No ante-natal class can ever prepare you for quite how much crying will become the soundtrack to your life for a good two to three years after your child is born. That is probably just as well because babies and small children cry A LOT. I sometimes think that if social media is good for anything it would be good for an annual day of uploaded clips of your children crying so that you can stand in solidarity with parents the world over. As it is only psychopaths would do something like that.
Among the many new senses that parents, especially mothers, come to discover when parenthood is upon them is the ability to discern their child's cry from amongst a tumult of wailing children. However, just as we mercifully are unable to recall physical pain it's remarkable how quickly when your child stops crying that amnesia sets in. It wasn't so bad really. This, by the way, is the only reason any woman can have more than one baby
In the early months of first time parenting even the slightest cry is met with a Defcon 1 level of immediate response. A few years and children down the track and the threshold changes quite dramatically. We have recently moved house and the baby/toddler is in a new and much smaller square room. This has an impressively magnifying effect on the acoustic so that his cries get the best possible amplification from every surface. I'm sure the neighbours have been marvelling too.
I was recently engaged in that most favoured of parental tasks namely sitting in a small dark room while your child goes to sleep (howls the house down). Needless to say the experience does remarkable things to one's heart rate and nervous system. After a while, probably 5 minutes but felt like 5 hours (crying time is remarkably elastic), I noticed something extraordinary. I stopped hearing the crying and instead I started feeling the crying, after I time even that feeling passed and I
was the crying. I had passed into another dimension. Fortunately at that moment the baby threw in the towel and nodded off before I lost all touch with reality.
So modish has mindfulness become over the last years that we're probably well into the backlash but I am yet to meet anyone who can explain how you're supposed to parent mindfully when your baby is screaming like a banshee. As I have said the only certain solace comes in the reminder that this too shall pass. Until it does there are always headphones and many, many copies of Gina Ford to be found at the charity shop.
