Dealing with GroundHog Day

Lots and lots of parenting feels like doing the same thing over and over again. Your days can seem to all roll into one, especially once that first wave of excitement about having a baby has worn off. Changing nappies, feeding, naps, bath time, bedtime aaaaannnnnddd repeat. It’s very easy to feel stuck in a rut, especially if you have friends who don’t have kids. Social media posts of fun holidays, gigs etc. can make the monotony of the grind even harder to take.

Let’s start by acknowledging that the adjustment is hard. People always ask what was the hardest adjustment, going from one to two kids, or two to three kids. My honest answer is, neither. It’s going from zero to one. Your life changes so fundamentally in every way. By the time any subsequent children come along, you already have something resembling the life you will have afterwards. But for the first kid, it's a total reinvention of every routine you have.

You are on the schedule of the baby. There is no easing into it. It’s an incredibly rewarding and amazing time in your life and so it’s easy to overlook the fact that your routines and lifestyle have just changed completely. In the warm golden haze of celebrating your baby, you don’t stop and look at what is changing. You just ride the wave.

Then one day it starts to wear off a little bit and you realise that not long ago, pretty much everything you do now would be completely foreign to you.

One of the challenges for me was that I was on the early end of my friend group to have kids. We were living in London and were the only couple out of all of our close friends over there at the time having a baby. We got lucky with a great group in our ante-natal class, but none of our close friends were in the same boat. So while my life was changing, everyone else was still living that same life. If I’m honest, I did a bad job of dealing with how I felt about that.

And by doing a bad job of dealing with it, I mean I didn’t at all. I veered between struggling to acknowledge my life had changed and living that new life with so much rigidity that nothing of my old life could be accommodated. It was not good for me. I was having massive F.O.M.O, but then also beating myself when I allowed myself to go out with friends as if I’d let my wife and child down.

I had to get into therapy at this point as a whole lot of things were starting to unravel for me. One of the things I uncovered was that I was starting to resent the new routine. I had stopped appreciating and enjoying the little moments of the day, and was focusing all my mental energy on what wasn’t happening.

This was the way I was looking at my routine. I’d get an hour or so in the morning before I went to work where things would be really nice, but I’d be getting ready and then out the door so couldn’t enjoy it. Then I’d go to work. Back then I worked longer hours and carried stress poorly. Then I’d get home for the ‘witching’ hour. Try to do a bath for a very tired baby, have it not go well and then collapse on the couch for an hour or so before going to bed. Five days a week.

I could only see the negatives, the parts I was doing badly and the routine was crushing me. I couldn’t accept the things I was doing well and I couldn’t see the amazing and beautiful things that were part of that routine.

So I started talking with my therapist. The first thing we started talking about was reframing the way I was viewing my work. It wasn’t stealing the best hours of the day from me. It was the way I was supporting my family, keeping a roof over their head and well fed. And while the hours could be long and the stress could come from time to time, it was giving me an opportunity to grow the leadership and relationship building skills that I wanted to grow.

The next part we talked about was my time at home. My morning wasn’t just preparing to leave for the day. I was waking to the sound of my daughter, we were bringing her from her cot into bed with us and watching how even overnight she was growing before our eyes. That morning routine wasn’t groundhog day, it was slowly watching a baby grow. In a short space of time she went from lying with us, to rolling over, to sitting up and then moving around. Everyday I was witnessing the growth and learning of a person I had helped create.

The last part, the part I was dreading the most. The night time, where I felt like the biggest failure. But it wasn’t that at all. I was focussing on the fact that she’d scream after the bath. I was overlooking the fact that I’d hold her once she was dressed and sing to her, songs that I still sing to her to this day. We were laying the foundations of a routine that we continue to this day, seven years later. We were building our bond. Her learning that my cuddle and songs were my way of soothing her, and me learning that babies cry and that it’s the soothing and calming that is where you build the bond and love.

And that’s the realisation I had to come to about the feeling of groundhog day. It isn’t living the same day over and over again. It’s turning up everyday for someone you love. It’s teaching them that you love them and watching them grow a little every day in front of your eyes. Love is a verb. It’s what you do. 

So nowadays, whenever I feel the grind getting to me, or a sense of all the days being the same, I return to that thought. The routine is my commitment to my family. The routine is me helping my kids to grow a little bit each day. The routine is love.

You might have guessed by now what this module is going to be about. It’s about creating a list, and I recommend the first time you do it, that you write it down. The exercise is to make a list of all the things you do in a day that are of benefit to yourself and those you love. And I mean ‘all the things’ making a bowl of rice bubbles for your kid at 6.30am. You’ve got up, acknowledged them and fed them when they are hungry. It all adds up. Doing that everyday is how you show them that you love and care about them.

So have a go, you’ll be surprised by how much you do everyday for the good of the people you love.