A friend recently pointed out something about motherhood I’d never thought about before – and I thought I’d thought of everything. Well, everything... bad, because all too often as parents, we’re primed to focus on our faults: not being patient enough, not being organised enough – or that time we forgot our kid’s packed lunch.
“When I went back to work,” my friend Sophie told me, “I realised how efficient I am, since becoming a mother. Especially when I’m working from home – if I have a spare five minutes between calls, it’s just the right amount of time to shove a wash in, then peel and chop some potatoes to put in the oven.”
And it’s the same in the office, she says. She’ll get more done than she ever used to – in 10 minutes between meetings, she’ll make a call or create a quick Google document.
Aside from quite obviously being Superwoman, Sophie is right. Becoming mothers turns us all into a multi-tasking maestros. By virtue of necessity, most of the time, because there’s simply so much to do.
Most mornings, I’ll look at the time and realise it’s 8.27am. I’ll think, “Oh, we have loads of time.” Loads of time, that is, before having to leave the house to do the school run... at 8.30am.
Yet in those three minutes I will turn off the TV, get the kids’ shoes on, put on their coats or jackets, wrestle my son into his buggy, make sure we’ve got bags/keys/homework books and make everyone a sandwich. Three minutes is buckets of time.
The concept of time changes entirely when you become a parent – in ways I hadn’t expected. Back when I was a student, time was counted in hours – “I can’t believe I have to go to nine hours of lectures... a week”. But as a parent? “It’s been 25 minutes since his last feed and he wants more milk?!”
When you factor in things like baby nap-times (which last all of about 20 minutes), toddler early wakings (like clockwork at 5:23am), is it any wonder we deal in minutes, rather than working from hour to hour, like we always used to?
“Is it any wonder we deal in minutes, rather than working from hour to hour, like we always used to?”
I remember the awful ‘growth spurt’ days, when my children would wake every 30 minutes or so for a feed (‘cluster feeding’, they call it). Or the times they would occupy themselves for a maximum of 45 minutes – 45 minutes in which I learned either to do the domestic stuff (washing up, cooking, tidying), sleep, or watch an entire episode of Gilmore Girls. The latter two, by the way, are much more important for parental self-care than the former.
The thing is, you barely even notice it happening, this concept of time changing. The one place you do notice it, of course, is in the absence of it. Specifically, sleep, which you can count all on one hand, because there’s so little of it.
The pressure is always on for parents to ‘do it all’. We get used to those whacking doses of ‘mum guilt’, and feeling like we never quite measure up. But the next time we start berating ourselves for not being enough, let’s try and remember all we can achieve in three minutes.