Name: Becky

Children: Leila (6) and Asher (3)

Location: Manchester

Previous blog entry: http://www.the-mothers.co.uk/2013/08/becky-leila-and-asher.html

Life since the last blog post: When the last photographs were taken, I was on maternity leave with Asher, our second child. I was at home five days a week with a pre-schooler and a baby, and running on minimal sleep and maximum cake. Looking back, I can see that it was the hardest I have ever worked, but it was also a much simpler time. It was the time before either of them went out into the world, and I was barely in it either. My world revolved in a very small orbit around the two of them. It was a strange, sweet bubble.

Now Asher is three and Leila is six, and life is much more ‘normal’. I go to work, my partner goes to work, Leila goes to school (which apparently makes me an actual grown-up, I realise with a jolt every time I sit on a tiny plastic chair at parents evening, or pair up little white school socks), and Asher is deeply in love with his fantastic childminder. The week is a finely-balanced house of cards which, with one vomiting bug, one last-minute work trip or one forgotten school dress-up day, could collapse around us. The magazines call it juggling. I think of it as juggling jellies on a treadmill. 

But somehow there is more room in my life for other things now, too. For friends, and going to bars after dark occasionally, and exercising, and doing the things I enjoy that don’t involve the children.

The thing is, I love being a mum, and I love going to work, and I love having more of a life of my own- but still, by the end of most days, the combination of it all leaves me wanting to stand in the kitchen shovelling pasta into my face straight from the pan, before falling asleep on the floor.

Motherhood since last being on the blog: Watch me tempt fate recklessly, as I tell you that it is easier now (it’s still hard. But it’s easier). They sleep! They eat normal food! They take themselves to the toilet! Going away for the weekend doesn’t require a Winnebago of specialist equipment! The prospect of spending a whole day or weekend alone with the children isn’t laced with a slight, guilty sense of dread. Instead, I look forward to hanging out with them, having conversations, rejoicing in watching the friendship between them grow (and trying to ignore the bickering), and seeing how long they will let me smell their hair on the sofa before they make me play a game where I am a dog with an American accent.

Has motherhood changed you? I’m poorer, and happier. I’m calmer, and frazzled probably 70% of the time. More motivated to follow my dreams, and lacking in time to do that. Less sociable, but less shy. I’m braver, and terrified to the core of my being. Stronger, and made fragile- because if they break, so do I.

I cry more often and more easily- Asher’s elbow can bring me to tears, for God’s sake, with its dimples and its silky skin and the way it is so defenceless and small; but I’m less frequently sad. 

I have many more grey hairs, and my formerly-toned abs are now…not so. I see more than ever how stupid it is to care about these things, but I care about them much more than I thought I would. 

But for me, that’s just surface stuff. The hardest part is how much it all matters. Parenting looks like the most pedestrian of worlds: a rolling parade of crumbs and kisses, nits and packed lunches and school plays, wiping faces and bums, and carrying toddlers screaming out of crowded places with a fixed smile on your face. But all of these mundane things are, invisibly, absolutely fraught with feeling.

Even taking my daughter to her swimming lesson is an extreme sport for the emotions. The desperate internal struggle not to be Snappy Mum as I hustle her, late again, through the sweaty, pube-strewn hell of the changing rooms, and battle to wrestle a swimming hat onto her reluctant head. The physical ache that I can’t describe, at the sight of her tiny, spindly shoulder blades rising out of the water; the pride that roars through me when she picks up her feet and kicks once, twice at the surface. The sheer frustration when she drifts away from the group to sing to herself and gnaw on a rubber float instead of doing as she has been asked- and, consequently, that familiar plummet of guilt that we are Doing It Wrong, because our child doesn’t listen to her swimming teacher. And then, afterwards, with a wet hand in mine and a small gap-toothed smile, she asks ‘did you see me?’ and I could melt, almost literally melt into the over-chlorinated swill of the shower room floor.

All of it turns me just completely inside out. I’m going through life with my heart hanging out, pouring joy and pain out all over the place- and stone cold fear, too, because now my heart is out there, I can’t put it back in again, and it is in great danger, because I can’t keep my children safe and well all the time. And love. There is love, everywhere. Frankly, it’s a bloody mess, and I wouldn’t change any of it.