HOLLY: "I didn't feel like a mother. I felt like a fraud."

By HOLLY WAINWRIGHT

An experience I will never, ever forget.

I was a new mum. My baby was five weeks old. I looked like a mother, wandering around with birds-nest hair and a 1000-yard stare, holding an infant. But I didn’t feel like a mother.

I felt like a fraud. I felt like I was the only person alive who was deeply, deeply confused about what to do with this tiny person who had been recklessly placed in my care.

I was also madly in love. And just like in other love affairs before this, I couldn’t understand why the object of my affections would treat me so bad.

Keeping me awake, yes, but also keeping me guessing in pretty much every regard – why won’t she eat when I think she should eat? Why won’t she fill her nappies on command from the baby book? Why does she cry, and cry and cry when I just love her so? And so on. The minutae of new motherhood is exhausting, and incomprehensible to anyone on the outside.

Just as an FYI, this post is sponsored by Omo Ultimate. But all opinions expressed by the author are 100 per cent authentic and written in their own words.

Taking myself and my tiny tyrant out of our bubble and into an Early Childhood Centre for a gathering of new mums took every ounce of will and courage I could muster. It is very hard to look back and understand why it’s so hard for new mums to get out of the house, but it just is. Especially to a deadline. Especially when you know other people will be looking at you. And your baby.

But with some tears and drama, out of the house we did go.  And taking my place on that circle of plastic chairs changed my life.

Because it turned out I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand why my baby would cry and cry and cry at 4pm.

I wasn’t the only one who was worrying about poo, how it would stay away for a day and then seemingly flow forever.

I wasn’t the only one who was stressed that I couldn’t measure how much breast-milk my daughter was actually drinking. “But how do I know she’s getting enough?”

And I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t understand why all the “settling techniques” in the book didn’t work for day sleeps. Turns out, they weren’t working for anyone.

Some of those women, I never saw again. Some of them became friends I now couldn’t imagine my life without. But what happened in that moment was that I realised that all of us, who had no idea what we were doing, were learning all the time, and the important part was the exchange of experience, which continues, with each child, with each age.

Now, I don’t need to worry about day sleeps and breast milk.

Now, I worry about getting my kids to eat vegetables. I worry about school choices, and why my daughter doesn’t write as well as the kid sitting next to her at preschool.

But now I know where they keep the wisdom. They keep it in a group of mums, none of whom think they know anything, sitting around sharing information.

I will walk away from the playground, or from an online conversation, or a chance encounter at the shops, or from lunch with my mum mates, with a whole slew of new ideas on how to deal with whatever it is that’s keeping me up at nights.

And I realise that over the years, I have earned some wisdom.

I’ve earned the wisdom to know what matters, and what really doesn’t. I’ve learned that what’s important to me is what’s important to my child. If she’s upset about it, if she wants to try to explain it, if she needs me to see it, to hear it, then it’s important. If I care, but she doesn’t, then it can wait.

If it’s about me worrying about appearances, about her ruining her princess dress by jumping in a muddy puddle, it’s not important. What’s important is that she gets to jump, to show me how happy it makes her, how much she can do. That’s what matters. Not what others see.

That’s a rule that will shift again as the years bring us new challenges but it seems to me that in the mad rush of a typically busy day, if I have to sift out what’s really at the top of the To Do list, it’s as good a filter as any to work out what’s worth worrying about now, and what can be dealt with later.

So, what do I know for sure about parenting? We think we’re failing, but we’re not. We think we know nothing, but really, we all know a whole lot more than we think we do, and we’re all in it together.

Really, against all the odds, we are wise.

My bit of wisdom: Share your problems. Ask every other parent what works for them. When you worry about judgement, and keep problems to yourself, you are the one who suffers. Reach out, however you can.

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To enter, click here and tell us in 25 words or less “Whats the one thing you wish you knew when you first had kids?”

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