To wonder why having young children turned me into someone I don’t recognise?

[peachpearandpink]

My children are now five and two and a half and I’m slowly staring to find things getting easier and I reflect on the last five years and have so much guilt and shame.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done things ‘right’; I’ve read to them, taken them out to groups and classes and swimming lessons and park and woodland walks and soft play and duck ponds but my god I’ve been so angry for so much of it. Sometimes frustration has boiled over and I’ve shouted, a lot, on a few occasions going on a proper rant where I just haven’t stopped.

My first was born after a horrible birth, I was exhausted and passed out after (he was eventually born by EMCS) and I felt so unwell and spaced out after the birth. It was Covid, there was no support, breastfeeding was impossible to establish and I took it personally, it felt like a rejection of me and I got so frustrated with both of us. I stayed awake for hours at night expressing breast milk and I honestly think it turned me a bit mad … he had the most awful witching hours and I’d panic, would think he needed to see a doctor as he must be in pain. I remember one awful night when he was just a few weeks old driving around in the small hours and falling asleep in a layby somewhere. I got obsessed with sleep and his naps, would get all tense and angry if he didn’t nap on schedule. His sleep was very poor until we sleep trained at 18 months. Then I got the idea he was a ‘bad’ toddler because of my ‘bad’ parenting. all in all I want to go back and shake myself.

when I had dd two and a half years later things initially were much better; she was a better sleeper and I knew what to expect (plus planned section) but the stress of meeting two children’s needs (often conflicting) really got to me. I felt guilty all the time, tense all the time, the only time I’d relax is if I was driving and they both fell asleep. I got so angry about stupid stuff like once toddler ds kept walking in front of the pram or toys on the floor, potty training ds made me furious if he had an accident

I can feel myself relaxing by the minute as it’s getting easier and I just wish wish wish I could go back and be the gentle and loving person I always actually thought I was.

Reading this with interest and solidarity. My little girl is 2 yrs 3 months and it is HARD. Bedtime is slowly getting longer and longer, with her refusing to stay in bed. This morning she woke at 4am singing. I am constantly worried about her getting ill (ex-NICU baby) and jump every time I get a text from the childminder. I feel like I'm walking on eggshells sometimes. She can be so unpredictable and goes from 0-100 on the tantrum scale in seconds.

We had a couple of weeks of good sleep and I started to think, maybe this is it, maybe I can get some of myself back. I booked a hair appointment, I bought myself some new clothes. Now I feel defeated again. The constant illness which then spreads through the house! I don't know how or why anyone would want to do this more than once.

I knew it would be hard, I knew my life would change, but MY GOD I didn't fully appreciate it. On the other hand, the good times are so good. Having my daughter has given me so much, she is kind and sweet and funny (when she wants to be!) She is learning so much every day and I am so proud of her. I'm just exhausted. I do get breaks, and my husband is fantastic, but the breaks are never enough.

Then the guilt comes. I should be doing this and that, I should want to spend more time with her, I should want more children... I'm getting counselling and I'm on anti depressants and anti anxiety medication so I'm doing all the right things. I still find myself crying several times a week. I feel so judged by everyone, and constantly like I'm not doing enough.

I agree with lots of this. Slightly concerned how many of them (excluding sleep) overlap with my teaching career as well, it's a wonderful I haven't had a breakdown.

I understand this ..you must forgive yourself parenting is really hard and nobody is perfect.
You may of been depressed low mood you would of been tired.
Running a house and all tjat comes with this many people don't admit to this so stop giving yourself a hard time .
There are many years ahead were you can be the calm loving understanding parent now you feel things have eased a little ..x

Oh op!!! I feel like I wasted the first year of my babies life because I was frustrated! My husband’s worked away so I was with her on my own. She was cared for and feed etc but I wasn’t happy doing it! It was a chore. I love her she is my oxygen but those early days were tough and I think it was because I didn’t lower my expectations! I can’t go back in time but now I know that that time is gone, I am determined to not lose another year because of the unreasonable expectations I had of her and myself. She is a nightmare at nappy changes… 30 mins to get a nappy on never mind the accidents! Now I just wait until she comes to me and clean up the mess. I don’t even feel upset/angry. I just look at her enjoying running naked and laughing and tell myself nothing else is more important than this minute she is happy! Don’t be hard on yourseif…

Oh, please, please forgive yourself OP. You are speaking for so many mums who went through what you’ve experienced & thought, the same as you:
“If only had done it better, it wouldn’t be like this”.

You did enough. You were OK. You were enough. It was OK.
Tho’, in theory, we’d all like to be perfect, in retrospect we have to be a bit forgiving of ourselves. 💕💕💕

You are so normal.
I had 2 under 2. had to express and syringe milk into both for weeks. No-one slept until the youngest was 6 and a half. It was musical beds and floors every night as no-one would sleep in their own bed or cot. The youngest would only sleep lying across me. Videos of the early years look idyllic, but felt like hell at the time. I felt like death for 6 years (doctors said it was just me being tired until one finally did a test and discovered I had haemophilus influenza). I was constantly exhausted and had no help. It made me feel angry and bad-tempered a lot and I was so disappointed to find that I was not the lovely mother I wanted to be. THIS TOO PASSES. You are doing great.
Mine are 14 and 16 now. Life has returned to normal. I love them to pieces and everything is good.
HANG ON IN THERE.

Theres a good instagram account "biglittlefeelings" run by 2 mums of toddlers who are very real about it not all being ok/perfect parenting. They cover topics like this a lot. My children are similar ages to yours, and I have learned to apologise to my them for getting snappy when overwhelmed. Neither are "easy" and the first few years were frankly hell. I've hidden social media friends who have picture perfect families and post constantly, as the comparison got to me. I keep telling myself that I am lucky they are healthy and have great personalities, but yes, it is bloody hard.

It sounds like you might have had post natal depression? Especially when you describe taking things personally.

I found the baby/toddler years really hard, I also had a terrible birth and was a single mum. At the end of the day you do the best with what you’ve got which at times is not much!

Kids are very resilient and forgiving and you only have to be good enough.

Be kind to yourself op.

Op my mum lost her shit with me ALL the time…and as an adult we have such a close relationship and I wouldn’t be without her. As well as losing her shit on an almost daily basis she also hugged me regularly, told me she loved me and was my biggest cheerleader and defender when it came to school etc. So I think kids can overlook the shouting and impatience if the good things are consistently present in between the shit losing episodes.

Ohhh, I feel you…deep in my bones. My mother once said to me ‘I never knew anger like it until I had children’, and that was also my experience. Like you I was good with kids and felt confident going into it. What a fall I had!! I think some of the challenges you are describing is being so attached to how you imagined things to be, or how you felt they were meant to be. How toddlers were meant to behave etc. And gradually you are learning to lower the expectations.

I do think anecdotally, that the mothers that have the hardest time are those that think it will be lovely and expect that they will take to it. Those who expect it to be a shitshow and are afraid of lots of aspects of impending parenthood, often seem pleasantly surprised. Low expectations. And baby/child temperament a huge part of course.

As for your question ‘is this just who I am?’ - it’s behaviour that comes out under strong stress and is temporary. You probably just didn’t have this kind of stress to show you this response before. It definitely is the most stressful thing I’ve been through in my life and I’ve experienced a fair bit of bereavement and other traumas, worked in very stressful roles etc. I think precisely because how you are as a mother is so core to our sense of self and who we think we are/who we want to be. Truth is there’s no ‘real’ us - we change all the time, and you are changing now. Give yourself grace as you’ve done your best and it IS good enough.

Thank you for this thread. OP, you've managed to articulate so much of what I feel. I find it hard to even look at photos without feeling sadness, and regret and shame about not being the parent I always thought I'd be. I have spent (and still am spending tbh) so many evenings vowing to do better, be calmer and more patient, only to repeat the same patterns of rushing and shouting and haranguing.

So many of these replies are not only comforting, but also really helpful and interesting and I'll be looking back to this thread often I think.

I have ‘mum guilt’ every day. My son is 30 years old now. He basically cried non stop from when he was 2 weeks old he until he was 9 months . I felt like I had lost my mind. One day, he cried so much that I put him in his cot, shut the door and went in to the living room and turned the tv up as loud as I could bear, just to drown out his cries. I remember thinking that I could understand how some parents just snap and end up shaking their babies.
I scared myself with the anger i felt toward him.
I felt so traumatised by the whole first 6 months of his life that I had to have counselling.

I should have had some sort of domestic help or a reliable babysitter , I had none and no support network when I had my 3rd child because we had moved to a different area of the country ( plus my parents not willing to help ) .
What did stop me from going completely mad was sorting out a morning playgroup place for my middle child .
It wasn’t much really , only 2 mornings per week while my oldest was at school.
So was just baby and myself those 2 mornings .
I also made use of shoppers crèche at a small mall not too far from us + supermarket near us also had a little drop off for kids over the age of 2 so I’d drop middle child and get a coffee at the cafe then get my weekly food shop with baby .
It wasn’t much but it meant I could at least get a food shop or browse the mall shops for an hour in peace while baby slept in pushchair .
I did activities at home and out of the house too , walks to parks etc .
it was hard work

Yes, I despise the notion that they have an optional clinical diagnosis (PND) for a perfectly logical, human reaction to the circumstantial abuse that mothers have to live through. It implies that some mothers are weaker or better than others and if you are not enjoying the early years then there must be something wrong with you. You see this trivialised time and time again on MN. As soon as any woman starts a thread about how hard she finds the early years, the answers are always "ooh it's normal" or "you may have PND" or worse, "you're doing great mama".

Unsurprisingly, most women tend to feel better once they finally get enough sleep and their kids are more independent. But there's a huge dark hole left behind at the memories of those years which were fun in some ways but horrific in others. I suspect it's like soldiers coming back from war and refusing to remember or discuss the things that they experienced. They can re-integrate into normal society again but they will never talk about certain things because it's too taboo to mention.

Im a mum well and truly on the other side now, my first baby is nearly 19. I could of written your post....trust me when I say you've done your best with what you could at the time, your babies will love you just as you love them.

Just tonight my boy lay on my bed whilst he told me all about his day at work...these are the moments that will soon be yours...you will hold them close and treasure them

Just wanted to send you .
It is a really hard job and no-one does it as well as they would like. You clearly love your kids and that will be enough to get you and them through. This is the hardest time. It WILL get easier.

It's horrible isn't it. My son is 14 now and it's so much easier. Sounds like you had a really rough time. Perhaps you had PND in me it caused anxiety, OCD and rage. I ended up having to apologise to my son for letting him cry out as a baby when he was about 12 just to let it go. Also can not recommend therapy and EMDR enough. Got to the root of the issue without too much talking.

Parenting is fuckiny hard. YANBU

My children are mid-lifers themselves now, but I still feel guilty about how bad a mother I was at times and I don't even have the excuse that they were difficult children either - they were both exceptionally good sleepers and have never caused me any real problems, although that never seemed to stop me from shouting at them!

Please don't feel guilty OP - I really take my hat off to today's new mothers, who are shoved out of hospital hours after giving birth with very little help or support and virtually none if they don't live near their families. And so much is expected - working up until labour begins, exclusive BF, never leaving the baby unattended for a moment for the first six months - still can't even begin to imagine how that could work -and often back at work before the baby is a year old, if not younger. It all sounds completely nightmarish and I'm surprised that there aren't more cases of PND - perhaps there are and they just aren't picked up because nobody seems to give much of a toss about mothers' wellbeing.

I'm sure that you were nowhere near as bad as you imagine and mostly just tried to do the best you could with the resources you had, which is what most mothers do. As other PP have said, we are all better with some ages than others - I was a very laid back mother of teenagers and really quite enjoyed the primary school years. Babies' early years are both dreadful and wonderful and every combination thereof, often within the space of the same hour. Please don't beat yourself up - just try to enjoy the two wonderful little people that you have co-created and know that it will keep getting better as time goes on. Love and hugs to you.

Total solidarity OP.

I hear you. My best friend adores being a mother of infants ... co sleeps bf loves it all infinite patience etc. I didn't love it. But do you know what? I love being a mother of teens, adore it. Our time came. And ive asked them if they remember individual incidents at 2/3/4 that i still feel guilty over and they dont at all. Today is a new day, your son sounds lovely .

There's a quote from Downton Abbey that I love "there's more than one kind of good mother". Try not to feel guilty, not everyone can have the patience of a saint. There's so much pressure on women now to do everything perfectly. I have similar aged children and I've lost my temper lots of times and I beat myself up after, but we're only human and all doing our best! Potty training my first for me was the most stressful experience by far

are you a single parent? Just asking as you don't mention any support. Can you seek counselling?

Some great support on this thread. Sending solidarity ladies

This has just given me flashbacks to the time I was panicking because a baby from our NCT group could say "chickpea" at 14 months and mine was still babbling. With hindsight it was ridiculous but at the time I felt like I was falling her. It sounds like you had a really rough time. I'm glad it's getting easier for you. Don't beat yourself up, if the stage of motherhood you were worst at is the one your kids won't remember then really that's in their best interests!