Don't Touch

My favourite parenting nightmare is when a simple conversation with a toddler is revealed later to have a different, often diametrically opposite meaning to each participant. Or indeed when many conversations appear to have been at cross purposes. Such as in February when we realised the toddler thought that the word for the ladder on his brother's bunk bed was 'NOCLIMBING'.

Having sagely discussed the 'no climbing' policy for two weeks we were both happy and confident of our chats. Me thinking we'd finally established a house rule he understood, the tiny dictator mildly amused that I kept showing him how to heave himself into his brother's forbidden top bunk, even giving him a nice new word for the means of getting there.

We had an arty weekend, one of fun and learning. My strongest learning was you can only do so much stuff with kids on a bank holiday, something I know really but always fail to heed in my attempts to make any family time jam packed with fun. That, and that buying a load of cheap canvasses and throwing paint around the garden a la Jackson Pollock is more cool than almost anything else you can do with your best friends.

In preparation for our action painting we went to the TATE to see some real life pictures on walls. That husband and I split, he taking the eldest to see Roy Lichtenstein (Spider-boy liked the explosions and the nudes) and me schlepping younger round Ellen Gallagher's exhibition AxME. He liked her pictures and collages, especially the ones which involved playdough, pictures cut out of magazines, face doodles and lots of yellow paint: these are his mixed media of choice too.

Mostly though, he wanted to touch them. I can't blame him, not least because most adults get a glint in their eye near the really massive pictures which look so rough, and huge and kind of touchable. You can tell if no one was looking most people would cop a feel of the Mona Lisa.

He's faster than roadrunner and as bossy as Napoleon though, so I had my work cut out. I began a tortured Joyce Grenfell monologue about standing back, looking, pointing, appreciating, liking, talking about but NOT TOUCHING, and a physical routine of manoeuvring and scooping up out of the way. He was unimpressed and grabby.

He clarified in case I didn't understand his requests: 'LOOK mummy, play dough! I touch?' I point at a guard rail and say 'Look, the wire is there to stop us touching the pictures'. Son inspects the small wire frame protecting the sacred foot of floor beneath the biggest most touchable ones. A problem he can solve: 'I noclimb over it?' he offers.

I have him up in my arms before both hands have gripped the wire but an assistant has seen us. Son and I freeze, already chastened. I explain I wouldn't let my son touch the actual picture or win the argument, and that I'm hoping this painful display will pave the way for easier gallery visits in the future.

The assistant looks slightly suspicious of me but tries his best children's TV presenter voice for the child. 'We don't touch these' he says.

Toddler narrowed his eyes. 'Not that one?' he says, pointing at the one furthest from us. 'No' says the assistant with great clarity. 'No touch that little one?' bargains the kid gesturing nonchalantly at the least impressive. Negative agrees the assistant. Son nods to himself and points out some more, 6 more in fact in the same request/denial mode. He pauses, isolating the biggest picture without a cordon: 'This one?' he suggests. 'None of the pictures' says the guard, with authority.

Bloody hell I think. I'll invite this guy over for tea. He can teach them to wash their hands and not throw their cereal. Son breaks into a broad grin and then with perfectly clipped, loud sarcasm sighs at the guard:

'My touch your chair?' he asks and then shakes his head and strides out of the room laughing. His conviction the guy is a lunatic who can't share his toys is as clear as his rueful giggle. I grab his hand and we walk into the next room, with a 40 foot installation of what looks like a climbing frame and no assistant visible. 'Mummy' he says, knowing we're on the same page: 'We touch this one'.

Wobble

Eldest child has his first wobbly tooth. This is the sort of thing which makes me feel unimaginably old, but also so very young and green and quick. It unites the child me and the grown up me, sheds light on the foolish me of my twenties when I was clear I'd leave a twenty pound note for the child's first tooth to make snarky amends up for all the bullshit I've endured in school gate talk (my own and his).

But parenting has taught me you can carve your own tradition but be really careful, never do anything at a momentous or potentially repeated festive or milestone time which you are not prepared to do again. Never eat something for Christmas dinner, or create a birthday cake you aren't happy to eat or bake every year from now on. Kids are sticklers, well mine are, so I'm a BFG style collector of traditions from parents and families I respect and love, always on the hunt for a greatest hits of special things to do for my kids which combine the best bit of me and thathusband's memory boxes with new things for our kinder.

There are obvious questions which I flirt with immediately, though I try not to slide too far down the rabbit warren of worry. I ask around about what the rules are in 2013. I try to gauge what is the real going rate for an incisor 20p? 50p? More? Do the first teeth to hit the pillow space get a bonus, a golden handshake? We've settled on a pound or two pound coin, depending on which is shiniest though I feel odd about my son's excitement about selling a body part. Son is unbothered by that aspect, and already though this is his first wobbly tooth, has an inkling there's more (or less?) to the tooth fairy than to Father Christmas - I think it might be just your mum or dad, he hypothesises over Easter, but that would be okay, I'll leave the fairy thing a note just in case.

But nevertheless I feel a bit like my voice will crack when I talk over the tooth with my husband and make our plan.

I wonder why the tooth feels so poignant before it has even gone? And why it feels like the strand that holds it in is echoing a strand which pulls together so many mes.

It reminds me of a physical sensation which sends me back in time to my own Reception class. The achingly exciting painstaking gradual work of loosening a tooth, like excavating one of those amazing but infuriating plaster of paris eggs which hold a Gothic knight or a plastic dino skeleton which must be carved and chipped and brushed until they kiss the half-term morning light and signal a new activity. And we both know it won't be long until snap: the tooth will be out.

For him he'll be able to big boy up, join in on the categorising of experiences and firsts which dominate the playground chatter. But it is hard for me to completely avoid the feeling his milk teeth arc built from me, my great creation, crumbling and making way for something larger and bigger and further out in front. A good thing, natch, but as ever his wiggle work project takes place as I project on him.

I'm transported to my 30th Birthday party, when fecund and swollen and really, really wishing I was drunk, I got the fear about teeth and, knowing he was a boy wriggling inside me, for some reason the concept of dealing with wet dreams. The latter I have had to delegate to my husband out of a combination of squeamishness, and cowardice, and a poor understanding of our washing machine settings which I imagine I may never rectify. The former though, has remained. Then I was quite terrified about not what to pay for a tooth, but what to do with it. Throw it away and risk it being found and thought part of a body? Even as I ate my birthday cake my mind spiralled into a Waking The Dead montage whereby I keep and then finally throw away my child's string of teeth only to find his face reconstructed after a worried tip worker discovers a potential fragmented corpse. Luckily my nice mum has bought me a pot for his teeth which I will keep in my dusty bedside drawers until I can fathom the right place for them.

But when you see a child worming out a wobbler, it is visceral and inviting, and almost impossible not to feel like you too are wearing plimsolls thinking of shiny coins unaware of the precise precipice on which you stand. As I see him working away at the forward and back tooth rock I can feel the cool warm jelly slick of the undertooth space, the curved rectangle of you goo that a tooth bequeaths as a fleeting memento of the struggle.

I realise that apart from my usual sentimental fool's position in the courtly world of parenting I'm over identifying because I'm all about the minutiae of physical recovery right now. So tight tight focus on one pain/pleasure place is so real I feel closer than I have for two months. More at home as I just about make it up the ladder to lie under my son's ikea canopy of stars at bedtime, giggling as he wiggles and feeling like we understand each other so well it doesn't matter that so much of the last few weeks have been about catheters and tubes and the piss and glory of surgical recovery.

As if a metaphor moment created for us both his new teeth signal a brave new world. I understand the appetite for change he has as he knows, he surely does, that this is a milestone, even if he doesn't feel the cordsnap sensation I do at his new skeleton. But I understand the fear of it, a new body, a better one, a stronger one too.

Will it hurt mum?, he asks, (now he's grown up and in year one and can go to sports camp on his own I'm not mummy). And it feels like he's asking about more than a tooth. Certainly I am when I say, only a little bit, and there are probably great rewards after the initial wobbles.

To do

David Attenborough was allegedly asked once which animal he found most fascinating to observe and replied an infant human. I concur. I was holding a baby yesterday and her mum remarked on how the wee one liked me. I put it down to a combination of experience at mumming and the fact that uncivilised babies have ruthless instincts for an old hand's safe arms and the feeling that whoever is holding them is both interested and unafraid.

I'm interested, and unafraid, of babies, even tiny ones. Toddlers though? They are different beasts. I love them. But I will never understand them. They are unknowable jaguars to the scrawny orang-utan charm of little newborns. Predatory forces of nature when compared to teeny babies who are just stretching their necks to see the world, all about the velvet skin and bright eyes reflecting back the best in all of us. Toddlers are far more beautiful. Beautiful, fierce, snotty, profound, cross patches. Familiar, cliched and simply unknowable. They are also terrifying.

Tonight newborn, who is now two, and solid and tormenting and all about the eyes and the indulgence they squeeze from sentimental adults, was in an inglorious mood.

We crunched home at 6.20 pm. He upended a litre of apple juice, overflowing, sloshing, insisting he was 'sharing'. He slammed me and his brother in the bathroom door, and eschewed tea by shoving a handful of crisps into his mouth and, then remorseful? resolved? relentless? let them fall out of his mouth again: splat. Returned. A sticky lump on his dinner plate. He put himself in time out, then told me off for eating an egg. He cuddled me deep, fought his brother off my lap like a wildcat, then asked for chocolate, cereal and porridge, 'please'.

And then? then he laughed so hard at his brother's impromptu slapstick show, all loose trousers and a comedy crutch, that we, his brother and I, cried with proud hysterical joy to hear him.

After climbing the wooden hill, ranting step by step about toilets, he fell to his knees mid-sentence on the landing. He sighed and smoothly fell on to my lap as I reached the top stair.

It was 20 past seven. On his face, a face unweathered, unwrinkled, untouchable, the serene smile of a man who has finally finished his To Do List.

No shame...

I know, I know you must all be sitting at home thinking what on earth happened to thatwoman after she got all embarrassed at a urogynae appointment and spilled it all online. Why did she stop blogging? Is she dead? Or is she still scrabbling for her Oyster card and messing up her life?

She is, of course, still around AND still unable to function as a normal commuter. And just too stressed about too much, too scared, too worried, too too too too everything, including too self-conscious about being far too much information last time.

So how do we get her back on to the stigma saddle? Where to start? Depression? Smoking? Chaos? Parental angst? Actually with the second part of the piss poor poor piss story. With what happens after your initial assessment, when there are surgeons taking an interest in your bladder and wanting to check how dynamic all your urinary behaviours and faults are. Grab a cuppa, peer into the piss void, you know you want to…

I had my hospital appt the other afternoon. This time I managed to avoid actually pissing all over my clothes and took my husband with me. I can confirm it is a lot easier to cope with extensive incontinence testing when someone who loves you is waiting outside and you have babywipes and a nice jumper in your rucksack.

I would say I don't know why I was in such a state and wobble about going (this was the big assessment to check whether surgery would actually be an option for the appalling stress incontinence I’ve had since my first labour and delivery). And after so many years of physio it seemed weird that I would have a cataclysmic meltdown at the point help was on the table, especially when I’ve tried very hard to be a fanny feminist and to do, in my small way, for incontinence, and especially for those who are functioning but with pretty terrible incontinence, what Mind and others are trying to do for mental health.

But I do know why I got so upset I couldn’t write about it: because it is rank and depressing and really upsetting to be incontinent, and fucking lonely too. But that’s not the story today.

Usually I try to be grown up. I hate that I meet so many women who have nowhere to go with their distress and no idea whether there is help. But no-one, really no-one, can be the upbeat incontinent woman all the time, because it really does and can rule your life, which is why I pulled myself back to the doctors for the d-day public analysis of my broken twat.

The short of it is this: I went, pissed all over my feet in an x-ray room, and it was all good. The consultant was ace and offered to operate as soon as. It was the sort of vindication and reward, and completely odd mixture of euphoria and heartache, that I don’t have the skills to describe.

The test, however, the urodynamics test, that is the sort of ghoulish devilment a gore-whore like me can really sink her teeth into. Pretty grim, but something I wish I’d read or known about from the perspective of the pisser rather than the piss monitors. ie I really wish I’d heard about it in more than the very clear, kind, and 'sort of' accurate descriptions I found in the letters and leaflets and websites I trawled before I went. So here goes...

First off, I would do it again. I really was surrounded by destigmatising kindness. The very best treatment. The sort that is so kind and humane it is the reason you carry on and evangelise about help, even though it sometimes makes you die a bit inside.

Take the incontinence nurse. Let’s call her Carol, she had a Carol sort of face and her straight up kindness was so quietly but firmly reassuring that she made all the catheters and things just seem so normal. Honestly, she was fiddling with my ass and other holes and then using wires to attach me to a fucking machine with the air of a kindly school nurse giving you a pad when you started your period in PE. I burned, but that was my shame, not her projection.

‘That’s lovely,’ she says when I emerge from a changing room ready in my gown. ‘But you’d better take your socks off my love’.

Before that, before Carol shoved in a balloon of some sort, with some technically named straw attached to fill me up and feel the pressure, I entered a surreal nightmare of Jess Franco proportions. In the bowels of the hospital’s corridors of shame (my term, not theirs) are the special toilets. Toilets where you are asked to sit on the one with the silver seat not the normal one. Sit on the silver bog and wee on to a spinning propeller. A propeller! And this isn’t even the good bit.

I walk in and survey both loos. My bum is cold in my gown. I take a deep breath. I can wee on a propeller, I’m a grown up. I sit and try to ‘relax’. The wall moves, there is a hidden door. Though I’ve locked the main door, the room is actually attached to some others behind it. And there is Carol! She’s popped up, from behind me, to see how I’m doing.

She ushers me to be attached to the monitors and to lie on a big white wipe clean bed in a radiography room where some people are milling. It is not unlike the bit in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory where they enter the Wonka TV studio. Everything is white. The staff are in those anti radioactive anti X ray aprons. They look to me like they are in galoshes.

‘Don’t worry, Lucy, this is a wet room,’ says Carol.

‘You mustn’t be embarrassed if you leak on the floor or anywhere,’ the radiographer concurs. ‘This is why you are here.’

The scan set up is pretty weird. You have wires protruding and the whole thing made me go a bit queer and pale. They basically fill your bladder up bit by bit, after introducing the team. ‘This is Jim the scientist’ says Carol. (At least he looked like a Jim).

‘Awesome!’ I think.

‘And your consultant is just around the corner.’

I feel rude. I’d turn to acknowledge him but I don’t want to move on the bed in case I dislodge something.

Jim the scientist is very kind and manages to be discreet whilst talking loudly and clearly about a series of fictional scenarios which may or may not chime with how much I need a wee as they pump cold stuff through a straw up my snatch.

He keeps asking me, as he fills up my bladder, if I feel like I need or want to do a wee. The hilarious thing is, though I can see, with my eyes, that my bladder is growing, and though I feel really bloody strange and scared, I don’t know. I don’t know if I need a wee. Or want one, for that matter. For the first time in five years of being ruled by my bladder and hyperconscious of its failing I have no idea.

‘Would you pop to the toilet now?’ he asks. ‘Would you go in if you walked past a loo right now?’ ‘Are you beginning to feel any pressure?’ I have no idea. I don’t know why. Nerves? Worry? Shame? Yes, probably shame.

They assure me there is no right answer – I don’t manage to joke about how that isn’t the sort of test I like. I hate tests with no right answer, tests where I can’t get an A*.

Though I do crack them up when Carol asks if I’m allergic to anything and I say ‘cats’ (true answer).  

‘I left mine at home today’ says nice, nice Carol with a wink. ‘Good job,’ I say out loud in the way you never actually do: ‘NOBODY wants me to sneeze’. I can make the wet room work, I decide. This is all material.

And then they tip the bed. Tip it up until I am standing. I rise like Hannibal Lecter and see all the people (who are so nice), the people who have come to watch how and why and when and how much I pee.

The very nice radiologist, who is soothing throughout, warns I might feel faint, some people do apparently. I feel like I'm dying, again. But I hold my nerve and am shaken into reality when I realise I actually do really, really need the loo now my bladder is full and I am standing up. There are 5 or 6 people in the room. I can’t count or be that accurate because I feel like I’ve had four glasses of warm white wine and no dinner. I’m here for this, I read up, but I still nearly cry, nearly cry like a little girl in the supermarket who is about to wet her big girl pants.

Then next bit is awesome. You have to cough and move so they can see how and when and why you pee, what bits of you actually don’t work well at all. To help, because I am helpful, I agree to lift my gown so they can get all views. Still, I fathom, I get to watch it occurring on a luminous screen, all angle weeing as I pee on the floor. This is pretty cool, and almost convinces me this isn’t something I’ve made up completely and should shut up about. It was so surreal I'm letting it fly. Though I still wish I'd shaved my legs.

Then came the best bit of all. I’m standing, weeing and not weeing depending on what I’m asked to do, trying hard not to be nervous as I’ve read somewhere that could affect the test, when I’m asked if I would be able to empty my bladder completely, right there, in front of them all.

Time stopped a bit. I was like: Now? Here? Being watched? Is this the bit of the movie where I become a porn star despite my 70s grooming?

I emit a squeak.

‘Don’t worry’ say the nice radiographer and Carol. ‘You don’t have to, some women find it too embarrassing’.

‘It would help’ says the consultant, 'but there’s no pressure'. The room expects, though.

And I’m still thinking: ‘SOME? Only SOME of them find it too embarrassing? Not ALL? Jesus, I’m far less cool about this than I thought’.

They seemed a little surprised at how upset I look, though I possibly imagined that as my head is all buzzy and light. ‘Deep breaths,’ I think, 'If we’re being realistic TWO OF THE ADULTS IN THIS ROOM HAVE STUCK THEIR FINGERS UP MY BUM BEFORE. And be reasonable, thatwoman, the rest of them have been so reassuring and respectfully upbeat. And, bonus, they keep telling you you're doing really well when you tinkle all over your feet'. I conclude that I should probably woman up and just, well, stand and wee everywhere ignoring the fact that, again, it feels like a bit of me is dying. So I say, in a slightly scared little voice:

'Um, okay…'

I take a breath, with a shocked but defeated expression. The radiographer and Carol suddenly understand my abject misery. They fly over and save me from the most humiliating thing of all time.

‘No, no, my love’ says one. ‘You don't have to just wee on your feet!’ ‘He means will you wee into this machine here' confirms the other. I am saved.

They proffer me the bottle, useful for festivals I’m sure, attached to something from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or the TARDIS in the 80s. It is to measure my flow. I get top marks. Go me.

The outcome was really great. Thankfully they stopped the test before asking me to do star jumps or walk around as I’d heard mooted online.

We had a long meeting, a detailed discussion, another examination in which I urinated freely like a tacky European fountain. But I was high on humiliation by then. And Carol was there, and she helped me clear myself up. ‘He’s here to help you’ she said of the surgeon who is sprightly but assured now he isn’t in a weird lead suit. I love Carol and the surgeon now, they have a quiet but enthusiastic calm and confidence. Perhaps because they actually spend their days making life less shit for people and fixing stuff.

I still almost fuck it all up by wittering. In my defence I felt quite odd (the test is draining, because you are lying down and standing up at exactly the moments you wish you were doing the other and because, as a wise fanny warrior who had done it before soothed later, it is very tiring to drop your dignity completely for a whole afternoon). In the time it takes to put my clothes back on I convince myself the consultant is going to say 'No'. Say I’m too young, haven’t done enough pelvic floors, that I’m moaning, or whinging, or too fat, or… something.

He humours me for a bit and then pulls a face and describes my stress incontinence as ‘off the scale’. Good or bad? I want to know, but he beats me to it. He can tell it is awful. ‘What do you want to do?' he asks and boom, finally the fanny feminist thatwoman rises from the dead.

‘I want you to do an operation and stop this now, because I can’t bear it any more’ she says.

And that’s what he offers – to try and fix me whenever he can next fit me in, which was pretty nice of him given I had just pissed all over his arm and the wall of his office.

Shame

I loved the film Shame. I found it moving, and simple, and complicated, and dirty, and clean all at the same time. I was drawn in but horrified, not by the central character’s sex addiction but the easy decline of me into voyeur, and the extent of that voyeurism. I was as pulled into the film’s slippery unravelling of its characters. It was uncomfortable because the spotlight was as much on my willingness to look deep into the central brother and sister characters, their rotten past, their flaws and mistake and challenges to each other and the world, as on those things themselves.

And then there was the cock. Michael Fassbender’s majestic cock, and the endless raw, dispiriting confusion of sex and desire and need and want and eroticism and beauty and nastiness it embodied and touched. It is a strong film. A grown-up film for grown-ups and not everyone’s cup of tea.

It interests me though, the potency of everyone and everything, but especially the contradiction of the male lead’s nudity. His bareness is what is perhaps most shocking and high-end about the film, but it is also the film’s most crushing weapon, and Fassbender and McQueen’s masterful provocation. We see all, but we see nothing. And his desperate face on orgasm is more intimate and distressing to watch than his full body. The film is striking for its intimacy laid bare, but more so as that intimacy is false. Though we see all of him, we know nothing of Fassbender’s sexual behaviour, predilections, orientations or past.

I think this today in the tunnels of shame below UCLH when I go to meet a consultant. Of course I do. Because I can’t think in depth about being incontinent at 35 and I realise I’ve ‘coped’ with it merely by denial. Try as I might, for example, I’ve failed to write a simple list of my history to discuss with the big man who perhaps holds the key to a more normal life. Which is completely stupid and self-sabotaging, but the idea that he may be able to cure me contains two others:

The truth of it in all its pissy, shameful and embarrassing tedious unglory

And the fact that he may not, actually, be able to sort it

Perhaps, I panic, he will send me away. Tell me to shut up, buck up and cross my legs. Tell me I am making mountains (of Tena Ladies) from molehills of shame and should be endlessly appalled of myself for complaining. As ever, I can’t decide which is worse – being told there’s nothing wrong or revealing my physical inadequacies in public.

Despite being a regular and an old-hat old hand when it comes to urogynaecology and other humiliations, I have ducked into a tailspin, afraid I’m more of a tired twat. Partly I’m wigging out, of course, because I don’t want to fucking go. Mostly though, because the world of gynaecology and repair and physio, unlike some of my experiences of midwifery and obstetrics, is so surreal.

When you are there, in the belly of the beast, lying in your own piss and bearing down on someone’s hand, or god forbid, a speculum, it feels so normal. They act like it is okay, to uncontrollably wee on someone else’s hand. That OF COURSE when you are weeing all over the bendy bed someone else should be watching.

The humiliation is massive, despite their efforts. And their kindness and normalness brings a cost. It requires a detachment from the doctors - and catches them out in the destigmatising decency. They have to be detached from the reality, because they have to keep pretending that talking to someone who cannot control their urine or other functions and acting as if that is an okay, normal and not at all embarrassing thing is, in and of itself, okay and normal for everyone. It is a confidence trick leading to a strange complacency in the situation if not the people, that I’ve noticed in so many of these areas of embarrassing illnesses.

For example, in a discipline full of bells and whistles and thought and cleverness and kindness, I have yet to go anywhere where there was a normal place to put your pants and Tena Lady and trousers and shoes when you do the half strip. Never. I always end up clutching them and feeling like a prize twat. A total twat. A twat with no knickers on being asked to wee on a man’s hand after shoving a pile of my clothes on top of the bin for waste products.

They crack jokes, they ask questions to put you at ease, you know their names, who their kids are, when their wedding will be. And they know these things about you. No-one mentions that you are having these conversations as they are performing acts that would, in another scenario, be either erotic or abusive. At one point, when told to just ‘keep going’, I almost die. ‘I could charge good money for this in Amsterdam,’ I nearly quip, though I don’t have the heart and am too busy listening to my monologues of ‘sorry, sorry, SORRY, sorry’ on a loop.

Usually, I giddy along. I take a deep breath and pretend I think it is all normal and okay too. I talk candidly and joke. I display my embarrassment only with the weird quirk of being descriptive, detailed and unashamed to use Latin or Anglo Saxon in my c-word-talk, all the while unable to look anyone in the eye.

Today I managed that a little, but I couldn’t get my history out, I jumped around, I was so confused I felt the narrative of me might for ever be broken. It was poetry not reportage, a deranged conflation – medical terms and interjections, most of the right notes but none at all in the right order.

I’m putting it down to fear, but also to the insane mixture of being laid bare completely and utterly for strangers to see but trying to remember that I can and should be myself, that I exist outside of this, that I can be private. And that does make it hard to talk menstruation and sex and orgasm and sensation and toilet talk and tearing and stitching and trauma all at once, and show my snatch to someone, who is still actually a stranger. ‘Who are YOU?’ I want to ask at the obligatory ‘Do you have any questions?’ bit. ‘Would this be easier if we had a relationship?’

I don’t think it would be, and none of this is a complaint about the superb surgeon I spoke to, who was so very kind and hopeful and upfront with me. But that’s why I think of Fassbender, and those stars of 9 Songs too. And how well, and how little, we know them at all. And the trust they must have had in the director and the camera and the story they were telling. Which is the lightbulb moment for even me. Because the story I’m telling is mine, but horrible, and one I am still a bit too immature and cowardly to own. I pass it off as snippets of anecdote and rude jokes, and then write about it on the internet to pretend that by the chutzpah of self-publication I skip the bit where I think about it and process it properly.

I can’t even decide if that’s a shame, or just the only way to deal with it.

July / Birthdays

This month was a well of nostalgia. July always is. I am thrust back to the past, however hard I cling to the present. However hard I work I'm hurled with my broken nails into maudlin reminders. A month of anticipation and worry, niggling silliness. A week, two days, 24 hours until the anniversary of Spiderboy’s birth. It is ironic how potent these days can be, given my often scatty, forgetful approach to birthdays and anniversaries.

If I were a better mother I'd see July as the month of Spiderboy’s birthday and focus my thoughts on how to realistically sculpt a sugar predator on top of a Victoria sponge. But my mind control, like my icing, is not quite good enough. I can no more escape the pull towards picking scabs and unleashing the ghosts of depression all over again, than I can get the jawline of a jaguar quite right.

Dreadful to see this day as anything else but his special day. He’s been obsessing about it for months, after all. Since his first weeks in reception it is all he’s spoken about, all the way home, every day. Every conversation an endless meditation on presents and parties and food and cakes. I can’t shake my preoccupation with it though – for five years I’ve tried - though this month fate had a new idea. On the morning of the 13th, the day before his birthday, after a night of brooding worry, I wake to a litany of time reminders. At exactly 10.45 my phone beeps, an alarm goes off, I catch the time on the TV. I tell the temp receptionist at work (because I can’t stop the words coming out of my mouth), that five years ago I called my husband and told him I was in labour. And I'm off.

On Twitter, I get involved in a conversation about gas & air. It was around the time, lunch time and early afternoon, where I was still giddy and excited. When I wasn’t broken yet, when it never occurred to me what could go wrong. A friend said she didn’t think much of that floaty puffing stuff; I note I was the other way, thoroughly enjoying it for a long good while, though conceding that, like most things, G&A is better experienced with a slice of cake and a glass of wine, than with an angry mammal climbing out of your vagina.

The evening spreads out before me like a brutal mistress. There is no escape: snatches of birth stories and birthdays jump out from TV, in books, on the radio. Even seeing old friends and building a playmobil zoo is merely a brief distraction.

Excited as I am by the thought of my big boy I don't want to see any clocks change tonight. I am afraid of his birthday. I may be dramatic and occasionally sentimental, but I’m not usually obsessed with dates. Yet by midnight? By then I am the worst kind of fool, staring at him asleep in his bed, transfixed by the time as if there’s still the chance, the second, the moment where I can stop the clocks and replay, rearrange, make better, mend, re-shape.

Silly woman, wasting time wanting to be Marty McFly. We know it never works out well fiddling with the past – so why can’t I stop replaying it and wishing (hoping even) for a way to change it. I once tried thinking of ways to obliterate it, but that only resulted in being given enough drugs to keep me from lying in a bus lane.

I wonder when it leaves? Speaking to other mothers, many find the build-up and the day itself, the anniversaries of giving birth, tough. Not just those who had a horrid time, or were left with reminders of birth through injuries and damage (mental and physical). Not even those whose children are not very young any more.

It is a monstrously earth changing moment, of course. And an epitome of the parental obsession with milestones and change we all link with children – from ‘hasn’t he grown?’ to ‘is he sleeping through?’, to ‘how’s school?’, ‘is he crawling yet?’, ‘can he read?’

Our noting and noticing feels like we want to capture the change as it happens, bottle the babies at each stage and understand them. We never can of course: once it has happened, there is rarely any going back. They only say Mama until the day they say Mumeeeee, we only recall the utter charm of their stilted early steps as they acquire poise and grace. But we do all this collecting of time, like charms on a bracelet, as our children stride through it showing us up and getting ahead as we scuttle behind savouring them as they no longer are. Forward momentum is theirs.

It is like we approach it dimensionally differently – children zooming along time in a great straight line, us scrabbling around at a standstill trying to understand that movement. I think we are unable, and scared, to properly view children on their pathways.

We are too busy looking back. It is as if our decedents are each some sort of Michaelangelo block in memory, our kids are things (hunks of potential?) from which we see each layer after each layer of youth chipped away by life. As if life is endlessly discarding bits of the picture, and our job is to scrabble around and sweep them up into albums, fashion the scraps, the redundant and the obsolete into anecdotes and stories to feel safe with a narrative. We look up hoping to see the next bit revealed, but rarely see it fitting our imagination or our plan.

We are peeling our children like onions! Hoping to see what? Them finally revealed? This wouldn’t be surprising; after all they are our biggest mysteries, so similar to ourselves and yet so very different. And so changeable that it is sometimes hard to imagine, especially when they no longer fit like soft pug dogs in the crook of our elbows, when they give proper barely moist kisses rather than huge mouthful sucky smackers, that they were ever attached to us. In some cases stuck inside us: part of us, joined together, acting like they didn’t even want to come out.

Birth is such a violence and mystery, even when it is strong and positive and beautiful too. It makes no sense, it seems absurd, the further I am from it the more ludicrous I find reproduction and delivery. How can one fuck produce all that creation and morphing and stretching and reforming? How can it result in giving birth, not just to the animals who have grown within us, but to the body they have ravaged and the people looking on?

I say that, though I appreciate it sounds syrupy and over emotional, but I think the act of any great moment of love, and the measure of that act, is a form of rebirth. You give so much of yourself away when you open up, just for a moment, to let someone in to your heart – whether that’s by letting them out of your body or by letting them in via any other means. Children are our great lovers, their shape carved into us somehow, built from us, riotous and righteous and brutal in their acts of tearing out of us to be themselves. No wonder I forget whose birthday tomorrow is.

Birth is becoming for both of parties, no matter how unbecoming the experience. It turns each player into a new animal, a new thing, and that should be celebrated, not least as it can never be reversed. We can only hope that the transition is positive, it usually is.

And I can only hope to atone by fine tuning the (big) cat cake, and praying the jaguar (not leopard, jaguar) costume we've ordered on Amazon turns up in time. Then at least someone will get to celebrate being a new animal for the day.

Who is that? (Come on baby, the laugh’s on me...)

You sit around getting older. There’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on me…

It was my birthday last week. To celebrate I danced to Horrible Histories songs in the lounge and played Springsteen too loud for my own good. The quote above is, of course, Springsteen. It is from Dancing In The Dark which is less anthemic than some of his most famous songs, but remains perhaps his best known in running onto the dance floor terms, and was one of his most commercially successful hits. I love The Boss at the best of times but in the last few weeks this line, that song, with all its self-denial and impetus and charge and regret and love has been following me about in my depression.

Things have been hazy. That’s why I used the picture above, but also the one below.

I know it is rubbish and blurred; no filters or special instagram tricks can save it. My husband laughs at me for loving it so much, but perhaps the combination of the shuddery fuzz and those staring, staring, staring eyes is what makes me want to blow it up 8 foot square and stick it on our living room wall.

The reason I appreciate the stare and smile (mirthful? judging? anticipating? happy? confused? bossy? hungry? I don’t know) is this:

Sometimes I stare at my second child and I just have no idea who the fuck he is

I would say what the fuck he is, though that is too similar to my view of Moshi Monsters. His brother I understand so much more. I may not have the big cat/predator love or quite such an incessant interest in the minutiae of Birthday parties, but we share our over sensitivities, bellowing laughs, disinterest in wearing clothes, our big emotional rollercoaster view of the world. I can predict Spider-boy’s unpredictable mood swings. With his brother? I’ve no idea. And I find this is especially the case right now.

The blog’s been quiet because I’ve been overwhelmed. Suffocated by an inability to do much but hope (when not at work or involved in direct childcare) and sit around thinking sad thoughts. I’ve been praying too. Yup. Praying. Praying maudlin and morbid prayers to the ether (as I’m an atheist), but as fervently as when I did believe in God. I’ve been whispering under my breath, crossing my fingers, being sentimental and superstitious.

I know I’ve probably been no fun as I've been driven only by this groundswell distraction: but I’ve not known any other way to act when all I want is newborn (and some other babies I know) to stay well. To reach the mythical milestones. For newborn it is one month, two months, three (COME ON THREE), without a hospital admission or decline or giving us a fright. He’s made two months since he was last in a ward overnight. I’ve decided maybe that’s enough. Even if I can't halt the fear, I can ease it and try to move on from the headachey pressure to think about little else.

My chest aches from nervously smoking cigarettes (not near him or in the house or anything, obviously, but as I pound the streets of Soho after work). But I can’t keep everything on hold and stop talking and thinking and writing forever. A part of me believes that if I write anything good about him I’ll get mine (and a by product of that will be him unfairly getting his to punish me). But a part of me also secretly believes that by worrying strongly enough, being a worrier warrior mum, I will keep him alive. I can’t shake this thought, I just can’t. But I can’t sustain the fear either.

Three things dragged me out of it:

1. Turning 35. Middle aged according to the stats I learned in primary school. MIDDLE AGED and still moping, for God’s sake
2. Going to a rock concert, to which I travelled without children, and where I got drunk, and sunkissed and backstage, and shouted the words to Springsteen songs with my mum, my dad and my baby sisters
3. And, thirdly, (vain, moi?) taking a photograph of myself at the top of this page with a mobile phone. The photo is hilarious as it is one in which I look about 15. I look nothing like myself, of course, I know this. But something in the fluidity of time behind the image, knowing myself and having no idea who I was, being me from now and some other world of DMs and drinking snakebite, shook me like the shaky hands blurred my baby in the second photo.

The thing is, my son has changed. He’s really changed. And so much, all whilst I’ve been too scared to think about the present. In just two months and he’s put on some much weight he’s back on the 51st centile line. ‘His’ line in the red book weight charts, the one he was born on. And this is after dropping off the grid completely on just the 1st of May. Those were sorry days. He looks so different now. He has pulled off that trick whereby we now see how awful he looked before with new eyes unclouded by our desire for it not to be that ill.

But now he’s fat(ter). He’s also tanned. Regardless of my attempts with sun-block he’s like his grandfather, not me, and goes for gold in even the patchiest Summer. Best of all he catches me off guard by not catching his breath. He needs his inhaler, sure, but I haven’t had to sleep on the floor in his room with my clothes on and a mobile phone for what seems like forever.

I find as fog of panic lifts a little I see my son afresh, and he is so strange to me it is like giving birth all over again. I’m thunderstruck. Bewildered I heard myself go straight to the horse’s mouth this week. I stared into my toddler’s darling little mullet framed face as he clutched an Iggle Piggle toy while dancing round the lounge singing the theme to Gigglebiz and I said, not unkindly, but with feeling:

WHO ARE YOU?

He stared straight back into my face and shouted: "Mummeeeeeeeeeeee".

Then screamed with laughter.

He’s always been good at jokes, but I’m impressed with the devil in his eyes today. Like all toddler he would repeat the same joke for hours if I had the stamina, but he’s working on timing by the third repeat of this one. 19 months old and his eyes flame bright with anticipation. I ask again and he defers the inevitable, teases me with the possibility that he will change the game, perhaps say his own name for the first time. He starts snorting through his nose with anticipation, stifling a hoot of mirth and half laughs half shouts: "Daddeeeee". But only the once.

The Boss knows the truth, and so does newborn. Wallowing and fear is no good, if I can’t do anything else the joke’s on me.