The level of multitasking you have to achieve when you become a parent is out of this world.
A mum can cook a full dinner while holding the toddler in one arm, rocking the baby in the bouncer with her foot, and making a phone call (if the speaker option is unavailable due to screaming baby/toddler, the phone is placed between shoulder and ear). Her free arm is peeling, chopping, dicing, stirring, the whole lot. And don’t you think for a second the toddler and baby are cooperating and keeping quiet and still, silently thanking mama for incorporating them into the dinner-making process. No, the baby is probably screaming the house down and the toddler is pulling mum’s hair while poking her nose. And yet, she makes it look easy.
A mum’s spirit animal is definitely an octopus. Some women are one baby away from mutating and growing a 3rd foot so that it can do laundry while all this is happening.
The speed of this adaptation process is something to admire. It doesn’t take long at all for a new parent to learn to do all kind of tasks and jobs while holding a baby. You just go about your life with one arm permanently deactivated.
My twins never wanted to be put down, they didn’t like the bouncers, cots, buggy… nothing. They wanted to be up and they wanted to be entertained. I never found a double carrier so whenever I needed to do things around the house, I would put one baby in the carrier and the other baby in one arm, so that I had one free arm to do stuff. You’d be surprised at how fast I learned to hang the washing with just one hand.
In the chaos of it all, you get so used to do so many things at the same time, that you really forget how to not-do-stuff, or even how to do just one thing at a time.
If I’m ever lucky enough to make dinner with nobody else around, I feel every second counts. I think every bit of the time something is in the microwave or cooking on the hob is a waste of time. So I’ll go and put on a wash, tidy up toys, put clothes away, make school lunches for the next day, answer a work email or empty the dishwasher.
There’s just no time to waste. As a parent, when you’re not holding a baby or tending to a child’s every need, you feel the need to use that time to try and complete every task on your list as fast as you can. It feels as if someone was on the side timing you to see if you’d make it into the Guinness World Records for “most household tasks achieved in under 12 minutes”.
You just live your life at a faster speed than child-less adults. There are so many things to do every day, and 24h is just not enough.
Yet we attempt it, EVERY.SINGLE.DAY.
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