By Hayley Bukhamsin
This too shall pass.
I vividly remember sitting on the floor of my parents’ rental apartment (we timed a visit back to the U.K. poorly – it clashed with the work they were having done in their house so we all ended up in a tiny apartment with poor soundproofing and creaky floors) – and sobbing quietly to myself as my 8-month-old played happily in the light from my phone: it was 1:30am.
I was exhausted, frustrated, overwhelmed, lonely and panicked. Could this be my life forever now?! Will I never get enough sleep again?! Am I doing something wrong? I’ve got to be the only mama in the world who is up right now, suffering like this, right?!
Being a first time mama, I couldn’t see past the stage we were in.
I feared that this would be permanent and I’d be woken up at 1am to play with my daughter every night for years to come.
It made me feel dizzy and nauseous just thinking about it, but I was also so tired and so stressed that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
So there I was, sobbing, silently, in the hope that my daughter wouldn’t notice. Forcing a smile through the tears when my daughter held up her toy in delight. I loved her with a blindingly fierce lioness love, but I did not love motherhood at all right then.
What I know now, that has made ALL the difference with my second daughter, is that these stages pass. Things change quickly. The midnight wake ups, the blow out diapers, the leaking boobs, the rocking to sleep in a figure of eight whilst humming a specific song and holding in that cough for dear life. They will all pass.
And just knowing that, with confidence, can change your whole experience of parenthood.
It’s not easy. I heard the mantra “this too shall pass” but it didn’t mean much to me to begin with. I doubted it: “yeah, but what if it doesn’t?”, “How long til it passes?”, “What if I don’t survive long enough to see it pass?”, “Do I need to do something to make it pass?”, “What about these ‘rods for my back’ that everyone is warning me about? It doesn’t sound like they’ll pass!”.
