It’s birthday season Chez Spud as Bertie turns 4 in a couple of weeks…which means all the friends we met through ‘baby class’ have children turning 4 too. We’re so fortunate to still be close friends with our baby group but the downside is that late August/early September is sugar rush a go-go. We went to a party today, we have another tomorow…another on Thursday, yet another next weekend and then Bertie’s the weekend after. Last year I was pretty much ‘done’ with parties by the time we got to Bertie’s…I’m hoping to muster more enthusiasm this year since he is already in a state of high excitement.
But this time of year, these few weeks that lead up to his birthday, are a strange time for me. I can’t remember very much about being pregnant with Bertie, other than being tired and grumpy the whole time. But the last few weeks before he finally rocked up, two weeks late, are burnt in to my brain and I have very vivid memories which can easily be ‘played’ for a trip down memory lane…that lunch I had with the baby group friends where F felt odd and had a baby a few hours later, how S stood me up for lunch and called later in a tizz of apology because she’d been having a baby…the dinners we had (and actually finished our sentences, not realising it would be YEARS before we’d get to do that again when together)…the nap I had on the day I finally went in to labour, interrupted by the postman delivering soap dispensers for the bathroom which didn’t make it out of the box for months and months…all these and more spin round in my mind.
I think I cling on to these memories as they mark the watershed of ‘before’ and ‘after’ children. And, in all honesty, I sometimes have a wistfulness for the ‘old days’. Not that I regret or resent the Megaboys at all…but I have pangs for my old life every now and again. I’m sure I’m not alone, surely there isn’t a parent anywhere who doesn’t wish that they could occasionally step off the parenting carousel and take a breather. I don’t just mean time away from your children, but time when you actually don’t have children, the responsibility of them, the constant low grade anxiety and all that jazz. I’d just love a weekend of my old life every once in a while.
But, then, what did I do at weekends when I didn’t have children? I really can’t remember…sleep, go out for meals, shop, see people, read, work? Basically there was a lot of lounging around, not having a plan and just ‘being’. You never ‘be’ as a parent…we’re always out and about, visiting places and people and doing ‘stuff’. “What are we going to do today?” is pretty much the first question Bertie asks me every day and “erm, staying home and hanging out?” isn’t an option.
So these late August/early September will, I’m quite sure, always be a quiet time of reflection for me, a time to remember those last days of Before Children life…the days that heralded the coming of the rest of my life which started the second the midwife handed me my precious boy, who frowned at me and looked so puzzled by it all…you and me both, babe, you and me both xx
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