Regrets – or, not playing by the rules

I should have done this years ago, which is to say I probably shouldn’t be doing this now. Being a ‘stay at home mum’, in itself, perhaps a redundant phrase at the best of times, feels particularly redundant when your eldest is at an age when he can officially leave school by himself, and your youngest, schooled in self-sufficiency from an early age, so I could rush to a job in an attempt to feel fulfilled and busy, but which only left me worn out, harried and stressed, is so un-needy of me that my attempts to connect with her leave me rebuffed . Why, oh why do I always do things the wrong way round? I guess the answer is, you don’t know there might be a better way until you try.

It’s not like I can’t fill my time, right now, although I feel my CV crisping up round the edges as every day passes by. The kids are still young enough that I can fill my afternoons with playdates and taxi-ing them to piano or Scouts, and fill my days with exercise, holiday planning and cooking wholesome one pot meals – and with Tom away so much at the moment, it certainly makes our lives a lot easier that I’m around to do so. But the days are numbered that they will need me for even these simple tasks, and I wish, I wish I’d enjoyed it more when they really did.

I guess, back then, I couldn’t see the woods for the trees. Back then, I had a point to prove, a chip on my shoulder about being able to do it all and to be fair, my salary came in handy, for all so much of it went on childcare. Now, when the end of childhood is so close in sight, and I could merrily skip off to paid employment free as a bird, and work all the hours you need to in this blurred lines economy, while the kids familarise themselves with bus routes and remembering their own front door key. Yet I am burnt out, disillusioned, and in many ways, back to square one.

In the meantime, many of the local mums with children the same age as my two have sprouted a third, now toddling along in a logical height order. Having a new baby now would feel like a mismanaged sum. But then, being a mum didn’t come easy to me, although in so many ways it was the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. It’s only now I have the perspective to say that, while I seem to have got through it okay – for all the additional challenges we faced along the way – there would be things I would have changed. And yet, if I could do it all over again (and perhaps that’s ultimately why I would even countenance a third), I would be making the same mistakes all over again, but I would make them better. Though at the time, I know I was only doing my best, under the circumstances. Perhaps the circumstances were all too predictable, given a bit of hindsight.

The fact is, when they were young, I was too. There was a part of me that tried to keep up with my peers, at work and at play, for all I was doing a job many of them are only embarking on now. I don’t envy them – first time parenting is a shock to everyone –  though a bit of me wonders whether they are perhaps going about things in a more logical way than me. But then, logic was never my strong point, especially at 25.

Now, a decade older, my career, such as it ever was, in bits and my hormones playing tricks on me, amid surging nostaligia for the past, it would be too easy to revisit. Tom, however, at 42 doesn’t want to play ball, and I can’t really blame him. Shouldering the burden of three kids, one of them grown up – has taken its toll, and it shows in his badger grey beard and the wrinkles round his eyes when he smiles. His fertility is on the wane as much a mine is, but he feels no such impetus to throw caution to the wind and give it one more shake of the dice. With him away again, this week, it actually feels worthwhile that I am here to cook and clean and iron his shirts and juggle the kids’ activities, for all it grates on me that in some ways feminism has failed me, for all in many ways, I might have failed it too. But in part, it’s failed because I didn’t do things in the prescribed fashion – and that’s feminism’s problem. It only really works if you follow the rules. And I guess I’ve always been a bit of a rebel in that respect.