Does motherhood make you boring?

Thoughts on drinking, fun and the intense responsibility that parenting brings

Illustration by @sarahjhollandillustration_ (sarahjaneholland.co.uk)

A friend recently told me I was boring. We were sat in a park, the tail-end of summer, my baby asleep in the buggy while my three-year-old pushed a toy tractor up a nearby oak. You’re less fun, this friend said. I think you need to find a release. He thought I’d changed, that I needed to reconnect to my “old self” again. What you need to do, he said, is get pissed. Let it all go. Get really, really drunk.

It’s telling that instead of being offended, I said, “Maybe.” He was right that I needed a night out – my time outside the house past 6pm had at that point been severely limited for almost a year, what with the whole new baby thing and the breastfeeding thing and the being-woken-up-and-needed-a-million-times-a-night thing. Just the thought of an evening out – longer than two hours – was appealing. As was the tantalising idea of letting it all go. But drinking myself into oblivion? It seemed an incredibly simple solution for my apparent boringness, and a short-lived, impractical one at that. Not least because I am pretty much sober these days. 

This person has known me a long time. His directness is borne from friendship well rooted over nearly two decades. A friendship where we’ve done a lot of drinking together. We met in a pub, bonded in pubs and cemented our connection staggering around at music festivals way before we became people who preferred coffee shops, park meets and fancy steak. As we’ve navigated life’s many twists and turns, forging our own paths, we’ve had some big nights along the way. But it is our paths now that are marked most differently – by the two children in mine, and his child-free. He’s right I’ve changed. We both have. But becoming a parent has, without a doubt, cemented my estrangement from our drunken origins. The ‘me’ he first met seems another person entirely.

I used to drink excessively. Back in my teens and early twenties. And, OK, yes, my mid-to-late twenties too. I drank until the room spun or I was sick. I drank because everyone else did. I drank because I thought it gave me power. Whether club nights or parties or after-work drinks, I knew little restraint, often overwhelming an over-dieted body with more white wine than it could handle. What was my low point? Oh, there are far too many to pick just one. But going to a wedding where the bride told me I was a mess remains high on the humiliation scale. Waking up again and again not quite knowing what I had done for large chunks of the night before also did little for my shaky self-esteem. And yet, despite all this, I knew I didn’t have a ‘drink problem’. But I did deep down know I had a ‘me’ problem. I felt entirely uneasy in my own body. I was a shy extrovert. I didn’t think I was enough on my own. I thought everyone preferred my drunk alter-ego. I thought she was the fun one. 

I stopped drinking to excess long before I became a mother. In fact, it was a bike-obsessed ex-boyfriend who I credit with that shift. He didn’t really like drunk me. Or hangovers. He liked getting up on a Sunday morning at 7am and cycling 100km. By the end of our three-year relationship, I’d absorbed his passion for fitness through osmosis. And by 33, I’d gone from marathon drinking to marathon running. I wasn’t interested in being the last one at the party, I wanted to be the first one at the gym. I didn’t want hangover paranoia, I enjoyed clarity of thought. I had discovered a different high. Even though some friends called me “grandma”, I ignored it. The more familiar – and accepting – I became with my sober self in social situations, the easier it was to say “no thanks” to alcohol. That’s when I really started to change.

The pursuit of motherhood only intensified this (although it did also kibosh my fitness obsession) because, for the past five years, I’ve either been trying to get pregnant, actually pregnant, nursing a baby, or – now, concurrently – nursing a baby while chasing a toddler. I spend a lot of time at home. I don’t go out so much. I can’t go out so much. Not right now, though I know this will change as the children get older. And I can’t drink so much because I’m still breastfeeding. But also, I simply don’t want to. Don’t need to. Won’t.

But this isn’t really about drinking. After all, the opposite of boring isn’t drunk. In fact, some people might argue they’re synonymous. My friend didn’t say I was boring solely because I don’t go out drinking any more (at least not this time) – the implication was I am less fun now that I have two young children. 

And in some ways, I want to say, “No shit.”

If I’m less fun right now it’s because the mental load of motherhood is a weighty one. There is so much admin to raising children, insurmountable to-do lists, never-ending research. Your brain becomes the keeper of schedules, of when they eat and when they sleep and when it’s so-and-so’s birthday party and when their next vaccination is and what the deadline is for school applications and if you need more nappies or milk or spare clothes and what to do about weaning and nutrition and potty training and rashes and how to do crafts and support phonics and where to go for outings and how to put those name stickers in clothes and what is the most effective cream for chicken pox and and and and….

The things to think about never run out, and that’s often before you even consider your own wellbeing. And the to-do list of parenthood isn’t just charged by chores, it’s external pressure too – to do the best job, to get it right, to not fail.

It’s not like this new normal means I’ve lost sight of the old me. It’s just she can now sometimes be heard in the attic, screaming into the abyss. Sometimes literally. When a sick bug swept through our household recently, I lost it while hanging up the eighth load of washing upstairs in our loft. I shouted to my husband, who was calmly folding clothes opposite me, “THIS IS SO BORING. THIS IS SO BORING! I don’t want to be doing this!” There was nothing I could do to reframe that as pleasure. I find the Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch multimillion-pound industries unappealing: who wants to do all that cleaning and sorting and tidying and why oh why is everything grey or beige and bland? – but having two kids has made domestic perfection a Sisyphean pursuit. One I cannot spin to be some kind of vocation, let alone a joy. 

All I can do is accept this as the underside of infinite love. 

My two boys are my favourite things. Making them happy makes me happy. But it can be hard to reconcile with the fact that people may simply see me as a knackered old mum pushing a pram, placing upon me all kinds of assumptions, when I know the wild things I used to get up to. I don’t want to be solely defined by the bumper box of Pampers I might be carting around. But this is the thing – as a parent, you facilitate the joy of others. I think about what would be fun for them before I think about what would be fun for myself, because I know their fun matters more, at least developmentally, and because their fun becomes mine. And yet, somewhere, somehow, I am still aware of the person I once was. 

My husband says he misses acting on impulse. I get that. In fact, I think the issue is exactly that. Acting on impulse and without responsibility are the opposites of being a carer for someone else. When I scroll through Instagram and compare my life to other people’s, I don’t actually want to be stumbling out of bars. Or 20 years old again. But I do miss feeling unburdened by responsibility. I miss lie-ins and duvet days. I miss long, lazy brunches. I miss time to mull. But being a carer means you can’t check out. The needs of a dependent supersede your own. Even when you feel tired, or ill, or pissed off. The responsibilities pin you down, sometimes grind you down; the immensity of being a parent can be overwhelming.

So, yes, I actually could do with a big night out – my friend may be right about that, after all. A night where I can magically not worry about anything or anyone. Where I can have a drink or two and be a bit stupid and goofy and not worry about the day after. But that’s the other thing about getting smashed when you’re a parent – you don’t have the freedom to write off the next day. You lose the disposability of tomorrow.

Maybe I would be more fun if I didn’t have young kids. Maybe right now I am far too serious. Preoccupied. Distracted. Stretched with all the juggling. Focused. Perhaps this is what I should really tell my friend. The real me is still here, she’s just tired. She needs time to surface again, she needs space to think. But she’s there, and she’s still wild. Give her time, you’ll see.

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