Writings by me

I just finished reading The Push by Ashley Audrain. It’s a wonder of a book, all about being a mother for the first time and the sometimes-extreme relationship with your first born. Massively recommended, but you will need tissues and time because you will not be able to put it down.

It got me thinking about the emotional baggage of the relationship with your first child. For me, and I suspect a lot of mums, being plunged into this all-consuming, equal parts joyous and emotionally exhausting ride that is first-time motherhood, it was the best of times and the worst of times. For me, being a first-time mother amplified my existing anxieties, fears, perfectionism, and troublesome personality traits and eventually led to postnatal depression. Undiagnosed, this morphed into moderate depression during my second pregnancy and is something I still deal with daily.

This experience left marks on my relationship with Freddie – how could it not? All that uncertainty, anxiety and exhaustion had to go somewhere. In fact, it’s not surprising that the pressures we feel as first-time mothers have that impact on our relationships with our firstborns. From religiously following the latest guidance, comparing our children at baby groups and the way our lives change irrevocably post-children, it’s inevitable that all of that ‘stuff’ will impact on the first child relationship. 

It’s hard to talk about this. It’s difficult to admit that you wish your first-time mothering experience was better, that you’d learned more quickly, the things you seem to take for granted second time round, that you’d enjoyed it more. That you’d never had to make the mistakes with your first child that you didn’t make with your second.

Today Freddie and I have a beautiful relationship, if sometimes stormy. I feel there is emotional baggage with him that I just don’t have with Harry, as the second child. I question the way I parent Freddie in ways that I just don’t with Harry. This book is an extreme version of that (Freddie, thank goodness, is not a psychopath). 

Nevertheless, I think that if I’m feeling that my relationship with my first child comes with a whole load of emotional baggage, someone else out there might be too. So hi! You’re not alone.