Census

I love a good Census. Really, I mean it; I am such a phenomenal dork that I love filling in forms and, as far as forms go, the Census is top of the heap. I got so excited when the Census guy came to drop off my form, he nearly fell down the porch steps as he took a frightened step backwards. (Actually, my most favourite form so far is Anna's birth certificate, but I will forever lament the fact that I was so whacked out and dazed from the enormity of brand new motherhood I came over all official and actually put my real job – admin goon, and I didn't even write that – under the 'mother's occupation' box. I wish I could turn back time to that day and put something interesting in there, like Cartoonist or Fur Trapper.) This year the Census can even be done online; that's called filling in forms on the internet, folks, and it just doesn't get much better than that.

I can't handle people who don't do the Census. It shits me. More specifically, I can't handle people who don't do the Census and then have a whinge when something happens in their neighbourhood that they don't like. It's like people who don't vote and then whinge about the government. Hey, have you got small children and the funding for childcare in your suburb gets slashed? Do you rely on public transport, and the local bus route is cancelled? Are you on a low income, and the local co-op is closed? And you didn't do your Census? Well, don't come whining to me, bucko, 'cos you got what's coming. Let's make it clear: if you don't fill in your Census form, you are writing yourself out of existence. I normally really, really hate having to defend governments, 'specially this one we've got right now, but if they don't know what you need they can't be expected to provide it. Politicians don't have ESP (sadly, otherwise a certain PM who looks a little like Toad of Toad Hall but with not as many cool friends would not be able to sleep at night from the furious cosmic screaming in his ears) and there's no better way to test a party's mettle than to let it know loud and clear what a community wants, then sit back and see what it does.

Tonight's Census form also presented me with my first conundrum regarding Anna's paternal lineage. One of the questions was regarding ancestry, and you were only allowed to pick two. Mine is boringly simple – I am a mix of English, Welsh and a little bit of Irish – but one of the things I do know about her Donor Dude is that he was born in an entirely different and much more exotic part of Europe. So, given that he is not in any way a part of our lives, did I put his half of the ancestry on her tally or keep it all the same as mine? I asked my Coven friends the other night at a dinner party we had to celebrate a new dining table and most of them agreed that I should put Anna's lineage down to correspond with mine. Their argument was something along the lines of: a) her father is not in our lives, and I am, b) I am doing all the work, c) ergo, me and my heritage deserve to be the One and Only. Although I do respect their opinions enormously, I ignored them completely on this occasion and put down the Dude's ancestry as part of Anna's ancestry. I thought that even though he is not in our lives, and does not, in fact, even know of our existence, we know of his, and what we know of him belongs to her. She is going to grow up knowing so very little about her father that it seems just a bit unfair to erase the snippets we have.

And anyway, it makes her way cooler than 'English and Welsh'.