Double trouble
“Going from 0 to 1 is an existential challenge, going from 1 to 2 is a logistical challenge.”
When you’re out and about with two tiny children, people love to offer their pearls of wisdom. Some of this wisdom has questionable value - the next person who tells me to “enjoy every minute” is welcome to trade places with me during the night shift. But some of it resonates. I’m thinking in particular of the woman I met in a lift, who told me: “I bet you thought it was hard first time round, but now you wonder why you ever thought that.”
This does sum up my experience, and I’ve heard it from other people too. Granted, my second baby is an objectively ‘easier’ baby than my first was, at least so far. But the experience of finding the second baby easier seems to transcend the actual programmed difficulty level of the child. You look at them in all their squishy newness – their portability, their digestion-based needs, their willingness to stay where you put them – and you can’t understand what you were complaining about first time round.
Maybe I’m overstating my case here. As I type these words, one-handed, my ‘easy’ baby is slamming his head against my collarbone repeatedly. The obvious assumption would be that he’s searching for a nipple, but every time I offer one, he responds with the righteous anger of an Old Testament prophet pronouncing judgement on a wicked world. He isn’t truly ‘easy’ – which baby is? He’s a tiny, impossibly fragile, pre-verbal human, with a lingering cold, whom I’m tasked with keeping alive.
All this said, I do find my days with him straightforward – relaxing even! – and I don’t remember feeling that with his sister. After all, I have a toddler now as a point of comparison. Consider these two scenarios: a two-year-old kicking off because she doesn’t have access to a pink violin, and a baby kicking off because he doesn’t have access to a boob. (Reader, we bought a pink violin, but it took three weeks to arrive from China. The same could not be said of the boob.) Toddlers have more complex, more baffling and often more irresolvable needs.
I’m also comparing toddler + baby to the simple demands of baby alone. Since having two tiny children, I understand the meaning of multitasking, and it has something to do with simultaneously breastfeeding, cooking lunch, averting a potty-training meltdown, and reading a story about princesses. Navigating public transport requires a mix of extensive planning and brute force. (Seriously, have you tried lifting two children, a pushchair and 17 tote bags over the gap from train to platform at Lewisham station?) And while we used to have SOME floor space, we don’t have any floor space anymore.
There are relational challenges on top of that – how do I ensure child A feels loved when I’m beholden to child B’s needs? What do I do when the two-year-old has a meltdown and wants to be carried but I already have the baby in the sling? (See the photo at the top for my less-than-ideal solution.) While I’m sure love expands infinitely to encompass all your dependents, in practice you find yourself caught in endless trade-offs between them.
As a result, I do sometimes want to say to my past self, “pah, you find that hard? You haven’t seen anything yet…”. And yet that past self would be well within her rights to slap me. There just isn’t the same head-spinning, life-altering element to grapple with second time round.
When Jasmine was born, my major struggles had less to do with the baby, and more to do with having my freedoms curbed. I could no longer meet my friends in the evening. I couldn’t go on the kind of holidays I like to go on. My body didn’t look like how it used to, I couldn’t responsibly get a buzz on, and my workouts needed to be squeezed into specific times. Here on Planet Parent, I was discovering plenty of new wonders. But there was also plenty to be mourned.
By the time Dylan was born, I was already used to living on Planet Parent. I’d managed to make myself at home. As a result, there was no seismic shock, just a kind of doubling down and uplevelling. It isn’t easy, but hey, at least this version of me has changed a nappy before, and has just about made peace with the fact I can’t currently go to psychedelic raves.
In other words, I do know why I found it hard first time round. As the saying goes: “Going from 0 to 1 is an existential challenge, going from 1 to 2 is a logistical challenge.” And both types of challenge are bloody knackering.