Not child-friendly

I spent the first 35 years of my life deeply disinterested in having kids.

I was notorious for my refusal to hold babies. If one was forced into my arms, I looked awkward and terrified, like I was holding a bomb that might explode at any second.

I’m even ashamed to admit I mouthed “you’re ugly” at a baby screaming in a supermarket queue once. It promptly threw up all over my designer sandals and the spew trinkled down between my toes … There’s karma for you.

The only reason I got pregnant was I’d set a deadline. I told myself when I turned 35 it was time to start trying, just in case I left it too late and couldn’t.

Not really the most romantic notion, but my career kaboomed rather late in the piece and I got caught up in climbing rather than nesting.

The last thing I expected was to get up the duff on the first attempt. Yup, the very first. I took a pregnancy test in the office bathroom and wept tears of panic – not happiness – when the positive blue line appeared.

I’d been looking forward to six months of trying before it actually happened, which is a terrible thing to say when so many people have so much trouble conceiving.

When I gave birth nine months later, I wasn’t one of those motherly types who claps eyes on her vernix-covered, screaming infant after it’s extracted from the womb and gasps “OH MY GOD, I LOVE YOU!”

I wrote a feature for Cosmo Pregnancy magazine many years ago, giving mums-to-be advice on what to expect in the first year with a new baby. Number 1 was: It’s OK if you don’t automatically love your baby.

I explained: “Some women fall madly in love with their child the moment she’s placed in their arms. Some women don’t. Don’t beat yourself up about it if you’re the latter. It doesn’t mean you’re a cold, heartless cow, or suffering post-natal depression. It just means you’re a bit shocked and overwhelmed by what’s happened. Labour is hard work, it’s painful and exhausting. A baby is hard work, too – at first all you seem to do is feed her, change dirty nappies and try desperately to get her to sleep. But you will fall in love with her eventually, I promise. It’s impossible to resist those little fingers and toes and chubby arms and first smiles. You just sit and stare at them in amazement, thinking “I made that!” And the love just keeps on growing until you’re so completely mushy about being a mum that it brings a tear to your eye just thinking about it.”

Husband took six months off work to care for the eldest while I went back to my career – I was editor of Woman’s Day and could only get two months maternity leave – and he’s fancied himself as an expert on parenting ever since. He even appeared on 60 Minutes jouncing the eldest around at Gymbaroo.

In those early years, I was regularly admonished by him for battling with my willful little doppleganger, who seemed fully formed at age 18 months. I look back now and wonder how the hell I managed to argue with a toddler, but she was speaking in sentences at that point and knew how to push my buttons.

I’m also not great with unnecessary weeping – I think it should be saved for actual traumas – and toddlers are champion wailers.

I concede that perhaps I could have been more patient with her floods of  tears.

Later, I was accused of “standing off to the side observing your kids and smiling wanly.”

There’s a certain truth to that. As a kid I lived the most rich imaginary life, but the older I got, the more self-conscious I became. I couldn’t let go and release my inner child.

Mind you, when the eldest was eight, she wrote a poem at school about me that went like this …

My mum is orange

She is spring time

Mum is in the kitchen

She is warm

Mum is a jiggly jumper

She is a little lounge

Mum is Mr Bean

So I can’t have been a total wet blanket, more a squishy doona …

More recently, Husband snapped one night that he was “sick of having to intervene” when I told the kids to stop fighting over their pizza because they were being greedy. He told me I was “emotionally distant” from my family. He expressed disappointment that I hadn’t made any Hama bead pictures with the kids or played with their new Wii over Christmas.

Oh, I could go on … but my chest is getting all tight.

Funnily enough, separating from Husband has released my inner child again. It’s just me and the kids five days a week, so I need to step up to the plate. Perversely I thank him for forcing me do that. I’ll never be awesome at it like him (send him to a kids’ party and he’ll step into the role of Pied Piper at a moment’s notice) but I’m definitely way better.

On Tuesdays, for example, the kids and I head to the local swimming pool and clown around for half an hour before their swimming lessons. I dance and splash and pratfall and pull silly faces while we chuck a ball around and they LOVE it.

I’d never have done it before he left. I’d have let him do all the work in the water, because I hate the stuff. (A bloke wrote on a bouquet card to me once: “For a Pisces who doesn’t like water, some flowers to put it in.”)

And a funny thing has started happening on our Tuesdays at the pool. Children stare at our games with fascination and longing. They come up and ask to play with me (not the girls!). I’ve become a kid magnet.

It drives my daughters mad because Tuesdays are “our” time. We play in the pool, they have their lessons, then we go to a restaurant for dinner together. They don’t want to share me with strangers.

I look around the pool and I realise that most mums are either sitting on chairs beside the pool or standing in the water supervising, not playing.

And I remind myself, it’s not just me. There’s nothing wrong with me because I’m not great at child’s play. Lots of grown-ups are the same. It doesn’t  make me a bad mum. My kids love me. I love them.

We’ll be OK.

Are you good at playing with kids?

Song of day: Fleetwood Mac “Dreaming”

Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down
It’s only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat.. drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost…
And what you had…
And what you lost
Thunder only happens when it’s raining
Players only love you when they’re playing
Say… Women… they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean… you’ll know
Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It’s only me
Who wants to wrap around your dreams and…
Have you any dreams you’d like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness…
Like a heartbeat… drives you mad…
In the stillness of remembering what you had…
And what you lost…
And what you had…
And what you lost
Thunder only happens when it’s raining
Players only love you when they’re playing
Say… Women… they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean… you’ll know