When your parenting journey isn’t what you expect

To quote John Lennon, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” I think many of us may confess to imagining what our future lives may look like, from time to time. Perhaps we imagined the pretty little cottage with roses around the door, or the life where we set off to our dream job every day, before returning to dinner prepared for us and an immaculate kitchen. Maybe our thoughts turned to children; “We’ll have four, two of each!” “Three is perfect for us, fill the backseat of the car.” “We’ll have a two year age gap between our children, that will work perfectly.” “Saturdays, we can go to ballet classes and then go and watch the rugby.”

Of course, when it comes to it, none of us really expect life to look like the pages of the mamas and papas catalogue and we find it easy to let go of the Pinterest-perfect pictures we formed in our minds before we lived the reality of parenthood. But, for many of us, the differences between the parenting journey we anticipated, and the one which evolves around us can be far more difficult to take.