In my head I always think that Mother’s Day should be this perfect day where James behaves impeccably and I barely have to lift a finger, and judging by the Facebook posts you see you could be lead to believe that every mother out there is having a perfect day.  Let’s be realistic though, that’s not really the case is it?  Your child is not any more perfectly behaved than they are any other day of the week, or is that just my child?

My Mother’s Day was far from perfect thanks to James.  It started off well in that he was in a really happy mood and my husband had done really well on the presents he had bought me.  I spent the morning doing our weekly shop in Asda, as Sunday morning is a chance I get to do it in peace without James.  It’s not really the relaxing idealistic image I had for Mother’s Day though, but it is something that has to be done.  I got home and my husband put the shopping away as usual, and we then went out for lunch.  James was great during lunch, he ate the food and behaved nicely.

We had pre booked tickets to go to Cotswold Farm Park because mums get in free on Mother’s Day weekend.  As it’s quite an expensive place to visit we thought we would make the most of the offer and go.  James seems interested in animals so we thought it would be a hit with him and a nice thing to see him enjoying himself on Mother’s Day, after all James being happy makes us happy. James fell asleep on the way to the farm and was abruptly woken up when we arrived as the car stopped.  Having had only 20 minutes sleep and woken up before he was ready things didn’t get off to the best of starts with his general moaning and inability to understand the concept of queuing and paying to get into places.

Anyone that has ever been to Cotswold Farm Park will know that there is lot of play equipment for kids near the entrance, well when James saw this that is where he wanted to be.  We decided that we would look at the animals first and he could play on the play equipment afterwards, otherwise we would never drag him away from it.  James had other ideas and did not want to look at the animals.  As we walked around I noticed that other children seemed to be enjoying looking at animals, and really interested in them, our child on the other hand was having tantrum after tantrum. We tried everything we could; going on Daddy’s shoulders, me carrying him and talking to him about the animals, singing to him and counting but the usual tactics were not cheering him up.  He was angry that he had not been allowed to play when he wanted to and would therefore punish us by behaving like a little horror.  At one point my husband suggested we should just go home but I was determined not to give up, despite James making things as difficult as he could.

As we got towards the end of the animal section and he could see the play equipment in sight he started to cheer up. He could see that he would soon be getting what he wanted. We headed to a maze which with some effort he seemed to enjoy, probably because it was next to the swings which he had his heart set on next.  After the swings we headed to a woodland walk which he really loved and then finally he played on the slide.  When it was time to go we had yet another tantrum because mummy and daddy were taking him away from something he was really enjoying.

Mother’s Day was just like any other day, well worse than some days, believe it or not, some days there can be no tantrums.  The secret to a perfect Mother’s Day would probably be to do exactly what James wants to do, so we don’t have to deal with the tantrums.  Looking at animals was obviously so awful for him that we should have just taken him to the park, at least that would have been free.

I didn’t post any Mother’s Day pictures on social media because they would have been totally misleading.  As you can see from the pictures I have included in this blog post it looks like we had a great time, but there are no pictures from when we were looking at the animals, just when James was happy during the woodland walk. Mother’s Day can be painful for a lot of people – those like myself who have lost their mother, those that have lost a child, those that desperately want to become a mother and probably those whose Mother’s Day isn’t as perfect as social media portrays it to be.  There’s nothing wrong with posting perfect Mother’s Day pictures on social media, but I think we should all be more aware that Mother’s Day can be really hard for some people.  I know before I had James I used to avoid looking at social media, because to be reminded of something that you haven’t got can be really painful, but at the same time why shouldn’t people celebrate mums?