It takes a village to raise a mom

In my life, ‘excitement’ is a dangerous beast. It has multiple heads good and bad plus many layers and qualifiers. While I envy friends who trek up Mount Kilimanjaro and catch the sun rise, I know that post having a kid, a dull day, when everything goes according to plan, and no bones are broken, is about as fantastic and exciting as it gets in my world!
In other words, boredom is bliss.

For instance, on my dull, routine, evening walk, I dread it when the phone rings and my mother’s familiar icon flashes on the screen. She’s with my kid during playtime, and the call can potentially carry news of a range of disasters. This is excitement I don’t need: emotional upsets like the mean girls bullying my kid to tears; or worse still, physical ones like the time when she broke her wrist, or that time when a football smashed straight into her face.

The irritants in my day are thankfully small and few; but the smallest things now seem to drive me dotty. The daily set of variables deadlines, cook, driver, courier, kid, kid’s health, husband’s health, bills, internet connection, school pick-ups, geyser, washing machine dance above my head like so many dinner plates.

Drop one, and a State of Emergency might have to be declared. Maybe it’s part of the whole nesting instinct – this need to have things just so in the small assemblage of twigs that I call my world. Or, more shamefully perhaps, it’s a personality trait that decided to rear its ugly head only after I crossed 35 which was, honestly, a long time ago!

Thankfully, there are pressure-release valves built into my day. These pockets of peace are my friends, and the conversations we have. My friends can be divided into the ones I had before kid was born and the ones I made post-kid (mostly other parents). Both bring reassurance and sanity into my life albeit of different kinds. The post-kid friendships are relatively new, forged because we are all in charge of small human beings who thrill and terrify us at the same time. We struggle to make sense of life with them, and any sharing of knowledge or emotions helps.

Parenthood is a great conversational equaliser. You can always discuss the kid’s feeding habits and build up from there. It’s a subject we love, and one that will slay non-parents with boredom. Being a parent has led me to friendships which go above and beyond the comfort-zones of education and class. It’s been humbling because I’ve learned that there’s understanding, wisdom and comfort to be drawn from the unlikeliest of quarters.

But my oldest and closest friends are the pre-kid ones. We have the comfort of a shared, slightly-checkered past. We’ve watched each other make life-altering decisions at work and in relationships. They will, I know, put aside their lives to step into mine and help. And because our association has run for so long, they don’t need to be told about every facet of the emotion I am feeling. We share a mental shorthand, which makes talking fairly effortless.

 The key difference between the two sets of friendships is that the pre-kid friends knew me at my worst. And surprisingly still stuck around. The post-kid friends met me during my let’s-try-and-become-slightly-human phase. Only old friends know how sulky, unforgiving and reckless I can really be. The post-kid ones have bought into my comprehensive self-improvement plan. They think I’m always polite, cautious and nice. If only they knew!

I need both kinds of friends desperately more than they would ever know or I would ever admit. The kind that can talk me out of over-stretching myself in my efforts to be a good parent and the kind that can push me towards becoming one. As it turns out, it takes a village to raise a child and her mother as well!