Hell is other parents

There were myriad reasons I went back to work, but one was other parents. It began at NCT classes and made its way into the playground. The subtle competition which starts with the size of your bump, your birth choice, the colour of your baby’s first shit, breastfeeding, percentile, crawling, walking: all the milestone are noted and measured by those who use your own child as an angle for comparison for their own.

I admit, I was in on it, this measuring, because who doesn’t use their first child as a reflection to measure themselves? But this is why I was probably more sensitive to it in others, but then, Jonah took the biscuit, more often than not. A natural birth was followed by breastfeeding success, and he seemed ahead of the game in so many respects: long, healthy looking, peachy skin, and then he was the first to stand, the first to walk and then, scarily, the first to count among his NCT peers.

I smothered his delayed wave and comments about his ‘serious expression’ with my pride. When my mother noted he didn’t have the ‘chocolate laugh’ she remembered from my sister and I, I tickled him until he ran clear dribble from his gummy giggling gob. He laughed; he must have.

But as he went from toddler to two year old, and the sleepless nights continued and tantrums began, a few queasy concerns would bubble up into my conciousness, and I found myself ceasing to compare him with other children.

He hit them too often, and mothers would cluck at me as if I myself had taken a swipe at their toddler. By then, his insistence on lining up his toys, rather than playing with them, obsessions with numbers, tiptoe walking and continual fidgets led me to a specialist, who seemed to agree that they were ‘tendencies’; the same tendencies that would lead his school professionals to refer him on our behalf. By then, the short walk into school was a walk of shame, Jonah howling after failing to put his shoes on, and squirming his way through dressing: wet sheets and broken nights par for the course, and by then Ava, who was a baby.

But it was by turning my attention to her (and having a course of CBT to work out where I was going wrong) I learned to zone out from Jonah’s attention seeking yells and screams when the blinds weren’t straight, or I’d forgotten to pocket a snack for nursery pick up and gradually, gradually, he grew out of a lot of it, and by hook or by crook, with mostly calm consistency, strict bedtimes and leaving him more and more to his own devices, Jonah became manageable.

So when I see new parents fussing and fretting over their babies or overreacting to their toddlers or harshly discipling their three and four years, it gets me all frustrated, because I had to learn the hard way but there’s nothing you can say that will make the blindest bit of difference but watching them, learning the hard way too is hard to watch.

But after all the smacking, biting and (only once, thank Christ) bloodied face that accompanied Jonah through nursery, the parents who had once shared my milestones started to dissipate, make excuses or not come round for play dates. They would watch me frazzled, marching a bawling Jonah into class having battled him out the door, and I know they blamed me, because back in the day, before Jonah, I would have blamed them. So it’s a hell of my own and society’s making. But it’s hell nonetheless.