What has made motherhood easier for you?

[daisidoo]

Was it staying at home, working part time, always working full time? Support network, area you live in, temperament of child, having an only child? Your attitude and personality? Having kids young while you have energy or having fun first before settling down? A combination of any of the above, or something else entirely?

Just interested as it seems some folk have a very easy breezy carry-on and adapt quickly while others seem to seriously struggle and complain their lives have altered for the worse.

I know that no two experiences are identical but wonder what helps and what doesn’t iyswim 😀

I can imagine it would be so so much easier with hands on family helping out. My friends seem to have the kind of Mums who when babies arrived they stayed for a week or brought round a cooked meal. They are hands on and can look after baby for a few hours here and there so Mum and Dad get a break. My family love to tell everyone about their grandchild and annoyingly share the photos with every Tom, Dick and Harry (that we have taken but I think they make out they have taken) but they just don’t help out in the slightest. One lives in the next town and pops in regularly for all of 15 minutes (she has plans with friends usually several times a day). The other also lives in the next town and I guess just can’t be assed as he will go 3 months with our seeing us. I think it would have made a huge difference to our lives if they had helped out. I just resent them now. It makes me genuinely worried if anything happened to us before our baby is grown up as to who would look after her.

Having a very reliable, close support group of friends, and family. Although, most of our family are far away/overseas, the couple we have close by (DM and Dfil) help us out no end, and we feel extremely lucky to have a couple of such brilliant, hands on grandparents, as the others, and the rest of our extended families all live so far away. During the baby stage my NCT group was really close, and those baby, toddler years just seemed so much easier on days we met up. So much so, that as the babies got older, when alot of the mums retuned to full time work, a few of us, who were only working part time ended up spending the vast majority of the week together, taking turns to host, or meeting at soft plays, and those days were so much more enjoyable and bearable than the ones spent doing it alone. We relocated when the kids were preschool age, and I was devastated to be leaving the mums I'd met, but I was extremely lucky to meet another group of women locally who have become my best friends. Now the kids are older and all at (the same) school, having them to rant to eachother, and support eachother emotionally, physically, and mentally, has really made the tough times more bearable. They are my village, and I'd be utterly screwed without them. I have found parenthood pretty easy on the whole so far, but we all have our down days, and having others to lift you up during those moments, and being able to support someone else through bad times, really helps. That feeling of "all in this together" just changed your mindset on how to cope with things.

A nanny.

Anyone you know who finds it all a breeze either is just very relaxed and has pretty low standards (not in an unkind way) of kid behavior and even home tidy ness / so therefore don't sweat the small stuff as much (maybe rightly so?)
or have naturally easy going kids - we all know the type the ones that sleep from day one, eat well and just don't seem interested in trying to be a complete knob and are happily entertained by a pram stroll or a bit of tv etc - to be fair all the mums I know with (mainly) boys like this do sometimes get worried later on as they seem a bit behind their peers but they often catch up and just have a plodding personality type (these tend to crawl late, walk and talk later etc but are just so easy to manage!)

Mum friends
A tumble dryer
Extra time off work when they were little (returned when aged 2 and 4)

Having a hands-on, decent partner who is committed to me and the baby. Having a support network of involved family (both mine and his) living nearby and doing regular childcare to give me a break. Having lots of good, understanding, caring friends.

Without any of the above it would be so much harder.

My life has got better since I met my fiance when ds was 4. Prior to then I was a single parent for 3 years whilst my ex did next to nothing. Now my ex does 30 percent and my fiance helps with ds. No way am I having more kids though.