Sareida Snow

Tell us a bit about yourself?

So, you know those memes and TikTok’s about how the dads want praise for doing the most basic house jobs? Yep, I’m one of those mums that don’t relate because in my house, the script is flipped! I am Sarieda Snow and I am a 28-year-old mama to two highly active little boys: Hamilton, 3 and Lincoln, 2 and my gorgeous fur baby Sonic. I am also a primary school teacher and wife to the one pretty incredible stay-at-home dad, Tristan!

What were you doing before babies?

When I had my babies, I wasn’t looking to have any at the time. In my early 20’s, I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and it was made very clear that I would struggle to have children. So, my doctors advised to improve my health for an optimal opportunity which was what I did. Before my babies came along, I was freshly married and super keen to be starting my first year of teaching! I had also started a health and fitness journey with Century Strong Bootcamp and was smashing goals! At this point in my life, I had exactly ZERO plans to be responsible for any sort of child other than my dog and spoiling whatever child my friends and family had! My husband and I just bought our first home and we had plans to continue to build memories across the world!

How did you come to be a mum?

Well, both of my babies were a surprise! Hamilton was a surprise we found out about three months after our wedding, and three months after he was born, we found out that Lincoln was coming! But let me make a clear statement: unplanned, does not mean unwanted! The day they were born was life changing in so many ways and I'm thankful that they came when they did!

What has your feeding journey been like?

When I think about my feeding journey, I think “heavy”. I was still breastfeeding when I went back to work and the stress, anxiety and pressure to pump a certain amount each day at certain times to make sure my baby was fed was really heavy. I promised myself with the next baby, I wouldn’t need to pump at school because I would be at home. But, the day before we found out that I was pregnant with Lincoln, Tristan was in a motor cycle accident that would leave him unable to work which forced me to go back to work which then; had this same feeding cycle repeating. Go figure! The second time round, my supply was lower, and sadly my journey ended sooner than what I wanted it to because I was just exhausted every second of the day. But I am hopeful that if we ever have another baby, and no one gets into any vehicle accidents, I can be at home to go through a feeding journey workless! CbrMamas, please touch wood for me!

What has sleep been like in your house?

Sleep? What’s sleep? In our house, it’s more lying down with your mouth and eyes shut! Have you ever heard someone say that when the second child comes along, everything you know about parenting goes out the window? Yeah, that was true with us… There was a stage where I googled if children could be allergic to sleep or have an intolerance because I was convinced Lincoln had this! Lincoln has a natural talent to be such an amazingly bad sleeper! So bad that I had to be referred to the Perinatal Wellbeing Centre for care for post-natal anxiety from the exhaustion of sleeping a total of two-hours a night! I got to a stage where, even though Tristan took over the night care, when one of the boys woke up, so did I anyway. My doctor said I needed to rebuild the habit of sleep all over again. There was a long period where Tristan would give me a day to rest, but I still wasn’t able to settle to sleep! Sometimes when I would tell people of my exhaustion, I think they thought I was exaggerating but my matted hair in a daily bun and eye bags would serve as my evidence!

The hardest bits…

LORD where do I begin here! Now, we all know parenting is hard. Period! So, whilst I was trying to prepare for the hard bits of parenting, I had no idea about external factors that would be hard. There were so many challenges I was not prepared for in so many aspects of my life: work, home-life, society, birth and parenting-styles!

RACE and AUDACITY:

This is the first challenge that I want to address! As you can see from the image, my boys are CHALK AND CHEESE! They are polar opposites in looks and personality and there are so many people that just love to let me know and to be honest, sometimes it’s just bloody rude! Now, I am clearly an ethnic and have experienced my fair share of racism, but when it’s towards your children, it hits different! So pre-covid, we were preparing to go on our first overseas family holiday and I went to the post office to get the boys’ photos taken. OUT OF NOWHERE this lady turns around to me and says “are they from the same dad?” and has this look of interrogation on her face as if she had any sort of right to this information! And even if they were from separate dads who cares! Another time, I was walking in Kmart where a lady stopped to tell me how cute my kids are and, in this conversation, she mentioned how this one, she pointed to Hamilton, “came from the butt hole” clearly referencing his darker skin complexion against his own brother’s lighter skin. If you need part two of this story, you’ll need to DM me personally :P! Before my son was even BORN I had someone on my husband’s side of the family comment on my baby’s skin colouring already and how he would be “the only tan” one of them. Literally mentioning nothing else other than what his skin colour might be. Not hair colour, face shape, possible interests or anything. What is my point bringing this up? Is that my boys, both of them, and any other child as a matter of fact is MORE THAN THEIR SKIN COLOUR! There are so many things to mention about a baby, child or person other than their skin colour. As a primary school teacher, I have seen the generational effects of seeing students make judgements upon other students and their families based on what they look like, and it’s disappointing. Also as a primary school teacher, I have also seen the immense power of diversity and how a community can thrive when it is embraced. It’s hard, but we need to do better.

WORK:

So, when I was pregnant with Hamilton, at the time Tristan had a great paying job and we realised that if Tristan was the one to take maternity leave, we could get four months of time together without a huge financial loss. I would only need to go back to work for eight weeks until the school Christmas holidays. Then we could have a huge chunk of family time not everyone gets! Now even though we were super proud of this plan, I was not expecting such harsh judgement from people I worked with who didn’t even know me! I had staff members go out of their way to start conversations with me just to tell me how they think I won’t handle it and how I am “crazy”, how I’m “too young” and how I don’t understand how hard it really is to make these decisions and it’s such a “young-mum” thing to do. Now, these things might not seem harmful, but when they are from people who don’t know you, or take the time to get to know you, and they are said consistently and in such a demeaning and degrading tone it’s very irritating. Especially when you are so excited about a new job and new baby coming and they are repetitively raining on your parade! Good lord, now I’m rolling my eyes so hard it’s giving me a headache! This was really hard because not only was I navigating being a first-year teacher, I then had to navigate avoiding people I worked with because I hadn’t reached that level of professionalism to meet it with a passive and professional response so I just had to try and avoid the situation altogether! After Hamilton was born, it continued and it put a lot of pressure on supply levels, especially when I had to find a different nook or cranny each day to pump because the staff members would allow students and parents to use that area for whatever reason knowing that I needed that room to pump.

Working now, is a struggle street! I am at a new school with the best people! I decided to work as a relief teacher, but had to jump into a contract this last past term due to the sudden illness of a co-worker. So now I am working at a full-time capacity again and in lockdown. My teaching sisters out there know that teaching, isn’t a 9-5 type job and I struggled with managing and balancing my time between my sudden workload and my family. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and I love being a teacher but finding a balance between the two is hard. When lockdown hit and everyone was complaining I was secretly cheering! I loved the idea of working at home because I can spend more time with my kids! But what I wasn’t prepared for was my unavailability to them at home. When I'm in a video chat and I hear Hamilton or Lincoln at my door wanting my attention, not only can I not open it, I have to blatantly ignore it. I hear them fall over and cry and I can’t help them and I hear them having so much fun with their dad and I can’t join them because I'm planning lessons and so I feel so left out of my own family. I was not prepared for how this would break my heart. This is hard.

BIRTH:

My whole pregnancy I was so excited to feel and experience the birth, in its full entirety. As weird as it sounds, yes, I was keen to go through the pain of birth! But like the majority of births out there, it unfortunately didn’t go to plan. Hamilton was delivered via a frightening emergency c-section. He wasn’t breathing, he swallowed meconium and needed to be pumped and taken straight to NICU.at this stage I remember negotiating with God asking him to take my life and give it to my baby and I was serious. Thankfully the good Lord didn’t need me just yet and Hamilton made it through and I was ecstatic that both me and my baby were safe. However, I still couldn’t help but mourn for the birth that I didn’t have. In some ways, it almost felt like I had failed my first task at being a mother by not being able to birth. I also didn’t get to do the skin-to-skin that I longed for, and I was only able to hold him for feeding then he needed to go back into the incubator. I know to some it will sound so trivial, but I know that there are other mothers that know exactly what I'm talking about. So, the news of my c-section had spread across the community including the school community where I was told by a parent of one of my students that because I had a c-section I was “not a mum yet” in these exact words. That was hard. Very untrue, but it was hard to not wring someone’s neck because you’re at your place of work and you are a professional queen! That was shocking, offensive, hurtful and hard.

HOME:

The next hard thing was Tristan’s accident. Thank Jesus our Lord and Saviour that his accident wasn’t life threatening, but it certainly was life changing. He will need further surgeries down the track and adjust how he does things. The time when I was pregnant with Lincoln was hideously atrocious! It was painful, I had gestational diabetes, Hamilton was a toddler with ATTITUDE in every sense of the word, my husband’s entire left side was out of order from the accident and I wasn’t allowed to have any chocolate or ice-cream otherwise my blood sugar would be too high! My GD sisters, I know you feel me on that one! I had never felt more alone at this time. Suddenly and literally, everything was on my shoulders. My husband’s health, my toddler’s development, my growing baby, my health, being a new mum and working again! Flash forward two-years later, Tristan is still in recovery from his accident but now I am the patient and I'm trying to parent through one knee surgery, one ankle surgery and another ankle surgery coming up in the next couple months! This is my current situation now. I’ve taken time off work to recover and the feeling of being useless and not being able to do everyday things like bath your kids and play with them gets to me on most days. You feel like you have no purpose at work because you’re replaceable, and you feel you have no purpose at home because everything is functioning just fine without you. This is hard.

Being a parent of two so close in age, is incredibly hard in its full definition! When I found out about my pregnancy with Lincoln, it was more of a “here we go again” type feeling. The pregnancy was terrible and when he arrived, of course I was in love with him, but the connection and relationship was so different to that of my first. Of course, this grew very quickly, but handling the guilt of feeling different to my second child and handling everything else that was going on at the time was really difficult.

And finally PARENTING STYLES:

Being one of the older siblings of my family I honestly thought I had my parenting style set in stone. It’s so hard to determine which parenting style your children will thrive under and so our styles change constantly based on what we think our children need at that time. We both come from extreme opposites of being parented. My parents were more authoritarian with a focus on discipline and obedience and Tristan’s parents were more permissive which gave him a lot of freedom with very fluid rules. This is a constant never-ending challenge that isn’t easily understood to some people. We’re aware that it can make us seem uncertain but regardless of what style we try to adopt, it will be done with nurturing and with the safety, wellbeing of our children as a priority. What style that leaves us with? I have no idea! This is hard!

The best bits…

Now this paragraph will be drastically smaller than the “hardest bits” part but this part is all love! The best bits to me about motherhood, are the smallest bits. They’re not huge events that are planned. They are those sweet moments that randomly happen and you don’t have your camera to film it but the feelings these moments give you last longer than those of staged photos! These are not only the milestones that every kid goes through, the first steps, first teeth etc. but I’m more referring to the personal milestones that just your baby has and the moments that are shared between the two of you. Every parent has their own  .

The best bits are when they do something that they have never done before and they don’t notice but you do! Like climb up the slide for the first time, say words they didn’t before, do new dance moves, sing new songs, make sassy faces and tell you what they need. These bits reassure you; they fill your heart and you learn from them too! One of my most memorable (not favourite) parenting moments was when Hamilton refused dinner and when he finally tried it, he said “ew it’s shit!”. Completely unexpected and although it filled me with laughter, it was the mirror I needed to curb my swearing!

One of my favourite things is to go on family outings and holidays! I don’t plan on slowing these down! I love them! I can’t wait to start our own family traditions! We’ve already started with Christmas and Easter! My family celebrates Christmas on Christmas eve, but we want to do it the morning of! We did it for the first-time last year and it was every bit as magical as I had hoped!

Personally, my BEST and favourite bit that beats everything else, is that every night when we put our boys to bed, I tell them that I love them so much, they always respond “so, so much” without fail every time! This has become our little thing between just us and I love it so much!

How do you make time for yourself?

Part of my plan with the Perinatal Wellbeing Centre, is for me to have time to myself. So, this is quite crucial because the effects of constantly spreading yourself thin and filling everyone else’s cup until yours is gone is exhausting and mentally and physically damaging. When the boys go down for their nap and when they go to bed for the night are usually the time, I can have time for myself. But if I need more, Tristan has my back on it without hesitation!

What’s next for you and your family?

Well, if everything goes to plan, we are hoping to secure a lottery win sometime soon! But on the very high chance that it doesn’t happen, we have a plan B! Firstly, we need to find a balance that works for us. I cannot continue to work at the capacity I am, it’s draining emotionally, mentally and physically. I miss my kids, and I am not achieving the parenting goals I want to. So, Tristan has decided to fulfil his lifelong dream of being a driving instructor. So, when he completes his competencies, we are aiming to work part-time each. Then it’s onto working towards our forever family home! We love our little unit we’re in now but these boys eat like horses and are growing quick and maybe one day we might want one more baby! We’re hoping to buy a caravan and make so many more family memories travelling across Australia when we can! I personally would love to travel Australia and see all the family I have…and there’s a lot!

A piece of advice for our readers?

As you can tell from my story, I am a mother that is still trying to figure things out for myself, for my kids and for my family and I am as close to having it worked out as I am to winning the lottery. So, I feel I have no capacity to give any parenting advice. One thing I have not regretted, looked back on or questioned is cutting ties with people that were not good for me and my peace and growth. I have learnt to set healthy boundaries for myself and my family in doing that I have found a supportive community of completely supportive friends. So, my one bit of advice is just that! Keep calm and cut ‘em off!