- Sarah 2 Comments

Stop crying mummy

Tonight, as I sat with my son in my arms waiting for him to fall asleep (as I had already done once this evening with the baby) I once again felt the crushing weight of responsibility heavy on my shoulders. 

Until you become a mother I don’t think you can ever know what it feels like to be needed so absolutely by one person (or two, or three…) I love my boys, of course I do, but my life now is just an endless stream of feeding and washing and cooking and trying to get a baby to sleep or trying to stop a toddler taking an accidental car nap which will lead to a bedtime that can last for hours. It is a never ending chorus of ‘mummy do it’, ‘my cuddle mummy’, ‘I hurt my finger’, ‘I did a poo’, ‘I want my daddy’. 

It is having a toddler hanging on my leg as I try to put my shoes on, of little eyes watching as I sit on the toilet. 

It is a baby who is actually endlessly patient as I plonk him in his bouncer or on his playmat yet again so I can make breakfast or lunch, or change a nappy or pack a nursery bag. A baby who is so good as he is bundled in and out of the car several times a day as we run another errand. But it is also a baby who has me up by 5am every day and who I spend at least two hours of the day trying to get to nap, or stay asleep. 

It is a two and a half year old who still wakes up crying almost every night and who will only settle for me, usually when I get in bed with him. It is trying desperately to stay awake so I can creep back to my own bed rather than wake up in bed with a toddler at 3am when I hear the grumbling of the baby next door in my own bedroom. 

I have the best, most supportive husband I could wish for, but there are so many times at the moment when only mummy will do. And as much as he helps with the chores (and sometimes it seems our only conversation is about whether there’s washing to be done, or how many bottles need to be made) he can’t help me escape from the suffocating neediness that two small children have for their mother. 

And so as I waited for the toddler to fall asleep (anything to avoid the crying and wailing which are inevitable at the moment if I try and leave the room while he is still awake) and the tears rolled down my cheeks I heard a little voice say ‘stop crying mummy’ and that only made me cry some more. 

- Sarah Leave a comment

What the. . .? Another blog??

If you’re reading this the chances are you’ve come here via Toby Goes Bananas. And if you didn’t, well then hello. You might be wondering why I’m writing here, instead of over there on my well-established, moderately successful parenting blog. Well, the answer is quite simple…

When I started blogging back in 2009 (and you’ll find the very first post here) I was primarily writing for myself. A few friends read my posts and the odd person would stumble on my comedy reviews via Google but mostly I just wrote whatever I wanted and I was happy if my post views got into double figures. Then I had my son Toby in 2013 and I started reading parenting blogs and I wanted to write about my new life. I decided that the friends that read this blog (or rather it’s previous incarnation over on Blogger) wouldn’t really be interested in reading about my life with a new baby so I started a new blog and Toby Goes Bananas was born. In the early days I used to write whatever I felt like there too, but then I started getting more interest and I was lucky enough for some review opportunities to come my way. I was, and still am very grateful for those opportunities but I started getting caught up in it, always thinking about stats and SEO, and whether what I was writing fit with the Toby Goes Bananas ‘brand’.

And somewhere down the line my mum and dad, and my mother-in-law, and people I hadn’t spoken to since I was 15, and friends of my mum, and did I mention my mother-in-law? Well those people started reading Toby Goes Bananas, which was great and I know they’re just really interested in what we get up to, and they like to see pictures of Toby (and now my other son Gabe too). But it means there are loads of things that I find myself wanting to write about that I feel like I can’t. I talk to my mum a lot and we get on brilliantly. I tell her lots of things, but not everything. I think the last time I wrote a really personal post it was this one, when Toby was about eight months old and I thought I maybe had post-natal depression. I got I fantastic response from the people who read it, and so much support. But I also got an email from my mum telling me she had no idea and had been awake all night worrying about me…which if I’m honest didn’t make me feel massively better about myself.

So sometimes I want to write about how I really feel now I’m a mum, or how I’m struggling to come to terms with my post-natal body, or how I sometimes miss my old life, and sometimes I just want to swear about how no-one really tells you how ridiculously fucking hard it is being a parent to a toddler and a baby who tag team you through the night so you haven’t had a full night’s sleep in nearly a year.

And now I have somewhere I can do that. And I can do it without worrying about SEO or how many people might have read my post, or making sure I’ve got a Pinterest worthy image (not that I ever do that anyway!) as well as without censoring myself so my mum doesn’t worry about me. This new (old) blog isn’t going to be anonymous as such (clearly, as I’ve already told you who I am!) but I won’t be mentioning it on Toby Goes Bananas, or on Facebook. I have set up a new Twitter account here (because my mum can just about manage Facebook but Twitter is beyond her) so you might find me over there sometimes too. And I know with the great interconnectedness of the internet there is every chance my mum or someone who knows her might come across a post from here, or maybe I’ll have a post go viral and become an overnight internet sensation (you never know!) but I’ll deal with that if or when it happens.

I toyed with the idea of starting another new blog but I had this one already and it’s quite interesting reading back on some of the things I wrote six or seven years ago (do feel free to have a wade through the archives if you fancy). And Toby Goes Bananas won’t be going anywhere; I’ll still be posting there about life with the little ones.

Oh, and if you were wondering… ‘We must be bold’? It comes from a speech made by John F Kennedy in 1962 about how it was important that the US government invested money in putting man on the moon. Because sometimes, even now, being bold is what we have to be.