I’m a people pleaser. 90% of my anxiety comes from worrying someone won’t like something I’ve done or that I’ve dropped the ball somewhere. Did I walk too fast past that person and now they feel slow and useless? Will husband notice I’ve not cleaned the bathroom floor? Does that upset him? What if the plumber thinks our carpets are ugly? What if work doesn’t like my filing system? Why do I still feel guilty for what I said to someone twelve years ago?
It’s taken me six years to choose a wallpaper for our bedroom. I went from grey to more grey to yellow to pink and settled on green. I love it. Husband loves it. Or that’s what he says. I’m now in the midst of living room decoration and honestly I’m finding it more stressful than giving birth.
My indecisiveness and hesitation has started to creep into my life as a mother. It took me four months of research and reading the same reviews over and over again to choose a baby monitor. I spend too long trying to decide if he should wear long or short sleeves. Will he like his name? What if I’m forcing Elmo on him? Does he notice if I stay in my pyjamas all day today? Is he sick of me? Am I entertaining enough? Does he remember the time I accidentally poked him in the eye? Will he grow up hating me?
I guess what I’m saying is this. No. He won’t. He’s happy and healthy and has everything he could ever need. He will grow up loved and fed and with a warm (potentially undecorated) home with not a worry, because I won’t let him worry like I do. That’s what mums are for. We take all those little worries and concerns and we absorb them into ourselves. We carry the weight of our child from the moment they get a heartbeat. And that means carrying all their pain and heartache for them, for as long as we live.
We hover behind our babies as they learn to sit, holding their hands as they take those first little wobbly steps into independence, always there ready to catch them when they fall. The silent protector waiting in the wings, gathering up their sorrow and tidying it away out of reach. We can’t stop them experiencing it all, but a mother’s job is to soften the blow and lessen the ache.
If there’s nothing else this last year has taught us is that there’s no limit to what a mother can endure. Please go easy on yourselves mums, we do so much and worry about it all. Your baby loves you, the world is brighter for your child being in it. If you’re indecisive like me you’ll know that even if I can’t decide what to have for lunch for the rest of my life, by baby is the best and greatest decision I have ever made.
So as I sit here, right behind my baby as he plays on the floor, I’m staring up at my chimney breast covered in wallpaper samples, from the corner of my eye I see him wobble and start to topple. I reach out and catch him, he laughs and I say “don’t worry honey, mummy’s got you.”