Here and now, things are changing.
I know things are always changing. Each season of life, and motherhood in particular, is fleeting. You're warned in advance (a lot). "Relish this time; they won't be babies for long." "Enjoy the peace before they learn to crawl!" "Sleep deprivation is awful, but nothing lasts forever."
I accepted those things to be true at the time. I really did spend precious hours staring at my children's eyelashes and lips, watching their chests rise and fall while they slept in my arms. I kissed their heads and breathed in their sweet baby scent. I captured countless baby smiles, toddler giggles and pre-schooler questions and tantrums. I lived each moment, even the really shitty (literally and figuratively) ones, and stayed aware that this was all fleeting.
Tired Baby R
And here I am, six and a half years after I became Mummy, looking back at that season of my life and knowing that it's over. My babies are walking, talking, reading, writing, chattering, investigating, playing independently people. My days of constant breastfeeding, babywearing, nappy changes and toddler entertainment provision are over.
Snoozy Baby O
I'm not sad about it. It's a bittersweet feeling to have, because remembering those moments fills me with an aching love and wistfulness to hold their sleeping baby forms once more. I miss my pregnant belly, swirling and wriggling from within. But I'm not sad.
Oh my gosh... love this image. Master R's caring little hands, and my post-natal belly.
On the contrary, I'm feeling really quite chipper. Life is changing, and these changes are exciting, positive and fill me with gleeful happiness.
For one, Miss O will be starting school in September. It's close enough that I'm starting a list of things to fill my days with, for the few months that I'll be at a loose end. It's a big list. Catch up on compilation videos. Decorate our bedroom (which hasn't been decorated since we moved in... always the lowest priority). Create photo albums for all the artwork they both made in their first 4 years. Create Miss O's first and second years albums since, despite frequent reminded, Rachel still hasn't got round to it. Read a midwifery textbook and take notes. Turn over the compost heap in the allotment. Re-build all the dodgy raised beds. It's an ambitious list of getting-our-lives-in-order type stuff, so that for the three years I'm then working flat out on my midwifery degree and life is chaotic, the groundwork has been done.
As for Miss O, she's understandably anxious about the upcoming transition to full time school. She's gradually moving into a place where she's more excited about it, now that she's had an afternoon with her new teacher and we've talked about it LOTS. But she's not with the one good friend she made at nursery and she is with one particular child whose loud noises and unpredictable behaviour really bother her. So that's a couple of challenges on top of the general challenge of coping with such a lot of stimulation for her highly sensitive brain to process. I'd love to have started her off part time, but our local school doesn't often have any part timers, and she'd be missing all the more creative aspects of the curriculum if we, for example, started with just mornings. She'd missed vital times that the class would be bonding and becoming a cohesive group. And falling behind on social dynamics would be a disaster for her. She's slow to warm to new people. She needs to be there to form friendships. Plus, with me waltzing off to University in February, we need to try to focus on one change of routine at a time.
Master R is growing into a "middle child". I don't mean middle of a brood of children. I mean, into the sphere of middle childhood. The bit, interestingly for me, that I used to deal with, when I taught years 3-6. The part of childhood when friends and teachers become really important influences, and the importance of your parents wanes a little. He's still very much into playing with us, but when he does have friends over, they often vanish off away from us adults to play in their own imaginary worlds. Or, they bore the pants off us with interminably long "shows", which mostly involve sword fighting!
Parenting Master R is so different now. It's mostly about repeating ourselves, we're finding. And trying to find ways of delivering the same instruction that he might feel compelled to follow, before we have to resort to bellowing or threatening to remove his treat at the end of the day. Frustrating, but predictable. I'm trying to remind myself that he has entirely different priorities to us, and that it is better to simply state that he'll lose his privilege of a cartoon before bed, than allowing myself to get emotionally embroiled. He's not proving that I'm a worthless mother by ignoring my instructions. He's simply being a normal 6-year-old and digging his heels in.
The biggest change on the horizon is my degree, fast looming on the horizon. We've been talking childcare options and scenarios for months now. Finding out about local childcare options, and discounting all of them because they're not good for my here-and-there timetable of sometimes at uni, sometimes at hospital, sometimes in the community. With the help of my Mum and Rachel's company allowing her to work weird hours, plus calling in favours that I've amassed in the last 6 years, we're hoping to get through three years of challenging schedules. There will be a colour co-ordinated family organiser in our lives, I suspect. I've heard there's an app you can get so partners can share one calendar on their phones; that could be crucial, so that we're co-ordinated.
Outside of the organisational issues, I am REALLY EXCITED about learning. I'm doing lots of reading at the moment, both of books (loving my Kindle again!) and The Practising Midwives journal. A lot of it is revisiting things I've already read, since I read up a lot on birth while pregnant with Miss O. And then some of it is about details of physiology that I know NOTHING about, so it kind of blows my mind, and I have to either really concentrate, or just read to get the gist. This is why I want to acquire and read an actual midwifery textbook. So that when it comes to this stuff later one, when I'm juggling mothering and housework and pets and allotment, it's more like revision than learning something for the first time.
Of course, I might find the textbook incomprehensible and need to wait until there's a real live midwife explaining it to me... but I can try.
I feel like myself again. I've said it to several people at different times recently. I don't know whether it's the new magnesium tablets I'm on, or simply that I'm finally getting a full night's sleep most nights, for the first time in about half a decade. Or that Master R and Miss O, being older and less needy, are allowing me the emotional space to find my zen place. Or that I'm finding time in the mornings to do HIIT workouts most days. Or that those 2 mornings to myself when Miss O is at nursery is allowing me to catch up on housework and admin, so I feel like I have my shizzle together.
Whatever it is, it's good. The now is the only place we can be, and I'm loving our now, and looking forward to our future.