere in between then months go by without a full night’s sleep, and I suddenly realise the sense of grogginess and fogginess has become my new normal. Nothing new here. Absolute bog-standard, parenthood basics. Many of my friends haven’t slept all night for three years, or four, or five.

Sometimes I’d hear someone in a cafe saying their 3 month old slept through the night, or complaining that they had to wait 6 months before their child started sleeping all night, and my blood would boil. Sometimes it still does. Without proper connection to each other it’s easy to forget that everyone has their own cross to bear and no one gets a simple ride. The weirdness around what we consider a “good mother” and a “good child” means we often feel a sense of failure or disappointment if they don’t do something that some old white guy 50 years ago said a baby or child “should” do by now. We compare and compete with each other rather than empathise.

Maybe your kid sleeps but they have extremely gnarly tantrums or ill health or additional needs, or you’re parenting alone, or your partner works away for months at a time, or you have like five children. Outside of challenges specific to parenting is all the rest of life: ageing parents or illness in the family, work or mental health challenges, money problems.

Humans have always raised children collectively in small close knit groups. Now that we are responsible for so much with so little support, now that we are isolated and undervalued and ignored, there is plenty of opportunity for us to be exhausted, and sad, and angry. There is no shortage of material to feed a cross outburst. We find our own anger so shocking and horrible but the really shocking thing is how much we stay in control, how patient we are - even if we’re pretending, how much we stay connected and how deep we dig when we feel we’ve already plumbed the depths of our capacity. How much of the time we do our best, and how often and it’s more than enough.