It’s a well known fact that parents with three or more children are the most laid back people on earth. Their kids could be setting fire to the curtains and they’ll respond with a shrug and an eye roll. Even as a mum of two, I’ve come to appreciate the freedom that comes with being pushed so far under the surface that you simply stop swimming, sit on the bottom and watch the fish swim by with a whimsical smile.
I remember how obnoxious I was as a mum of one, filled with arrogance borne out of an ignorance of parental hardship and a baby who slept well. After the birth of my second child, a stint of postpartum depression and the almost-breakdown of my marriage, I stopped judging other parents.
The baby who did not sleep taught me the most about what happens to mothers when their basic needs aren’t met. I shook hands with the edge of my sanity and realised that each person survives this paradoxically harrowing and beautiful time in their own way. We have all learned different strategies to survive and not everyone starts on equal footing. Access to money, proximity to involved family and community, as well as the impact of trauma on our mental health all collide in an individual soup that is thicker for some to swim through.
My second child pushed my capacity to that sweet spot, otherwise known as a mental breakdown or a Menty B for anyone born a millennial or younger. As you run desperately to keep up with the demands of your external life, the surface of your inner world thins and thins, and thins beneath your feet, until you reach a breech in the crust, and like a ripe pimple, one brush against it releases the fetid, neglected parts of you.
Although this sounds awful, and at times it was exactly that, the challenges of my second birth and postpartum became a gift. Like every new mother, I tried hard to grasp at the straws of my previous life, the things I could do and achieve as a mum of one. Not to mention the problematic perfectionism and chronic high achieving that turned me into a walking aphorism: consequor ergo sum, ‘I achieve, therefore I am’.
Parenting two children under two with no external formal care and limited family support, chronic sleep deprivation, while my husband worked full-time and after years of Covid isolation meant the gradual erosion of my mental and physical capacity was expedited. We tried everything to maintain capacity until we were left with the bare facts of our life and the culture we are living in.
When there’s nothing left to give, when no more help can be garnered, when nothing else can be changed and nothing else is within our control, then it’s you who must cede control, who must bend and buckle, so as not to break. That’s when I stopped giving so many f**ks. That’s when I started letting go of mum-guilt and began chasing my own joy and prioritising my health as the pillar of our young family. That is the gift that grew out of hardship.
When I had no more capacity to keep our house clean, and not enough money to outsource it, my expectations of myself was the thing that had to change. Even now that my kids are a little older and I have a little more capacity both financially and energetically, the legacy of that time stands. I do almost no cleaning in our home. My standards for cleanliness and order plummeted until there was almost no bar left. So now I step over piles of washing, clean and dirty mixing together on the floor, kick toys out of the way and I have to push against an overflowing box of shoes just to get in the front door.
My husband cleans when he has capacity to do so, or when the anxiety of living in a dump reaches his standard bar, which tends to sit much higher than mine. I no longer align the state of my house with my own self worth.
What does my untidy house say about me? Shit-all, as it turns out. Instead it says “small children live here”.
So back to sweeping generalisations: I have this theory that the more children you have, the more control you cede, the less you care and the more you’re able to appreciate the small and vital joys. When the illusion of control disappears, we are left either with despair or trust. Despair that we cannot control our lives and the subsequent anxiety that ensues, or trust that things will work out as they are meant to and the resultant relief of surrender. My experience is that it’s not so black and white as that.
I feel that, actually, the anxiety and trust are on opposite ends of a scale that is constantly shifting. It’s the spectrum from nihilism to absurdism, from raging despair into manic laughter. Perhaps having more children forces us to put a boot down onto the trust end. And perhaps with each new child we need to go through this spectrum from grief to levity as we peel away more layers of our carefully acculturated shell to find our true selves at the core.
