The days are long, but the years are short, chronicle of a woman at the end of her rope

I have two children. Well no, I don’t have two children, I have two hurricanes aged 7 and 2. Two strong, powerful and exhausting winds, who can only be calm and composed when they are fast asleep. And once again, I’m lucky and I know it: they sleep, most of the time, in a deep, heavy sleep, without waking up – and me.

Parenting, this merciless universe

During the day, as soon as their little blue eyes for one, green for the other, open, they don’t stop. My children are not instagrammable, they have too much disheveled hair, chocolate on their fingers and around their mouths, mismatched and stained clothes to be present on social networks. Is it serious ? Absolutely not.

Their room, even if tidied every evening by me or their father, is a nameless mess as soon as they enter it. It’s full of plastic toys (but second-hand, let’s free ourselves from guilt as best we can), and tacky decorations (or at least, not mine). Yes, I admit it, the Frozen, Miraculous and Paw Patrol posters are not my favorites, and they don’t go at all with the eco-certified wooden loft bed that cost me an arm and a leg, two kidneys, and which is already stuffed with glittering horse head stickers.

My kids have hands, and eventually, they have fingers, which have the unfortunate tendency to stick everywhere. The windows, the doors, the curtains, the walls, everything. And they leave traces of these little fingers full of chocolate, snot, drool, sweets, on every surface within their reach. With every ray of sunlight that hits the windows, we see them: these little traces of fingerprints that cling to the windows like Darmanin at his ministry.

The other day, as often happens to me, I was exhausted: I had just cleaned the entire apartment, ironed and folded mountains of clean laundry (yes, I iron clothes, eh), put away their room and complained because hell, no it’s hard to put a game away when you’re done using it, all the while cursing that the living room wasn’t a playground. I was at the end of my rope, bdr as people under 30 say, making me seriously wonder if 4.30pm was a decent time to have a glass of wine. Everyone has their own vision of snacking, right?

Mourning for life first

So is my life reduced to this now? Putting toys away all day, washing, ironing, folding clothes, cooking three different meals every night because doesn’t everyone want to eat the same thing, all while having a full time job? What had become of me? My life at the moment was having to worry about these whores of children that I created voluntarily, for everything and for nothing, to the point that I even had the desire to stick an AirTag under my eldest daughter’s sole to make sure I could find her if she were kidnapped from school?

My life has become that of a feminist woman who, on the one hand, wants to send used menstrual panties to Figaro reading their article on the mental load of men, but who is on a mission to buy 45 bales of bullshit Party-This Party-That to liven up your child’s birthday?

When I think that not long ago, I was dancing like crazy at the Bootleg bar in the 11th arrondissement of singing screaming Rihanna or Bruno Mars.

The weather is incredible. The notion of time. The hours that pass, the days that pass, the years that pass. One day you are there, calmly, dancing on the tables while making out with strangers in a slightly seedy port, and a few blinks later, you try to keep your eyes open, the ones that want to close after waking up too early in the morning, while you observe your little ones who have found some used bandages at the bottom of the sandbox and seem seriously intent on eating them, to see what they taste like.

The ambivalence of nostalgia

Gosh, some days can seem long since I’ve had kids. And yet, and yet… And yet, one day, I came across a phrase, the one that is the title of this post on mood, and which has a sort of magical magical power to make me forget all the parental problems I have and have sex for 7 years already: ” the days are long but the years are short “.

Yes, I know, it looks like I opened a file fortune cookie and that I discover the nostalgia of a time that is not over yet, but this sentence had the effect of a small bomb in my heart. I think I’ll miss all this later. A bit. Maybe a lot.

This time of footprints on the windows and walls, toys everywhere even in the bathrooms, wake up call at 6.45 on Sunday morning, schoolwork, incessant questions and requests from my children when I need calm and peace, the edges of the bathtub full of all the Playmobil figurines, their breath after snack that always tastes like strawberry jam, the weekend walks even when it rains and I would have preferred to stay under the covers but they have to go out for some fresh air otherwise they end up being unmanageable… I travel by car listening to nursery rhymes coming out of my ears (if I find who invented it Turn, turn, little millI hate it), birthday snacks to organize, emotional storms to manage, diapers to change, more or less gentle hugs, necks that smell of warm bread, their curls of hair that get tangled when they come out of a nap.

Life after

One day I will miss all this. It’s ridiculous, if you think about it. I spend many days complaining about my current life, the lack of living space, the fact that my children depend too much on me, the enormous difficulty of being a mother and parent, while the day it stops, I know I will have attacks of withdrawal, like a drug addict who has been taken off the last dose of coke.

One day my children will grow up, they will no longer want to come on holiday with us, they will move, they will have friends who will be much more important to them than their parents. One day they too may have children, jobs, homes. One day they will be too lazy to come home for lunch. One day they will forget to text him that they are back home safe. One day we will no longer be their center of the world, and it will be a terrible evil.

The days are long but the years are short, and every day I get to see it just a little more. My oldest daughter tells me stories of her heart and friendship, and she rolls her eyes when I lecture her on her behavior. As for her brother, day after day she affirms her character, she begins to take off her diapers and will start kindergarten, even though two days ago she was still in my belly. Yes, they still need us, of course, and always will, but to different degrees, as they grow, and that’s strange.

Soon, all too quickly, there will be no trace of their little fingers on the windows and their footprints will be erased from our walls. Their childhood has begun, it is already almost over and their life moves forward (very) quickly. If I can question myself and sometimes regret my years before they existed, if I also wait to regain my freedom that will return once I leave early childhood, I know that the traces of their fingers will remain engraved, somewhere, on a window of mine memory. Really, parenting is a big mess.

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