moles //. By Holly Ruskin There’s a popular game traditionally played at carnivals that involves whacking a mole with a mallet, forcing it to retreat back into its hole. The only problem is that once you’ve whacked one mole, another pops up from an entirely different hole. This is the game. This is whack-a-mole. Defined by a quick Google search as the colloquial way of describing a “series of repetitious and futile tasks, where the successful completion of one just yields another popping up elsewhere”. When I’m asked by people who don’t have children what it’s like to be a parent, this is not the way I characterise it. Unless . . . they ask for 100% honesty. The truth of my experience. What I really think and feel about parenting. If they ask for that, then this is what I say. Parenting is exactly like a game of whack-a-mole. And though this may sound humorous, diminishing or as though I have a complete lack of respect for the job at hand, I have the goods to back it up. Because my daughter has just started her two-year sleep regression. Since the day she arrived, there has not been a nap or bedtime that she hasn’t railed against relentlessly and literally without fatiguing. Yet in the early days, a swaddle and white noise would eventually yield success. Just as we’d nailed that routine though, she started teething and so we were back where we started. Once through this (pretty awful) phase, we once again found our rhythm and it was a gentle rocking that helped her fall asleep. But then came learning to crawl, after that it was cutting her molars which was swiftly followed by walking. Moles popping up everywhere. Finally, around six weeks ago, we found ourselves in a sweet spot. Our daughter had cut all her teeth, was walking, talking in a way that we mostly understood, and she had dropped down to one daytime nap. The bedtime routine we had been honing for some time was working and so we had some much needed quality time together in the evenings.
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