Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I - Charlotte, hi! - write about my life as a mother of three small children - Poppet (m, 5 years), Pickle (m, 3 years) and Peach (f, 11 months.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.
I write to you today from the tail end of a ‘relaxing’ bath, taken in a bid to ward off mastitis.*
*My patented mastitis cure, you ask? Ok, I shall share. Why not. So, first of all, you have to look out for the signs. Those signs being pain in the breast, a lumpy feeling, a fever and chills. You have to really look out for this starting as it’s important to nip(ple) it in the bud in order for my method to work. Let it really take over and you’ll likely need antibiotics. Anyway, once the onset has been identified, there are several simple steps to take, and they are as follows: take ibuprofen, drink loads of water, have a very hot bath, lightly stroke your breast away from the nipple in order to stimulate the lymphatic system, get on as many layers as you need to get warm, feed feed feed, go to sleep. I wore three jumpers, two pairs of trousers and a pair of slipper socks to bed last night. What can I tell you, it works.
If you, too, are a fan of a bubble bath, do not be jealous that I have just had one. Green is not your colour and, also, it would be a waste of precious energy to be jealous of my time at relaxation station because it was not, in fact, relaxing at all. Having intended to spend a quiet hour reading Sophie Kinsella’s ‘The Burnout’ whilst in the tub this evening, I instead found myself doing the following things as my water, once the perfect temperature but merely a bit ‘meh’ when I finally got into it, waited for me:
- I re-settled Peach in my bed, twice, whilst casually browsing tiny ghost shaped candles for decorating the living room fireplace come Halloween. ‘Do you need to do this?’ I asked myself, as I took things in and out of baskets, ‘would decorating the house with spectres be for you or the kids?’
- I spent time on Poppet’s bed reassuring him that there are no murderous wild animals prowling the streets of Northern England, primed for the opportunity to kill him in his sleep.
- I had a good long chat with Pickle as he (at least waiting until I was in the water, I suppose) wandered out of bed to find me and let me know that: “I NEED A POO!” Sat for the following 15 minutes with his chin in his hands, he chatted on and on as I tried to nudge him along and back to bed. “What are you doing mummy?” He'd say, to which I'd tell him I was trying to have some quiet time but someone kept talking to me. He'd then laugh, exclaim “I'm talking!” before continuing to prattle on. We had a lovely chat as he considered the night sky from his throne and talked me through the key plot points of Disney's Moana and then, finally, he summoned me to clean him up and went back to bed.
By the time he was done, I’d lost the will. Kissing him goodnight with a plea to get some sleep, I decided not to try again for a bit of a relax, but instead to get another cup of tea and write a blog. Here I am, world, back on dry land.
I only hope the sea witch doesn't know where to find me.
The past few weeks have been full of change. Poppet is now in full time education, Pickle is at a brand new preschool, and Peach and I find ourselves with more time to ourselves. As a result, a new routine has been established and, while it’s taken a bit of getting used to, I am enjoying this new way of life. The school mum life, if you will. A life that has so far surprised me with both the realisation that I will see the same few people every weekday, twice a day, without ever having to make arrangements to do so, with the sheer volume of apps I am expected not only to download, but to keep track of (six so far, SIX!), and with how many messages have been sent in the mum’s WhatsApp group about who has whose jumper in their bag while the dads, in their adjacent group, have only spoken once, about booking in a night to eat curry. Getting into a new routine with new faces and places always sends me into a ‘they’re GROWING SO FAST’ spiral. I wrote about my mild panic about everyone hurtling toward teenagehood the other day so I shall not bore you with that tangent again (god Charlotte stop BANGING ON - but also if you wanted to read that - and are a paid sub - you can do here) but I will say that it really is a time for reflection, whenever these big life changes occur, and that some of those reflections, mundane and everyday as they are, come up out of nowhere to take me by surprise - one such reflection occurring today as I was shuttling Pickle and Peach between swimming lessons and soft play. A reflection that was, quite simply: I’m no longer a baby class mum.
Baby classes - a solace for some and a nightmare for others - were once a big part of my life. Offering a reason to be out of the house and an anchor to plan my days around, they were where I became comfortable with myself as a mother, where I learned that everyone else thinks they’re failing too, where I made friends and, perhaps most importantly, where I got a hot cup of tea and a biscuit. Sure, sometimes the crawling babies went through my bag as I sat nap trapped nearby, yes some of the mums were a bit cliquey, but it was all a part of the fun of the fair, and I loved it - so much so that, for a year, I ran my own baby classes, teaching baby massage and baby yoga to exhausted new mums, all of us sharing highs and lows as we ate Biscoff biscuits on the floor. That’s a story to delve into a bit deeper on another day, but allow me to leave you with intrigue by saying my baby yoga class lead to a turf war I had no idea I was a part of until, years later, I tried to book a yoga class to attend myself, only to be told I wasn’t welcome. Drama ensued. Very low level drama that was over in the space of three texts but still, more adrenaline than I’d expected when trying to namaste.
Anyway.
I see a lot of discourse online about baby classes, with many seeming to equate the humble baby class with online mum forums. “It’s the same vibe only the mean girls are in the room with you,” I’ve seen people say, to which I have to respond that, from my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. The typical baby class, as I’ve found it, is formatted as follows: mum and baby arrive at a class at approximately 11am (any earlier is too much for a first time mum, she says, remembering responding with horror when invited by a friend to a 9:30am playgroup when Poppet was 4 months old). Mum and baby survey the room, taking in the chairs placed around some sort of centralised playmat as a class leader smiles in greeting, directing mum to take off her shoes and find a spot on the floor. Mum sits wherever is free, placing her baby in front of her and smiling cautiously at the other mums, who are all doing the same thing. The class leader directs the room in around thirty minutes of singing, dancing, peekaboo’ing and baby sensory’ing before dumping toys in the middle of a mat and going off to make tea. Everyone smiles at each other’s babies, making small talk for a few moments before spilling the beans on their entire birth, postpartum recovery and weakened pelvic floor, fetching the tea for the nap/feeding trapped mums as more and more people overshare before, as everyone gets up to leave, someone says “sorry, what was your name?” and everyone heads off to continue their day. The online mum group, by contrast, goes a bit more like this: “Hi everyone, I’ve just had a baby and am struggling to feed, can anyone point me in the direction of the best formula please?” “FORMULA IS POISON BREAST IS BEST YOU DO NOT DESERVE TO BE A MOTHER YOU WILL BURN AT THE GATES OF HELL.”
I have fond memories of baby classes (I have some disturbing memories of online forums). I also have a diary entry from my time as a brand new mum of one, written after my first baby sign language session with Poppet, which I will now divulge.
*
Sometime in November 2019: I took Poppet to a baby sign language class today. It was a newborn session and there were six of us, all with tiny babes. The teacher was Irish with lots of black curly hair, and is so warm that I instantly wanted her to like me/adopt me and become my mum. She had us all sit on the floor on a velvet blanket, talking us through how to communicate with our babies as we did so, before making us all a cup of tea, handing out chocolate biscuits and encouraging us to chat. It was a bit awkward at first - we’re all very different and none of us had met before - but eventually the teacher said something to which I responded ‘you sort of spend the day trying to make eye contact with the other mums and hoping someone will ask you if you want to go for coffee,’ which opened the floodgates. As I say, on the surface we were all quite different. Although the group was small, it ranged crunchy mums to very fancily dressed mums, breastfeeders to bottle feeders, pram users to babywearers and what have you. None of which matters, really, but which does make you (me) wonder who you (I) most align with, and where I fit in. I use a bottle but it has expressed milk in it, I babywear but I love my pram, etc. It’s so easy to make snap judgments and to try to shoehorn everyone into a category but this class showed me how narrow that view is. We sat and we had our biscuits and we opened up to one another and all it went to show was that we’re all the same, really. We were all there trying to figure out what to do with our babies, trying to be good mums, trying to learn on the job. And I love that. I love that, actually, we’re all the same underneath. Her baby has colic, mine has a tongue tie, hers isn’t gaining weight. And all of us, each and every one, is doing our bloody best regardless. We’re all just doing our best.
*
I went to that baby class with each of my children, with Peach starting when she was just four weeks old. It was the best. I sort of thought I’d be going forever, in my sleep deprived state, which you think in every stage of parenting, I’m coming to find - everything feels like an infinite loop that will never be over and then, before you know it, you’re out of the loop and into a new one and all that was everyday and ordinary suddenly seems lost, sepia toned, magical.
Despite my wonder at the end of an era, I did see the end of my time as a baby class mum coming.
The closing of the chapter came in July. Classes were drawing to a close for the summer, and my beloved baby sign language teacher had announced that she was selling her franchise after 18 years at the helm. Knowing Peach would be starting nursery a few weeks into the new term, I made the choice to call it a day, and hang up my baby class boots. Arriving into the same room I’d frequented since 2019, then, I walked in for the last time to the green walls and the multicoloured blanket and the lady whose presence always felt like a hug. Doing my last lot of bear hunt stomping and hokey cokey’ing and of moving my steaming mug out of reach of crawling babies as I told yet another story that involved my womb, I bid adieu to the baby class life without much fanfare, other than a tearful goodbye - forgetting for a moment that I am British as I landed an unexpected and most likely unwelcome kiss into the hair of the woman that I do believe changed my life as I (literally) cried a thank you into her ear - and a box of expensive chocolates I was tempted to eat myself. I walked out of that class with my friend (the spendy one from this post, god love her) and even said ‘that’s the last baby class I’ll ever go to,’ shutting the door on TinyTalk and Rhythm Time and Rhyme Time and Hartbeeps and Moo Music and all the rest as I did so, skipping away into the day with only lunch on my mind, not yet processing what it meant that this chapter of my life was over.
Today, as I mentally planned the next few weeks, I was thinking about whether or not Peach and I could fit in another sign language sesh before I go back to work when: ‘Nah, she’s too big, she’d just trash the joint,’ said my inner voice, bringing me to where I am now. No longer a baby class mum. No longer someone that sits on a colourful mat and sings nursery rhymes as their child looks around the room in bewilderment, or sits under a parachute as their child, again, looks so bewildered that the other mums can’t help but laugh, his eyes so wide they almost pop out of his head (Poppet’s eyes always looked ready to pop out of his head as a babe) as the fabric goes up and down and up and down for absolutely no reason - I’m sure - other than to tire out my arms. No longer a baby class mum, no, but still a mum, nonetheless, morphing and changing day by day into all of the iterations my children need me to be, giving it my all even when I have mastitis.
That’s love, that is.
I’m doing alright after all.
In other news
I bumped into two moderately famous people one after another last week, confirming to myself just how socially awkward I have become since pregnancy killed all of my brain cells. The first, an influencer, offhandedly called me ‘supermum’ while I made a strangled sound before fleeing. The second, a reality TV star, was stood next to me at the swings in the park. Not knowing whether or not I should acknowledge that I knew his entire life story, we stood in awkward silence under the watch of a bodyguard until, finally: “they like swings,” I said to him. “Yeah they do,” he replied, and then I walked/ran casually/not at all casually to my friends to make sure they’d seen who I’d seen, to which one of them responded by very loudly exclaiming his name, blowing my cover entirely. Awkward.
We are considering transitioning Peach into her own sleep space which, despite assertions from some people outside our family unit that this is SO EXCITING!, I am in two minds about. While I understand it might be nice not to sit in the dark all night every night to make sure she’s safe in my bed, I can’t deny I love cuddling Peach as she sleeps. I thought I was doing OK with the choice but then I had a dream the other night, in which I spent a year nursing and sharing a bed with a cow I didn’t know was a cow, only to be told after taking her on holiday that she was too big to get back in the car and would have to be left behind. ‘That’s my daughter!’ I said, to which I was told ‘it’s a cow.’ ‘But I’ve been breastfeeding her,’ I said, ‘how will she sleep without me?’ At some point in the dream I looked at the cow and conceded she probably wasn’t my child after all, and then I woke up. So, perhaps not as OK with it as once thought.
And this post from
had me laughing so much I almost cried, which is why I think you should read it, and tell all your friends to read it too. (This post, by almost made me cry too, but for different reasons. I recommend you read this one, too)Until next time ❤️
P.S. I published a post exclusively for paid subs this week. If you would like to become a paid subscriber, I would love to have you. (And even if you don’t want to go paid, thank you for being here regardless.) The post:
Brilliant post, Charlotte. From where I sit, you are doing better than alright.
This speaks to me very much Charlotte. That transition to school mum and trying to work mum is where I am at, and I will miss the community I found in those classes. I mourn them a little as the time comes round each week, but I remind myself that this is what I wanted, it is still hard moving on to the next chapter and accepting change. ❤️