London - Mabel regards the young nurse with suspicion. “This is easy, can I go?” she asks. The nurse holds cards with pictures of everyday objects in front of her, encouraging Mabel to name them. Mabel has already placed some shapes in their respective slots.
She’s also removed her shoes, revealed that her bottom “feels a bit salty today” and pulled the leg off a small plastic table before tossing it across the room and yelling “whoopee!” like a demented guinea pig.
She speedily completes all the developmental tasks required for her two-year check-up and is in the 98th percentile for growth. I’m worried a passing circus may kidnap her in a bid to bring back wrestling.
Her tests are done in about eight minutes and I can see the nurse is conflicted: it’s happened so quickly she’s worried she’s left something out, but she doesn’t want to keep Mabel in the room for too long given the risk to the furniture.
It appears that she is an Alpha Toddler (Mabel, not the nurse, though she did seem awfully young).
“It’s because she’s the fourth,” I offer as an explanation for the mayhem.
“Actually,” the nurse replies, “it’s unusual for the youngest of a larger family to be so boisterous.
“Usually, they are calm characters because their siblings do everything for them and they don’t need to develop an individual voice. I think she is just Mabel.”
Indeed. And that is why I find such joy in her.
This boisterous, often inappropriately behaved little one may be an exhausting demon to wrestle through a day, but she is incredibly good fun.
I don’t care that she sometimes gets me up at 5am to read Stickman again and again. I don’t mind that she takes off all her clothes unprompted when people visit, or that she asks strangers embarrassing questions about their accessories.
I don’t fret that I have to run everywhere when I take her outside or that the bathroom looks like a herd of wildebeest have passed through after she’s been in it.
I find her short fuse entertaining and her raspy voice — which makes other people stare in public and mutter “Thank God that child isn’t mine” — is a delight.
At the end of a day with Mabel, I collapse into bed like a worn-out Ironman contestant. But I still look forward to tomorrow.
I mention my ridiculous parental positivity because news reaches me of a new book that explores how unrewarding parenting is on a day-to-day basis.
Like a moth to a spitting flame, I pounced on this book desperate for new morsels of maternal knowledge/reassurance that I haven’t created psychopaths.
The book is called All Joy And No Fun: The Paradox Of Modern Parenthood by American writer Jennifer Senior. I haven’t read it, just good reviews about it.
It reflects on how children affect their parents’ lives, rather than vice versa. It explores how parenting today seems to have become a complicated chore and questions whether our child-centred lives make bringing up children work as opposed to play.
Our emotional and financial investment in them is much bigger than it was, say, 40 years ago. They are the suns at the centre of our solar systems. This is very stressful. The book reports on how every parenting study concludes it makes you unhappy. And you only see happiness in retrospect when the gruelling, sleepless bit is done and they can pay for their own petrol.
This negativity about being a mom or dad is predictable, but a shame.
When your children are little, it’s overwhelming, you feel your loss of independence and the weight of new responsibility so strongly.
We have huge expectations of motherhood and a modern-day tendency to aggressively nurture our offspring — so, if someone asks you how it’s going, the parental moan reflex kicks in. “It’s awful,” you reply. “I’m exhausted.”
It’s rare for anyone to say: “I’m having a wonderful time, it was exactly what I fantasised being a mom would be like when I wrote baby names in the back of my diary aged 14.”
Only now, after having my last baby at the age of 43, can I really feel the daily joy of being a mom.
It’s hard work and our toddler is a handful, but the message that being a modern mom is like wearing a fearful cloak of relentless gloom isn’t helpful. The majority of moms I know are brilliant at it. They just need to be told they are more often. - Daily Mail
* LORRAINE CANDY is editor-in-chief of Elle.