Sometimes my girl is such a boy

Hello and welcome back. Sorry for the prolonged absence but I have been very busy in a complicated and deadly serious dance of mothering and counter-mothering; all well oiled by endless cups of tea. I sometimes feel I am stuck in a modern version of the Mad Tea Party: the conversations around here tend to bounce along in the same way as the March Hare and the Hatter's (Anna, I suppose, is the Dormouse, without all the pinching and tea-dunking). Although unlike Alice, I haven’t just wandered in accidentally. Being a member of the original line up I have to claim equal responsibility for the machinations of the whole complicated business. That really sucks, because there is not much I like better than to be able to say that something was someone else's fault.

I have also been spending far too much energy being vile to everyone around me. I am more irritable now than I ever was at the height of my hormonal carnival of a pregnancy, so I think the sooner I find some little home of my own to live in the better everyone’s lives will be.

Anna quite likes it here. If she is aware of the maelstrom of obsessive caring raging around her, then she is not letting on. It’s hardly surprising she is enjoying herself; there are now two people close at hand to adore her, and one of them never fails to coo and cluck over every little thing she does, which is obviously a nice surprise for her. I’m expecting her to be totally ruined by the time we leave.

On occasions, I am convinced that Anna is an absolute child prodigy, and I spend many a happy hour imagining the unimaginable wealth that will surely come my way when she bursts on to the world with her genius. At other times, she reminds me that she is a perfectly ordinary baby who is not yet in full control of all her mental faculties and quite possibly will put off staging a take-over bid for some time.

Like in the bath the other night. My mother has what is called a Roman Bath (which as far as I can see is a fancy way of saying they’ve built a little wall along the open side of the shower recess and laid tiles everywhere). The bath taps and the spout stick out along one side of the wall at about perfect head height for Anna, and on this particular Bart Simpson moment she’d manoeuvred herself so that she was leaning against the wall with her head between one tap and the spout. By turning her head very slightly from side to side, (it was a comfy fit) she could see first tap, then spout, then tap, etcetera etcetera. I could tell by the grin on her face that this is what passes for thrilling entertainment for a young ‘un. Then she tipped her head slightly from side to side, and oh, the thrill! when she felt the corresponding rubs of tap and spout on her little bonce. Then – in what I can only describe, very lovingly, as an act of pure and mindless stupidity – right before my incredulous eyes she banged her head very deliberately, first one side, then the other, on the two very hard objects on either side of her. In case I am not making myself clear: the two very hard objects that not a minute earlier she'd been looking at and had then carefully tested, with her own head, for solidity.

Amongst all the ensuing wailing and the soothing and the cuddles and the ‘there theres’, I knew I was faking it. I’m sorry, Chicky, but love you as I do, it is just not possible for me to muster up any sympathy for that sort of behaviour.

The changing face of Anna

Now that Anna has three and a bit top teeth, her face is starting to look much more like a little girl's face and much less like a scrunchy little baby's face. (Sob! My baaaaayyyybbbbeeeee is growing up!) And every now and then I catch a glimpse of someone altogether much more grown up, and I think I can see what she is going to look like when she's older.

Or maybe not. Here's who she's resembled so far:

When her hair is wet and it's plastered against her skull, she looks like Ralph Wiggum (Chief Wiggum's dorky son) from The Simpsons.

When she's looking at something which amuses her but also impresses the shit out of her, she looks just like Sharon Strezleki, the

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Do you know what I hate? I hate women who quiz each other endlessly about their husbands’ domestic skills, or lack thereof, with the winner being those who have the most Neanderthal, couldn’t-find-the-oven-with-a-map-and-a-guide-dog bloke. For starters, I bet most of these men are not even as bad as they sound. I bet they are perfectly capable in the kitchen and laundry; otherwise, surely they would have starved to death between leaving home and getting shacked up? At the very least their clothes would have been so revoltingly smelly they'd never have made it to the altar. Newsflash: they are not useless, girls, they are just in a relationship that is gleefully - even proudly , for Pete's sake - based on deep stereotypes, which at least one of you is not willing to change.

Secondly, at what point is it cool for these martyr wives to be proud of being married to couch potatoes? If it were me, I'd be keeping my mouth well and truly shut until I'd had a few little matrimonial discussions of an egalitarian theme.

Most of all I can’t stand it when women refer to their men as being ‘house trained’ (or not). What happened to those vows of respect, girls? Did you think it was just old-fashioned twaddle that was not relevant anymore? More to the point, do you think you can really demand any kind of respect for yourself, when you give him so damn little?

I'm sleeping in a Professor's bed!

Well, it is an ex-Professor’s bed, or a Professor’s ex-bed.

I realised this at some ridiculous time last night as I was walking around the bed, gazing longingly at its giddy expanse of softness and electric-blanketed warmth, attempting to comfort a grizzling child who did not want to be comforted but most certainly did not want to go back in the Portacot either, thank you very much. I was musing on the obscure little ways the future can unfold: the bed originally belonged to a senior academic at my University, at whose lectures I avidly took notes (clearly, I took her units in the early days, back when I was eager and fresh and actually took notes in lectures. And listened. And never, ever, dozed off). In my learning frenzy, it would not have occurred to me that one day I would be stalking back and forth at the foot of her bed, near to swooning at the thought of soon being able to get in it. (I bet she never realised it either, otherwise I suspect I would be adding ‘Restraining Order’ to the list of strange things I have seen in my life). Here is a little known fact: academics are people too; and this particular one is a good friend of my mother’s. Hence my mother now owns the bed, which once belonged to the Professor but was a casualty of another house move, and which I am now sleeping in (although I have stretched the definition of ‘sleeping’).

I’m in it because of a monumentally gallant act on the part of my mother: that of giving up her bedroom – and everything in it – to Anna and I, and relegating herself to the single bed in the spare room, with both the dogs. (This is a classic example of selfless motherhood that I feel I must try to live up to, despite the fact I know damn well I am never going to make it). It’s a bold and cunning plan designed to allow me to relax, unwind, and catch up on sleep, sort of like a private little health spa in the burbs, but the plot has been foiled by Anna’s refusal to get with the program and sleep angelically or, more to the point, with longevity. I may have to start investigating traditional remedies such as laudanum, or a bit of brandy in warm milk: my favourite, for obvious there’s-a-whole-bottle-of-brandy-left reasons.

Despite the tantalising headline to this post, there is no one else in the bed with me. (Well, I am at my mother’s after all – it is most certainly not because I have not yet managed to find myself a suitable man-like object to place around the house. I'll have you know that I haven't really started looking yet). One of the very many reasons why this is a shame is that further to yesterday’s grim underwear realisation, I went out and bought new gear. This morning I put on my brand new white bra with brand new white matching knickers, neither of them the fade-to-grey colour that usually pass as whites in my life, and it occurred to me that despite the bags under my eyes, I probably looked about as good as I am going to get for the foreseeable future. Certainly the best I have been for a year or so. And there was no one there to see me. Except Anna, and it being breakfast time, she was none too happy at seeing the bra.

Uprooted and homeless

Did I mention moving sucks? I have just done it; or more accurately, my family did it around me while I ran around weeping and wailing about how much I hate it. They packed, cleaned, cooked, weeded, and kid wrangled until I suddenly looked around and realised it was all done. Utter legends, the lot of them. To think I spent 6 years living in a completely different country from those guys and spent the better part of all of those years not just functioning perfectly well, but moving about a fair bit as well. The moving part was a la backpack and sleeping bag, so my possessions were few and as light as I could manage (slim novels became all the rage), and thus even in the middle of a complete hung-over, time-challenged, disorganised meltdown, even I struggled to really jeopardise a move in any meaningful way.

I think it is safe to say that that was a different time, involving an altogether different, carefree and responsibility-less self. I have discovered, for instance, that I have packed for storage all of my fully elasticised and functional underwear, and left myself nothing to actually wear but the scaggy embarrassments that should have been thrown long ago. It’s the same story with my bras; I have nothing save for the scaggy embarrassment I dubbed, in some fit of twisted logic, my ‘moving bra’, (because surely if you don’t need extra-good boob support while hefting, sweeping and scrubbing, you don’t need it at all?), so I will have no choice but to morph into a saggy titted hippy mama for a couple of weeks. (I could buy some more, of course, but my Inner Tightarse is screaming that there are perfectly good ones still in storage and that a couple of weeks is not such a long time). Worse than all this, I still can’t find the brilliant bees wax stuff-in-a-tin which is all Anna needs to sooth her red bum back into a more fetching shade of pink, and which I distinctly remember putting somewhere safe because I knew I’d need it. Naturally, she got a bad case of red arse the first night we were here. Luckily, I am living in a proper mother’s house, because a quick rummage through the first aid box (note to myself: get a first aid box, you slattern!) and I found some ancient gooey soothy stuff which looked grossly yellow but worked fine.

Yep, having a breakdown about moving out of one house and having a breakdown about finding a new house to move into was way beyond even my considerable drama queen talents, so Anna and Bud and I are bunking in with my mum and her dog until a new house presents itself. So far, we have not fallen out, which is pretty impressive when you consider we have two fiercely independent set-in-their-ways women, one teething baby who has developed an intense dislike of being in Portacots longer than three hours at a time, day or night, and two fiercely irreplaceable set-in-their-ways dogs, all squished into one two-bedroom duplex. Of course, it’s only been three days, but each hour that goes past without an increase in the West Australian homicide rate is a credit to us all.

Even more impressive than this, given our predilection for sweet things and slothing, we have only had one pizza and ice cream night, which means healthy and home cooked is so far winning 2 to 1.

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'.

The Universe tells me its time to leave

I have been planing on moving house for a couple of months now for a few reasons, mainly to do with the fact that the house we live in right now sucks and the owners are not interested in doing anything, however small and cost effective and contrary to their promises, to relieve some of its general suckiness. So after 18 months of waiting and hoping, I am not interested any more in faithfully paying their mortgage every bloody fortnight. I am also bored of this neighbourhood and should probably never have moved here in the first place as it is 30 minutes from my old stomping ground where I grew up and where I want Anna to grow up. Half an hour is a long time between friends, and petrol prices are not looking like coming down any time soon. Again, nobody warned me about this. Every time a woman gets a pregnancy confirmed, they should be given a pamphlet telling them that they are not allowed to move while they are pregnant or for at least six months following the birth. Their hormones are all up the shit and they get an obsessive nesting instinct which compels them to make ridiculous real estate decisions not based on any known laws of common sense. I had a perfectly nice share house in a perfectly lovely inner city suburb close to absolutely everything and as soon as I knew I was up the duff I threw it all away for an enormous run down fibro box out in the boondocks with sand and weeds in the place where usually is found a back yard. Sheer madness.

My decision to move was altogether compounded the other night when I arrived home after dark, and noticed that I had inadvertently left my bedroom lamp light on. One of the things that doesn't work in this house (apart from the obvious: my brain) is my bedroom blind, which is an old crappy plastic Venetian thing with a broken wand so I can't close it all the way to shut. When I moved in, as well as accepting in good faith the owners' promise to replace it, I checked from the outside to make sure that no one could see in and because they couldn't I reasoned that it wasn't too bad and I could put up with it for a little bit until a new one arrived. It didn't occur to me to go outside and check it after dark, which is a shame, because the other night as I drove up the street and saw my lamp light blazing through I realised that I could see right into my bedroom. My mirror, the clothes rack, the bedroom door, the whole lot. The only thing I couldn't see was me, but only because I was at that moment stopped dead in the street behind the wheel of my car, mortified, trying to work out how many actual open-to-the-public nights there are in the 18 months I have been here, undressing and dog arranging and doing other night time ready for bed things. I was in such a state of shock it took a while for me to realise that I can't do maths and so can't come up with a definite answer but the point is, there are lots.

I asked my neighbour the next day, she whose kitchen window is - unfortunately for her – right opposite my bedroom, if she realised that my useless broken blind was as thin as a tissue, and she suddenly got interested in some fascinating thing on the ground near her foot and said that, actually, she hadn't really noticed. In other words, YES, the poor woman has been trying to not look out her kitchen window for the past year and a half. Most importantly: WHY didn't she say anything? Did she think I was displaying on purpose? What do they think of me around here? At least now I know why the Christian charity mob doesn't deliver free milk to my door any more.

So. It's time to fly this crazy coop. I haven't been updating the blog for a while, partly because I've been grumpy and also because I have been stupendously busy not packing or organising removalists or, oh yeah, finding somewhere else to live. Hee hee. It's all happening next Monday and I have packed not one single cup, not one single sweaty fat man with a truck has been booked, and my forwarding address is the spare room at my mother's.

I have a Gold medal in procrastination and eleventh hour panic attacks.