Mrs Helicopter Writes

Got small kids? It gets easier. When I had my first baby, I noticed that whenever he appeared to be peaceful, certain people couldn’t WAIT to tell me what awful things I had to come. Not sleeping through? WAIT til the terrible TWOS! Terrible twos? Wait til he’s a threeanger! You think you have problems now, wait til they’re an ACTUAL TEENAGER! BE GRATEFUL. Actually, this is not very helpful thing to a new mum. Or in fact, ANY mum. You may be greeted with a wan smile if you say this to someone but inside that person will be swearing at you. Because NO one wants to hear that things get worse. Stop it! I often think about whether or not I actually would have wanted to know how hard I found EVERYTHING from pregnancy onwards. I’ve had many a conversation since with fellow parents starting “no one ever tells you …. *insert awful realisation about parenthood here*…” But would I have REALLY wanted to know?     Would I have wanted to know that: a) Pregnancy is s...

We are always told that failing is good for us . It teaches us. It helps us grow. We learn from our mistakes. But what if it doesn’t? What if it just makes us feel really, really bad about ourselves? What if constantly failing damages us psychologically and emotionally for a very long time? How is THAT good for us? And even if we do learn something from our experience, what if those lessons don’t outweigh the oppressive feeling of low self worth? Failing to look at the camera I don’t think of myself as a failure in life. Even I’m not that dramatic. I don’t think I’m a particularly negative person either. In fact quite recently I read an article about how optimistic people are always late....that MUST mean I’m an optimistic person, right?! But I have some big fat failures under my belt. And as they stack up over the years I am finding it increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that I am pretty shit at a lot of stuff. And that’s not great for anyone’s self worth. ...

One of the things I dreaded post childbirth was the state of my downstairs department. It’s a pathetic thing to be worried about in the grand scheme of things. Especially if it takes precedence over whether you’ll be a worthy mum and whether or not you can create children that are not psychopathic etc. But I’ve always been quite proud of my downstairs bits. I’ve had quite a few compliments and definitely no complaints. I worried: would it be obliterated by squeezing a watermelon out of it? I mean, I’d seen a documentary with one of those funny, cool girl presenters who you wish you’d been bezzie mates with at school (Anna Richardson, Dawn O’Porter you know the ones I mean) and I’m pretty sure SOMEONE on there had said SOMETHING like it not being too bad afterwards. I pinned all of hopes on that one opinion. I wanted my vah-jay-jay to be in the exact same state afterwards as it was beforehand. Well that was a bit naïve wasn’t it? Throughout my first pregnancy I noticed I ...