The Turn of a Friendly Card

1. You're in the trenches - don't judge yourself right now. Caring for your first very young kid is a massive expansion of capacity/capability and represents a learning curve in which you are scrambling to level up while the game constantly changes parameters. It's tiring. However, you ARE levelling up - and as you do so, your kid will be levelling up too. You can and will be clever and energetic again. I wanted you to know this. The secret: you have to level up fast and hard when your first kid is very young.

2. I do a lot of things, but you don't always know the quality to which I do them! While people on the internet DEFINITELY expect EVERYTHING that YOU do must be of the ABSOLUTE HIGHEST STANDARD, most people on the internet are very unclear about the standards to which they hold themselves! I recently finished a quilt for a child - it is a delightful quilt that makes the child happy, but no two edges are square! I'm a poor-quality quilter. Sure, I am a working parent who finished a quilt - but it doesn't mean it's a show-quality quilt. The Secret: most people don’t share the quality of their endeavours - anyone can appear to do a lot of things if they do them all badly! - so don't judge yourself by standards of people who aren’t sharing theirs. The converse of this is: If you are overwhelmed, you can usually drop quantity or quality.

3. Okay, so some things are stacked against me: my spouse is disabled, I don’t live on the same continent as my birth family, my in-laws are in their 80s, and I never have any bloody money. But i do have a decent serious day job and some support networks. I can often ask local people for in-person help that I need, like walking my kids to school, and I have just enough money to pay for things that help me, like #4. Secret: money and friendship can tape over a lot of small cracks that would otherwise lead to big cracks. Most people NEVER admit to having EITHER… but most parents have one or the other.

4. We do have various avenues of help, ranging from paid childcare to flexible working, and even paying professionals for things around the home and garden, even if I can technically do a lot of things myself. Even though I'm strong and skilled and physically able, I don't spend all my days chopping wood and carrying water. I own a robot vacuum and an air fryer. The secret: Where possible, we spend money to buy free time.

5. People who are legitimately entitled to my attention never feel they get quite enough of it. Probably the only ones who do are Dr Glass (for whom I stay up late every night so he feels he gets time with me; see 6) and Mouse (for whom I get up early, ditto.) my older children would definitely love it if I spent more time attentively lying on the floor playing Playmobil with them. Work would quite like me to consistently Exceed Expectations. EVERYONE IN THE FUCKING WORLD WISHES I WAS MORE RESPONSIVE TO MESSAGES (take a number! No, literally, please take a number.) secret: I am definitely not doing everything. and everyone I have ever interacted with would probably prefer if I gave more attention to their priorities.

6. I am not sleeping much at the moment. I sleep about 6 hours a night. Secret: I sleep less than is recommended for health, let alone happiness. That's not good.

7. Threaded through all of this is prioritisation. I certainly sacrifice sleep for “writing.” However, I also don’t do low-priority things AT ALL. I don’t sit down to watch television. I don’t play video games or mobile apps. I don’t wander around in circles. I don’t scroll Instagram or Reddit, and I am not reading books that don’t interest me. I’m usually multitasking, and am usually either doing high-priority tasks or things that are HEALING AND FUN (drawing horsies.) where possible, i offload and delegate, and where not possible, I apologise. Sometimes people kindly recommend me books, films, music, etc - it will literally be a case of, "I can pencil in listening to that on Wednesday." Secret: I don’t do a lot of lowkey “decompression” activities / hobbies. On the one hand, I free up a lot of time by not going on Reddit. On the other, people decompress to relieve pressure, which is a luxury I don't have.

8. I quite likely have crippling ADHD, but I’m also quite high-capacity, so I just run permanently in a really high gear with little downtime or rest as my operational state. Secret: my shoulders are broad, but most people would probably prefer to drop hobbies/standards.

9. Secret: Multiple children can be easier to care for than just one. Just one child wants all your attention. Multiple children play together or can be led through activities. I often offer to have my neighbour kids over because this makes all the children happier and easier to care for (and I receive the reciprocal favour.) note this when you need to take your kid to the park (awful by yourself, lovely with a friend.)

10. Secret: bigger kids honestly do better with certain impressive-sounding activities. It sounds impossible to make jam with three kids, but it’s literally easier than watching TV with them. Making jam is an activity where every child can be given an important task. Mouse (2) washed cherry-plums for a full half-hour. Bug (5) could have pitted cherries all day (the best way to pit large volumes of things like cherry-plums is to squeeze them in your hand and pull out the stone with your fingers.) Bear (8) could sort bad cherry-plums with reasonably good judgment, and could be trusted to stir hot jam, watch the numbers on the scale, and other literate tasks. This is (emotionally, mentally, spiritually) much easier to project manage, even in a cramped little kitchen like ours, than trying to find a television show they all like. Any household task that can include a Kid Job module is gold dust in terms of childcare/entertainment. You can also invent them if you don’t have any. It’s super hard to keep Mouse out of the kitchen when I’m in it, so Mouse does a lot of small invented jobs, like “washing things that don’t need washing” or “chopping cucumber with a butter knife.” Stuff like “doing crafts” or “having an allotment” or “camping” or “visiting attractions” ditto - crafts, travel, and gardening may sound impressive, but are all things that have lots of little tasks that can really absorb kids. Secret 10b: there will be some activities with your kids, especially as they get older, that you quite like doing. Your kid may never exactly become a HELP, and it’s not likely that all of your interests will mesh, but it does count as quality time + hobby time for you.

11. There’s a saying, “With your first kid, you need lots of help. With your second kid, you get by okay. But with your third kid, you help others.” It does get easier with time. But parenting requires skills. It makes a material difference that I’ve already experienced (and learned from) a lot of specific challenges. It would be upsetting if I hadn’t! You would EXPECT someone in their late 30s with 8 years of parenting experience to have some apparently-successful coping mechanisms and a few success markers. The alternative would be unspeakably depressing. We should EXPECT some things to stack, some powers to develop, some skills to grow, and our own characters to deepen, strengthen and evolve. The secret: skills take time to learn, but they do accumulate, and it should be noticeable when someone has spent time collecting them. Parenting may never get easier - life may never get easier - but ideally we will be developing our own character alongside these challenges, and facing them with ever-more maturity! We aren’t done growing yet either.

12. The secret: My kids are pretty easy. I've been lucky. I wouldn't have had any past the first if it had been miserable.