Motherhood | AD

From the soon-to-be mums, to mums of many and those who help, love and protect us, notonthehighstreet believes they deserve nothing short of thoughtful this Mother’s Day and so do I.

I became a Mum over 9 years ago now and I’m not going to lie, it was a shock to the system. Nothing can prepare you for a job that means you’re on call 100% of the time. Just as no amount of talking about it can give you a true sense of the breadth of emotions it catapults you through.

I now have the capacity to feel extremes of joy, guilt, despair and bone crunching love, all within the time it takes to do the school run.

If you were to take everything you see online as gospel, then as a group of people, parents fall into one of two polarised camps. We’re either #blessed and cherishing every precious moment, or we’re rather, erm, hilariously using crude language to describe our children.

I mean, the reality is that most of us are somewhere in-between. I’m sure there’s a great homogenous mass of us that go to sleep promising ourselves that we’ll wake up in the morning as the #blessed Mum, only to have disintegrated into an agitated mess by lunch.

There are days where we lovingly prepare lunch boxes filled with fresh fruit, carrot sticks and hummus. And others where we try to scrape together a lunch box from the remnants of the cupboard and hope the dinner lady doesn’t spot your child’s lunch of crisps and biscuits, because that’s essentially the only food in the house that’s not gone off.

I try my best and sometimes that best looks like a mothering superhero and others, it’s, erm, questionable.

All I know is that one day, I will look back and wonder where all the time went (I know this because my Mum told me so). I probably won’t remember much of the stressful days or trying to find hiding places around the house for just 5 minutes peace. Instead, I’ll just wonder when my children got all grown up and I’m sure a big part of me will wish I could go back in time and do it all over again.

That’s the funny thing about being a parent. Although I’m quietly confident that these years will probably be the most stressful days of my life, I’m also certain that they’ll be the best.

So if the years could just slow down a bit now, I’d be much obliged. Thanks.

If you have a Mum in your life that deserves spoiling rotten with thoughtful gifts this Mother’s Day, then you can find loads of lovely goodies, like this “You’ve Got This wall hanging’ over at notonthehighstreet.