One thing that makes every parent’s eyebrows rise to their receding hairline is hearing a non-parent declare wearily “Oh, I’m so tired. I’ve just been so busy.” Hmmmmmm, they think, wondering just how busy a person who doesn’t have small version of themselves trashing the house every twenty minutes, plus and job, plus finding out where to get a build-a-bear before said small person’s birthday at the weekend can possibly be. Are you sure you’ve been busy? Really, really busy? Perhaps you’d like to come and spend 48 hours at my place. Then you’ll know what busy means!
It’s true that the life of a parent is one that scares the bejeebies out of anyone who hasn’t produced offspring yet. I remember looking at friends who had kids, at a time when I felt I had no spare time in the world, in between my job, washing my hair and erm, well, that was about it actually, and wondering how on Earth these people coped. Did they have an extra five hours in the day that the rest of the world didn’t know about? Did they grow an extra arm with each child? Were they just better than me at doing stuff? How would I ever cope, should I have kids one day?
The very lucky answer, for all those of us who have taken the plunge and procreated, is that when you become a parent, you just manage. Nobody is ever sure exactly how you manage, but you do. The washing gets done. The children are fed. The beds are changed. Food arrives in the fridge. The PE kits labelled. The birthday parties get organised. And cleared up after. It just happens.
It’s as though parenthood is the biggest wake-up call to get organised a human can ever experience. Where once you might spend all morning wondering what to make for lunch, now the lunch is made and stored in an air-tight container next to the kids’ packed lunches the night before, and by breakfast time you’ve done more jobs than you did in a week as a singleton. The change is really quite extraordinary, and probably accounts for the fact that most of us don’t look quite as young as we did before small people took over out lives.
There tricks, of course, which all parents learn as they go along in order to survive past their first-born’s second birthday. Trick one, is learning to multi-task. If multi-tasking were an Olympic sport, parents, and, dare I say it, mothers in particular, would win every gold medal going. I mean, why just have a telephone conversation when you can also order Match Attax cards on-line, grill some chicken and empty the dishwasher at the same time – while breastfeeding? Why just pop out for a pint of milk when you can post five letters, return the overdue library books and have a ten-minute conversation with your mother about why you don’t want to spend Christmas there again, as you walk along at a snail’s pace with your toddler, picking up every leaf along the way?
Multitasking is the key to survival for parents, and it goes hand in hand with trick number two: finding ways to make their life easier. A parent’s little black book of short-cuts, things that work, cunning time-saving methods and products that make everyday tricky situations easier to cope with is priceless. If you have ten minutes to get out of the house and it’s just started raining cats and dogs, you need a great system for storing all the wellies and raincoats so they’re all to hand in a flash, a buggy rain-cover that doesn’t take a degree in physics to put up and a cunning distraction technique to get your child safely strapped in. When you’re hanging the washing you want clothes pegs that actually hold, a basket that’s easy to carry with a toddler on one hip, and a washing line that doesn’t collapse under the weight of four hundred baby gros.
Knowing what works, and how you can cut corners and makes things happen easily, quickly and properly the first time, is something all parents learn extremely fast – and for good reason! Often, there is no right answer – we all have our own ways of removing stubborn stains, our own techniques for getting a child to sleep, and our own must-have items that we depend on. That’s the beauty of sharing tips with other parents – you’ll always learn something new, and it could just be something that makes your day a lot better.
We’re not super-human. We just know what works.
