The New Normal?

I'm listening to my baby coo happily in the other room. He should be asleep, but he's happy, so I'm not bothered.

I've been thinking about how I vastly underestimated how hard it would be to go from having one kid to two. I anticipated being constantly stressed out and overwhelmed. What I didn't realise was how emotionally tough it would be, or that I would be in a near constant state of guilt and anxiety thinking how I was failing one or both of my sons - loving and missing my eldest intensely while simultaneously feeling completely unable and somewhat unwilling to cope with being around him. And of course feeling like a monster and an unfit mother for feeling the previous.

It's a near perfect storm of love, loss, growth, change, fear, excitement and dread.

This I feel is much more tiring than the actual physical output needed for the care and upkeep of two miniature humans.

It is a mental struggle, and for someone like me who is already mentally struggling with lots of plates in the air all the time anyways, it has brought me to the point of almost no return a few times. I have said aloud, "I cannot do this! I am an unfit mother! They'd be better off without me!"

And yet, here I am, trying to do this, trying to be fit, knowing that for my children, there is no 'without' me and for me there is no 'without' them.

I don't read The Books, so I can't be sure if no one really warns you about this part of coping with two, but I am fairly certain they don't. Who even has time to worry about sleep strategies and shared bathing when slowly losing their grip of all possible reason and sanity?

A few times I have had to ask, "Am I depressed, or am I just tired?" I was always under the impression that if one had to ask then one, in fact, was categorically Not Depressed. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe it's not your standard meat and potatoes PND, maybe it's just a little sneaky sadness that creeps into your day - along with the realisation that your first born, your special little one is getting less little each day. He cuddles less, demands less, needs less from you - and him slipping away from you and his toddlerhood is an almost palpable, very painful feeling. It takes your breath away. Suddenly, I don't care if he wants to sleep in our bed, I don't care if he wants me to stop what I am doing and COME RIGHT NOW MUMMY AND LOOK AT THIS IMPORTANT THING. I know that one of these days it will be the last time he does, it will be a sweet memory and not my reality - and I assure you, I desperately want those memories.

A note on conventional wisdom.

They said that if I didn't take the pitocin, he wouldn't come. 

I didn't, he did. 

They said if I didn't wean him at six months, he'd never stop breastfeeding. 

I didn't, he did. 

They said if we didn't sleep train and cry it out, he'd never sleep through the night. 

We didn't, he did.

They said if we didn't hit and shout and "discipline" he would never learn, never listen. 

We don't, he does. 

And they say that unless we force him, he'll never get out of our bed, he'll never be confident or independent. 

Well, guess what. 

We won't. And he will. And he is and he is. 

Just in case some mom, somewhere, is tired of being told that her instincts are leading her down the "wrong" path and that she's making a "rod for her own back" she can read this and know. 

You're not. 

It gets better, it gets easier. 

And if you want to gentle parent, you go right ahead. 

They don't know the half of it.

(DS just leaned over and said to me, "Mummy, I just really love you so much." This is why we do the hard graft.)