A month ago almost to the day, along with my husband and our three daughters aged 7, 11 & 13, I arrived back in Australia after a six month sabbatical in Canada. We had temporarily relocated for my husband’s work, our girls were enrolled in school and I took a leave of absence from my job. (The Parenthood’s acting CEO, Jessica Rudd, led the organisation exceptionally well in my absence).
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.