Esther McCarthy: A mammy’s pleas for change - one per stage of childhood

I was reminiscing with a friend recently about how lovely it was when our kids were smallies, but then she went a bit quiet. “Remember the playgrounds, though,” she muttered.

    A harried midwife once handed me a set of silicone nipple shields, told me to get on with it, and moved on to the next bed. That was it, no time to show me how to actually latch the baby, just a plastic not-so-fantastic solution and an air of exasperation that I wasn’t managing it myself. For a few weeks after, those shields were the single most important object in our house. And that, I think, is the thing nobody tells you about parenthood: There’s a stage where an item becomes the most important thing in the world to you, and then, almost overnight, the most inconsequential.