It's Moments Like These...

December 19, 2014

For weeks Alice has had the most unsettled nights in her entire life time. I’ve made it sound cliff-hanger drastic because that’s how it felt; especially at four o’clock in the morning when she woke for the fourth time and I was out of options. I would have ticked all the boxes – bottle, nappy, temperature, pain relief, and cuddles of course. I would be in tears. I could count the hours of sleep I’d had in a week on one hand. Chinese masters of torture would be proud of my sweet, blue-eyed baby girl.

My partner could feel my frustration and I could feel his, and we blamed ourselves for her crying and clinginess. Nights of broken sleep turned in to weeks of broken sleep and I feel like our water-tight relationship weathered its first storm. For no good reason I thought Paul – beautiful, loving, strong, peas to my carrot Paul – truly resented me for not being able to figure out what was going on, and I took everything personally. I am still not entirely comfortable with the fact that I am being financially supported by another person, and after weeks of sleepless nights, the guilt of being a burden as well as the cause of his fatigue ruined me. Helpful tip – don’t ever think a baby is going to fix a bad relationship. It will make a bad relationship so painfully unbearable that you would rather scrape your corneas out with sandpaper than have to deal with your equally aggravated partner.

Alice has cut her tenth and eleventh teeth in the past two weeks; two bottom molars that have changed the shape of her jaw and given her ulcers on the inside of her cheeks. By day, Alice was her usual, chipper self, if not a little precious about me being too far away. By night, her cheeks burned and her voice cut through the night time silence like a rusty knife. This is the first time we’ve had any really significant effects of teething, and I think Alice was as thrown by it all as we were.
I felt her pain. I can’t imagine what life must have been like for her these past few weeks.
Alice has been getting frustrated, too, with not being able to exercise as much control as she would like. Bum shuffling isn’t quite getting her from A to B fast enough any more, and there are things on higher shelves that she would like to reach. Therefore, she has learnt to tantrum. Quite effectively, too.
It seems that placid, angelic Alice now only comes out in public and special occasions.

And do you know what she did today? She walked. For the first time, Alice left the arms of her Daddy and tottered like a drunk toward me, falling with a squeal of delight in to my waiting embrace. As I held her close to blow a raspberry on her neck, I forgot how exhausted I was. I looked at Paul and fell in love with him for the 89^th time, seeing the expression of pure joy on his face. Alice giggled as I turned her round to walk back, and shrieked with glee as she fell on her backside half way there.

The moment Alice stepped away from Paul was a defining moment in all our lives, not the sleepless nights or teething or tantrums. The challenges over the past few months just didn’t matter any more (although now I might have another explanation for them – It’s good knowing that unsettled sleep can be a pre-cursor to the mastery of a new skill!). The three of us, ignoring dinner’s dishes and sitting on a carpet in need of a vacuum, celebrated Alice’s first steps for half an hour and let the sensation of bliss wash over us like a well-deserved, well-needed balm.

I think this is what parenting is all about. I can’t believe how hard being a mum can be; the worry and sleep deprivation and confusion can seem endless and all-consuming. And yet those long periods of challenge and difficulty are nothing – NOTHING – compared to those moments of joy and love and celebration. Fatigue and frustration don’t compare to what I feel during once-in-a-lifetime events like first steps. Those moments are potent, and enduring, and years from now it is what I will remember most vividly about raising Alice.