Dignity

It’s a given that having children is a wonderful, rewarding experience, otherwise nobody would do it.  The good stuff has to massively outweigh the bad, which it does, every day.  What I didn’t expect, however, was how undignified it can be…

I never thought that I would be so blase about someone pooing on my jeans that I would just rub at the stain with a wet wipe (wonderful invention) and assess whether I could get another day’s wear out of them…

I didn’t anticipate looking at the food that my child has chewed and taken out of their mouth, have nowhere to put it and so eat it myself to get rid of it…

I imagined friends’ weddings as occasions where I would get dressed up, enjoy good company and drink champagne.  Not once did I picture having to hitch up my £90 dress and squat down in the Ladies’ to change a dirty nappy, get poo under my fingernail and be required to dodge a projectile stream of wee…

I thought my hair would always be styled with products designed for just that job; I didn’t think that removing bits of banana, smears of yoghurt, bogeys or chocolate would be such a large part of my beauty regime.

I knew that I would sometimes find it necessary, if unsightly, to remove a bit of food from between my own teeth.  Not for one minute did I think that one day I’d be doing the same for someone else…

I always hoped that if I ever had saliva, snot or vomit in my mouth, it would at least be my own…

…But then again, when it all started with piles, heartburn, leaking boobs and then squeezing something melon sized out of somewhere distinctly NOT melon sized (with the world and his wife watching), why would I expect anything else?