When did you start feeling like a parent?

[NicciLovesSundays]

Was there a moment you started to feel like a parent or was it a gradual thing? Did any of you feel like a parent before baby was born or did it take a long time to start feeling like a parent?

Oh I think it took me a long time! I think once my DD was a few months old and the novelty had worn off and I would be planning things around a third person. Now there's a forth and it's really hit me

I was reading some tweets yesterday from Bliss about people feeling more like parents when they could become more involved in their babies care.

I don’t understand what you mean by ‘feel like a parent’. What does being a parent feel like?

I feel like myself but more tired

From the moment I found out I was pregnant? That's the moment I changed my behaviour. Good bye cigarettes and alcohol, hello looking both ways before I crossed the road.

Telling a great big teenager who is taller than me that they can't go out, and quashing their back chat about it with just raised eyebrows and a hard stare makes me feel like a fully qualified parent.

When DD started walking. She run away in the shop one day, I visibly panicked and shouted her name and someone said: your daughter is over there.

That bit: your daughter.

I thought: fuck, I've a daughter. I'm a parent now.

I'm not even joking but the first year was such a fug (she was an awful sleeper until 20 months) that I just about survived it so this was truly the first time I got I was a parent and had a child and that's how people saw me

From the minute he was born, from his first cry - I felt a primal surge of what I can only describe as motherhood

One is 3 and one is 7 weeks and I still don't feel like a parent. I regularly look at them and think 'where the hell did you come from!' 😂

When I went back to work. When I was on mat leave it all just felt like a bubble, like it was all a phase and then I would return to real life (I know that’s bonkers, and obviously I didn’t really think that, but that was the feeling). Once I’d been back at work for a month and still a mum, then I really felt like a parent.