Little Big Things

Regular readers among you will know that I usually limit myself to one post per month, but a few days ago a post I wrote in December 2012 came up on my On This Day app and inspired me to write an extra one.

It was a summary of the year: both for the country and for myself, and I was delighted to find (when I was self-indulgent enough to read my own writing back) that there were memories in there that I had completely forgotten about. 

A sad moment for me this year was when I discovered that the diaries that I wrote religiously for four years between 2008-2012 had been ruined by damp in my mum's garage (and unlike when that happened to Monica in Friends I didn't manage to bag myself a Porsche out of it), so finding that reading my blog back can feel similar to reading old diaries was wonderful. Which is why I decided to do the same thing for this year. 

(I should note here that between deciding to write this and actually sitting down to write, my little brother has expressed disdain for anyone who insists on reflecting on the year on social media. If you either are Chip or are like him in that way, apologies. This post is not for you. In fact, this post is mainly just aimed at 2022 Rebecca, but please do feel free to read on if you're interested. Also how mad is it that we're as close to the end of 2022 as we are to the end of 2012?!) 

Anyway. 

2017 was a mixed bag in that it was a sad and scary one for the world, really. I often find myself wondering whether the world has always been this scary. Perhaps I'm just more aware of it as I get older. But there were some super moments for us all as well, and in my personal little world it was one of the best years ever. Probably the most important so far (maybe ever?) for me. 

I've convinced myself that it's okay to write about my best year so far as my 2012 summary was of my worst year so far. So that's okay, right? Keeps the balance? I don't want this to be like one of those awful Round Robin letters (or emails as the case may be) where you have to read about how flipping wonderful everybody else has been this year when you're there in your jammies, surrounded by chocolate wrappers and covered in spit up (me, right now) and feeling fairly gross.

It is a joy to read about warm and happy things at this time of year though. At the beginning of the month I deleted all social media apps from my phone because I was driving Dale crazy with my fury at the ridiculous things I would read.

"Why do you do it to yourself, especially just before bed?" 

But as Christmas Eve crept up on us I logged in on the internet on my phone; partly to have a little peek at how all my creative mummy friends had used Elf on the Shelf (if you have me on Facebook and shared pictures of how you make magic with that little guy, trust me, I saw it and loved it-well done!) and partly to look at the cosy Christmas pictures of my friends across the globe. Everyone suddenly manages to have something happy to say at this time of year and it really is wonderful to read. 

This year is the year I got married and had a baby. Big Things. 

And the thing about having a baby in October is that when you welcome the new year in you have no idea that you'll be ending the year with a new baby. And somehow that feels huge. New Year holds such weight for me- as it does for many. Sure, there are the scrooges who insist if you want to make changes you can do so at any time of year, and of course they are right. But the thing is, I- along with many others- do make new resolutions throughout the year. I don't realise I need to change something in my life in May and think ah well, only seven months until I can action that. Obviously. But New Year is a super opportunity to reflect and set goals because it's one that's easy to measure in time. 

So I take New Year seriously and it's just mad to me that when I was making my plans for the year this time twelve months ago I had absolutely no idea that I would be seeing in 2018 with a new little human that I spent the year making from scratch. Huge. 

But of course, I won't ever forget getting married and having a baby. I won't forget those great things like walking down the aisle or meeting my little girl for the first time. I won't forget our incredible honeymoon or the moment we finally agreed on a name. 

But I might forget some of those little but important things, so here are my top five big-and-magical-but-minor favourite moments of 2017...

1) Moment Number 1

My cousins, mum, auntie, Grandma and I have somehow found ourselves in a pattern of meeting for breakfast every now and then to laugh until we choke on our Eggs Benedict. I'm fortunate enough to be related to the funniest women in existence, and hanging out with them has created a million magical moments for me this year. 

But the number one moment has to be when one of us (and for anonymity's sake I won't tell you which one of us) had egg on her face. This is how it went: 

"Oh you've got a bit of egg on your nose. I can't carry on telling this story whilst that's there." 

"Have I? I'll wipe it off." Gone. Super. The story continues. 

"Wait. Sorry. I can't continue. Now it's on your cheek. How has it got there? The plates have been taken away! I can't-even-tell-the-story-now." 

Spoiler alert. It ended up on the forehead. None of us could breathe for laughing. The story was never told. 

You know those moments you laugh so much it forms a magical bond between everyone that's laughing? That's what every moment is like with that bunch of ladies. 

2) Moment Number 2

In May of this year my beautiful friends planned me a Hen That's Not a Hen. I'm not a Hen weekend kinda gal. I'm a coffee and a chat kinda gal. Okay, I'm not boring (I like to think), I just can't think of anything worse than dragging my nearest and dearest away from their husbands and kids for the weekend so that we can drink too much through phallic straws and scream a lot whilst wearing devil horns and sashes. 

So instead, six of my absolute favourite humans in the entire world surprised me with an afternoon tea in the sunshine. It turns out that my mum is a genuinely fantastic actress because I really did have no idea, and that my friends are just the best. 

Anyway, that's not my favourite moment. My favourite moment was the moment that they presented me with a book they had made me filled with photos, messages, and funny stories from throughout our twelve years of friendship. I laughed, cried, cringed (I remember saying to them when I was seventeen that I just couldn't imagine we'd ever look back and regret our 2006 clothes and haircuts because we just looked normal. What did I know?) and laughed some more, and every now and then I get it out again to look at and am filled with warm, fuzzy, loveliness. 

3)  Moment Number 3

Dale and I were standing at the altar, in the middle of our vows. The registrar asked for the rings, and so the ring bearers- Dale's nephews aged 7 and 2- brought them up, and we began to exchange them. 

We got as far as "I give you this ring as a token of our..." before we were interrupted. Dale's two year old nephew had wandered over to the little stage we were standing on, hoisted his right leg (and it was such an effort) up onto the edge, followed- with equal effort- by his left leg, straightened himself up, wandered over to Dale, and gave him a little packet of biscuits to snack on. In the middle of the wedding ceremony. Oh, he knows his uncle so well. 

It was just the kind of magical moment that you could never have planned but which made the day. I don't think you're supposed to laugh out loud during your vows (although my friend Pumbaa did laugh during hers saying with my body I honour you ha) but we all laughed and it was the talk of the reception drinks. 

4) Moment Number 4

My leaving party from work involved the team ordering a lot of pizza and playing Heads Up in the centre. Hanging out with people from work is a rarity in my job because we're open seven days a week, so just being together without the responsibility was brilliant. 

The whole thing was full of so much fun and laughter, but the highlight for me was when someone got carried away trying to win the game and described the movie Tower Heist as 'a heist....except...in a tower!' 

5) Moment Number 5

It was Boxing Day, and the entire family was sitting around the lounge, sipping glasses of wine and waiting for dinner to be ready in the next few minutes. None of us even realised anyone was missing. And that was when my mum popped into the kitchen to check on the turkey and immediately came running out squealing and laughing. Grandad Derek was in there. Eating the dessert. With crumbs all around his mouth. He really thought he wouldn't be caught. 

When will he learn? 

Hopefully no time soon. It's the most I've laughed since Tower-Heist-Gate.

And so it ends- the best year so far.

My resolution last year was to Be Fearless- something that I worked really hard on all year and will continue to keep in mind as we move in to 2018. This year I have a sparkly new diary that I plan to keep to record all of those Little Big Things that I know will mean the world to me, and encourage everyone to ignore those New Year Scrooges (sorry Chip) and take the time to reflect on your year, make a resolution that's important to you, and continue to find the magic in your own Little Big Things <3 

What being a mum is REALLY like...

I have always wanted to be a mum.

The moment that my baby was placed on me for the first time I immediately thought of the Christmas (1995, I think) that I was given my Baby Born doll. I remember so clearly that my mum was getting more and more exasperated because my brothers had opened all of their presents and there was still a big pile for me that I simply wasn't interested in. I remember thinking that my mum didn't understand. If I put the baby down, she might cry.

(For those of you unfamiliar with Baby Born circa 1995, there was no crying feature. But to me she was real.)

By 1995 I had chosen names for my children as well. Names I was convinced I would use. So convinced, in fact, that I named my dolls different names so that my real children wouldn't be named after toys.

(Fun fact: I haven't used my girl name because Dale thinks it's the absolute worst name in existence. But if he hadn't been quite so passionately against it the name I chose as a child would have been the one I used. It's still my favourite 22 years later.)

Anyway, I named that dolly Gemma and I loved her more than anything in the world. I looked after her beautifully, and I can still picture putting her into a little cradle every night even in the house that we moved into around 2 years after I was given her.

Fast forward twenty two years and I'm finally laying in my hospital bed with my very own and very real newborn on my chest.

The room was filled with people buzzing about doing their thing- midwives, paediatricians, doctors, healthcare assistants...(I think. I'm actually not completely aware of who was there or what they were doing), and a few of them, along with my mum and Dale, kept firing questions at me that I would vaguely brush away so that I could focus on my new busy and important job: staring at this baby.

Very much the same as 1995.

And so now I'm a mum. I have, at last, joined that coveted club that I've been desperate to be a member of for as long as I can remember.

It feels a bit like I'm fibbing when I say that.

I'm not really a mum because my baby is only seven weeks old. Perhaps I'll be a real mum when she's seven years old. But then I won't have experienced what it's like to have a teenager. So do I have to wait until she's eighteen before I can count myself a member of the club?

But of course not.

I am a card (or is that scarred?) carrying member of the mum club, and I spend most days staring at our baby (Squirt) completely unable to believe my luck that this huge dream has finally come true.

Having spent a lot of time working with children of more or less every age, in a wide range of jobs, I've spent a lot of time wondering how it will be different when I have my own baby.

When you work with children but don't have your own you spend an unfair (I feel) amount of time being told you don't quite understand because you're not a mum. 

And so I have wondered for my entire adult life what secrets I would be let into once I had my own bundle of joy. What would I finally know once I was allowed to join the club? What pearls of wisdom would finally be bestowed upon me once I had been through childbirth myself?

Well now I know, and today I am going to break all the rules and reveal The Big Secret to you: whether you have children or not.

The Big Secret is: there is no big secret.

In my now vast experience of being a mum to one little girl for seven whole weeks, two whole days and around ten hours, I can tell you that whatever the books, blogs, vlogs, and other mums in your life may tell you: nobody knows what it will be like for you. 

I've found myself reading/watching/listening and speaking to parents who insist they know the answers. I'll read articles called things like Four Things I Wish I had Known Before I Became a Mum. The entire article will then be written as though it's fact (e.g. 1. You will lose half your friends once your baby is born) and will exclaim things like we need to talk about this more- nobody talks about this stuff!

With all the things I have read and all the people I have spoken to, the absolute biggest lesson I have learnt so far is that everyone thinks they're an expert, and nobody actually is. If you believed everything you read about being a mum oh my goodness nobody would ever do it.

But so many of these articles will also say 'everybody likes to paint a positive picture of motherhood: focusing on the positives instead of telling the truth about what it's really like.'

Firstly- I think focusing on the positives about the biggest thing in your life right now is a fairly healthy way to live. Only talking about the negatives all the time cannot be good for your happiness, and definitely won't help you with keeping all those friends you're due to lose when you have a baby. (Just to be clear- I haven't lost any friends, but more on that later.)

Secondly- these lists always include lack of sleep, and when I was pregnant I can probably count on one hand the people I spoke to that didn't take it upon themselves to let me know I was never going to sleep again (including strangers who approached me in the supermarket at random)- so I'm not sure who these people are that are having babies and not realising that their sleep pattern is going to change.

Thirdly- nobody can tell you what it's really like. Because it's different for everyone. Because everyone is in a different position.

In my quest to make sense of the fact that the majority of the things I've been told/read about parenthood haven't been true at all, I imagined someone writing an article called 'What It's Really Like To Go On Holiday' with absolutely no context.

I went on holiday this year.

So I'm qualified to write about what a holiday is like, right? I could write that article, and write a list of things that you can and should expect when you go on holiday.

My holiday in May was for ten days. It was action-packed and non-stop. I went with my fiance. It was in California. I was twenty weeks pregnant. We went to three different cities and stayed in four hotels- some quite fancy and some that involved wonky flooring and questionable bedspreads. The weather moved constantly between baltic and balmy.

Similarly, my friend Jiminy went on holiday this year.

Her holiday in October was for five days. She went to Blackwood Forest with her parents, husband and one year old. They went to Peppa Pig World and the New Forest, and had unseasonably warm weather.

Now imagine if I wrote a list called 'Five Things You Need to Know Before You Go On Holiday' and sent it to Jiminy and insisted that my experiences in California were exactly what she would experience in Blackwood Forest, and if anybody told her otherwise then they were just avoiding the truth about going on holiday. 

She would, of course, know that my list is nonsense.

But if she had never been on holiday before, and was already a bit nervous about going on holiday, it might worry her if a) I had insisted that anyone who is positive about holidays is lying and b) everything I said would happen didn't.

It's exactly the same with having a baby.

So here are three things that I've been told and read about motherhood that haven't been true in my case... 

1) You will lose half your friends when you have a baby.

I haven't lost any friends. (As far as I know, anyway.) Partly, I think, because I tend to only be friends with nice people. Partly because I really didn't have any expectations of my friends (and they have therefore all surpassed anything I could have expected). And partly because my lifestyle means that my friends can still be friends with me.

I think perhaps that one is aimed at people who have come from a wild lifestyle involving being out drinking every night with friends who don't have their own children. Before I had Squirt I would spend Saturday nights texting my pal Lady Adelaide my up-to-date opinions on Strictly. Having a baby hasn't affected that. So it's been easy for me to keep my friendships primarily the same.

2) You will no longer be able to sleep. Even when your baby is sleeping, every little sound will wake you up.

Dale wishes.

Dale has to spend around ten minutes (or so he tells me, I'm sure he's exaggerating) trying to wake me up to feed Squirt in the night. Nothing wakes me. Never has, never will. I'm just a super sleeper.

3) The first few months are torture.

I entered into parenthood with Dale. We decided- together- that we wanted to have a baby, and now we are in this adventure very much together. He doesn't 'help' me- we help each other. My own parents are so excited and beyond enthusiastic about helping. Dale's mum worked out how Squirt most likes to be held within about five minutes of meeting her and that knowledge has been invaluable. In the first week after she was born we had people turning up to make us lunch and do our washing up every day- without being asked. In the morning after our first tricky night with Squirt when she was going through a growth spurt my phone rang. My friend was outside with a Sleepyhead (a sleep tool that we didn't have yet) and a Tesco bag filled with the ingredients for wraps- within half an hour of her being here Squirt was asleep, I had had the most amazing shower, and Dale and I were both on the sofa eating lunch. When I was suffering from the effects of the labour Dale's sister sent me a long text filled with genuine empathy and advice. Jiminy Cricket receives around 30 texts a day from me asking questions- I feel like she is guiding me through motherhood one ridiculous conundrum at a time. Squirt and I go to two Baby Groups where people are kind and warm and chatty and lovely, and I get to sip coffee and chat to them and hang out with my baby instead of being at work. When I'm not at Baby Club I'm either at home or wandering town in my own time, reading, and always looking after my baby. Which suits me very much because I'm a home bird and enjoy my own company, but I know that it's not like that for everyone.

Yes, I do have to get up a few times in the night. Sometimes she cries and I don't know what's wrong and I'm not sure what to do about that. I spend a lot of time smelling of her sick, and the thought of having her in the car makes me feel so sick I could vomit right now thinking about it and as a result we've been in the car around 5 times since she was born.

On the other hand I know plenty of mums who have been immediately confident driving their babies about, and wouldn't have given it a second thought. I know babies who don't really spit up, and whose mums don't have to spend their days smelling of sick.

But I genuinely love every single second- even the seconds that I'm trying to stop her from crying, even the seconds that I want to (and often do) swear at Dale for waking me up at 3am, even the seconds that I'm convincing myself I forgot to strap her in (I have never and will never forget to strap her in), because I am so aware that this time is going to go so quickly and am going to miss it all one day.

When I was pregnant, among all of the 'make the most of your sleep now' and 'it changes your life you know?' chats, I had two stand out conversations.

One was with a parent from work, and one was with my auntie.

The parent told me that she looks back on those early days- even the days when she ended up sitting and crying because her baby just wouldn't go to sleep- with real affection, and that I should enjoy them whilst I can.

My auntie told me that she was just so excited for me because I was about to embark on such a lovely time in my life. She told me stories about her routine with my cousins, and what she enjoyed about those days.

And I really think that it should come back into fashion to have conversations like that.

I completely agree that mums should feel able to moan, and to warn one another about the hard bits and pieces that come with motherhood.

But I also feel that we shouldn't talk like experts (nobody is), we shouldn't be making women feel ashamed or guilty for enjoying it (which honestly so many of these articles do- it really isn't in vogue to enjoy being a mum right now), and we certainly shouldn't be insisting that we know what it's really like, because what is it really like?

The secret is: nobody knows.

A few mums have actually opened the conversations they've had with me since Squirt was born with 'I promise it gets better.' Before even saying hello.

And I always think how flipping exciting. 

Because it's so magical as it is. 

What I wish I had known before I had a baby?

That nobody would be able to tell me what it's really like.