I’ve been a mother now for fifteen years and a few months and a mother of two for nearly ten years.
Reading that sentence back is still incredible for me. There is so much focus and attention on the early years but it’s like once those tearful, toddler tantrums are done time speeds up. Their growth is lost in a sea of spellings, a clean P.E kit, a lost P.E kit, birthday parties, school terms, Christmases, summer holidays, trips for school shoes, uniforms. Then suddenly your children are having grown up conversations with you. Your youngest is correcting your grammar or telling you what the meaning of a word is. Your eldest is explaining something scientific that goes straight over your head. And it feels like its’s always been this way.
Yet fifteen years ago I thought time had stood still. I was there, in my lounge - I spent a lot of time in the lounge back then - feeding my son for, what felt like, the twentieth time that day, and I thought I was the worst mother in the world. Because I hated it….
