2. Once you are a mother, you are every child’s mother. You are the mother on the news holding her sick baby and you’re the other mother at the playground nursing a grazed knee while calming heaving sobs. You can’t listen to true-crime podcasts the same way you devoured them pre-baby and you certainly can’t watch the Madeleine McCann documentary on Netflix without feeling a physical ache.
3. There is a right way to peel a banana and a wrong way. But the right way isn’t the same on Tuesday as it was on Monday.
4. You feel relief when you see another child have a meltdown in public because it means yours isn’t the only one disturbing the peace on a morning out.
5. You will do a lot of maths; sleep maths, medicine maths, birthday maths and total-hours-in front-of-the-TV maths. You are grateful that, unlike what your high school maths teacher told you, you do walk around with a calculator in your pocket (and a notepad).
6. Even though the day of your child’s birth is one of the most momentous of your life, you will never remember her birthday when you get to the reception desk at urgent care.
7. There is no human on Earth receiving a more nutritionally balanced diet than a baby between the ages of 6 and 10 months. Remember to honour how well you did during this time when a year later you’re serving your toddler spaghetti tossed with butter and salt with a side of Ingham’s chicken nuggets.
8. You will either be a sleep training parent or you won’t. Once you have figured out which camp you fall into, do not read commentary on social media from the other camp. It will only make you mad.
9. It constantly blows your mind that other parents at the playground are the same age as you, not the same age as your own parents. Because you’re also constantly surprised that you’ve been allowed to raise children as a 17-year-old. (Newsflash, you’re actually 38).
10. Your second child will be from a completely different planet to your first child, despite the fact you have parented them in almost the same way.
11. You will never have a clean car again. There are biscuit crumbs in your seat stitching, raisins wedged into the crevasses of your Britax Boulevard Clicktight, and the interior door handles are suspiciously sticky. Funnily enough, you couldn’t care less because when your children are eating, they’re not whingeing, and that makes every rotten banana string worth your while.
12. Bluey is the only kids’ TV show worth watching; Chilli Heeler is mum goals. (But why is your secondborn more like Muffin than Bingo?)
13. You will not care what your child wears leaving the house provided they are dressed appropriately for the weather, and even then, as long as they’re not naked, you’ll take what you can get.
14. Rain, hail, shine, hangover, broken leg or Covid-19, when 7am rolls around (actually, make that 6am) you have to get up and parent all over again for the next 13-plus hours. You cannot call in sick and you will not get a lunch break (unless your child still naps. Long live the nap).
15. Once you drop your children off at daycare/kindy/school and head to work, you will secretly hope you get stuck in unprecedented levels of traffic so that you can be alone for longer with your podcast and your takeaway coffee (that you can enjoy uninterrupted).
16. When you’re in the trenches of new motherhood, you will resent your partner for getting to go to work, even though you couldn’t imagine anything worse than going back to work.
17. You can always find a fellow mum who has your back and will have a relevant yarn to soften your current struggle. It may well be a stranger on the internet, but you know what, it’s okay if your “village” is other mums on Instagram.
18. In teaching your children to regulate their emotions you are simultaneously learning to regulate your own. Oftentimes you don’t know who is teaching who.
19. Motherhood is a dichotomy of emotions. It’s a pleasure and a pain. Patience and fury. Joy and despair. A full heart and a broken one. Ups and downs. Laughter and tears. The best of times and the worst of times. (If Charles Dickens was talking about parenting, he was bang on).
20. You can always try again tomorrow.
Lucy Slight is a beauty and lifestyle columnist for the New Zealand Herald. She has worked in print and digital publishing for the past 17 years in both New Zealand and Australia, across a number of well-known fashion, beauty, entertainment, food and home titles. Recent helpful advice includes how to read more books this year, the best seasonal produce to buy, and how to make your cut and colour last longer.
