I was pondering the other day why it is that I never seem to achieve anything. Sometimes I will get to the end of the day and realise that the house actually looks more of a mess than it did before I started. It certainly rarely looks tidier – or if does, it lasts for an hour, at the most. Yet it doesn’t take a lot of thinking to work out exactly why stay at home parents find this so difficult. It’s because every tiny little job takes four times as long when it involves a small child. Six times as long if that child is between the ages of 1 and 3.
Take getting ready in the morning, for example. I wonder if this will ring a bell with anyone else.
The day begins with getting up, eating breakfast, and getting dressed. Well that’s quite straightforward, isn’t it? You get up, you get everyone breakfast, breakfast gets eaten, you get dressed, get the children dressed, and then you’re all ready. Easy. Yeah… Something like that. What actually happens is that like the responsible parent you are, you get up on time and start waking up the children. One of them takes issue with the fact that the ‘wrong’ parent woke them up. A minute or two is taken up trying to placate the screaming child, or if they are old enough to know better, lecturing them on the making of unreasonable demands.
Eventually everyone is up, and you proceed down the stairs, asking them what cereal they would like for breakfast. One of them will change their mind several times and you wonder (as you will repeatedly throughout the day) whether the ‘good parent’ thing to do is accept only the first thing they say and not pander to them (pushing on through the inevitable tantrum), or to give in and wait for them to make their minds up. You will get three bowls of cereal full then spend another few minutes once you’ve put them on the table either finding a child a different spoon, telling them to find a different spoon themselves if they have a problem with that one, or telling them to suck it up and eat breakfast with the spoon they already darn well have. If it’s not the spoons, it will be discussing what the optimum amount of milk is for a bowl of cereal and whether you have or have not achieved the correct level. These happy family discussions may or may not be punctuated by lectures on how lucky they are to have breakfast at all, references to starving children in the developing world, and a sinking feeling that you are beginning to sound exactly like your mother.
Once breakfast has been dished out to the small people, you quickly finish making your own breakfast and sit down. This is clearly a mistake: never sit down with small children and certainly not with food; it’s an immediate catalyst for someone to need something. A drink refill is required. Again, you could ask them to sort it out themselves, but then that would probably result in a flooded kitchen which is the last thing you need to deal with in your pyjamas at 7:30am. It’s easier to do it yourself. So you get up, refill drink, sit down. Then another one immediately drains their cup and wants some more. Meanwhile, while you are up filling a second cup, the toddler decides now is a good time to develop some independence in the sport of breakfast-eating and starts feeding themselves Ready Brek with a spoon, liberally spreading it all over the table, the bib, their neck and the floor. After gulping down your own breakfast you wipe off everything that needs immediate attention, realise you haven’t yet made the packed lunch for Pre-School, and throw that together whilst hoping the toddler does not attempt to climb out of her chair until you’ve finished. By the time you’ve done this, you realise there’s no time to clear the breakfast table, but that’s ok, you can do it after the school run. You shoo the older children upstairs and then wonder where the toddler’s gone. Finding her about to make a second breakfast of last night’s cat food, you remove her from the utility room and ask her to go upstairs. She refuses (obviously). You try holding her hand and guiding her up the stairs, but she turns her back on you with a sulky expression that would put a teenager to shame and runs away. A few minutes is then spent retrieving her from wherever she has run off to, and you then carry her pointedly up the stairs while she yells at you. Reasoning that at least the older ones will at least be getting ready by now you poke your head round the door of your eldest’s room to find her lying on her bed, still in her pyjamas, reading a book.
Reading a book is a good thing, so you swallow your frustration, ask her nicely to get dressed and read her book afterwards, and then turn your attention to the middle child. It should only take five minutes to get her dressed, but it doesn’t, because you need to have the argument for the thousandth time about why she can’t wear a party skirt to Pre-School. As a responsible and intelligent parent you have obviously tried the ‘this outfit or this outfit’ approach but this only works in the utopia that is parenting-book-universe because as it turns out the pre-schooler wants ‘that inappropriate outfit’. You put the proverbial foot down, tell her to choose between the two options, and she, enjoying the opportunity for a bit of drama, will throw herself on her bed crying. While deliberately ignoring her that in the hope she’ll give up and get dressed, you go back to the elder child to check her progress on getting dressed. You find her four inches to the left of where she was the first time, still reading, still in her pyjamas but with addition of one sock. In sterner voice than last time you tell her to get dressed. Now. You then realise it’s been a while since you last saw the toddler, only to find her in the bathroom, standing on the toilet seat to reach the sink, and dropping the toothbrushes into the dusty filth behind the toilet that you haven’t got time to clean. Retrieving her, you tuck her under one arm and the clothes that she was wearing yesterday (because they can’t be that dirty) under the other and give her to her father to dress.
You return to the stroppy middle child who is no longer crying but is still sitting on her bed with a face like thunder. She greets you with the words “You’ve RUINED my day”. However, she does at least silently and poutily agree to get dressed into your choice of outfit and you can go off to dress yourself. This process takes much longer than it ought to due to the constant interruptions from children who want to come in and strew toys all over your bedroom carpet, or gaze at you blankly while you try to go to the toilet. Having struggled into some halfway decent clothing you go back to check on the oldest child who is now running around in two socks and a pair of pants – and nothing else. Giving her a piece of your mind and stabbing a dramatic finger at the clock she finally gets dressed, but only because you waste another few minutes standing over her while she fusses about being unable to find her uniform (“It’s there”) her hairslides (“over there”) and her socks (“on your feet”).
Daddy takes over on teeth-cleaning duty while you rush downstairs to pack the school bags. Yes, you should have done it last night. But last night you were busy doing all the other things that you failed to get done the previous day, before collapsing exhausted on the sofa with a glass of wine and The Big Bang Theory. Because you now have six years of parenting experience behind you, you are not surprised to find the reading book under the sofa. You are surprised by the absence of any fruit in the house to take to Pre-School because you could have sworn there were at least two bananas and an apple left yesterday and have the children really been stealing fruit and eating it on the sly?
With the bags packed, surely it’s finally time to go. It is, but you still need to call the children downstairs three times, tell them to put their shoes on three times, find their shoes which are (much to their surprise) where they always are, tell them to put their coats on twice, put a coat on the toddler, help do up a zip, put the coat back on the toddler and do it up, put shoes on the toddler, sit the toddler in the pushchair, sit the toddler back in the pushchair, wrestle the toddler into the pushchair and do up the straps.
Then you open the door and discover it’s raining.
It takes another few minutes to locate the rainhood for the pushchair and another few after that to figure out which way up it goes and get it over the pushchair past all the school bags hanging on it. But that done, you find that you now have three children ready to go. You check for your keys, check everything else, go out of the door, close the door, and there you are. And apart from popping back in to get your own coat which you’d forgotten, you are now free to walk to school.
You’re already exhausted. And it’s only 8:20am.
The whole day sometimes can pass like this, running from one ‘crisis’ to another. I have boundless sympathy for parents who are not only coping with the standard stresses like these but with the additional pressures of caring for disabled children or elderly relatives or who are simply single parents with only one pair of hands.
Take going out to the shops, for example.
People without children decide to go to the supermarket. They pick up their keys and some money, they get in the car, they go to the supermarket.
People with children need to go to the supermarket because they have run out of breakfast/nappies/wet wipes. They pick their keys, some money, a bag, a nappy, and some wet wipes, just in case. They pick up their toddler, look for their shoes, can’t find their shoes, look for their shoes using wider parameters, find them in the washing basket. They put on the shoes. They go out of the front door, and unlock the car. While they are unlocking the car the toddler takes the keys, and insists on being independent and climbing into the car seat by herself. Agonisingly slowly. Eventually they strap the toddler in then discover she refuses to give back the keys. They ask for the keys back and get a shake of the head. They demand the keys back and get a shake of the head. Finally they prise the keys from the surprisingly strong fingers of the toddler, get into the car and drive to the supermarket listening to the dulcet tones of a tantrum from the back seat.
It’s no wonder everything takes forever. Generally I get to the end of the day and gaze wearily at the list of things I had hoped to accomplish that day. One of them will be ticked off, the rest left to accrue to the following day. It’s hard not to feel frustrated and deflated – particularly if you are someone who in your pre-child life was quite productive.
However, it’s too easy to answer the question ‘what did you do today?’ with ‘Nothing’.
You may not have got to the bottom of that pile of handwashing, or cleaned the kitchen floor, or finally sorted out the filing cabinet. But did you get your children to school on time, dressed, fed, and ready to work? Did you give the ones at home a reasonably healthy lunch and tea? Did you talk to your children today? Did you play a game with them? Did you listen to them read? Did you read them a bedtime story? Did you tell them you love them? Did you share a smile with them? Did you listen to what they did today?
Because we do these things every day we tend to forget that the basics of parenting are the things that matter. Feeding your children, listening to them, loving them – we do this all the time and rarely tick that off the list as a successful, completed task. But we should.
The next time you get to the end of a day and think ‘I’ve done nothing today’, think twice. Sometimes what you think of as nothing is everything that matters.
Sleep Decoration 