What I Wish I Had Known

There are so many things I didn’t know before becoming a parent. I know this is natural, and I certainly didn’t expect to know everything – far from it. I knew it would be a whole new world of things I had never experienced before: nappies, sleep dynamics, developmental leaps, recovering from birth, weaning – it was going to be a learning curve. But many of the things I know now are also things beyond any realm I could have predicted before becoming a parent.

There is an intense emotional journey for anyone when they have a child, and it looks different for everyone (with some elements that are similar). Usually, 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 elements to 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, but part of the journey.

There is so much support that is assumed to exist for parents and it can be so lonely when you realise it isn’t there. I had no idea how quietly that would creep in, that the realisation would slowly unfold that things don’t look the way it is so widely portrayed, and that built-in support isn’t always there and doesn’t always show up the way you hoped it would.

It’s normal to wonder, when this happens, whether you have done something wrong, and to feel like others are miles ahead of you or they have a map or guidelines that you don’t. It’s natural to feel like the odd one out, watching others with support systems that seem settled and established. This self-doubt is understandable when things don’t look the way we thought they would, and it isn’t your fault. So much of this 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, 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 didn’t look like everyone else’s.

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

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

Knowing all of these things arrives slowly, in a way that can only come with experience. Not knowing these things does not mean you are failing, at any stage.

This is not about wishing I had done better, but realising I was never meant to know everything from the start. Some things you just cannot prepare for. You are not alone in any of these feelings, everyone has something they wish they had known before becoming a parent. We are all learning on the job and that learning can be hard.

Be gentle with yourself this week.