Skip to main content

10 Years a Mother

So... this amazing girl just hit double digits.


There was a time, when I was pregnant with her, that I really had to work through my feelings about becoming a mother at all (I've linked some blog posts here). I had never been all that keen on motherhood - from my own growing up experiences, I saw children as nothing but needy and motherhood as a trap.

How different it all has shaped up to be... I guess like the baby inside me during pregnancy being unable to imagine life outside, nothing I imagined was anywhere close to the reality. Because what I was surprised by wasn't the drudgery of changing nappies and constant feeding - which turned out not to be drudgery at all - but the joy and love this little being filled me with. I felt like I was coming into my own, I never felt lost or 'not enough' as I heard other new mothers lament at times... against all expectations, I felt perfectly equipped and was loving every minute. Tired as I was, I loved it and I embraced it all.

From this tiny newborn, she grew into a curious toddler, who was never anything but kind to the little brother who invaded her world when she was only 19 months old (although at first she was really quite cross with me!) - even from this tiny age, she's loved babies and she still does.


So where are we now, at age 10?

There's so many aspects to her personality, I can't even begin to do her justice. She has always been a people person, and remains that - everyone's a friend, there are no strangers in her world. Her friends range in age from zero to a hundred: it really struck me during the hard of hearing conference in Norway, how easily she related to a hard of hearing elderly conference attendee one moment and a little four-year-old Ukrainian girl the next.

Receiving a birthday gift from our Norwegian friend


She's also a footballer, loves to play at the local club. That she's the only girl doesn't seem to bother her at all; and the other players have started calling her 'the medic' because whenever anyone falls over or looks hurt, she's the first person there to check on them.

Birthday Cake


She's always been people focused, rather than 'stuff' focused; and so buying her presents has never been easy. This year, again, I spent a good amount of money on her party at a trampoline park with friends, because that was her main gift - other than that, the only thing she really asked for was a dog onesie! And the party was a huge success for all.





She's been empathetic from the get-go, and remains that way. When D(8) flies into a temper and shouts at me, she's always there to hug and comfort me. I reassure her I don't take it personally, as D is just angry, but her concern is for my feelings... what a beautiful heart she has. She sees the good in everyone, believes in and cheers others on (in football, she's usually the only kid who's totally unbothered by losing - it's the game that counts!) and looks after the small and weak in a group.

I don't know how I've ended up with a child like this, whose middle name - Joy - so defines her character and what it's like to know her. I can't take credit for any of it. But I love walking with her; and so we enter a new decade, new challenges and experiences, and I can't wait to see where she will go. I'll be right alongside her.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...
1 comment
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...
2 comments
Read more

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...
Post a Comment
Read more