MY KIDS AREN’T MY WORLD

Natali Drake - 10 Mar 16

My children aren’t my world. I know, it’s a pretty powerful statement. But it’s true. Maybe I should explain. Let me set the scene…

It was two weeks after the birth of my firstborn and it wasn’t what I had expected. Breast feeding was hard work and I was failing, sleepless night were tougher than I had imagined, and even keeping the house in order, making dinner and fitting in a shower all in one day was proving an impossibility. Every time I left the room, my baby screamed. When I didn’t hold her, she also screamed, but I didn’t want anyone else’s help – because nobody knew my child like I did – I could do this.

So why couldn’t I do it?

Before I became a mother I used to manage a team of twelve people across the globe, I handled million pound promotional campaign budgets and travelled the world presenting to blue chip clients. If I could manage an international brand’s six month marketing strategy, why couldn’t I juggle dinner and wash my hair in the space of twelve hours? Why, as soon as my husband went back to work, did I find myself yet again in my PJs, baby in my arms, staring forlornly at morning telly?

I wasn’t suffering from Post Natal Depression and I was not ill. I was just doing what my baby wanted me to do, when she wanted me to do it. For the first time in my life I didn’t know what to do or how to do it. I was lost.

And that’s when my mother stepped in.

“Get a grip!” she shouted at me, when she saw the mess I was becoming. “Put some make up on, get dressed and get your life back. This isn’t you, this is pathetic. Pull yourself together!”
As you can see there is little room for pity in my mother’s world.
“But this is my life. My baby is my life!” I cried.
“No, she isn’t,” my mother replied. “You’ve been living your life for thirty years, she’s just another addition to it. You were here first, she needs to adapt to your world. Get back to you.”

I didn’t like what I was hearing, so I turned to my dad. Except by some strange cosmic misalignment he agreed with my mum. “Kids are like chewing gum,” he explained. “They are completely malleable. You need to do what you need to do, and she will adjust.”

My parents aren’t sadistic nut jobs (honest), but they love me and they have never walked on egg shells around me. They were watching their once vibrant, successful, dynamic and confident daughter crumbling into a heap of sour breast milk stains and self-inflicted disappointment.

Why wasn’t I enjoying being a mum?
Because I was trying to be Motherhood Personified. I had discarded my old self and tried to replace her with a stranger over night, I stranger I would never have had time for in the real world.

So how could I retain my old life while still being a good mum? Wasn’t that (shock, horror) SELFISH? Isn’t that enough to get reported to Social Services for? I thought once you became a mother every decision had to revolve around what the baby wanted, that I no longer came in to any equation. I was but the ghost that carried, sustained and nurtured. I wasn’t meant to be important any more.

But of course my parents were right. My kids couldn’t be my world. My world had to remain my world, and I had to remain true to myself…the same Me I had always been. Just one that happened to have a child now.

And, truth be told, seven years down the line it’s working pretty well for me. In fact it worked well enough for me to go on to have another little girl. Once I gave myself permission to do the things that made me happy, as long as they were not detrimental to my family, I was happy. I am still happy. My marriage is happy. My kids, who accept their mum as being their mum (they know no different) are happy.

So now I’m a woman that goes out with her old mates (not all of them mummies) and has a laugh – all be it once every three months instead of every three days. I’m a woman who runs her own business, who has written her first novel, who sometimes goes on romantic holidays with her husband (no kids in sight) and a woman who has respected herself enough to not look too different to how she appeared ten years ago (okay, so my face is saggier and my eye bags bigger, but I try). I’m the Me I want to be and like being, I just happen to have children. My girls aren’t an afterthought, they are an intrinsic  part of my large, vibrant and busy life – they are just not the only thing filling it up.

My children are not my world. If my life is the world then they are my sun and my moon. Always there, vitally important, but working in perfect synchronicity and balance with everything else.

I would move Heaven and Earth for my girls. Yet although they may not be my whole world…they are still the most important people in it.

Natali Drake

Natali Drake is an author, freelance writer and mother of two little girls. In 2015 she co-founded theglasshousegirls.com - an online magazine for women who say it how it is! Her work has appeared in our very own The Mother Book, as well as in various online magazines and UK newspapers. Her YA Fantasy Romance series 'The Path Keeper' (written under her pen name N J Simmonds) is now available to order at all good bookshops or visit njsimmonds.com

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