Enjoy it while it lasts!

Do you mind keeping your opinions to yourself? Yes? Oh go on then...

Everyone, without exception, said this to me when Pickle was a baby. "It won't last for long, enjoy every moment! Don't take this time for granted!" Old ladies at the shops. Friends who had teenagers. Work colleagues. To the point where I started to get a guilty complex just for existing without gazing adoringly into her eyes for hours and hours. I started to resent the people who told me that, because it felt like they were assuming that I wasn't paying enough attention to her. They couldn't have been more wrong, as it turns out, as if anything, I gave her TOO much attention. Probably as a result of these people constantly telling me to! 

And then, when she was sleeping well, through the night in her own room at 6 months, it was "Oh enjoy it while it lasts, because just you wait....it's not going to be like this forever!" It was the "Just you wait" through forced, angry, smiling teeth that pissed me off the most. What they really wanted to say, it seemed to me, was "You're gonna suffer like we did one of these days. Don't get too comfortable because in a few years it's going to be complete hell for you. I hope you never sleep again, just like I didn't." We nodded politely, laughed wisely and secretly fantasized about punching those people in the face. 

We clearly lost the ability to "enjoy it while it lasts" because we were now terrified that every night would be the very last night she ever slept properly, fearing that tomorrow she wouldn't go to bed til midnight, sleeping for 35 minutes at a stretch, jumping up between shifts screaming, leaping around and beating her chest, waking up for the last time at 4 am, demanding to be fed and played with under gunpoint, not going back to sleep until the next evening at midnight again.

What I am finding really annoying, though, is that all of those comments, all of those well meaning people were absolutely correct. Time does go by, when you look back on it, very fast, although in the moments it feels as if time has slowed down, and also at some point stopped, but I look back on the time I had with her as a baby, and the retrospective vista is like paradise. I could go to the coffee shop while she was in the pushchair, have a latte and a brownie and watch her sleep between reading chapters of my book. The biggest stress for me at that point in her life was which latte to buy, where to breast feed her, and if I had enough nappies and wipes to clean up when she puked and pooed all over me. 

It's funny that people say that baby years are the hardest, because they are definitely not and that is a complete lie. I think that at the time it seems like they are because it's the first time you've done this. It's the first time you've never slept at night for months, involuntarily. It's the first time that you are solely responsible for keeping a tiny screaming pooping puking creature alive 24 hours a day, every day. It's the first time you have absolutely no time or energy to think about anything except your baby. It's the first time you cannot do one thing that you want to do, or need to do, for yourself. It's the first time you are so exhausted at the end of every day that you can't have sex, you can't make dinner, you can't even read a book. 

But with every new phase of a small child's life, I have observed, although possibly some of the hard bits are over, there are new hard bits. And the new hard bits are harder, and there are more of them. However, (and this is where the irritatingly accurate comments come in) I am starting to miss them. For example, after battling with Pickle every single night to try to get her to go to sleep, for over two hours most nights, she finally crashes like a badly built plane around 10 o'clock, and then 4 hours almost exactly later, without fail, she pads into our room and flops down on her cot bed, (that we have provided for her like her underpaid, terrified servants) sometimes crying for a cuddle and some milk and a wee wee, but mostly just to sleep close to us. Sometimes, when she is really REALLY tired, she doesn't do this until around 4 or 5 in the morning. I wake up around 3 on those nights, and have a profound sense of loss that she isn't in our room. I am already mourning the loss of her needing to wake up in our room although it hasn't even happened yet! 

This morning, after a relatively stress-free routine - getting out of bed was a little sluggish (especially when she climbs into bed with me and snuggles up against me with her back to me, slotting her body shape into mine, the top of her soft golden head brushing the underside of my chin and talking to me with her adorably lilting, unceasingly curious voice) but the other stuff was manageable - I said that she could take a toy with her into daycare, as she usually does. She decided to take a big cloud that hangs on her bed with a music box inside. I told her that actually, she couldn't bring that one because it lives here, in her bedroom. But she could take any other one. Cue meltdown. Screaming and crying, she rushed into her room and buried her head in her bedclothes, refusing to be mollified. It was a terrible tragedy of epic proportions. Not even the promise of a sparkly necklace and a dolly could soothe the savage beast. She was inconsolable. At this point we were already horrendously late for daycare, but, being self employed, I have the luxury of not having a deadline in the mornings, and so I decided, if we are late, we are late. Because I know that in a year, she will be going to school every morning, and there will be no flexibility with time - you are there by 8:30 or else you are branded as "always late". So I said she could have some alone time, and I cleaned the house a little while she stayed on her bed, and I came back into her room and rubbed her back, and eventually, she was ready to be picked up, cuddled, and carried out of her room ready to go. My point is, I was able to give her that time, that moment, this morning. Soon, I may not be able to, and I am so glad I did.

Yesterday, I met a crazy old man outside the coffee shop, as I was pushing Pickle, who is almost 4, in her pushchair. He looked at her and waggled his finger fiercely in my face, saying sternly "Enjoy every single moment with her! My daughter is 53! And it's gone so quickly!" I was stunned. I hadn't had that kind of chastisement since she was a little baby! But I think little interactions like that don't happen without reason. I think we all need a little bit of reminding once in a while, however annoying, condescending, and punch-in-the-face-worthy it is, to enjoy the moments. They are indeed the most precious, and we will never get to experience them quite like this again. 

Thanks for reading x

Edit: So I saw that crazy old man again more recently when I was at the same Starbucks. He said the exact same words in the exact same order and with the exact same inflection. I wonder if he does, indeed, have a daughter, and whether she has been 53 for the past 2 decades....