Over the past 10 years I have watched my fair share of young women and men enter into the scary and wonderful world of parenting. I’ve observed as they’ve changed from young fun loving people into caring mums and dads once or twice over. Not that they are no longer fun loving, its just not the priority anymore. Parenting is an all-consuming, all juggling journey and when you make an effort a little further down the line to carve out some time for yourself, it is still with your children in mind and won’t happen unless you are satisfied that they are safe and well.
The more responsibility I had the more I found I needed to feel connected and supported. For me it deepened my connection to God, my husband, my mum and other women I trusted and there was the added bonus that with God I had a 24/7 hotline that was never busy!.
It’s important to invest in relationships that give you a sense of safety but more importantly that don’t exhaust you emotionally. As parents we’re usually running on empty and it’s often then that we find we have to put emotionally draining relationships on the back burner. We can even find that some friendships need redefining or sadly may even have run their course. This is not always a bad thing but part of our growth and experience about relationships that we will be able to use to support our sons and daughters when they encounter forks in the road in their own lives.
I found that in the first few years of parenting I often felt lonely. A feeling rather than actually being alone. There’s something about being the only adult in the house, especially if you’ve taken time out from your working life! I also found that I wasn’t 100% sure of who I was anymore in the early years and in hindsight I realise that it was ok, I was changing. There is no quick fix to that and neither should there be. It’s a period of redefinition and growth, especially for us as women as our bodies have changed as well as us changing on the inside, and the coats we wear will continue to change in style, shape and colour over the next few years. I know from speaking to my husband and male friends that the feeling of responsibility men feel when they have a family to think of is immense, more than we as women realise. I remember feeling too old and responsible to see myself as young and nowhere near middle aged. A kind of no man’s land!
There is no ‘one size fits all’ on this journey, especially during the early years and the years that your children approach and enter adulthood (but that’s a journey for another time!). You may work or not, live with your husband/wife or partner or not but what I think I’m trying to say at this point is that the early years are really a very small window. I know you’ve heard this before and I also know that equal amounts of time can be spent loving and enduring it. When you reflect in years to come it will seem like the blink of an eye. It doesn’t all feel good does it? and that’s ok because as we know building muscle takes work.
In a while, you’ll be passing your wisdom on and supporting someone else starting out and though you won’t feel anything like you know it all, it will feel like a lifetime ago that you weren’t a parent.
As I Was Thinking 