Ouch

I don't wanna be a mother today. I'm over it. I'm bored making food that doesn't get eaten and I'm bored of needing to be touched every three minutes. I'm bored of hoping for an extra long nap and getting an extra short one instead. So I've done what every sensible, mature person would do: I've shut the door on myself and the dependents and I'm wallowing on the computer. I can hear Anna having a little whinge but I can also hear the toys clanging and clunking as she plays, or throws them around in frustration, so I know she's still breathing. Bud is sulking because I got annoyed at him today: one two many whines from him pushed me over the edge, somewhat. (I'm sorry it's pissing it down outside, Bud, but I can't do anything about it. It's horrible out there and I'm not going out. You, on the other hand, are more than welcome to go out, but I'm not standing here holding the bloody door open for hours and I'm not going out with you. I'll melt.)

In the good bad old days, this would be the time that I'd drag my arse off down to the shops for a tub of lardy guts triple choc heart by-pass ice cream, without even bothering to get out of slippers, then I'd eat the whole lot in front of Oprah or Judge Judy and flake out feeling sick all afternoon. Now I have to pretend that I am a responsible adult and, ye gods, it's only 3pm so I have a whole afternoon to fill with something interesting before I can legitimately expect Anna to go to sleep again.

This wasn't what I expected of motherhood. Why am I counting the hours to sleep time? Why am I not enjoying every single moment of wake time? When did I turn into such a drudge?

This is what happened yesterday:

There we were, having a nice civilised coffee and games afternoon at The Moon Café, when Anna BIT ME. Not while feeding or anything (holy crap that would have made me sing) but, almost as bad, right on the fleshy part of my arm. With the full force of her sharp new little teeth. With no provocation at all. It bloody hurt. And it even left a most impressive bruise which I showed to everyone and we all agreed that she should be immediately flogged and sent down the mines cuddled and comforted greatly because she was S-C-R-E-A-M-I-N-G, owing to the fact that I had shouted, at her, for the first time ever in her life.

(Actually, that's a lie. In order to present a realistic version of motherhood and not participate in the grossly unfair myth of new parenting being all fluffy and loving, all the time, I will hereby admit that I have shouted at Anna on two other occasions. Both were when she was a lot younger (before three months, sadly) and were at that time in her life when she would often cry, loudly, for a couple of hours at a time. I shouted 'Shut up! What's wrong with you!' or something equally helpful, then took myself off outside to water the garden for some time out. Crying myself at the utter wretchedness of my whole life. Naturally I am not especially proud of these episodes, however I know that they are very, very common in stressed out new parents, and I know that as long as no physical harm occurs, the babies do not suffer any long term trauma at all. Even if they don't obviously help with the crying, I doubt they even rate much of a mention on the short term trauma scale either. If more of us would admit to these less than perfect parenting moments, more of us would not feel the ridiculous pressure to become perfect parents).

Anyway, yesterday I was a lot more specific. I yelled 'Owww! Don't do that!' (which earned me A Look from everyone in the room), and then the wailing began. The poor little bugger, it really shook her up a bit. On the flip side, though, I'm hoping it was a big enough shock that she won't do it again, and there are harder lessons she's going to have to learn.

We all decided that I should take a photo of the teensy teeth-mark bruise and post it to this blog, in order that I can have some leverage over Anna in the future. Unfortunately, I should have taken the photo there and then, as by the time I'd got home the bruise had gone. She's been reading up on her Torturers' Manual, the chapter on Leave No Discriminating Marks.

Dream Weaver

Do babies dream? Do they have nightmares? If they do, what is it that they find scary, given that they know no fear? If they don't, then what else is it that wakes Anna from a deep sleep to an hysterical scream in 0.4 seconds in the wee small hours, and then renders it near impossible to settle her again?

Of course, I don't know for sure that she goes from deep sleep to scream, maybe she lies there awake for a while. The thought of that is, somehow, even worse. Something's going on though, because normally when she wakes at night she starts off with a low grade grizzle and it will only escalate if I am slack and pushing my luck, lying in bed hoping she'll go back to sleep again. (Why do we do this? I know I am not the only parent who lies awake, making futile deals with any random God who may be tuning in, hoping against all hope – not to mention previous experience – that the crying will magically stop and we won't need to get out of bed. It's the Lotto mentality – everyone knows the odds of winning are impossibly long, but we all play anyway. And, hey, our dreams will come true – sometime between birth and 18 years, a child will stop calling out in the night. They'll stop calling out for us, anyway. Geez Louise, I really hope I have a blokie on board by then, someone who will be willing to prowl around with a bright torch and a defensive attitude, protecting the virtue of his daughter. I am not sure that I am up to the task, mainly because I discarded my own virtue so lightly I don't think I could stand the hypocrisy).

Anyway. Back to dreaming. Anna's Uncle was a chronic sleepwalker and a nightmare sufferer, so maybe these sorts of things are hereditary. If that's the case I will be calling for a total ban on all things sharp and pointy in her room, our family having almost learnt a terrible lesson involving a somnambulant 15 year old boy in the grip of a bad nightmare, a fully loaded gidgee gun, and my not particularly skinny mother trying to calmly talk him down but in the process presenting an impossible-to-miss target. I know this because I was hiding behind the door at the time, simultaneously hissing at my mother to get the hell out of the room, writing her eulogy in my head, and idly wondering in my spare time if "I was asleep at the time, Your Honour" was a good enough plea to escape a 1st degree murder charge. (Thankfully, we never had the chance to find out. My mother is alive and well, and my brother… well, I don't sleep in the same house as him any more, so as far as I'm concerned everything is peachy!)

Nightmares suck. The last lot I had, all hormonally induced, were while I was pregnant and I had various horrible scenarios of losing the dog (I don't need to be Freud to realise there were possible projection issues going on there) and then again right after Anna's birth, when the scene changed slightly to include various people stealing Anna, no doubt related to the signs pasted on every available surface at hospital about not letting your babes be handled by anyone not wearing an I.D. tag. Good advice, probably, but not really the sort of thing that will calm the frayed nerves of the newly-delivered. Before that, I had a cool (cool in a horror can't-watch-but-can't-look-away movie kind of way) bout of nightmares during my trip to Africa, which were brought on by the anti-malarial drug Lariam, only issued after all kinds of bleak warnings about it being known to ward off disease-carrying mosquitos but also not adverse to bringing on nightmares, hallucinations and, for the particularly lucky, psychosis.

All this might make for interesting reminiscing but it doesn't help me when, at 3am, I am trying to comfort a 9 month old with zero language skills by explaining that whatever she is crying about isn't really real, and why doesn't she calm down and come have some nice, warm, sleepy mummy milk? Strangely enough, she doesn't want to hear it.

My other baby

I got Bud in 2001 as a sprightly 7-year old from the Shenton Park Dog's Home, and let me put paid to the ridiculous rumour that you need to have a dog from puppy age for it to really truly love you. Bud loves me so much his world stops turning if he has to be apart from me for any reason, and he was well into middle age before we met. In fact, I think as far as canine love goes, the opposite is true: puppies are cute and all, but they are so fickle they will love anything and anyone; it's adult dogs (especially the ones from pounds and homes) who are the ones that really take time to get to know you and then make a decision as to whether or not they will make a lasting attachment.

Poor old Bud has had his life turned upside down and inside out, and he didn't even get to have a vote on whether a baby should or should not enter our household. (That's one of the many fabulous things about dog ownership, I've found; it's great for allowing a little bit of tyrannical rule to take place without anyone having to call any authorities). Buddy is an arthritic ball-obsessed 13 year old Staffy/Labrador cross and once upon a time, he was the absolute light of my life, the object of my slavish devotion, and (quite literally during a depressive episode a couple of years ago) the sole reason for me to get out of bed in the morning.

Then in early October last year, Anna was born and from Bud's point of view, everything went to shit.

Bear in mind that Bud still has a pretty terrific life, as far as your average dog goes. He gets walked at least once a day, without fail, which includes a park where he can run off his lead; his dinner biscuits get mixed up with a bit of warm water every night so they're not too dry for him (and when he was eating roo meat mixed in with it, that was microwaved so it was not too cold, being straight from the fridge); he sleeps on a double bed in my bedroom that he is kind enough to share with me (and recently, I bought an electric blanket and I lasted a whole week before I weakened and started turning his side on as well); he has his own Drizabone for the chilly weather. You get the picture: this is no strictly utilitarian biological alarm system we are talking about here. It's just that as Bud didn't think he was your average dog – he thought he was an average person – it has come as a bit of a shock to realise just where in fact he does sit on the food chain.

However, he is still my bestest furry pride and joy, and I would be lost without him even though Anna is here to fill my life to overflowing, and it has occurred to me that anyone reading this blog really would have no idea how big a part of my life he is. Hence, time to rectify the situation and declare publicly: I LOVE MY DOG! The fact that a few weeks ago he got very sick and stopped eating for days, and then threw up uber smelly stomach contents and so we had a panicked visit to the emergency vet hospital, and he underwent major surgery to remove a big lump of plastic (from a very expensive toy, grrr) from his bowel, and it was all very upsetting and teary because I thought he was going to die, and yet I wrote not one word about it on this blog, does not indicate a general give-a-shit factor of nil, it indicates that the whole thing was so very stressful I could not find any way of writing about it without descending into melodramatics and hysteria. It was bad enough that I was doing that in real life on my ever-patient family, let alone making a permanent record of it in a public arena for (potentially) everyone to see.

He has now made a full recovery, the only legacy being a very cool scar on his belly, a stern warning that he is not to eat any bits of plastic again, and a tremendously huge vet bill that I will be paying off until I am old.

One of the things that I have realised is that more than likely, unless Bud lives to be very old indeed, Anna will probably not remember him at all. And because he is such a fabulous dog and such an important part of my life, this makes me quite sad. The relationship between Bud and Anna has been thrown into relief lately due to two events: first, Buddy growled at Anna, and second, Buddy got between Anna and a stranger on the street trying to say hello to her and let it be known that he, stranger, had better not try any funny business otherwise he, Bud, would have something to say about it.

As strange as it sounds, I was quite happy about the growling thing. It means Bud is prepared to give warnings about when he is reaching the end of his tether, and I can teach Anna as she gets older about what growling means. In the meantime, of course, it's up to me to move her out of his face, or to tell him to shove off and get out of the way. And the growl in particular was not of the snarly listen-up-kid-back-off-before-I-eat-you kind, it was of the whiny oh-please-can't-you-just-leave-me-be? variety. It was also when Anna was grabbing his toes and I think that's just too much to ask any dog to have to put up with, so I can't really say as I blame him. The 'stranger getting too close' incident was a happy realisation on my part that despite the growling, and the almost constant interruptions of mine and Anna's floor play time by a wet nose and a slobbery ball, Bud has come to the conclusion that Anna is now a part of the family, and is prepared to make minor adjustments to reflect that.

So all I really need to do now is figure out some way to enable Buddy to live a very long time indeed. If there happen to be any practising genetic scientists out there who want to take a few molecular samples from something to practise growing something else from …… Well, anyway. Maybe I'll think of something else, just in case genetic cloning doesn't take off in a big way for household pets members.



As this post is dedicated to Buddy, and not Anna, I won't mention here that Anna got her third tooth through a little while ago. (Dead on the nine month mark; I think she has started reading my baby how-to manuals.) I will leave that news for some other time.

Beastie Baby

Thanks to Uncle Ric, I had a big grown up night out last night. I went to a quiz night and insisted I be scribe, which I thought would cleverly hide the fact that I wouldn't actually be answering any questions myself; however no one was more surprised then me when I managed to hold my own (I knew, for instance, that marmalade is Paddington Bear's favourite food, and that was one point the table wouldn't have got had I not been there). I think I might be finally ready to move on from the shock of child birth.

Anna spent the evening with her uncle and they had quite a little party. I found out later they'd played with toys, watched Foxtel, danced in the kitchen while dinner was cooking. Stayed up past bedtime. It must have been fun, because there were no tears (and no fretting about me, which is good in an ego-shattering kind of way).

When I arrived to pick her up, before I discovered how fun it had been, I could hear loud music blaring out into the night and I came over all funny and rushed up the stairs and barged inside, because I thought that Anna must be crying and Ric must have just turned up the music so he couldn't hear it and then got on with his life. Shame, shame, shame! Of course, my brother would never do something like that. Turns out that while they were cooking dinner and watching the Sports channel, Anna was boogie woogie-ing to the song rifts in between each segment, so when it was finally bed time Ric had an inspirational flash, whacked a CD in the player and let it rip. Apparently, it went down extremely well. She was not a fan of Nirvana but she loved the Beastie Boys, which blows all that womb-recognition stuff out of the water. If that was the case, she'd be drifting off to Paul Kelly and The Indigo Girls and Ben Harper and Beth Orton, not some crap misogynistic soft rock bad boy band.

Oh joy, now I can't wait until she's a teen.

It's me again

I'm back! The whining bitchy old bag of agro has been wrestled back into her little corner of my soul and now the more or less sweet Helen, more or less bereft of mucus and more or less tanked up on sleep, has returned to the control centre.

'Hello!' as Anna would almost say and that is the news of the day, that I think her first word might soon be 'hello'. She's certainly saying something pretty similar now, a sort of Eh-Oh! and there's a definite inflection on the end to indicate an exclamation mark. It's pretty exciting. I have been musing on a (ridiculous) made-up hypothesis that a first word might be indicative of a future career, in which case I thought 'hello!' might be paving the way to interesting and challenging work within the Immigration Department. But then I realised that there would have to be a complete change of government for that to ring true, because to be eligible for employment in the Howard Government's Immigration Department, Anna's first words would have to be 'Let Me Judge You Before I Decide On A Welcome (Or Not).' From what I can tell, John Howard uses the 'Three W' test to decide who gets to live in this huge, population not terribly big, supposedly multicultural nation of ours: White, Wealthy, Westerners. If you don't fit the bill, bugger off and go elsewhere… no, we don't care where, we don't even care if there is no other where, just don't stop here. Maybe … and here I am floating off into a lovely fantasy … maybe by the time Anna is old enough to vote and start forging a career, we will have a Green party in power and the policies relating to other human beings might become humane again.

My first word, apparently, was 'Bird', and so this might explain why I myself have no career to speak of – I am flighty and easily distracted by bright shiny things, and put all my energies into flimsy nest building and larking about in the sunshine.

Blergh!

This sucks! Anna has a cold and I have a cold and we both feel wretched and miserable and, on my part anyway, fairly damn angry. Because this is just dumb! (Because I don't 'do' sick well, and never have). Neither of us are getting much sleep, and I love my sleep; Anna because she can't breath (poor lovey) and me because then she wakes up and won't/can't go back to sleep and screams and yells every time she is horizontal, and meanwhile I am just about dropping where I stand, and this is happening every three hours. It's ridiculous. Where is the 'off' button on these things? Why are my instruction books so damn useless? Just what was wrong with my life anyway when it was hollow and meaningless and childless but had a good 8 hours every night? Why did I give up the kind of life where I had the luxury of ringing in sick and spending A WHOLE DAY in bed? Why didn't I do this more often, in preparation for now when I am not going to be able to do it for the next 15 years or so? Why didn't someone remind me? What sort of stupid universal rule is it that if you don't get enough sleep at night, you still have to carry on as normal during the day? How is a person supposed to carry on, with a smile, when she has snot wiped all over her, has Farex sneezed right in her face at high velocity, is thrown up all over, has tits that suddenly start leaking again, and has smoothed over two hissy fits, all before 9am? Where's the bloody angel to come and smooth over my hissy fits? Why did I ever, ever, think that I could do this parenting thing on my own? Why can't I make my child feel better? Where are the know-it-all health professionals when she is crying and snuffling at 3am? Why don't I make a recording of it and play it back to them at full volume when they tell me she's not heavy enough/doesn't nap long enough/should be eating more solids? Why can scientists and doctors and other clever people sort you out with cures for polio and hepatitis and even stick on a new leg if you lose your original one but can't figure out how to cure a cold? These people call themselves intelligent - how hard can it be anyway? How much time do they need to figure it out? Why doesn't bloody God, who I don't believe in anyway but if he really wanted me to believe he could make himself bloody useful, why doesn't he send someone around to make Anna feel better and to let me have some bloody sleep????????

Great Pink Plastic Stuff Hunter

Anna and I have survived our first no deposit! Lay-by now for Christmas! Post financial year! Big toy sale! All the major retailers have them in July sometime and K-Mart's started yesterday. I was there with stars in my eyes and gladness in my heart: this – this decadent frenzy of moveable, clickable, wheel-able, bounce-able, pop-out-able things, with attachments – is one of the reasons why I had a child.

It was mad. There was crap and kids and chaos everywhere, no-one followed any social rules or recognisable order, no-one minded, the heating was on way too high, and everyone was functioning perfectly well in spite of it all. There were even blackboards set up to advertise coffee and snacks within sight of the poor souls wasting away in the lay-by queue. It was like the excitement of a fairground except slowed way, way, way, waaaaaaayy down. And roller coaster trolleys don't have wonky wheels.

I don't know what I bought. As soon as I stepped foot in the melee, I realised that whatever I thought I might like Anna might like I should throw in the trolley then and there, as my chances of getting back to wherever I had last seen things was going to be roughly nil. So I was flinging things in and flinging them straight back out again when I came across a better thing; I think the contents of my trolley changed completely at least three times. It appeared everyone else was doing the exact same, so the shelves were a glorious shamble of stuff. In fact, it looked just like it might if a few kids had the run of the place for their personal toy room. The staff were going quietly bonkers trying to keep some sort of semblance of order – today was only the first day, so good luck guys! Reminded me somewhat of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill in Hades for all eternity – but I thought it was great fun.

Anna had a bit of a dummy spit in the middle of the 4 km long lay-by queue, which only added to the atmosphere of the day.

Being the total shopping legend that I am, I did find the one thing I was planning to get: one of those plastic clam-shell jobbies that you can fill up with water or sand (or both, I guess, if you are feeling particularly mad or in a mood to clean something) because it has not escaped my attention that Anna's favourite thing to do these days is stuff her face full of the dirt that collects in the cracks of the pavers at the back of our house. So I thought, a ha, the child needs a sand pit; if she's going to eat dirt at least I can ensure that it is clean dirt that I can keep some control of. Because I am nothing if not a considerate mother.

I also distinctly remember keeping hold of a really funky plastic penguin that you blow up until it is roughly toddler size and it has a weight in the bottom so that when you push it over, it will bounce right back and hit you in the nose. It is supposed to help teach almost-toddlers how to walk. I can't see how that would happen, being as it is something that moves every time they try to use it for support and then springs back again to whack them when they let go. Maybe they are so eager to get away from it, their 'run away' reflex kick-starts their leg co-ordination. Whatever: the important thing is, I can't wait to play with it.

On so many levels, I counted the day as a success. So much so that these purchases (whatever they are) have already been deemed as 'birthday', next week I'm off to Big W for 'Christmas', and then if I allow myself to get completely carried away I might even do Target after that. Then I need to stop and take a breath, as I don't want to suffer from Christmas burn-out in July. And all these things will need paying for at some stage. And I remember babbling on, pre-birth, like the idiot I am, about how Anna would not be getting loads of presents at Christmas time from me or anyone else because that was just rampant capitalism and totally unnecessary and in deference to all the homeless and needy children of the world, one present from me and one from Santa would be just fine and she could damn well be thankful for that. Now I will need to channel all my energy into thinking up a functional yet graceful about-face on the matter, and exhausting myself on way-too-early shopping trips is not conducive to back flippery.

Ode to Telemarketers

Oh, Telemarketers, how much do I hate you?
Let me count the ways
As I try to negotiate
Your conversation littered with
Open ended questions and
Your conviction that you are doing me
A favour

As you try to politely flog me a
New phone complete with
Camera and accessories
At no charge to me
Oh except for the 48 month contract for which I will end up paying thousands
I wonder if you realise how hard I am trying not to lose
My temper

How many times will you read your
Pile of drivel passing for a script
Before you'll realise that the 14 day holiday for two
At a hotel of my choice
Complete with restaurant vouchers and a fruit basket
Is not in any economically recognisable way
Totally free

Oh, Telemarketers, how much do I hate you?
Thank you for speaking with me
Let me take a few moments of your time
To tell you that if you wake
My napping baby one more time
With your unsolicited phone calls I will have to get
Very angry

Dedwydd pen-blwydd