Anyone who’s been watching the whole donkey story will know that what I found so hard – what the ‘adventure’ really was – was my ineptitude and discomfort with being in charge. And here I bloody well am again.
I am not the number-one parent. And in coming to realise this I feel like I have stumbled on something huge, important, and totally un-discussed, as far as I’ve read so far.
Rhys sometimes calls me the number-one parent, and it does feel like that often. It was obviously the case at the beginning – I had the megabelly, and then the fourth-trimester invisible-umbilical link to the new baby, and the wretched, useful, nipples-of-fire. As Osian’s consciousness grew so that he was able to be reasoned with, chivvied or cheered up, Rhys’s role grew. But in the middle of the night Osian waned younger, a closed-eyes, thrashing, clammy little burrow animal, and my proximity calmed him while Rhys’s – by not being what he expected – made things worse.
When breastfeeding finished Rhys could do nighttime comforting, but still I felt like default number one. I was often overwhelmed by the pressure, and Rhys was sometimes cheesed off when passed up for me, but it seemed just the way things were. Osian’s natural selection.
Then I was talking to some great friends who are a lesbian couple with a toddler the same age as Osh. A— was the one who gave birth, but she was claiming that by now, post milk etc, there was no difference between the roles of the two parents – no number-one and number-two mother. Their toddler’s preference for one or the other was just a matter of who was spending more time with her.
At the time, swamped as I seem to always feel by parenthood, this felt like an extra blow. I guess I felt needled by their modern freedom, free of gender-based traditional roles of tedious oppression. They were free from so much old crap, and suggesting in this simple but indigestible one line that my captivity was of my own making. I chewed on these words for weeks.
I didn’t like it. I thought up some excusing factors. Perhaps their even roles were actually because they are both women. The woman is naturally the number-one parent, and by both being women it was somehow naturally easier for D— to become a proxy number one than it would have been for Rhys.
Or perhaps they were just wrong. It was A—, birth mother, who had made this subversive claim. Maybe D— didn’t feel the same. I made an urgent note to check with her.
My inner guilty feminist heaped the failure of falling into gender traps on top of the actual discomfort of maternal overwhelm.
And then I walked to Hay Festival.
I was gone a week. On the second day Rhys dropped the backpacks off by the high, dramatic Claerwen reservoir so that Ursula and I could ease ourselves into walking without carrying the weight, and as he rounded a corner and saw us on the single track he breaked suddenly and I knew Osh was awake in the car seat and dived behind a bridge. Ursula spoke to my boy while I crouched in my fragile temporary freedom, simultaneously amused and heartbroken, so as not to upset him with a glimpse of me. Rhys carried away my unused waterproof trousers, my unwisely heavy tins of sweetcorn, and the tiny love-jailer who is all the most wonderful and miserable things about my life, and he left us tangerines. Osian wailed to part even with them, and Ursula and I walked on, free and sore.
After that I enjoyed the space, grinning like a simple-minded panting clown at the top of each hill, often thinking of the men I gave a (fairly friendly?) bollocking to in a pub on Offa’s Dyke when I passed with Chico, at the height of his mutiny. They were complaining about having to climb 400m from their night stop just to get back to the path, and I gave them short shrift, probably shrilly at the end of my tether, that “At least you know you’ll get there!” Loss of liberty trumps everything else in the suffering league tables, I feel, keenly, often.
ANYWAY, I digress. When our little family regrouped after Hay, I wasn’t number one parent any more. I expected to be punished a bit, but no. Osian was very glad to see me, but I’d been subtly deposed.
It was amazing. Out of habit and comfort Rhys was the one Osh went to. And administratively speaking Rhys knew how many nappies were left, what clothes Osian was willing to wear, his latest toy preferences, health peculiarities, state of hydration, recent bowel movement history. For a few days my Hay freedom leaked on into family life.
It didn’t last, but now I know it really is just a matter of hours spent. I don’t think that most of my contemporary mother-friends have had the chance to realise this. I’m rare in having had whole weeks away from my toddler already, and in being able to share the childcare slightly more evenly with Rhys as we’re both freelance (although this includes a lot of haphazardness and disgruntlement too; Rhys isn’t good at schedules, I’m not good at sacrifice, and we’re both prone to sudden deadlines).
But it feels really, really, REALLY important to note. So much so that this rambly, anecdotal blog doesn’t seem good enough, or is maybe just the start. A— was enthusiastic about my conclusions and said I should present it as something that could be easily shared – this isn’t it. It’d also be good to know about other people’s anecdotal experience of this though – maybe I’ll do a Facebook strawpoll and see.
There’s a chance too that other mothers hold tight to being number one. For me it was genuinely a relief to realise that I wasn’t biologically beholden, but some people survive by transferring themselves more wholeheartedly to the mother-identity, and maybe the idea of release is even scary. I’d love to know what you think in the comments below…
