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follow them around the house and must tear myself away to work her whelps and squeals are siren calls drawing me back my cells are alert to only her she is the queen of me she runs me longed for child lucy jones mothers are the countries we come from sometimes when i hold my daughter i try to apprehend this belonging for her to feel myself as solid and fixed to capture my smell and shape and atmosphere i try to flesh out her native landscape i try to imagine what it would be like to have me as a mother and when i do it seems remarkable to me that this mysterious and momentous transaction has been accomplished here in my house a life s work rachel cusk my daughter is laden with the joy of a child who is learning to speak full of valiant efforts and malapropisms and sweet mispronounciations i put on her new top noo stop and she runs to the mirror mia mia to see herself then hoots with joy and kisses the reflection repeatedly first thing in the morning she cries out out to come out of her sleeping bag mamma light socks brr an elephant is an uffalant a blanket is a planket we read books the uffalo she asks her head on one side and i know exactly what she is going to say at any point and when she says something new i translate her because i grew her and have watched her growing for so many seconds and hours and days and nights i know nothing about children but everything about her i understand all her contexts all the things she did as a baby or i think i do anyway all the constant second guessing of early parenthood where you re trying to understand their temperament or whether they re hot or cold or tired or hungry or experiencing existential malaise is clear now i understand the baby who never wanted to be put down and who took gargantuan efforts to get to sleep who wanted to sleep on us and who could cry forever if you left her alone in her cot that baby leads in a neat line to my baby at every nap and every night i lie with her until she s asleep and if i try and move before she s fully out she laces her surprisingly vice like grip around my neck and murmurs mumma and we lie facing each other holding each other every night she wants me to sing the wheels on the bus and i explain that that is not a sleepy song and instead i quietly recite peepo which i dutifully learned off by heart until she is quiet and still periodically she stuffs her hand down my top and smooches her lips to kiss me on my cheek for a long time i felt like a failure for not managing to teach her to go to sleep on her own and i was frustrated and angry about the hours and hours of every week where i am lying with her instead of living my life but this is my life in the dark i lie with her and think sometimes i get frustrated but i have accepted it as what is right for us as all about the details of her and the details of me and that this has not a single thing to do with anyone else in the drowsy hours when she cries in the night and i go and lie with her i see us as if i m hovering above our bodies as if we are sisters or twins but this word is not right and i struggle to describe our closeness with a words until i think mother i just did not know it would feel like this until now i think of those wormholes in donnie darko the transparent wavering loops connecting things together even though no one can see them as if it s a secret no one told us and only she and i understand in the garden she orders me to dig for worms gig gig tiny verm and we go for long walks where i push an empty buggy and she pushes hers full of items she has studiously collected her soft toys a nectar card her meg and mog collection and an empty persil box she walks next to me understanding that she is a mirror of me both of us with her buggies and her nearly beside herself with glee she is full of the strange obsessions of toddlerhood imaginary spiders she constantly points at the scratches on her knee things being hot or cold happy she asks anxiously poking at her avocado sad she decides and drops it on the floor the t rex in the british museum is sad dave in dogger when he has lost dogger and is bawling his eyes out is happy she collects and sorts and removes and adds so that i pick up a bag and find a chanel blusher a rubber dinosaur meg and mog go to the moon a shell and the back door key she struggles with particular basic words but announciates miss hubbard the jolly spinster from postman pat like a bbc news anchor she merrily waves goodbye to everything bye bye poo and rotates her hand like she s turning a door knob as she waves bye bye mumma in the morning she goes to sleep murmuring every word and phrase she has ever learned including saying goodnight to the four main seinfeld characters she will be two in june i wish i could bottle her sometimes she is sad when i go to work and cries pitcha mumma and adam has to show her the picture of us i have by the bed where she is 4 months old and laughing up at me and me down at her as i hold her we look like we really love each other the suggestion that you have to have children to live a life that feels meaningful and purposeful is ludicrous but it is an easy shortcut to those things which is perhaps why so many of us unoriginal people do what everyone else does and have babies i used to have a regular listless what is it all about feeling and she has cured me of that i think it is gone forever i know one day she will need me less but i can t quite face thinking about it right now i think we might have another baby at some point but i can t even slightly bear the thought that she won t get my exclusive mothering or that we will be a different family or that we wil have to shake things up in her world even if it means more joy in the long run maybe when she is a bit bigger it will be easier to countanence but i don t know my heart the space around us fills up with feeling as if it will all burst as if there is no room for anything else filed under parenthood leave a comment intervention 11jan17 4 months breastfeed rosa to sleep try and put her down she starts crying and ramps up and up pick her up and hold her lie down and try and sleep while she sleeps rock and jiggle her try and put her down she starts crying and ramps up and up pick her up feed or jiggle her 7 months stop feeding her to sleep and hold her in the dark she screams for a long time but eventually goes to sleep try leaving her for 5 min intervals to go to sleep by herself she cries forever though not as much as we do eventually she cries herself to sleep but it isn t like the books say 3 nights and you re done eventually i say i cannot do this anymore she wins 12 months cuddle her to sleep she wakes once or twice in the night but is easy to resettle and sometimes sleeps through then she starts to wake a lot and takes forever to settle i am leaning over the cot for an hour at 12 at 3 at 5 i sit in the chair with her then try to sneak her back down in the cot she often wakes soon after i think she s finally asleep just after i m back in my warm bed 15 months i realise months have gone by the tiredness has seeped deeply into all the parts of me we get rid of the cot rosa sleeps on her cot mattress on the floor and when she wakes and won t settle we sleep next to her on a mattress of our own at first the loss of the stupid cot and its back breaking necessities is glorious the warmth of the mattress a luxury i feel one million times better she starts to sleep better only waking once or so per night 17 months she starts to wake and wake and wake 4 5 6 times a night i start to co sleep with her for most of the night which can t really be counted as rest at all i get so tired and so cross with being grabbed and tweaked that one night i sit and weep loudly and she does too enough says her dad this is an intervention he starts to settle her in the night and i stay in bed even though she screams for me at first what a shit shower we say unable to countenance any sleep training with a toddler who can scream mummy and crawl out of her bed and bang on the door i work hard to resign myself to what is for now for however long now turns out to be i practice deep breathing exercises while she prods and crawls and tweaks i know she will start sleeping better at some point we just don t know when i had written in a notebook what is difficult and exhausting about parenting most of the things you have to do and the things you have to feel making difficult decisions sometimes just means waiting for time to pass while you agonise and weigh up options that feel unappealing or even horrendous carrying on as we are is unthinkable really committing to making a change is not realistic based on how hard she has found it when we try and change her behaviour perhaps the worst thing about parenting manuals the way they don t acknowledge the particularities of her or you or the way they make being consistent sound like a switch you can turn on as if you are not are a weak human responding to phenomena in varying ways as if you are also not dealing with another human with all their nuances also i d like to meet the baby who settles with a t shirt of comforter that smells of you instead of the actual you is this baby some kind of moron we are mugs we are soft as shit we have done everything they said we shouldn t do we are dealing with a vocal determined spirit would she be better off if we had firmer boundaries would we maybe there would be more sleep and less resentment though more crying and more guilt it is irrelevant anyway would we do things differently next time probably not we are here the essence of us parenting the essence of her tired as when i had a newborn i think violent thoughts about people whose children sleep through the night i seethe for days about the mum who reassured me that there is light at the end of the tunnel because her three month old baby was sleeping for 11 hours a night and so my 19 month old toddler eventually would too some tunnels are so long i think that having a baby who sleeps well must give people an utterly different early parenting experience than a having baby like mine but what do i know i am fucking knackered i think i am doing pretty well at work considering i think we are doing pretty well at being a couple considering at being human beings maybe the worst thing about parenting no one says well done well done for all the times you dragged yourself up from the bottom of the deepest sleep to be patient and kind for an hour 3 4 times a night every night well done for not killing anyone i used to hate those all mums are heroes should get a medal chat i don t think that any more i think parents should get nobel prizes and a three figure salary and an annual holiday on a silent retreat with obligatory massages it is important for me to write this to look back and remember this hellish element of it to accompany my instagram feed of dreamy baby time to accompany my experience of her being almost 100 delicious while she charges around chanting pat postman or gan gan granny or hot radiator tea all foodstuffs with her short little legs and round tummy and floppy hair and while she crawls into my lap while i read her stories or says mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy when i get home from work if she would only just sleep or if she would eat food that wasn t hummus toast or a cocktail sausage but that s another story filed under parenthood leave a comment you will love and you will sacrifice 26oct16 this line is from jennifer senior s book all joy and no fun the paradox of parenting which is brilliant and one of those books you think will be about one thing but also turns out to be about what it is to be human my favourite kind of book i have thought about sacrifice as i ve progressed through my yoga teacher training and left my kid and my partner looking after her for the 200 hours of the training but also through the many additional hours of travel and yoga practice and teaching practice and homework as well as working 3 and a half days a week as i reach my final assessments i have felt quite emotional about the culmination of what i have sacrificed and what i have gained so many times i was unsure i was doing the right thing as i left a baby screaming for mum and her tired father again about whether that terrible test it was worth it i missed her like how missing is you know it from the inside out from your molecules and organs and muscles and arms it was harder because when i started my course teaching a room of people yoga for an hour was the most frightening thing i could imagine doing it was a thousand times more nerve wracking to me than speaking at events or presenting to 150 people things i had done which involved talking about something less personal to me and where i knew what the hell i was doing my feelings stemmed from the vulnerability of an observed beginner and the feeling that comes from being really seen by people from the exposure of sharing something private that you have experienced as profound but i have learned not to be terrified to trust my competence a bit more and after my last assessment i ran to the station then jumped in my car and broke several speed limits to get home for bedtime as parents do to see her face of joy through the front window as they waited for me i fed her and she fell asleep on me with all the lights still on and i thought of how far i d come and about putting yourself out there to be seen about doing things that are hard but that make your life better i kissed her mop of hair in the dark as i lay down next to her my bias is terrible i think she is the most funny and interesting girl i ever met and so far i have found this second year of her life a lot more enjoyable than the first i think then i was still coming to terms with the total massacre of my life as i knew it and the torture of sleep deprivation i find the subject of parenting invites extreme hyperbole and though my daughter was by no means a dreadful baby i would certainly not describe her as chilled now she is older every day i see the joy of her personality seeing your kid start to have preferences i ve never seen anyone so full of glee when you put bread in the toaster in the morning or laughed so much when you ask your partner for some seasoning and she overhears and says peppa or imitate you saying ooh and laugh and laugh or join in your sun salutations or dance with you in the kitchen to paul simon s call me al has been for me a lot more joy invoking than holding a small baby who doesn t do much except wriggle and cry isn t it weird that when we decide whether to have a baby we think about the baby rather than the 90 or so per cent of the rest of their lives when they are people we should be thinking about whether we want to be parents in all joy and no fun there is a bit about daniel kahneman s differentiation between our experiencing selves and our remembering selves the latter being more rose tinted and inaccurate than our actual daily live...