Fun fact: This is at least my third attempt at starting a parenting blog. I keep finding it impossible to get beyond the first few entries. Tiredness, insecurity and sheer lack of free hands have all played a part. For example, right now I am writing this on my phone while using dictation software, holding the phone in one hand and a 7 week-old-baby in the other. It feels very awkward, and I keep getting distracted by the flecks of green and purple poster paint under my fingernails, left over from the toddler’s latest art adventure. I’m hoping that whoever is reading this will bear with me.

(ETA: I’m also writing this a week later, on a laptop looking out over an overcast garden with an 8-week-old baby strapped to my chest. And I’ll probably be writing it again in several further locations before it’s done).

The epigraph of this blog is about an axiom that you may have heard, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good“. This is something that I’ve found very useful over the past few years, and something that I’m interested in exploring further.

I have a very distinct memory of a friend-of-a-friend staying over at a sharehouse that I lived in during graduate school, and having her sleep on the floor of my room (because every other space in the house was presumably taken). She woke up in the morning and said “Wow! You do sleep after all! I wasn’t sure that you actually did — I thought you just survived on spite and caffeine!”. (She definitely meant this as a genuine compliment BTW — it was that kind of sharehouse). The idea that I might project to others an image of “spite and caffeine”, a kind of hard, glossy invulnerability, has stayed with me because it feels so anomalous to my own experience of myself as a hopelessly (hopefully?) flawed and messy creature.

One thing I’ve noticed in a lot of parenting blogs is is this culture of celebrating the imperfections of life. Everything is about acknowledging that your house is a mess* and your kids are enjoying themselves eating terrible food** and accepting that this is part of a normal and happy life.

* But always a sanitary, tasteful mess made up of cuddly toys and art supplies and the right kind of Lego.

** But always acceptably terrible food — think chicken nuggets and too many chocolate chip cookies, not expired yoghurt left out on the counter for a week and things found down the back of the sofa.

But I have often felt that this kind of “celebrating the joy in messiness” didn’t actually capture what was going on in my life during the first two years of parenting — that I came away from those blogs with the feeling that was fine to celebrate some kinds of messiness, but not my particular brand of it. Which has included the weird, obsessive world of exclusive pumping, the tense fraughtness of lockdown pregnancy, and suddenly retraining myself as a kind of homeschool nursery teacher while WFH. And yes, the occasional eating of things found down the back of the sofa.

Another aspect of writing about parenting that unnerves me is that part of writing, for me, is sharing ideas and opinions, and it feels very wrong to offer these to others while my kids are still so young. I’m afraid that a lot of my opinions might actually be fairly stupid, or at least blinkered by my own particular set of circumstances. I’m certainly making a lot of mistakes that I don’t even perceive, and I don’t really know what, if anything, I’m doing will turn out to “have worked” in the long run.

And then of course, there’s also the feeling that in the age of Instagram and Tik Tok, writing long form blog posts without any pictures at all is about as passe as one can be.

On the other hand, if two-and-a-half years of experience has taught me anything (and I hope they have), it’s that waiting for the opportunity to sit down at a keyboard in peace and quiet with no kids is a surefire recipe for absolutely no writing to happen ever, and that hasn’t been making me happy either.

So in line with the “wise Italian” Voltaire is quoting in the epigraph to this blog, I am aware that the best, or the perfect, can be a vicious enemy of the good. I’m not just talking about accepting or celebrating imperfections in one’s life, but about accepting the fact that there is no perfect opportunity to get writing done.