A few months on from my brush with social services and I may just have to admit that the experience has made me self-sensor. My initial determination to keep sharing the hard and dark elements of parenting has been slowly eroding by the drip drip of doubt.
In some ways writing only works if you can be free from the fear of failure and judgement. That fear looks like a blank page and doesn’t get anybody anywhere.
It’s pretty much the same deal with parenting. Gripped by fear of being a terrible mother, of being judged badly by others, you don’t get any better at parenting. Quite the contrary, it knots you up in a dark and twisty place.
The hardest thing about parenting is needing to sit with your many failures, to tolerate the tantrums and tears, without feeling defeat. To bear their whining or screams and to try and help.
On another more positive note, language has really helped me feel a bond with my daughter. Her words are still relatively few, and often hard to decipher, but there is something beautiful about gaining a glimpse inside her tiny, fizzing mind. Her world is exciting, simple and very much in the present. Her passions are momentary and intense, her disappointments absolute but then shrugged off in a matter of minutes.
It all seems in such contrast to the entrenched creases of my own mind. Where decades upon decades have created furrows so deep you start to doubt there is another side. For me, the present moment gets crowded so easily – with shadows of the past, fears of the future.
So I try to find her joy at a wooden owl, at a tractor trundling past or her tickling me and blowing a raspberry on my tummy. Once again I turn to a 2 year old to teach me that happiness is part of being human as much as being sad.