My DS is 11 months and he is my only child.
Most evenings I end up feeling very guilty and unsettled about various bits of the day and promise myself that tomorrow I will do things differently, handle things better, be more fun. And then tomorrow comes and goes, and I still feel the same in the evenings.. that I am failing him as a mother.
I imagined before I had a child that my incredible love for my child would mean that I would morph into some kind of Florence Nightingale figure towards me child. It comes as quite a shock to realise that becoming a mother has NOT changed me, and I am still an impatient person who likes things 'just so' and is crap at games. And it depresses me that this is the case.
I want to be so much for him, I want the best for him, I want him to be so happy and content. But I worry that the way I am going, he will not be these things. I worry I am lazy. We do go to Mini Mozart once a week, gymboree once a week and to the playground at least once a day. However, whenever we are at home, I very rarely actually play with him. Instead he amuses himself (pulling things open, banging things, generally hurting himself it seems!) whilst I do the housework. I worry he is not being stimulated enough but at 11 months I am struggiling to really know how to play with him and certianly for longer than about ten minutes!
I am also far more impatient with him that I ever thought I would be with my child. He is going through an extremely clingy phase atm. In the evening I think to myself that tomorrow I am going to be more patient when he is scratching at my legs to be picked up, but then tomorrow comes and I am irritated by it. It seems endless at times. Infact, on a couple of occasions I have shouted / screamed (not actually directed at him, but with him in the room) to "just give me a couple of bl*y minutes" or "leave me the hell alone". This achieves nothing other than making him cry harder and then I feel sick with myself later on in the day.
I could go on... with the list of ways that I feel I am failing my boy. He is lovely, a real fireball, but lovely. He is in a brilliant routine, naps well and sleeps well. During the day I am very much kept on my toes with him, but I do generally love it. I just want to know if there are others out there who beat themselves up almost every evening, remembering with a sick feeling how they really could have been a better mum and worry about the long term consequences of their actions.