As I sit on the loo, my teeth grinding with frustration, my head shaking at what I’ve become, my ears shrink from the sounds wafting up from downstairs.  Her sister is consoling him, hugging him, there-there-ing him.  She asks tenderly ‘what’s wrong?’ and his answer puts my head in my hands.

‘Mummy made me cry’

This morning, after a director’s-cut-extended-version of the normal ‘hurry-up’ mantra that increases in urgency and volume, today I reached decibels even my neighbours would have heard, the pent-up frustration of chivying two children into shoes and coats boiling over like milk on the hob.  Yet had I overheard someone else remonstrating so manically, I would’ve raised my eyebrow and muttered ‘how could anyone could be so melodramatic about getting to school on time?’

What Has Got Into Me?

I am not proud of myself.  My head hangs in weary shame as I go downstairs and apologise – I aim for unreservedly but am unable to resist saying that I wouldn’t have needed to shout if only he’d have hurried up in the first place.  Humble is not my middle name.

I used to be fun, mischievous, curious, creative and fun (again).  Yet recently I’ve become a shadow of my former self – a grey-washed version devoid of fun or cheeriness or that joie-de-vivre that surprised and annoyed colleagues who fervently believed that being at work and singing in corridors were mutually exclusive.

Who Am I?

I am not the mum I thought I’d be. Not the mum I dreamed I’d be. Not the mum I told the adoption agency I would be.

I naively thought that being intelligent, organised, a bit of a neat-freak, a creative problem solver and – let’s not forget – fun would magically make me into an awesome mum.  The sort of mum who never-shouts, breaks spontaneously into a chorus of ‘she’ll be coming around the mountain’ in the checkout queue, has a permanent powder-puff of flour on her nose from all that hilarious baking, hilarious-fun-mum that has other mothers jabbing their fingers down their throat in jealousy.

I am not even close.  And that hurts.

I can’t help feeling a bit of a failure as a mum – all because I judge myself against an unrealistic ideal of SuperMum.

Why Am I Not The Mum I Dreamed Of Being?

1. I am tired.  When I wrote about the skipping-through-the-meadow fantasy of forever family life, I hadn’t bargained on being this tired all the time.  I’ve never experienced such a protracted period of dead-in-my-slippers tiredness, so I failed to predict  the impact of this on my personality.  Turns out, mega-tired Emma has little reserves left for being some let’s-make-a-tree-house-now-fairy-cakes mummy.
2. I am tired.  I can’t remember the last time I woke up in the morning and felt refreshed – that kind of jump-out-of-bed-and-annoy-your-still-asleep husband as you fling open the curtains, declare “Hello World, You Gorgeous Thing, I’m He-ere”, then gleefully sing in the shower as I prepare myself for a day of gadding about, laughing, pottering, walking and more.  Instead, the kids cry my eyelids open, or the alarm shatters my dreams, I fight the impulse to take a baseball bat to the alarm and crawl back under the duvet whilst hanging a sign on the door telling my family that I am on strike.
3. I am tired.   I feel like a bomb disposal expert whose scissors are hovering over blue and red wires, the music winding to fever pitch as I go to either save the world or get blown to smithereens whilst screaming “should’ve cut the red one.”  When they are awake, my vigilance-o-meter is constantly in the ‘danger’ zone, alert for sharp corners, their siblings biting their ear off or snatching the toy they weren’t interested in two seconds ago, hot stuff, cold stuff, things they can climb onto and hence fall off, other people (all assigned potential kidnapper status), coughs, coughs that are choking, shouting,  that eerie lack of shouting that indicates mischief of YouTube fame and any noise that is out of the ordinary (which is every single thing in this surreal experience of becoming a family overnight).  And at night, it’s not as if I can simply fall into a pit of dreams only to wake in the morning.  Every thump wakes me up as my ears strain to discover if they’ve fallen out of bed… wait… no cries?  Just them thwacking their mattress with their leg then.  False alarm.  But since you’re awake (says my brain) why don’t we plan what you can make for tea a week next Friday, or better style, analyse all the ways you failed to be a great mum yesterday? Argghhhh!
4. I am tired.  There are so many tiny things to cram into every day, things that take up little time individually, but like writing a Christmas card, when you pile them all together into a single day, they take your will to live and wring it through a mangle, until the tasks takes on epic proportions that deserve a Nordic song, and you wish you could put it off until the last day of posting, but you can’t because tomorrow there will be another enormous list to complete.  If I drank it, I’d just want a cup of tea that doesn’t go cold before I even get a sip.
5. I am tired.  My children are emotional – their life is a rollercoaster of extremes but who knew I had tickets to ride alongside?  When they scream and cry from pain, injustice, or that minuscule sprig of cauliflower on their plate with which I am clearly hell-bent on poisoning them, I wish I could watch them with  disinterest and distance.  Like shrugging with confusion at how anyone in the audience thought that weak pun deserved anything more than a wry smile during a bad sitcom.  It’s not as if I get to join in the laughter and giggles, for my adrenaline response seems to think that when they scream I need to remain stressed for at least another 3 hours, or until the kids kick off again, whichever is soonest, so that even their giggles fail to penetrate the taught muscles of my nervous system.

No wonder I am grumpy.

The Anti-Grumpy (aka Sleep) Plan

There is of course a solution to all this.  I go to bed at 7.30pm and catch up on some sleep – which is the night they wake up every forty-five minutes, coughing their little lungs inside out, until they are so pumped full of Calpol I wonder if they will ever wake up.

But I am nothing if not persistent, so the next night I put my ear plugs in, go to bed at 7.45pm and tell my husband in no uncertain terms that tonight he is on coughing-Calpol duty.

I am not promising that tomorrow I will wake up and be the mum of my dreams, but maybe, with a following wind, a decent breakfast and without anyone being sick or wetting themselves before we’ve even made it to school, I won’t make my son cry.

SuperMum?  Gah

Is it just me who shouts and struggles and feels like I am not good enough?

Share your experiences of your struggles against the ridiculous ideology of the “supermum” in the comments below…