Mum’s new appreciation

KATINA CURTIS

“BEING a mother is a fabulous job, but a really tough job, a job that’s got many hats and I think we don’t give ourselves enough pats on the back.”

That is how Carmel Goldsmith views the job of preparing her children for the rest of their lives.

Carmel and her husband, Trevor Fredericks, have three children: 15-year-old Blake, 13-year-old Lachlan and 5-week-old Ben.

She said she and Trevor had wanted another baby since Lachlan was in kindergarten, so made a decision to have Ben now.

This, along with being “a little bit older and wiser”, had made motherhood the third time around quite different.

“I’m absolutely besotted with this little fellow, but I just know it’s for such a short time,” Carmel said.

“I don’t think I could do it better, but I just want to capture more of him. It’s not better, just different.

“I suppose with your first you go in very unaware of everything that’s going to happen, but (later) you know what you’re in for and you can embrace it more.”

She has also found being at home with Ben has allowed her to spend more time with her older boys, going to swimming carnivals, helping with homework and just being there for them.

The hardest thing about motherhood, Carmel said, was not being able to always protect your children.

She found this feeling best encapsulated in a line from an anonymous poem, Before I was a Mum, that says: “I never felt my heart break into a million pieces when I couldn’t stop the hurt”.

Carmel said that as a society we tend to underrate motherhood and she knows she did this herself when she was younger and focused on study and a career and thought children would just fit sometime.

“Now I realise how important (motherhood) is – not that we shouldn’t have careers, but it’s really tough to do both,” she said.

“I think generally as a society we need to be more supportive of mothers.”