Before a parent starts to complain to the world at large - about being a parent, and about the destructive effect their child has on their sense of personal identity - they feel compelled to clarify that they do, in fact, love their child very much.
So, I should clarify that I do, in fact, love my children very much.
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Becoming a parent alters the course of your life irreversibly. It changes the colour and tone of your inner dialogue, shifting focus away from yourself. It changes how you spend your hours, days and months. Your children bring you unbearable joy, and flood you with purpose and perspective. But in exchange for these riches, they also take from you something you hold dear: You.
I have always been disorganised; the kind of person who would lose an important document, turn the house upside down searching, and eventually find it buried under a pile of dirty clothes on the bed. But I have fought hard to curb my natural instinct, and in the time leading up to the arrival of the kids, I turned into an optimisation fiend.
I adopted efficient systems of personal organisation. I installed shelves and sub-shelves inside cupboards, drawers, suitcases. Even weeks after neatly arranging a cabinet, I could, with my eyes shut, point you to the precise location of items inside. It took years of practice for me to fix my ways, and barely a few months for the kids to undo my hard work.
Soon after I painstakingly clean and reorganise the study, they come in to look for something. They leave behind an assortment of items that do not belong there - hair-clips, crayons, sippy-cup - and steal things that do - bookmarks, coaster, stapler, tissue box. When I return, I cannot find most things. It’s as though I have landed in a village raided by bandits. I clear a patch of table for my laptop, and work amidst flimsy piles of random objects, because the alternative - to tidy up - seems pointless.
Personal hygiene is another frontier I have conquered only in my 30s. It was not easy to go from bathing on special occasions to, (in Tara’s words) ‘always smelling nice’, but we were both glad I made the switch. Parenthood has unfortunately triggered a dramatic backslide.
Its sudden onset meant that I lost control over about 70% of my day overnight. I notice now, as late as 9PM on some days, after we wrap up dinner and bedtime, that I have forgotten to shower; or that I have stuffed dirty clothes in my cupboard instead of the laundry basket because the cupboard was a few steps closer; or that I cannot remember when I last cut my toenails.
I have considered the reasons behind these regressions, and while laziness, giving up in the face of burnout, and a poor enforcement of boundaries are all factors at play, there is more to it.
Children are not expected to be too careful. It is normal for them to dirty the house, drag mud onto carpets, rub the odd booger on bedsheets, and drop food on themselves. They enter different rooms (especially the ones they have been asked not to) and leave behind some degree of chaos. This is a natural consequence of being curious and adventurous. Protecting their natural spirit is important, even though it comes at a cost to us as parents.
We do not love the state of our home, but to blindly prioritise a clean house over everything else would be excessive, and unfair to them. Creating a space for undirected play requires us to accept that the house will rarely be as clean as we’d like. This is a sensible approach, I think, but the lowering of the household’s cleanliness standards has rubbed off on me personally.
Not to mention how enticing shortcuts seem when I view my options through a lens of exhaustion and parental overwhelm. For instance, why, at the end of a long day, would I not use the same spoon I used to take rice, to also take dal and chicken curry and chutney on my plate, then lick it clean and put it back into the bowl of rice? Especially when nobody’s watching.
It may sound trivial, all this talk of cabinets and personal hygiene, but clutter and dirt get in the way of doing simple, everyday things. They disrupt your cognitive abilities, sleep and relationships, and make you anxious.
Over and above organisation and hygiene, however, the greatest weapon a child possesses to derail an adult is ‘sudden interruption’. And because the inability to hear yourself think rules out the possibility of having a meaningful inner conversation, the greatest casualty of the ‘sudden interruption’ is a parent’s quality time with oneself.
I will sometimes start to voice a thought to myself and before I finish, a child will barge into the room, or drop something made of steel that will clank violently against the floor, or scream from the other end of the house out of joy or despair or simply on a whim, and by the time I return to my original thought, it has passed.
The problem is not the interruption, so much as its unpredictable nature. What sound will come, when, from where, and how long it will persist, are things I do not know. So a distraction is expected at any moment, even when none is on its way.
We hesitate to admit that we lose something deep and personal when we become parents - as if this would amount to betraying our children in some way - but while parenthood makes you grow in immeasurable ways, there is no running away from the fact that it also makes your old, original self disappear. At least for a while.
It gets easier with time, they say. That you partially recover your lost self as the kids get older and the centre of their universe shifts from you to other kids, to the thrill and terror of social situations. But that circumstance brings its own distress: one day they will stop leaving their shit all over my study, and will complain about me not respecting their boundaries.
I know that day is on its way, though, and whenever it comes, it will be good to smell nice once again.
"The problem is not the interruption, so much as its unpredictable nature. What sound will come, when, from where, and how long it will persist, are things I do not know. So a distraction is expected at any moment, even when none is on its way."
This is how my children describe me in their journals. I am the sudden, unpredictable disturbance they dread.
. This ..., with its organisers and. what clutter does to your brain ....and the kids and play and chaos...and interruption and hair clips .....mazza agaya i want to say, but not just mazza ....also happy for the kids
P.S. I read this 30 minutes after my sister responded to my SOS and helped me organise one storage unit. We are only 1/4 th through and I know I will mess it up in two weeks and it won't be because of kids ..but my god looking at that 1/4th is bliss and for a fortnight I will feel like buddha