One woman's perspective of (twin) parenting (and other thoughts about things)
I recently spent a substantial number of hours trying to shoehorn a very specific conversation with my husband about the nature of parenting into a general call-to-arms blog post.
It did not go well.
I don’t know if other people experience this, but when I’m doing something that - if you’ll excuse the psychobabble - puts me in a state of incongruence, I feel it somewhere in my subconscious. It feels uneasy, unsettling, generally Not Good. I know - on a really primal level - that I’m doing something that isn’t ‘in the groove’ of how I exist peacefully with myself.
This is what happened with that blog post. So finally (after much shouting from my subconscious because I wasn’t listening to it) I put the post down, and I probably won’t pick it up again.
But it made me realise that a post that I do want to write is this one.
A reminder to my future self of why I’m writing this blog in the first place, and also an acknowledgement that the challenges presented by writing it are opportunities and not obstructions.
So why am I writing this blog?
Clearly, at some point in the future, people will find it and be dumbfounded by my amazing insights into parenting, yoga, feminism and dogs and offer me millions of pounds to advertise their products, do motivational speaking et c.
Until that day, though, I’ma go ahead and boil it down to two things:
There is a third reason for writing, of course, which is that sometimes I will attempt to write a post and in the process of writing it, I will work out that it doesn’t need writing. The whole point of that scenario is to help my brain figure out what it thinks about something, and nobody (not even my future self) needs to see that ‘working out’. It’s not a GCSE maths exam.
The one thing I really want to steer clear of, though, is generalisations and call-to-arms kind of posts. Which is going to be a challenge, because in my head I am basically Marius at the barricades. But I know that going down that road lands me right back where we started this post - in a state of incongruence with an increasingly frustrated subconscious. I’m a crap activist (I’m the one in the catering tent a few miles back from the front line enabling those with an actual talent for changing the world to do just that) - I realised this some years ago, so now I just need to weave that knowledge into my writing. Also, there is so much stuff out there that essentially tells you how you should be experiencing life (think “Ten things EVERY new mum will understand!”), and it’s really damaging and something I want to avoid.
So this is the first note to my future self: write about your own experience, and make sure each post fits into one of the two (three) categories above. Otherwise, you’re almost certainly deviating into a generalised call to arms, which is not going to help anybody, least of all yourself. Put the kettle on and chill out.
The second important thing to bear in mind is that I am a perfectionist with a tendency for completionism. Or maybe I’m a completionist with a tendency for perfectionism. Either way, I like to do everything and I like to do it perfectly.
It’s a really calm way to live. I don’t recommend it.
But what this means is that deciding what to write about, and how long to spend writing about it, is really tricky for me.
By the time I started writing this blog properly, the Smols were about 6-7 months old, and I had already forgotten So Much Stuff about the early days - stuff I knew at the time I wanted to remember, but I just didn’t have the energy to notate for future write up. The temptation to trawl through old diaries and texts and hit my memory with a big stick until things fall out is high, but ultimately I’m not sure it serves anyone, least of all me. We all write because our heads are full of stuff, right? Adding to that burden in order to generate more content seems a little counter-intuitive, however tempting it is.
So this is the second note to my future self: Let It Go (cue earworm #sorrynotsorry). If you remember more stuff later because you have a conversation with somebody and you think “Oh! I totally wanted to blog about that, but I forgot all about it until today!” then crack on and write. But don’t waste precious (and it really is precious) time trying to remember something that your brain has already deemed not worthy of remembering in order to remember it. Doing that makes about as much sense as that sentence did.
Finally, as I am sure I will write more about, I am a very strong believer in finding the opportunities for personal growth (ugh, sorry, but I can’t think of a different way of putting it) in daily lived experience. It serves not only Future You but also Present You, as (for me, anyway) it can reduce the stress/unpleasantness of a bad situation by knowing that you’ll get something positive out of it. This is the Extra Free Bonus benefit of writing this blog - it enables (challenges) me to keep checking in with my tendency to ‘do a Marius’ and/or fall down obsessive perfectionist rabbit holes, thus hopefully reducing my tendency to do so in the future.
I learnt this by doing an OU module during the first few months of parenthood - sometimes, life doesn’t afford us the opportunity to spend endless time editing, tweaking and perfecting something. Sometimes, good enough is all we’ve got. And, actually, finding it easier to accept that is the perfection I’m striving for.
So there you go, future self: write what you know, and don’t sweat what you’ve forgotten. Time marches on and there is tea to be drunk and there are babies to be amazed by.
xx