Today I'm answering this question from Annabelle: "What would you say your life is like the majority of time...enjoyable, manageable or overwhelming?"

What's the answer? You'll have to listen to find out!

If you'd like to submit an question to the show you can do it here.

This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wangal people, of the Eora Nation.

I pay my respects to Elders past and present.

EPISODE CREDITS:

Host: Rachel Corbett

Editing Assistance: Josh Newth

LINKS & OTHER IMPORTANT STUFF:

Click here to submit a question to the show

Want to create a podcast of your own? Check out my podcasting course, PodSchool

Email me: rachel@meandmytinyhuman.com

Follow me: Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube or check out the website.

Hello, welcome to Me My Tiny Human. I'm Rachel Corbett and today I'm going to answer a question. If you have one, please submit it. I have a little link to a page where can submit a question in the show notes. So feel free to ask me whatever you want. I don't care how rude it is. I know that this is quite a fascinating situation for a lot of people and there are some things that you're not allowed to ask in polite society. But when you're submitting it via a form and you are allowed to be anonymous, well then go for your life. Ask whatever you want.

Anyhoo, Annabelle asked, What would you say your life is the majority of time enjoyable, manageable or overwhelming? That is a really good question. I would say, and this is way more positive than any of the shit that's come before now. I am constantly oscillating somewhere between enjoyable and manageable with a hint of enjoyable. And I have said that it was, it took until eight months for me to hit this point. So the first eight months for me were a total write-off. The first six weeks we've discussed.

Hell on earth. So I would say from eight months on, and this was quite good. I'm a mad fan of therapy. I think going to a therapist is like going to see a life coach that actually has a degree, which is helpful because some of them, don't. Most of them, don't. But my therapist, I remember said just write the first year off. And I always felt quite happy to have kind of got a few months back from that because I was like, okay, I've actually only had to write eight months off. That's pretty good.

So yeah, I'm in between this sort of enjoyable and manageable with a bit of enjoyable all the time. It does occasionally dip into overwhelming. I'm not going to lie, but I definitely can handle a lot before I break. And that is really good for me to get through life, especially with this. And that's why I knew when I did it by myself, I'm going to be fine. Cause I know that I'm very good at getting through things, but I would say that there are more than six days a week that I do think to myself at the end of the day, how the hell am I doing this? Intellectually, it's like physically I'm doing it and I'm getting it done and everything is getting done. I feel like when I'm doing it, I often intellectually levitate, look down at myself and think this, you should not be okay right now. Like you should not be handling this.

And I think one of the things I've got to be mindful of, and I'm actually thinking about taking a bit of a circuit breaker week off work, keeping bub in care and trying to get some of the like life admin things done. Is it a waste of annual leave? Not at all. Where the F am I going anytime soon?Nowhere. So is it a good idea for me to take a week off and do things like get my tax sorted? Yes, it is. And not have to look after my child when I'm doing it because I don't think I can do taxes in the time that she sleeps. So I have to really be mindful of making sure that I don't collapse because I do have a tendency to keep going, going, going, going. And I can intellectually realise, okay, I'm over capacity here and something's going to break. But then it's really not until I physically break that it is an issue.

I remember I was once in a very toxic work environment. It was real bad. And I was definitely not dealing with it internally. I knew it was having a massive impact on me, but I was still getting up and getting going and getting things done. And I remember waking up in the middle of the night one day and I was vibrating. My entire body was vibrating. And it was like one of those, you know, those Pilates machines, the plate thing that you stand on and you do your exercise on. And I was feeling it I was like, am I dreaming? Is this real? Anyway, it was stress. It was stress.

So, your body can like really manifest all the things that you're dealing with. And, to get myself back from that point there, when I was like so highly wound because of all the stress, I just was so hard. And so now I'm really trying to clock it when I'm maybe taking too much stuff on because I know that I just will keep on going. And ultimately I don't want to be that person who keeps on going. And then the body ends up being the thing that tells you like, excuse me, we're on our last legs here. If you could just give us a moment and maybe think about us, that'd be really great.

So yes, Annabelle, I really do find the majority of it enjoyable now after she started to sleep more at night. That was a real game changer. Interestingly enough, that was at the eight month mark and I started back at work at four months. So even again, intellectually levitating, I'm like, shoot for that four months, I was getting up two to three times a night and then still going and doing a full eight hour work day. Like, how did I do that?

Now that I'm through that side, I can't actually work out how I managed to do that. It is honestly unbelievable what you can manage to do when you have absolutely zero choice. So I wanted to just share, for example, what happened to me today. And I wanted to share it today because I feel, I mean, I sound, unless I'm pretending. I feel really positive about today. I've had a lovely day with Olivia. I love spending time with her. She's a good time. She's fun to be around. We just hang out together and I'm so excited for when she gets older and can talk and just become more of herself because I already like so many aspects of her personality and it's just like really fun being around. And it's also slowed me down a bit. Like it's absolutely manic and there's nothing slow about my life. But would I have ever sat in the ball pit of a kids play centre for 30 minutes while my child climbed all over me before? No, I'd probably be running around running errands and doing something else. So I am stopping in a way, even though it is still, you know, there's still a lot of work to be done. But today it's been absolutely bucketing with rain all day. So anybody who has a kid knows rainy days, what the F am I going to do all day? Honest to God, like you're in mental planning mode. So she also has been waking up in the five o'clock hour consistently for about the last two weeks, which has been an absolute punish.

She was sleeping until 7, 7.30. So I was trying to get up at like five o'clock for a while so that I could have an hour, an hour and a half, two hours if I was lucky to myself in the morning, just to kind of have a slow start. And then I'd start the parenting. But when they're getting up to at 5.30, it's not quite as relaxing. So that's been a real punish. And last night, actually, I was thinking maybe it's cause she's cold. She's waking up, she's cold. So I dressed her like she was going to be sleeping on the ice shelves of the Antarctic thinking this is going to be brilliant and up she got at 5.20.

So, you know, those moments when you do something where you're like, I think I've pretty much nailed this. And then they're just like, no, you haven't. You're an idiot. You're like, okay, all right, I forgot you're the boss.

Anyway, so we woke up at 5.30. I had set my alarm, I mean, so dumb for 7 a.m. and there is no sound that heralds your naivety as a parent, like an alarm going out off two hours after you woke up. And then you think, oh, that's right. I've been parenting for two hours and I actually was stupid enough to think that this was going to be when I was going to be waking up. Like that's great. Anyway, so we start the day with me spending 20 minutes just ripping her out of cupboards that she's getting into. I've gone through this phase where it's so dumb, right? I think I can speak to her like an adult. So I'm trying when she goes into cupboards, like the chemical cupboard in the bottom. Now I've got my eyes on her at all times, right? I'm not somebody who's like going to let her wander around the house for 15 minutes.

If I go to the toilet, she comes to the toilet with me. So, but I'm trying to be adult about things because I'm noticing, right, she opens the chemical cupboard. If I just go, no, no, no, we don't go in there. But then she sees me 15 times a day going into the chemical cupboard to get the sprays out to wipe things. Well, that doesn't make sense in a kid's head, right? You're like, but you can do it. And they don't have the ability to understand like, I can do this and you can't do this. So I'm trying to say to her, no, no, like you can look at it, but we can't pull it out. You can't touch it.

Anyway, I mean, at what point has she been into the cupboard so many times that I actually go and just buy some child proof locks? You know, I'm at that point now where it's just like, do I really think I can reason my way or intellectualise my way through the toddler years? Because if I do grow up, like let's just get it together and do what everybody else does and get some goddamn child proof locks. All right. Cause that's the only way to do it.

Anyway, so then after that we went to my best mate's cafe. She sits quietly there most of the time, which is great. Waves hello to everybody, interrupts everybody's breakfast. Then she starts to eat all the crayons that I gave her, throwing food off the side of the tray table. So we're like, okay, great, fantastic. It's time to piss off and go to the kid's cafe. So it is absolutely bucketing with rain. I do five laps of the car park, trying to find an undercover car spot. Can't find it. So I give up. I park outside in the wet. like, well, just, I just won't take a bag.

I've changed her nappy at the cafe. We'll just go, I'll just take my phone and my keys and that's it. So we run the distance to the kids cafe. We get into the kids cafe and go down. We spend five minutes in the ballpark. She shits her pants. So we've got an hour to go on our ticket. The car is like 10 minutes walk in the rain away. I'm absolutely not going to go back and get my nappy's out of the car and come back. So we just play in a shit-filled nappy for an hour. And you can see the side eye from the parents because the kids come over, hang out. And I mean, you can catch a whiff of poo, right? You can tell when somebody's shat their pants, you become real astute at recognising someone around here has a soiled nappy. So anytime the kids come close and they're playing, and then the parent comes over, I find myself very loudly sort of going, mommy needs to change your nappy so that I can let these parents know I'm aware and I will do it. But then also you'll see me hanging around here for another 50 minutes because I'm not going to do it now. So then we go down one of the slides, right? So she's crawling around. I let her crawl around everywhere. She goes up to one of these like circular tube slides. It's see through. The whole of the parenting place and it's a Saturday PS, so there's 7,000 parents in the room.

So I'm trying to let her go and do things, right? I want her to be bold and courageous and to not feel like she's, I don't want to say, don't do that, but to be careful. I want to be like, oh, you know, be steady, be, you know, whatever. So anyway, she wants to go down the slide. Great. We'll go down the slide. So she started going down the slide at the park by herself face first. And I thought, okay, this is fine. We'll go down. I had usually taken her on my tummy, but it's very tight and it is a real squeeze to get in there. So I'm like, she could go down on her tummy and then I could just hold her feet and go down behind her.

Anyhoo, I go down, I push her down. I realised that the sort of angle of the slide is such that you kind of have to go down on your bum because if you go down in your face, it's a bit too steep. So you could just go right head first. It's not really designed very well, but I don't realise that until she's fully out and I'm three quarters of the way out because that's when the first dip happens. So we're in this see-through tube with these parents. Meanwhile, a couple of parents are like cheering her on cause she's looking at the thing and now they're looking at me.

And I realised a quarter of the way down, this is going to end in me on top of her and she's going to break her neck. So then I've had to abort the mission and crawl back, get myself like backwards snaking up through the slide, yanking my child while she's crying because I'm getting her not to do something that I was just about to get her to do up the slide and back in while all of these parents are watching while they're having their coffee.

And meanwhile, I'm trying to keep the vibe up, right? Cause we don't want to have tears and for her to be upset and for her to know, listen, I'm not telling you that we can't do it. I've just realised that you're probably not going to come out of this slide without some kind of massive injury. So I'm trying to work out how we can do this together. Anyway, I mean, honestly, when you're tackling this stuff by yourself and you've got no one to look out the see-through slide at and go, Hey, we're in this together. You know, it's like, well, there's nobody in this with me.

I'm just in the middle of this see-through slide with everybody looking at me going, look at that poor woman. She's really losing her mind. Anyway, then I get her out we go down the slide together. That was really fun. Then we get into the car and she's learned how to shut her water bottle, but she hasn't learned how to open it. So we're on the freeway on the way back home and she keeps shutting her water bottle and then screaming because she can't get any water and she wants water. But I can't turn around and get the water bottle open because I'm driving the car on the freeway. So we've just got to listen to the wails. And I also can't...

Reason with her, hey, push it back the other way. Like you're only not getting water because you've closed the water yourself. So anyway, you just got to keep on driving through the tears sometimes. Anyway, then we get back home. I get her something for lunch. She's in bed by this stage. It's 11 AM. So when I think about all this together, like if you had written this to do list for me to do today, and it had all of what I have just mentioned on it, I would tell you to go and get stuffed on paper. It looks like something you would never want to do in your entire life, but living it.

Is it hard? Yes, it is. I would love a break, but did it ever shift into overwhelming? No, it was just a lot, but that's okay. That's why what I signed up for. And in some ways it's flipping hilarious because there are moments when you're three quarters of the way down a see-through slide being judged by the parents where you're just like, you know what? This is going to be something that I'll talk about on the podcast and welcome to why I've started this thing. I've got nobody to sit on the couch with and debrief about these things at nighttime. Right? So you're my person.

You're the person that I'm sitting on the couch with going, have a listen to what my day was like today, because honestly, and ultimately I signed up for this, right? I wanted this kid. I wanted to do this. I would have preferred that we didn't have an hour playing in a play centre where she was squishing around in shitty pants and that she was screaming all the way home. But you know, you just got to get on with it. So I could have had a mental breakdown 19 times. I probably, maybe it's just all adding up to that eventual mental breakdown I'll have in the future.

But if I'd had a mental breakdown and gone to water, would it have made my day any easier? Not at all. So Annabel, yes, it is hard. Yes, it is a juggle, but is it impossible? No, it is absolutely not impossible. And it really is truly fun. You know, at moments she is just a joy to be around. And I am really like, I love the fact that when it is hard, I feel very proud of myself. I feel like I am being a very good mum because I am conscious of what I am going through to make sure that she is okay and I'm conscious of the work I'm willing to do and that makes me feel like an even better mum. I also did look in the mirror in the little makeup section that they have at one point and I had mascara rubbed all underneath my eyes because I'd look like such a bag of shit in the morning that I put makeup on and I never wear makeup in normal life because I always like rub my face or touch my eyes or something it goes everywhere I forget I've got it on and sure enough I'd like scratched my eyes in the morning rubbed the mascara all under my eyes and then not looked at myself again at all during the day and realised that I've been walking around looking like a panda.

So am I nailing life? Not at all. But is it fine? Yes, it's totally fine. So Annabelle, do not be afraid. Do not think that your life is going to be constantly overwhelming and that you're never going to enjoy a day in your life. It is honestly more enjoyable than it is not. And sometimes you just go laugh at the fact that you just to others probably look like you're not holding it together, but you are doing the best bloody job you can do. And that's it.

If you would like to send me a question, please do just click the link in the description of the episode. If you're enjoying the show, please share it with your friends. Let's all just laugh at my misery together. See you next week.