If your children start screaming in a restaurant
I thought: it can just be done. It couldn't.
It was a day that you, well, maybe prefer to forget as a mother. I hadn't had breakfast, showered, or talked to an adult when my best friend who lives in Cape Town stood at the door. If we could have coffee somewhere. Of course, nice. We can't see each other that often after all. The boys went along in the buggy. We walked through the streets of Amsterdam and I already had a little gut feeling: maybe I should have put them to bed for a bit and had coffee at home. But we were already on our way to a trendy lunch place and I didn't want to be a party pooper because I am just a mother.
I can tell you one thing: if you ever sit in a restaurant or coffee shop or pancake house and you hear children screaming from their toes, feel especially sorry. For the mother in the company. Because oh my god, what a disaster this was. The coffee was ordered and at the moment the waitress was at our table, it happened. Crying. First one baby, then another. Everyone is looking. But the crying gets worse. Picking up doesn't help, cuddling doesn't help, the pacifier is stupid and the rabbit even more so. Screaming. Throat open, volume 180. The decibels of baby wailing flew through the room. Times two, so don't forget that. And I stood there. Bright red. Sweaty. Stammering: ‘Yes, uh, sorry, it's going to be a coffee to go after all.’
The worst part is that I also used to look at other mothers when I heard a child cry, when I wasn't a mother myself yet. I thought: come on, keep your children in check and just raise them well. But unfortunately, that's not how things work, I know that now. Your day is so different when you have little ones. That literally just having a coffee outside the door for an hour is your only outing of the day. And that you can see your friends so little. That the days revolve only around the babies and no longer around yourself and your friendships and your need for caffeine and people around you. So you think: it can just be done. But I should have listened to myself.
What is beautiful about this story then? The spontaneous help I received. My friend quickly went to pay for the coffees so we could leave. And in the meantime, I was standing there alone in a packed place, with one screaming baby in my arms and one crying child in the buggy. Women came from all corners of the coffee shop to me. ‘Can I help?’, ‘Shall I rock the buggy for a bit?’, ‘Do you want me to hold him for a moment?’ They saw my despair. They saw my panic, my stress, my tired mother face. I was still smiling, but secretly crying with my twins. How easily these kinds of ordinary things used to go unnoticed. Now it's a whole planning and taking into account bottles, naps, wet diapers, angry moods. And that's not bad, I do it with all love. But it's really not always easy. And sometimes it's really just a day too much, a day not fun, a day to forget.
Instead of that whole coffee, I just had a glass of wine in the evening. I felt I had earned it.
