What I Wish I Had Known

There are so many things that I didn’t know before becoming a parent. I knew it would be a whole new world: nappies, sleep, developmental stages, recovery from birth. I expected a learning curve that might be fairly steep.

But so much of what I know now is far beyond anything I could have imagined. There was so much to learn through things I was not expecting.

There is an intense emotional journey that comes with becoming a parent, and much of it can’t be truly understood until you’re living it. We have all sorts of ideas about what motherhood will be like and how we will handle things before we have a baby. These are mostly ideas until your child arrives, and I think there are so many feelings and experiences that you can’t know about without going through them. Many key emotional parts of parenting reveal themselves only once you are in it. You were never going to know this stuff, and it is not at all a failure in preparation, just part of a characteristically transformative journey. 

Part of the journey is that so much support is assumed to exist and it can feel incredibly lonely when you realise it isn’t there. I had no idea how subtly that would creep in, how the realisation would slowly unfold, that things don’t look the way I thought they would. 

When this happens, it’s natural to wonder if you’ve done something wrong, and it is so normal to feel like others are miles ahead of you or they have a map or guidelines that you weren’t given. It’s natural to feel like the odd one out, watching others with support systems that seem so established. It is natural to doubt yourself when things seem different to the idea you had before becoming a parent. So much of it cannot be known until you are living it. 

I wish I had known what support I would have versus what I felt the promise of beforehand, and that there would be a big gap to grieve for a while and that is okay.

I wish I had known that it is okay to do things my own way, and that I was not failing if my support system doesn’t look like other people’s.

I wish I had known that it is okay to feel some pain when friends without kids drifted away or didn’t know how to relate to me any more.

I wish I had known that it was okay to feel hurt when I didn’t have the people cheering me on or supporting me in the ways that I thought I would.

I wish I had known from the beginning that my instincts are what I should trust above all else when parenting my children, and that I did not ever have to apologise for that.

Knowing these things comes slowly, in a way that can only come through experience. Not knowing them does not mean you have done some part of it wrong, or not prepared enough beforehand.

I don’t wish I had done better, I just know now I wasn’t supposed to know it all at the beginning. 

Some things cannot be prepared for, and you are not alone in learning them as you go.

Be gentle with yourself this week.