I called my sabbatical parental leave without a baby. Unsurprisingly, it was nothing like parental leave with a baby. In Canada on school days, between the hours of 9am and 3pm, my time was my own. I had nowhere I needed to be and nothing that I needed to do. That freedom felt every bit as luxurious as my younger-self on parental leave with a baby could have imagined.  

Routine liberation notwithstanding, there was one similarity between my experience of parental leave with a baby and without. I often found myself asking the same question: How do people all over the world do this? HOW? 

Learning the ropes with a newborn for the very first time is a singularly foreign experience that has never been better described than by Esther Walker when she said: “It’s like being asked to sit your A-Level exams. In Russian.”    

In Canada I had no newborns to tend to, and it wasn’t Russian I was trying to master, so why did I find myself flummoxed? Because raising children without a skerrick of a village is HARD. 

When we arrived in Toronto we really didn’t know anyone. We were properly on our own trying to find our feet and even with older children it was a gigantic undertaking. The ages of our daughters meant the travel itself – planes, trains, airports – was (save for the inevitable sibling warfare) civilised. 

There were no prams, nappy bags, naps or bottles to juggle. Our girls could carry their own bags, watch movies, read, cut up their own food and tolerate the travel without much hassle. 

But, taking older children out of their comfort zone and placing them into a whole new unfamiliar world presented challenges that younger children might not encounter. They felt the absence of family, their own friends, their regular activities and the familiarity of home keenly.

Being overseas, away from the comfort and anchor of home, very naturally increased the emotional support our girls needed, at the very same time our own options for support were dramatically reduced. We were without grandparents, siblings, friends, neighbours, our regular and beloved babysitters. We really were on our own. The cumulative pressure on the family unit brought an intensity to daily life in which the highs were higher, and the lows lower. It was alot. 

It reminded me – viscerally – that the adage about needing a village to raise a child isn’t hyperbole. It’s factual. 

Parenting is, easily, the hardest job in the world. The patience, resilience, optimism and strength it requires, daily, cannot be downplayed. 

I maintain that there is nothing as physically relentless as having babies and toddlers; the 0-to-5 window is peculiarly demanding in ways too many fail to readily acknowledge and appreciate. If you are a parent with children under 5, I see you and I promise life will not always feel like a marathon no one really knows you’re trying to complete every day. 

I promise you that fast forward five years you will find yourself inexplicably longing for the opportunity to go back in time for just one more day with those sweet, funny, wild bundles of need. This does not mean you should be soaking up every minute right now. You just can’t. It is a chapter of survival that is filled with affection and joy and boredom and exhaustion and love. Enjoying the moments you do enjoy, however fleeting, is enough. 

I am no longer in that chapter and as a family we are now able to explore and enjoy life in ways that were utterly unfathomable when our girls were younger. But parenting remains the hardest job in the world. 

I have done some hard things in my life but nothing challenges me in the way that parenting does. One reason, I believe, parenting can feel so difficult is that so much of the trickiest terrain is invisible. As children grow older their privacy really matters and their highs and lows aren’t ours, as parents, to share. 

This can create the false notion that raising children is more straightforward than it really is. That belies the conversations I have with parents every single week. Conversations in which the full extent of parenting – in all of its grit and glory – is clear.

From managing illness or a diagnosis, to tricky sibling dynamics, to social exclusion and loneliness, to intense dysregulation, to school refusal, disordered eating, anxiety, relationship breakdowns: the list of specific triggers is endless but the result is the same. Families struggling behind closed doors. 

Parents spending hours and hours of time trying to work out what support looks like for their child or family. Tears. Angst. Heartache. Desperation. From professional intervention, to quick fixes: whether the challenge is health, social, educational, behavioural – there are parents out there hunting down answers to problems many don’t know they’re facing. 

My stint on parental leave without a baby taught me once again that parenting is the biggest, most-consuming job in the whole wide world for which there is no formal training. 

It is why The Parenthood exists; not just to lobby for positive policy changes like better paid parental leave and access to quality early education, to ensure parents and carers and children are supported, but to ensure that the reality of parenting and caring is recognised and validated. By leaders, employers, government, decision-makers but also? By us! 

It is the biggest, toughest, most important job that we all need to acknowledge and validate as such. So, if you are a parent or a carer you have permission to recognise the work you do every day.    

The post What I learned on parental leave without a baby  appeared first on Women's Agenda.

They were brimming with excitement too, though less, I think, buoyed by the prospect of pharmaceutical relief than the prospect of seeing actual people in a place other than our house.

“Can we even get out of the car?” my eldest asked with the kind of enthusiasm that might, in other times, be reserved for a trip to a theme park or a beach holiday with their cousins.  

‘Oh yes we can!’ I said, sliding into the driver’s seat, lifted by their excitement. Legitimate grounds for an outing could not have been more welcome.  

Just moments before my phone had rung, we were engaged, once again, in a hostile battle about what school work needed to be completed and when. In an adult-version of blocking my ears and saying ‘lalalala’ I had, very literally, resorted to lying on the living room floor with our youngest, pillows covering our heads, in a bid to momentarily ignore my responsibilities.   

I said from the very start of this pandemic that I wouldn’t try to replicate a classroom experience at home. I’m not a teacher and nor is my husband. These aren’t ordinary times.

Our household response to the kids being home from school has not been to rigorously pursue academic excellence. But notwithstanding a deliberate decision to promote survival as the fundamental objective rather than a strict educational regime it has been hairy and hostile and more than a little soul-sapping.

Even with so many middle-class trimmings and the comfort of privilege it’s felt taxing.

The reasons vary and certainly being in the throes of pain hasn’t helped. Some days it’s been technology that has tipped one, or more, of us over the edge. On other days the prickles have emerged from frustration at a particularly demanding maths worksheet, a hard-to-decipher English task or even just the pressure of a class Zoom call. Occasionally it’s been a sister breathing the wrong way at the wrong time or, more often, me having the audacity to ask someone to complete a particular task.   

It’s all compounded, obviously, by the fact there’s been very little chance to escape. But it wasn’t until I was happily ensconced in the car, with the girls taking turns picking songs, chatting away, that it dawned on me exactly what I was missing most.    

I miss just being a mum. In the car I was just being mum. One job. Not having to simultaneously parent/teach/work/feed/resolve disputes felt thrilling. I was flooded with relief at the reminder that being a parent is something that brings me actual joy. In the fog of the frustration that had got a little lost.

Before lock down there were times, of course, where the lines between work and family were blurred but that was the exception not the rule. I worked at an office. The girls attended school and daycare. When we were home together my role was, predominately, parent.  

This pandemic has blurred so many of the lines that I now know made our family life so much easier. It has been a strange social experiment of sorts in our house, in the same way it has, I’d guess, in virtually every household around the world.

Gaining perspectives from families in this unique time, with a view to shaping the recovery out, is what the Australian Institute of Family Studies is seeking to achieve through its new national survey.

“We want to tap into what’s happening in families right now,” AIFS Director Anne Hollonds says. “We have heard a lot about how business and government have needed to ‘pivot’ but families have also been adapting and adjusting quietly this whole time too.”

While there have been snippets of the good and the bad in families portrayed in the media Hollonds says getting “a more complete picture” from across the country is critical to inform decision makers to ensure families can be supported through the next period of recovery and into the future.

“This is the first time we’ve gone straight to everyday families on this scale,” Hollonds says. “We want to find out how the patterns of life have changed for families and give them a ‘voice’ in the recovery. We need to know how this once-in-a-lifetime event has impacted Australians’ everyday lives, so the government and service providers know what support people really need.”

Hearing from as many families as possible will make the data rich and informative – and valuable.

“There is a vast range of different experiences for families. Some are really struggling, some relationships are ending because of the pressure of being cooped up,” Hollonds says. “But at the other end of the spectrum, in positive news, some families have used this time to rethink how their lives are, how they do stuff at home, how they share domestic duties or not and there’s been a reconfiguring of responsibilities at home.”

Certainly Hollonds has heard many Dads are really liking the juggle and may seek to continue working more flexibly beyond the virus.   

“We also want to track the findings so we’ll go back in 2-3 months to follow up,” Hollonds says. “We want to get a picture that allows the fragmented and patchy services out there to be improved.”

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