I have a confession to make.
Sometimes I don’t believe being a Mum is the best job in the world. Sometimes I think its the worst. Sometimes I hate being a Mother.
I feel guilt, deep into my bones for being so ungrateful. I did not have an easy path to pregnancy. Two long years of poking and prodding of elimination diets and hours spent in Doctors offices to get our little girl. I prayed to a God I don’t believe in that if was blessed with a child I would be the best mother. I would always be calm and measured and my child would know how loved they are, how very much they were wanted.
It’s in the small hours of the night when I am trying to get her back to sleep while she screams, writhing in my arms that I pray to that same illusive God to make it all go away.
Let me sleep. Let me read a book. Let me go out for dinner and be able to sit in one spot long enough to hold a meaningful conversation.
It's when I'm losing my patience at 3am that I have to tell myself over and over again 'don't shake the baby, don't shake the baby'. It's the stomach churning guilt I feel when I recall that moment the next morning when she greets me with her beautiful, big brown eyes. I feel like a monster. I wonder if it's people like me that end up abusing their children.
I recall days after my daughter was born when I was in a floating cloud of love and exhaustion, my Mum said to me that my sweet baby would give me the best and the worst days of my life. It didn't take me long to understand.
How do you reconcile your emotions when you have this entirely dependent human being, who is a cluster of yours and your other halves cells lights up your life one minute and crushes your soul the next?