I had a big cry yesterday morning.

I felt so out of my depth, because no matter what approach I tried, I could neither stop my little boy from being angry and aggressive, nor could I comfort him. He was consistently rude, angry, aggressive both verbally and physically (thank goodness he’s still really little!) and neither my husband or I could do anything that made a difference to him. It was a very difficult day!

Every single thing you experience for the first time as a parent is, of course, brand new. And there are so many of those! Jon and I realised quite quickly that once you’ve actually given birth and everyone is deemed fit and well, you’re basically on your own, even in the hospital. I wish there was a manual that could be downloaded into your brain when you have a baby!

The feeling of being out of your depth doesn’t really ever go away, I think! It began from the birth of my eldest and continues to this day… as evidenced by yesterday’s experience.

The first 6 weeks of Livi’s little life we basically spent on Google. I can’t even remember all the crazy questions we typed in as we stumbled in the dark trying to find the best way forward. Simple things like how best to dress a newborn for bed time, or how do you know when to switch breast when feeding. Whether swaddling is good or bad, and how to help them sleep well once swaddling is no longer a safe option. And of course there are the more serious things to do with sickness and health issues. It was a crazy intense learning curve that just seemed (seems!) to go on and on!

When we had Toby we felt so much more confident, but then he turned out to be so different to Livi in almost every way, that we basically started from scratch again!

Our latest ‘new’ thing, appears to be night terrors. Well that’s just fun and games! Liv never had them, although she had plenty of disturbed nights and apparent bad dreams, but Toby has now had a couple and it’s just dreadful to observe.

Reading up on them, you’re advised not to try and wake the child but just let it run its course. 10 solid minutes of inconsolable sobbing whilst calling out my name… I held him, whispered gently, but he just didn’t calm. Then, out of nowhere and with no intervention from me, he stopped, and fell quiet. It happened again during the same night, and followed the same pattern. In fact I spent the entire time he was crying the second time comforting Livi, and covering her ears, as she was pretty disturbed by the whole thing.

We have found so many instances in trying to parent well, where we simply don’t know what to do. It’s quite scary actually! The last thing in the world we would want is to do something that will cause any kind of damage, or trauma, or even have a minor unfavourable impact on our children, but it seems there are just so many opportunities to get it wrong! It frightens me a little, I’ll be honest.

Especially when it comes to trying to guide behaviour. That’s an every minute of every day task at this age, and I still don’t really know if our methods are too gentle, too lenient, too controlling, too strong, or too anything! We don’t want to raise bratty children who think they can just do as they please and never face consequences, and we don’t want to raise children who can’t think or choose for themselves because they were constantly told off for exploring new behaviours, emotions, expression or even activities (like seeing if rice will fit snugly into their drinking straws *rolls eyes*). There must be a balance, but exhaustion and having to repeat yourself over and over again can eat away at your patience!

With every new experience comes an opportunity to explore, invest, engage and learn. Hard to do that when so very tired, but the opportunity remains, nonetheless. My current personal goal is to find the silver linings that must be outlining these clouds, and figure out what I can do with these opportunities that my children continually present me with! If you have any thoughts on the matter, let me know!

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