Life This Week 25/3/2019: Memories I’d Like To Recapture.


In short, I’d like to recapture the early days, weeks and years.

There was so much to learn, do and accept that I didn’t have enough time to simply be in the moment.

Our first days in hospital together were a blur of hormones, nervous energy and sleep deprivation.  Fortunately with good coffee from down the road.

Embarrassingly, nothing I read in any of my books while I was hugely pregnant and reclining on the sofa with a bowl of Cheezels was anything I could confidently put into practice in our little room on the ward.  Thank goodness for the helpful posters on the wall and the nurses who checked in on us….
I remember the feelings the most from those early days of January 2013.  The warm fuzzy ones from azing into that sleeping little eyebrow and eyelash free face and the sharply contrasting feelings of being seriously out of my depth when I looked into that astonishingly large, toothless oral cavity as it cried and hollered.  I remember feeling as if I’d re-entered the world after leaving it for the planet of new motherhood that first time I walked out of the hospital for a quick stretch after Master SSG was born.

I wish I’d spent less time second-guessing and less time hurrying the next stage along.

I wish I’d been more in awe and less in fear.

In this day of everyday life being the subject of thousands of phone camera photos, I wish I’d taken just a few more photos of us in amongst the 99.99% of photos that were all just him.

I wish I knew then what I know now. 

That sleeping through the night, talking and toilet training would all happen in their own time.  That the silent disappearing act in public places of highly mobile toddlers would end when they did learn to talk and then you’d never again be without a running commentary of your time together.

That those seemingly throwaway lines other parents told me were both true and comforting.

The days are long but the years are short.  This too shall pass.  You’ll never get this time back again.  Yes, but they (the babies) haven’t read the books.

Would you have ‘done’ the early days differently?  Is hindsight a benefit?


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