London - This Saturday we’re giving away our youngest’s battered buggy. After all Mabel is nearly three.We’re not on the home stretch yet but we are at least heading towards the first bend on the road out of babyhood.
This week a mom friend of mine revealed she is expecting a “surprise” baby. For a brief moment I was jealous of this accidental pregnancy news.
But this is her sixth child and, although she’s putting a brave face on it at the school gates, I suspect deep down she’s trying to work out how to find this latest addition to the family as delightful as the first one.
“We were just about to get a new carpet in the bedroom,” she told me wistfully. Clearly that’s one plan that’s going to have to be shelved with the imminent arrival of a new little one and all the baby splatters that entails.
Certainly, a few minutes after she broke the news I was overwhelmed by a wave of emotional relief.
Hallelujah, I thought, as I realised I don’t ever have to go through those exhilarating but exhausting baby years again. We’ve got four, I’m done.
Obviously having our miniatures has been a truly amazing, love-filled adventure (etc, etc) and we know how lucky we are to have them, but for much of the time during those early months I felt as fearful as the losing contestant in a brutal Hunger Games sequel.
Surely no one can read The Hungry Caterpillar to more than four children, no one can keep the myth of Santa and the tooth fairy alive for No 5, let alone No 6, can they?
What kind of a maternal saint do you have to be to find all that extra baby energy? What level of devotion is needed to listen to any more recorder practice without hurling the dreadful instrument out of the window?
Just how many pet deaths can be explained with gentle care? How deep a breath does a mom of more than four have to take with toddler foody fads - my fourth informed me yesterday she can no longer eat “broken peas”.
Each one has to be inspected and passed as totally whole before she will chew it.
This is an extreme test of patience for a working mom who’s had nearly ten years of broken nights and chronically early mornings.
And can anyone keep track of more than four sets of “favourite toys”? Mabel has illogically adopted an owl-shaped doorstop full of sand from B&Q as her favourite toy. The one we use to keep her bedroom door open at night. ‘Owly’ comes everywhere, and it is quite a thing to carry around town (or drop on someone’s foot) I can tell you.
Along with the other children’s general toys, it means we have a shark, a monkey, a puppy and an owl doorstop to chaperone on every overnight trip. (I often think we look like a circus family auditioning as a new act.)
And, worse still, if you have a new baby today you have to deal with the competitive pressure of the women in their 30s dubbed the “millennial moms” who, I read this week, spend up to eight hours a day on their phones or laptops comparing the speed of their little ones’ development to their friends’ children and posting hundreds of pictures of their perfectly styled babies who can count to ten by the time they are six months.
I think that would tip me over the edge. Our family of four aged between 11 and two is a loud, chaotic, eccentric collection of spirited and overly-independent children.
Besides my kids are often so absurdly dressed (a source of great woe to me given my job) that if I posted pictures of them on Facebook they’d probably be taken into care by well-wishers fearing they’d been forced to join a bizarre cult that insisted members wear odd Crocs and inside-out tops.
So no matter how much I indulge in kidnap fantasies when I see Prince George and his deliciously chubby, wobbly thighs on TV, I am finally done.
I wish my friend luck and I’ll be thinking of her when we finally become a nappy-free zone. Then we really will be done. - Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor in chief of Elle.