Mammy No Mates

I don’t make friends easily. I never have, on reflection. At least with girls – I always had more boy friends than girl ones. I’m a weird uber-opinionated introvert – I have lots to say, but am only really comfortable doing so in trusted company. And then you can’t get me to shut up. I’m not shy, per se, but unless I can spot some obvious common ground in a room full of strangers (cool shoes and tour t-shirts are the best kinds of giveaways) the incline of my tendencies is most certainly more ‘wallflower’ than ‘social butterfly’. Sober, at least.

When I was pregnant with Ben (this was 2004) I felt more than usually isolated; I didn’t know anyone else in my immediate proximity that was also pregnant. I mean, I knew a few people… I was friendly with a few people, but my bestest best girl-friends were all an ocean away. Don’t get me wrong; they were great – they were all really excited, but I had no one to shop for tiny socks with. And I really, really wanted someone to shop for tiny socks with.

I decided that time was right for me to get some “Mum Friends”. For most of my life, I heard tell of friends that my own Mum made while she was pregnant with me – dynamic and affectionate women in baby clinics with whom she immediately bonded. And 30-something years later, she still counts them amongst her closest friends. So discomfort be damned: I was going to find some, too.

So, fuelled by occasionally distressing thoughts of a lonely winter maternity leave with no one to talk to while my husband was occupied with the business of being sole breadwinner, I went to a couple of baby-related workshops and mama-groups – well hello there, boundaries of my comfort zone – to see what, and more specifically who, was on offer. But soft – what hope through yonder stretch marks break? There was one girl at the breastfeeding workshop – for the purposes of this story I’ll call her Mary – who, to my surprise, I struck up a conversation with, and at the end of the session we exchanged numbers. We were due within weeks of one another with our first kids; as good a common ground to start from as any, I figured.

We did see each other once or twice – she had her daughter as scheduled a few weeks before I had Ben; I remember going round to her house to see the baby, and spent an hour or so catching up, getting to know one another. I went round again just before Ben was born, and recall a bit of an odd blip in the conversation in which she seemed really uncomfortable when I didn’t reply in the affirmative to her line of questioning surrounding our plans to have our baby christened. I wouldn’t say I felt ill at ease exactly, but it was a palpable bump, nonetheless. She plainly gave rise to her intentions and her faith and I thought it pointless and a little futile to get into “the whole thing” with her and I steered the conversation elsewhere.

I guess this would be a useful opportunity to state my case on the matter. No need to steel yourself for paragraph after paragraph of religious deliberation, please don’t click away. My spirituality and/or faith is a fairly basic premise: I feel very spiritual, but I’m not a Christian. I don’t worship anything (save chocolate and a wall of Marshall stacks) but I don’t ram this fact down everyone’s throat. Reciprocally, I don’t expect it to be rammed down mine. I don’t claim to be an expert in these things, but I’d say that’s a fair exchange by anyone’s measure. I can’t prove what I believe and neither can you, and neither of us is going to convince the other of anything different, so let us agree to talk about something else – in this instance there was indeed plenty going on; dilating cervixes, swollen ankles, Braxton Hickses, what have you.

So – back to Mary. I called her a few times in the subsequent months, but we never saw each other again.  I tried to initiate another connection with her, but nothing ever materialised.

I’m not completely ignorant of the fact that maybe we both realised that we didn’t really have a lot in common other than our swollen bellies. Maybe she took pity on me and my foreigner-in-England-with-no-mates sob story and thought she’d see if I had anything interesting to say. And maybe I didn’t. But, in earnest, there has always been a part of me that wondered if she took one look at my rusted, busted Christ-o-meter and thought better of striking a closer acquaintance, lest my long and distinguished vocation as a godless, practicing heathen taint her by association. Or maybe it was Christmas and she was busy and then lost my number, etc. etc. etc.

Who knows?

But I was reminded of it all this weekend, when I bumped into her - kind of.

I went for a swim at the local baths this Sunday morning, and walked into the leisure centre at the exact same time as her, her two absolutely adorable daughters, and her husband. I recognised her straight away – I am shit with names but I never forget a face – but if I was familiar to her she gave nothing away. We didn’t say a word to one another – I guess I wanted to spare her the embarrassment of not remembering me, if indeed that was the case.  

I never bothered with any of the “Mum Friends” when I was having Jude. I knew the drill; I didn’t feel the need. I had Jude in the summer – that meant lots of lovely weather to get out for walks in, etc. I kept this blog, I found pages upon pages of sisterly consolation in fellow bloggers, and I passed the ten months of my maternity leave very cheerfully indeed.

But as I was swimming on Sunday, I thought: isn’t it weird how no one is supposed to care what other people think of them, but actually, everybody secretly does? I mean, when I rewind through the poignant moments of the last 20 years or so, I’m not taken with hysterics at the giant gaping hole left by Mary McJudgey-Judger, the holy roller of a friend who never was. I’ve got more blessings than fingers and toes to count them with, and I know it. And I’m thankful and grateful every single day. But it really pisses me off that there is someone – and the laws of averages tell me that she’s likely not the only one – that has possibly made a judgement about me, and my personality, and my lifestyle, etc. based on what she perceived it was missing, rather than what was actually there. Shame.

Ah – it’s no matter; she probably liked shit music anyway.  :-)

Words Are Stronger Than Tanks

Remember a few months ago I whined about the whole tanks/guns/war thing?  Yeah, we're still trying to wrap our heads around it, too. 

*   *   *   *

“Where are we going? I’m hungry for breaaaaaaaaaaaakfassssssssssssst!” he whines, as we walk towards the school gates. “No, Mammy! School is closed today!”

“Yes, baby,” I say. “But Mammy is going to vote this morning.”

“What does ‘vote’ mean?” he asks.

“Well, you know the government who runs our country and... looks after everyone?” The latter few words stick in my throat slightly, but my inflection doesn’t waver enough for him to notice and he nods. “Well how do you think those people get into the government?” I ask.

He shrugs.

I explain the very basic premise as the furrows in his brow uncrease as pieces of understanding fix themselves together in his little head.

“Can I vote?” he wonders.

“You can when you’re eighteen,” I tell him. “And do you know what? Less than a hundred years ago, they didn’t let women have a go at voting. They only let men. What do you think of that?”

“So, they only let Daddies but not Mammies decide the government?” he asks.

“Yep.”

“Well I think that that mustn’t have been very fair for all the Mammies.”

“You’re right, it wasn’t fair for all the Mammies. But you know, all those Mammies got together and fought the government and made them make it fair.”

“Did they have a war with tanks?” his eyes light up.

“No, baby. They fought with words. Words are stronger than tanks.”

At this, he throws his head back and laughs. “Words are not stronger than tanks. Especially not the 75mm gun on the German Panther from 1943 that weighs 35 tonnes and has a turret and 80mm armour on the side of the hull.  Can we have crumpets for breakfast?”

Any Ideas, Internets?

Like any mother, I’m prodigiously proud of my kids. When they took their first steps, I just about lost my mind with excitement for them, for us: HE’S ON THE MOVE – WATCH OUT, NEWCASTLE! As they both made their way from the beginnings of language, from little nuggets of words, then sentences… and eventually reading? I’ve come to live for that familiar swelling of my heart, each time wondering if my chest cavity has sufficient capacity to contain my joy or is it just going to bust on outta there this time?

From a very early age, Ben demonstrated a fascination of all things mechanical. His collection of favourite machines started with fans – ceiling fans, pedestal fans, windmills – strange, but true. Then he moved onto gardening – lawn mowers, trimmers, edgers – he can retain information and statistics about anything mechanical; easily able to develop an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of engine sizes, rotations per minute, and could hold his own in any electric vs. petrol debate. We uncovered a world of ‘gardening equipment review’ videos on YouTube and Ben would happily sit and watch them after school. We even helped him make his own.

But lately, Ben’s penchant for mechanics has taken a turn that – I have to say – I’m not altogether comfortable with. He likes tanks. Yes, you read that right: tanks. A machine built for fighting. War. Guns. Armour. Missles. Explosions. Soldiers. Yowza.

Now, Jason and I are just about as non-violent as you can get. We have taken great pains to impress upon our kids that above all else, it is important to be kind. Jason is so inherently pacifist that he won’t even kill bugs. We don’t allow toy guns in our home, and I don’t even let Ben watch some cartoons – you know, the blowing up and blasting aliens Ben10 type of thing. So the fact that my 6-year old comes home with paintings of armoured killing machines from school? Doesn’t make me very happy.

I’m so conflicted: do I try and steer his preferences elsewhere; discourage this interest in these nasty big fat killing machines that make my skin crawl? Is it wrong to suppress this thirst for knowledge, just because I am uneasy about the subject matter? He wants to know about the World Wars, and even likes watching documentaries about it. But of course he’s too little to understand it completely – I ask him why he likes tanks and the war, etc. and he says, “I really like the parts where there are tracks instead of wheels.” He overhears someone talking about World War II and he’ll say, “Ah! World War II is my FAVOURITE war!” Don’t get me wrong; I like that he seems to be sucking up historical facts like a sponge – I guess the context will come later as he gets older – and it is kind of nice that he is interested, say, in the roles his great-great-grandfathers played in active service during the war… but on the other hand? [INSERT HEAVY SIGH HERE]

It’s his favourite item for discussion: he wants to tell me about how the turret on so-and-so tank is different from so-and-so tank, and how this German one was better than that Russian one… and I’ll admit, I’m quickly growing weary of the subject and often change it when it’s clear he’s got it on the conversation agenda. Is that awful? I’ve tried to explain to him about wars and guns and killing and the rest of it, but he’s just too fascinated with the actual vehicle that it just doesn’t sink in. And I’m glad, in a way, because I’d hate to live in a world where a 6-year-old actually had to comprehend those kinds of atrocities… ah, I just don’t know what to do. Any ideas, Internets?

Wherein I Lose My Shit

Okay, okay. I’ll admit it: the last 24 hours in my mammying career have most certainly not been a shining example of my finest parenting hour.

What has happened to my always-cooperative-low-maintenance baby? Who is this screeching demon in his place?

Man, have we ever struggled this week.

I blame Christmas. And Christmas chocolate. And Christmas holidays and lack of nursery and its blessed routine. Because this angel-faced child that used to go to bed at 6pm every night like clockwork has been replaced (snatched by baby-cloning alien teleport?) by a caterwauling harpy.

Jude listens to a CD of lullabies while he goes to sleep – but before we turn in for the night we unplug the CD player – obviously – for fear of the whole thing overheating and setting the house on fire. On Wednesday night, I went in at about 10.30 and unplugged it, as usual. Half an hour later, the wire – which I’d left resting on the top of the chest of drawers – somehow (ghosts?) fell off and behind the drawers, resulting in a horrendous

CLATTERCLATTERCLATTERBANG!

which woke up the baby.

What followed next could only be described (in the words of the inimitable George Banks, Esq.) as an unseemly hullabaloo.

Having gone to bed (with a minimum of fuss, it has to be said) at 6 o’clock, after an initial extended version freak-out screeching berserk-o-rama having been frightened by the

CLATTERCLATTERCLATTERBANG!

he was all, “Hey! I’ve just slept for 5 hours! I’m feeling so refreshed!"

"I’m up, LET’S ALL GET UP!”

Oh, yes he did.

For the next four-and-a-half hours, we seesawed between putting him in our bed between us hoping he’d drop off (read: crawling on our heads, pulling our hair, wriggling, squirming, trying to escape) and putting him in his cot to let him cry it out (AKA is that our child or a WWII air-raid siren?)

But actually... what is funny about this whole series of events is not that they actually occurred, but how quickly I LOST MY SHIT having to deal with it. Honestly… I felt so completely wretched for the whole night, I couldn’t deal with any of it. Poor Jason had to deal with a blaring baby and a nutcase wife. What happened to the superwoman who woke up 687 times a night to clamp the aforementioned offspring off her boobs?  Dare I mention cracked nipples?  Seriously?  I thought I was made of sterner stuff than this, but behold the evidence: a Twitter account of my nocturnal breakdown:

First, I’m just stating the facts:

 

Now I’m all about the self-pity:

Oh, great!  Whining, anyone?

 

More whining:

Aaah, but now, enter whining-related GUILT:

Desperation:

 

Self-loathing:

 

But not quite self-loathing enough:

SHUT UP ALREADY:

Eventually, he ran out of steam at 4:30am after I stroked his head for about half an hour.


I’m totally mortified exhausted just re-reading it!

Anyway – Jase and I both had to take the following day off work. I knew work wasn’t a goer when I got out of bed after my 30 second sleep and wibble-wobbled my way down the landing toward the bathroom… yay vertigo!

(All hail big-hearted and sympathetic employers whose understanding was invoked by early morning phone calls from gravely voiced verge-of-tears employees, resulting in the granting of emergency last minute leave.)

Be all that as it may; we slept a glorious ten hours the following night and I am happy to report that all is once again right with the world.  Isn't it funny (no, I'm not quite laughing yet, either) how your perspective-o-meter goes all skewiff all because of the lack of a little shut-eye? 

Now, where did I put that corkscrew...?

Happy New Year, folks.  :-)

A Sneaky Week Away

Doubtless you will all forgive me - I hope - for the light posting as of late... last week we were away and this week, this HORRID WEEK, is the last week of my maternity leave before I go back to work.  That, combined with the fact that it is sunny outside, has kept me away from the blog and out of doors with my kids.

I will write properly again soon, but in the interim here are a few holiday snaps from our few days in Yorkshire last week.

Ben's second tooth fell out on the morning that we left!

Crabs for sale at the fishmonger's on Bridlington's promenade.  Ben said to a passing stranger, "I don't eat those, because we are VEG-A-TEAReans."  Atta boy, kiddo.  ;-)

Low tide in Bridlington harbour.

One of the highlights of our holiday - we went on a tour of the John Bull rock factory.  Here are two hunky fellas rolling what will eventually be loads of little sticks of rock. 

We even got the chance to have a go at rolling our own piece of rock -- Ben's had a 'B' running right the way through it!  So, so, so cool.

He also got to make a chocolate lollipop.  Here he is showing extreme self control by not flinging himself headfirst, Augustus Gloop style, into the vat of liquid chocolate.

We even got the chance to go out for a meal - ON OUR OWN - while we were out. 

Highlight of the week - a visit to Castle Howard... one of my favourite places ever.  I bought some lovely Yorkshire forced rhubarb from their Farm Shop and baked the most gorgeous crumble when we got back to the caravan, too.  Mmmm, more double cream!

The place is full of treasures...

...and even has an adventure playground for the kids.  Brilliant!

That's enough for now -- will write again soon, I promise!

Right About Now, Funk Soul Mutha

Anyone got any money? Like, lots? Fancy giving me a substantial amount of it?

I’m in a real funk.

And I know exactly why. I’m trapped.

Trapped as a full-time working mother.

This post is not for the faint hearted – you are about to read an astonishingly elaborate self-indulgent whine about the fast-approaching end of my maternity leave.

Yes, it’s true -- I have to go back to work soon. In fact, technically I already have gone back to work and I’m currently on holiday. And let me tell you, I’m rrrrrrrrreally bitter about it. Before you know it, these final precious days will be over and I’ll have to hand my beautiful Jude over to someone else for nine hours during the day. NINE HOURS.

He’s only awake for 12 hours... so I’ll hardly see him. And I’m so, so sad.

Not to mention the fact that Ben - who has been used to his school day lasting from when I walk him to school at 9am until I collect him at 3pm – will now have an extra 3 hours tagged onto his day (an hour for the school’s breakfast club and 2 hours after school) to facilitate my going back to work. Poor kid. I’m trying not to think about what kind of disruption THAT is going to bring to his little world.

Depressingly, this back-to-work scenario is consuming my every waking thought; I feel positively wounded with it. I know, I know... I’ve had a lovely long maternity leave, and had some magical moments with both my kids – and Jason, come to that – since I’ve been off. And I knew this day would come... but I was so happily going about the business of being a new mother again and getting into a really lovely routine of being ‘Stay At Home Mammy’ that my looming return-to-work date has REALLY crept up on me. I’m bereft. Breathless.

I wish I could afford to stay at home and be a Mammy. But it’s just totally out of the question. Oh sure, women with children have the legal right to request flexible working arrangements, but any reduction in my working hours would hit us badly, financially speaking. We both need to bring in full time money to make things work.

Do you know, this year it will cost just slightly less for me to pay for my baby in nursery for one year as it does to obtain a full undergraduate 3year degree at Oxford university? Know how I know this? I TOTALLY CHECKED. Happy thought, eh?

After careful consideration, and without further ado, here are my options:

1.  Increase frequency and monetary contribution towards the purchase of lottery tickets in the next month or so.

2.  Go on benefit, default on all my bills, live on baked beans and move to a squat... in the next month or so.

3.  Finish writing, secure a literary agent, agree publishing contract and receive sizeable paycheque for my first novel... in the next month or so.

4.  Happen upon the as-yet-undiscovered branch of my family tree wherein I am the sole and direct descendant of someone with untold fortunes who is about to peg it... in the next month or so.

5.  Begin clandestine (and really steamy!) extramarital affair with Premiership footballer or rock star** or similar and be a ‘kept’ mistress... in the next month or so.

6.  Fnd enough money to finish university degree and get a job in education somewhere, so I don’t have to scramble around like a mad thing arranging childcare during half term and other holidays... in the next month or so.

7.  Suck it up, stop whining and go back to work. No points for guessing when that might commence.

**Have already consulted with Jason about this item, who says that gentlemen of either profession would be acceptable for any opportunity for adulterous activity; his credibility as a ‘dude’ would improve exponentially amongst his circle of friends if he became ‘the one whose wife had a fling with [insert name of famous footballer here]’.  So, you know... no worries there -- it’s all good.

But what really stings is that I’m faced without any element of choice in the matter. Isn’t it cruel how times have changed? Women in, say, my Grandma’s generation got married, had kids, stayed at home to raise them and rarely had jobs outside of the home. My mum’s generation was more of the same... but they could choose to work, or choose to not work. No biggie.

And now the tables have completely turned – while mothers and women in general are enjoying a better balance of equality in the workplace, many of them in my acquaintance these days find that they don’t have a choice – they MUST work, in order to keep their families. This is my hellish Catch 22: I chose to have babies, but I’m forced to pay someone else to raise them.

Jude was really unsettled tonight going to bed; I’m starting to worry that he can sense my anxiety about going back to work. I look at his little face, his little perfect face with big blue eyes blinking beseechingly at me to pick him up. And I wonder... how the hell am I going to hand him over to someone at the nursery next month and get in the car and take myself to work? Could someone please tell me, how the hell am I supposed to do that?

National Book Day

National Demonstrate Parental Ineptitude Day, you mean. The school noticeboard invited us all to send our kids to school on 4th March dressed as their favourite literary character. A fact which I recalled at approximately 8pm THE NIGHT BEFORE.

Oh... fuuuuuck.

Ben was already in bed. This is a good thing – entering into a debate with him about which character from which book in his library would have surely defeated me so close to my own bedtime, so making the decision on his behalf was something I was more than happy to execute.

I think about his favourite stories, and then start a slow, downward spiral into blind terror and panic, mixed with equal parts self-loathing because oh for the love of effing Christ HOW DO I MAKE A GRUFFALO COSTUME OUT OF SOME TINFOIL, DUCT TAPE AND TUPPERWARE LIDS which is all I happened to have at hand at the time.

In the end, I totally (and predictably) wimped out and mashed together a Harry Potter costume. I was going to say ‘haphazardly mashed’ but there was nothing haphazard about it – it was pretty impressive from where I was sitting. The irony is, my kid has never shown an iota of interest in Harry Potter (he is, after all, only five, and perhaps a little young for all that wingardium leviosa-ing) but be that as it may, desperate times call for desperate measures, etc. etc. and before long, a black skirt of mine became some wizarding robes, a pimped-up bendy straw became a magic wand and some cardboard and black electrical tape made a fine pair of Harry Potter spectacles. Add one stolen-from-website-and-printed-on-card Gryffindor badge later and behold the transformation:

Enthusiasm, anyone?

Thursday morning he woke up and I told him he’d be going to school dressed as Harry Potter.

“But Mammy, “ he puzzled. “Harry Potter isn’t from a book, he’s from a film and a video game. Can I go as the Hungry Caterpillar instead?”

Er, no. I had to get the book out and show it to him before he’d believe me and he still wasn’t keen. This loaned itself to an irritated reluctance (in the form of a near wrestling match) to let me draw a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead with my eyebrow pencil which was luckily dissipated by the shameless bribe of including a chocolate biscuit in his packed lunch... (exhale!) ... and off he went to school. I watched as he zipped his way into the classroom to take his place amongst the rest of the kids in fancy dress and stopped to admire some of the other costumes.

But wait, what’s this I see? How did I miss the TRANSFORMERS in the collected works of Enid Blyton? Was ‘Ben10’ a protagonist in one of Aesop’s Fables? Did Roald Dahl invent Spongebob Squarepants?

YOU MEAN TO TELL ME I COULD HAVE SENT HIM TO SCHOOL IN LAST YEAR’S WALL-e HALLOWE’EN COSTUME AND SAVED MYSELF THE TURMOIL?

(sigh)  Where's my corkscrew?

Haiti, Blog Power and Peter Pointer

Ben is so, so, so impressionable right now. There are a hundred and one questions, while his brain is busy formulating all kinds of wacky scenarios as the little sphere that has been his life up to now grows bigger and wider. His vocabulary is becoming more enriched as his reading skills sharpen and I have become a walking Oxford Dictionary as I constantly define words for him and contextualize ideas into sentences that he can wrap his head around. It’s harder than you think! He heard a newsreader say “generally speaking” the other day, and asked me what it meant. WTF?! How do you answer that for a 5-year-old?

I’m sure that I am not alone in occasionally feeling that I sometimes find there is a bit of a gap between the kind of mother that I am and the kind of mother that I would like to be remembered as. It’s not that big of a gap, don’t get me wrong... but it makes its presence felt very occasionally when I find myself bogged down in the minutiae of maternity leave, where I am occupied with packed lunches, ironed uniforms, baby wipes, scratch mittens and 1-2-3-4-5-6 scoops of formula (or was that just five-shit-I’ve-lost-count), etc. etc. When life is more about just making it to bedtime without ripping out handfuls of my own hair than it is about trying to instil values and shape characters of the two little souls in my charge. Luckily, all I have to do when I’m feeling a little beleaguered by this responsibility is visit the website of Karen Walrond at www.chookooloonks.com. Have you heard of this mother/writer/photographer extraordinaire? If you haven’t, check her out. She is my daily dose of inspiration – her daughter is the same age as Benny, we’re both married to Englishmen... so I can relate. But friends, I find her blog posts so soothing and the quiet beauty and calm that oozes out of some of her photos has this strange restorative effect on me such that I can almost hear the click of my internal clock counters realigning themselves to 0-0-0-0 so I can breathe out again!

Recently she spoke about how she tries to show her daughter an example of living with kindness every day; little things like buying the coffee for the person behind her in line at the coffee shop, etc. which got me to thinking that there really are a million little ways that we can all use to teach our kids about kindness and compassion, about human understanding, generosity and consideration.  And that it is our duty as parents to be brave enough to impart these sorts of lessons to our wee babas.

Cut to bedtime the other night, and amongst the plethora of quickfire questions aimed at me were the following memorable nuggets: “Mammy, why can’t you touch a rainbow?” “Imagine if I catched a cloud and put it in my wardrobe!” and then... “Mammy, what's an earthquake?”

We’d had the news on earlier and he must have overheard Jason and I talking about it, and the horrific scenes so reminiscent of the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, which was right after Ben was born. So we got his Children’s Encyclopaedia out and we read about earthquakes, and what causes them, and what happens to the earth and the houses on top of it if there is an earthquake near where you live. We got out his globe, and had a look to find Haiti, and talked about the people that lived there, and what had happened. I’m sitting there watching his little brow furrow as he absorbed it all. I tried to get him to think about how we (“...aaaalll the way on THIS side of the globe,”) might be able to help people in Haiti. “The people in Haiti will be poorly because of the earthquake; they will need medicine to make them better, “ he works out as I nod. “Have we got any medicine we can send them, Mammy?” We talk a little more and I steer his questions such that he works out for himself that we can send money to Haiti, and how it is important to use your pocket money to help people who sometimes need a little help.  "So... let's just say that if we sent a little money, and Nana sends a little money, and your teachers send a little money, and they added all the money together?  That could buy a lot of medicine, couldn't it?"

Minutes later, we logged onto the Disasters Emergency Appeal website and together we filled in the form to send a monetary donation to the appeal fund.

Then with compassion and concern, and with kindness in his little heart, I watched my child, his expression one of intense concentration, as he typed in his own name and our telephone number with his ‘Peter Pointer’ finger, carefully and purposefully, into the website and clicked 'Donate Now.'

(Thanks, Karen.)

2009 in Pictures - a little late...

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Spinning Plates

I’ve just had one of those moments. This morning I washed the cushion covers on my living room furniture, and I’ve dried them and put them back on and they’ve come up looking nearly spanking – brand spanking. I’m so pleased with myself. I even did a little dance. Fortunately, the postman had already been so there was no one to witness the little shake of my boo-tay but the potted plants in the room.

And then I thought to myself, “Excuse me, Self? Uh... exactly when did you become the kind of woman who gets excited by getting baby milk stains out of upholstery?”

If I look at my 33 year old life with the eyes of my 23 year old self, she'd be all: YEAH RIGHT, I’M SO SURE, and would stick her fingers in her ears and LALALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU before promptly bursting into flames.

Back then, I had lofty ambitions of filling up my passport: our first ka-dunk of the stamping machine at Customs brings us to the South of France, anyone care to join me? Bienvenue, cherie -- absolutement. Alors, et maintenant we’re off to Marrakech – let’s sashay about the souks in a kaftan and drink mint tea. Malta? Check. Florence? Si, si, si, bella signora... and the list goes on. I planned to show up with a bag full of dirty laundry at my parents’ place when I was 30 and then start looking to settle down.

But I met my would-be husband on my first port of call and I now live in England. Which is great... but the Cushion-Covers-Washing-Incident is one of my life’s occasional curveballs where I am reminded that at one time, I was having a blast being just 'Girl'... no responsibilities, no limits, no worries. No worries of course, other than, 'What time is that connecting flight?' or 'How much are tickets for that gig?' or 'Where's the corkscrew?' or 'Oops, that was kinda slutty.'

Me, circa 1996.

And now here I am with all these plates in the air: Mammy / Wife / Daughter / Friend / Colleague, etc., etc., etc ad infinitum... and sometimes the spinning gets too tricky and regretfully it’s 'Girl' which gets put down, to make the rotation of the others more manageable. And I’m sad to say that sometimes? It really is a regular struggle to remember where I left her, and to pick her up and dust her off and give her the occasional whirl.

Does anyone else do this? Why do we choose THAT plate – our first one – to set down out of the way? Can’t put down ‘Mammy’; that’s totally out of the question lest I condemn myself to an automatic visit from Social Services. Spiritually bonded to the lovely Jason such as I am, it is imperative that I keep ‘Wife’ up in the air, too; you all know how bonkers I am for him anyway.  There are a DILLION (there’s a “Ben-ism” for ya) reasons why my ‘Girl’ plate is over there in the corner not seeing any twirly-action.

I’m pretty sure it’s a matter of self-preservation. I’m no martyr – it’s not like I’m painting a picture of being pitiful and self-sacrificing; don’t misunderstand me, I don’t have any regrets. I have a fab life with a dreamy husband, I love the bones of my two wee lads and things are good.

Looking a little closer... that dusty plate over there in the corner on the ground isn’t delicate fine bone china, make no mistake. She’s tough, she’s earthenware, her glaze isn’t as shiny as it once was but whoa, nelly – she can handle a chip or two. She is cherished, she is big, she is central... and she is protected over there, out of the way, the heart of the dinner service. She doesn’t jostle for place and insist on heavy rotation like the other plates. Not because she doesn’t really enjoy a good old gyration once in a while, but because she knows that if she is dropped and shattered, then there’s not a hope in hell for the rest of them.

Couldn't put these two down if I tried. 

(I took that whole plate metaphor thing WAY too far, didn’t I?) But you know what I mean.

I take great satisfaction by paying homage to my cool ‘old’ self by refusing to cut my hair short and stomping about the neighbourhood with the pram in my Doc Martens/Chuck Taylors (delete as weather appropriate). I went to see Blur at the end of June this year, 2 weeks before Jude was born! That girl with the pregnant belly with the glow sticks at the back of the arena while Prodigy rave it up on stage? That was me, back in April. I’m still collecting tattoos and wandering around used book stores and record stores.

I’m still (intermittently) the same ol’ Nick – just with baby barf on my shoulder, bags under my eyes and always, ALWAYS a box of snack raisins in my purse for kid-related-snack-emergencies.

I’m all right, me.