tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899415705908511122024-03-13T03:04:45.762+00:00when you ARE that womanFinding yourself in the midst of the mayhem... (most puns intended).Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.comBlogger139125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-83077918086190597442014-07-28T00:26:00.001+01:002014-07-28T00:32:26.977+01:00WYSIWYG<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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This post is a bit late, I’ve missed the rush of blogs and
features on SATS and school reports and the start of the holidays. It has been
in the air though – exam and test results and that dreaded social impetus which
is the humble brag.</div>
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And in the world of humble bragging what you see or hear is
rarely what you get, no opinion is unfiltered by neurosis.</div>
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I remember it from my school days as much as I can see it
now. Parents and gossips feverishly comparing the A level results in the local
paper, looking especially at kids who went to the same primary school but different
Secondaries – the photo line up stand offs between the prettiest cleverest
clogs types at opposing private schools in the vicinity. </div>
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In a way though the results analyses I remember best are those
tastily awful seconds after Mrs Kelley gave back the A Level English coursework
and the skittering whispers started. </div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What did you get? What
did he get? What did SHE get? What did Mrs K like? What did she SAY? </i></div>
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Always the search was for the best kind of comment. Acerbic
or congratulatory in the body of the essay, or scribbled with a grade at the
end.</div>
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My best comment was usually something arch or chastising but
personal nonetheless hiding in the margin. I cared far more for the moments
where I knew I had made some dialogue with my reader teacher then the grades I
actually got (complacent teen). Comments meant connection:</div>
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‘Lucy, really!’ next to a heroine/heroin spelling
malfunction = <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">she remembered my name!</i></div>
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‘I know what you mean here, an examiner will not. More
clarity.’ Next to an assumption everyone agrees that Jane Eyre and Rebecca are
basically the same book = <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">she knew what I
meant!</i></div>
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It is understandable for both parents and pupils to pour eagerly
over reports and marked work to look for evidence of how they or their child
have done and also proof that they, or their child, are known and understood
and well cared for. It evidences our own choices within our circumstances,
doesn’t it, makes us think phew, this is going okay, or shit, something needs
changing.</div>
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I find the whole question of how to be positive to and about
your children regarding school work, without be a dreadful show off and/or a
boring twat, quite hard. In that, of course I know what side of the fence I
want to stand on, but I don’t know how to do that without falling straight into
the thorns on the other. Especially because there are so many pitfalls of
complacency around it.</div>
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I was pleased for my lad and pleased, I guess, for me when I
read his report. And I know I am lucky for that. He’s lucky too, but he also
worked hard, and deserves some credit as well. Quiet, non braggy credit, but
credit all the same for the work he did within the realms of his massive good
fortunes. It is funny blogging as your kids get older when there is so much you
want to think on and discuss which is really not yours at all. He’s had great
and not great times at school, but those are his stories and lessons, not mine
to learn from.</div>
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But I have been thinking about perceptions. To what extent
is it useful to be ranked against your peers, is it as rude to write off
results (they don’t mean anything!) as it is to brag about that, even humbly? How
helpful are comparisons really? A lot of my dissatisfaction throughout my life
has been cased by comparing myself to other people, personally, socially,
physically, whatever.</div>
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I saw several wonderful parents with marvellous kids getting
upset about the facebook and forum showing off. I saw some incredibly dissing
of ‘average’ from people who blatantly do not understand maths. And heard a lot
of thought about whether the most important bit of the report was: </div>
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<ul style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;">the
teacher’s comments </li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;">the
remarks about effort/how hardworking child was</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;">enthusiasm
for subject/school</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;">social
happiness or</li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;">results
achieved. </li>
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Forget all the arms taken up against phonics, what I think
is hardest about parenting a child at school is that while it unutterably does
help to have a good education, and therefore one must encourage trying and
excelling as far as possible across the boards, the real life lesson in terms
of attainment and effort is lost. For surely the prize in life is always
maximum achievement with minimum effort and most fun on the side or as you are
doing it? And by God would I have loved the Facebook Mom saying:</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">So thrilled with X’s
mega results. Totally nailed her sats, with a long comment from the teacher
saying she barely gave a shit all year!</i></div>
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Formal marked education cannot teach you that sometimes in
life you need luck with you and, even more god-willing, an aptitude for what
you are interested in or vice versa. You have to witness it yourself and set
your own parameters.</div>
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His teacher, whom<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
like, and who knows my son very best 30 hours a week at school, described him
as quiet and softly spoken little boy. Ha! I thought. I had the instinct to
insert a load of jokes into my repertoire about not knowing who that boy was.
But I do, or at least I can imagine him, he’s just my boy as he is for other
people, a side of him I can never see without spying.</div>
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And that’s okay, but it does kind of kick into a cocked hat
any idea that I can be an exam result peacock beyond something very
superficial. My boy is different to my boy at school, the credit and
responsibility is his. Even as young as 7. </div>
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<span class="uficommentbody">My son snarls if I mess up on
series link, dresses as a bear for the fun of it, has his own spotify playlist,
sneaks pickled raw garlic with me in the kitchen, and asks for a custard pie in
the face for every Birthday. I have no idea really about the little boy who did
my boy’s SATs, but I don’t need to, he needs to keep finding his own
connections with his own teachers and his own interests. At the moment he’s
lucky enough to have the sort of environment and circumstances which make that
possible.</span></div>
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The day son got his results and his report something far
more significant happened. I ran to collect him from afterschool club, scuffing
round the school corner at a sprint, tripping over the mound of bookbags on my
way to find the sign out sheet and only to be greeted by an empty room.</div>
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Disastre! Son was playing outside. All the kids were
outside. </div>
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This is good – BIG TICK – fresh air, fun for him, hooray. It
is also a –BIG BAD CROSS for logistics.</div>
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When the kids are outside it means another three minutes (or
even more if a shoe is lost in a bush or he’s smuggled yet another bloody toy
into school and lost it). </div>
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Four minutes is a killer in the mad dash to get from one
childcare venue to another and get his brother. Commuting doesn’t give me any
elasticity. Beyond five minutes and we are fuck-a-doodle-fucked. And taking
time to strategise is crucial when hoiking him out. The potential for a tantrum
if I extricate him at the wrong moment of a game could mean we actually take
longer than if I’m dead casual. And then we would miss the nursery 6pm cut off
and we will ALL TURN INTO STONE. </div>
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I pause on the edge of the playground wondering whether being
chatty, cajoling, or shouty will be most effective today. He and some friends are
in some bushes, their shirts grime smeared, their hands and faces sticky and
hot and dusty with discussing who is in charge of the game, which seems to be
taking place in a cloud of parched earth and dry rhododendrons where the picnic
area used to be. </div>
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One of the TAs who works at the club walks up. I don’t
normally have much time for chat and today I am on the wire so I am only half
listening.</div>
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‘I love your son’ she says, staring as I do across the
hopscotch. ‘I love him. Look at him, Eh!’</div>
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I look. He is animated like a cross between Jim Carey and
Scooby-Doo. White spaghetti legs flying out of polyester shorts, shoulders pulling
back thrusting out his chest, shoulders looping up and back again, everything ranging
around, as if enraged, the storm suddenly breaking into arm whirling outreach as
he throws back his sweaty, sticky, sticky face and parts his lick-spittle rosey
lips in a laugh.</div>
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I don’t know what I’m looking at, but I love it too. He’s
exhausting to watch, total Loony Tunes.</div>
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<span class="uficommentbody">‘Look Thatwoman,’ the TA carries
on. ‘Everything he does he feels. His whole body is his smile. When he loves
something it is all there. When he plays his whole body and his hair play</span>’.</div>
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She was right. That’s my boy after all. The one without filter.
WYSIWYG. </div>
Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-70212120434746743822014-05-29T15:01:00.001+01:002014-06-01T15:55:16.254+01:00Diamonds And Pearls<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Oh Maya Angelou. So beautiful and strong. It is so sad to know she's dead when her honesty and generosity with her own life and her raw story felt like such an open gift to everyone.</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /><br />She was one of the first authors who wrote about themselves that got in to my head. Her dancing, angry story of herself felt like a shout out into my teenage brain: she sang her uncaged heart out loud. Her words so easy to slip in to, but so hard to shake off.<br /><br />If Toni Morrison is stuck for words, then I feel worried writing a shallow tribute. But it is funny reaching somewhere near middle age and realising, as your inspirations and heroines start to die, which ones you have lived closest to, and who has popped up unexpected to taunt, share, help and re-express themselves through your experience. I was such a dilettante in my youth, perhaps the only blessing of my wrinkles is the endless confirmation of that when I realise I finally have understood things I thought I knew, or become accustomed to knowing I don't know them.<br /><br />I saw The History Boys last night. I don't love it but I do like the explosive ownership of the c-word from a teacher and the emphasis (in the film at least - I haven't seen the play) on the moments from films and books and plays which stick with us precisely as they reveal our lack of originality. I agree with Bennet's inspirational teachers: the best books are not those which are life-changingly original, but those which whenever, wherever, and by whomever they were written, express a thought which we had foolishly imagined was a thought unique to us. Be that thought joyful, shameful, clever or silly. We must only connect, and all that.<br /><br />And the things we read which return to us at different stages, works we once knew well and then realise we never understood at all, or which we hated and then are re-revealed by a shared thought later, those are the ones we should cherish. Lots of people have taken Maya's words and relived them, relieved at her generosity in sharing herself and the ease with which they can identify themselves or love her words with others. Nelson Mandela apparently read her poem <i><b>And Still I Rise</b></i> at his inauguration. <br /><br />You may write me down in history<br />With your bitter, twisted, lies<br />You may tread me in the very dirt<br />But still, like dust, I rise<br /><br />I remember inhaling Maya Angelou's poetry and prose the summer between my A Level years, along with a load of other books on a list given to me by my Head of English and my amazing teacher Geraldine Kelley. One of the lists, I can't remember whose, was in green ink on a piece of lined A4 paper. I kept it for years.<br /><br />Between them, they set out to offer me a chance to build my knowledge of contemporary voices, offer my brain more than the well-worn rites of passage (On The Road, The Catcher in The Rye, Adrian Mole etc) and 'the classics'. All of them were books from my birth century if not my lifetime and, at 17, I'd only heard of some.<br /><br />Those books that summer made it feel like life itself could learn and tell everything through poetry. Some of them made it shudder. Most of them confused me, or more shamefully, didn't and only confuse me now that I know how perky and ignorant I was then.<br /><br />They were interesting bedfellows as they piled up by my mattress on the floor. Surrounded by teen girl tat and revision post-it notes. I can see them now. The best were mostly modern and blew my tiny mind when I thought literature meant Silas Marner, Heathcliffe and Cathy, and small uniform volumes with a penguin on the front (or, if I hadn't the cash, a Wordsworth daffodil on the spine).<br /><br />The list books included <i>Schindler's Ark</i>, <i>The White Hotel</i>, <i>Tales of The City</i>, <i>Staying On</i>, <i>Beloved</i>, <i>The Bell Jar</i>, <i>Moon Tiger</i>, <i>Midnight's Children</i>, <i>The Swimming Pool Library</i>,<i> To Kill A Mocking Bird</i>, <i>Unreliable Memoirs</i>, <i>The Female Eunuch</i> (I think). Also PD James and Garcia Marquez.<br /><br />Many of them I should re-read now, now that I can share my experience with the writers rather than take their words for it, or rely on a teen imagination and sense of drama to fill in the gaps.<br /><br />But I think I'll start with Maya and Clive James (who is so reassuringly funny and wise and sincere) as I start to rebuild my blog again. I have noticed I have been away and think James' jolly and clever retelling of himself is a good combination with Angelou's soothing and straight up simplicity.<br /><br />As I read the tributes and remember when I first met her writing, a lot of her words cut to the chase regarding why I stopped last year (and why I started in the first place).<br /><br />I began this blog to look for things in the blankness and the madness of a changed world (mine). Changed by madness and sadness (postnatal depression), injury and joy, newness and epic blank exhaustion and confusion. These were bold sensations and for me thunderingly dull and exquisite. Epitomised by being a mother, confused by being a bear of little brain. But there were specifics too. An outrage about mental health, child bashing, battered feminism, broken bodies. A fury and a shame about what I had become, the sorry state of incontinence, the contradiction of my lucky heart and lips with their soft sweet-breathed babies to kiss and the violence of their arrival and the broken body and world they left me (that I am still shocked by and sorting out).<br /><br />When Maya Angelou died yesterday, a friend posted a quote on Facebook. A quote which has slipped around my brain, like an ice cube in just too much whiskey for a respectable late-night glass, for years. Clinking up against the sides: floating, chiming, melting in. I shouldn't appropriate for myself, but I think it is okay to share in it a bit.<br /><br />It is also from <i><b>And Still I Rise</b></i>. I like it because it is funny and warm and spiky and challenging and celebratory all at once. It holds great joy and self-possession and asks us to move outside our feelings about ourselves and be unintimidated by another person's confidence in her worth.<br /><br />Does my sexiness upset you?<br />Does it come as a surprise<br />That I dance like I have diamonds<br />At the meeting of my thighs<br /><br />For me now, because I am a narcissist, and preoccupied with wimmins' things and bits, I like best her proud display of her intimacy and her challenge. Whatever we have to rise from, whatever privilege or lack, we can hold surprises and wealth in what we are and we certainly don't have to accept or be cowed by any expectations of our worth, confidence or lack of either.<br /><br />And in this world of commercially accessible porn and women's bodies dressed up as show and tell, it is a salutary and necessary 'fuck you' to objectification too. Go Maya. I don't know what I have inside me, I know I don't have diamonds in my tush, just stitches and scars and contradictions, but I've remembered I have something and I think that is a good enough place to start.</span>Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-88838453571111271292014-05-25T23:10:00.000+01:002014-05-25T23:11:15.765+01:00In Memoriam - Part II<div>
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My 6 year old son is more sentimental about the past than his Great Grandmother who was born in 1920.<br />
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And yet... he combines this nostalgia (for when he was a small boy, that day when I let him have 3 polos, the time he found a stick in the park, the birthday party three years ago on Hampstead Heath where he had to do a poo on a party plate because there was no toilet nearby) with such a ruthlessness.<br />
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Take TV. Fireman Sam, poor old Fireman Sam with his simple, manly heroism and simple tales of being a good sport - he's rubbish now, Elvis doesn't even raise a smile. All those hours spent in front of In The Night Garden and Tinga Tinga, now dismissed as wasted. They are 'nothing' and 'for babies'. I point out he liked them then - he replies, wistful about my endearing idiocy rather than his past, he didn't know what he could like because he hadn't seen Horrible Histories yet. Some things remain, we revisit horrible Histories from time to time, but we have emigrated to popcorn proper kidz TV.<br />
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Worst though buses are now officially, completely and forever just not all that. They aren't even shit (like Fireman Sam). They are just, you know, buses. The winning seat above the driver, that still matters, and newborn (now 3.5) and he vie for the best seats in the house, but all the Ferver is gone.<br />
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For those who don't know me, I wasted hours, days, months of my life looking at buses. I went to bus museums, became a member of the Transport Museum. I frequented greasy cafe after greasy cafe drinking wartime tea to sit and watch the 144s move off majestically in the rain. We had one of our worst journeys ever on Christmas Day 2009 in the car when it became apparent that apart from the four double deckers standing proud on the Muswell Hill roundabout stop there are no buses on Christmas Day. He cried all the way from N8 to Loughborough.<br />
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Mr Thatwoman once took him to the Isle of Wight bus museum open day. Spider-boy took his best mate (more of a train man himself) and got his dad to ring me from the pier to say 'There are so many buses mummy and they are ALL OLD'. They were both pretty discerning, and though forgiving of the different colours of buses from the war and other areas of the country, clear that proper buses are red (and double deckers). Which meant they were positively gleeful (and slightly condescending) to the queues of grown up IOW bus fanatics purring enthusiastically over a vintage London bus. 'We see buses like that everyday' he told one gentleman with the pearl cheeked wisdom of a true toddler sage.<br />
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When I was pregnant with newborn, a kind friend C took Spider-boy out with her while I had a scan. The scan, though thankfully fine, was much longer and more fraught than expected. Stuck on Tottenham Court Road, having gone on a date with him, eaten pizza and run out of chocolate buttons and bubbles she resorted to her last ditch plan (a final plan filled with great insight, resourcefulness and imagination I might add). She just took him to a bus stop. At that point he had reached his high point of obsession. Not yet four he could name most bus routes that went from North London into the centre. He used to quiz (and judge) adults on whether they understood the route of the 41 or 29. At the bus stop he asked which bus they were taking.<br />
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'You choose' she replied.<br />
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His mind is still boggled, I'm not even sure he could handle the choice now and then he was stumped: so used to being thrown on to whichever bus had space by a harassed parent late for something, he'd never been given such power or responsibility.<br />
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'Okay, let's just get on the next one which comes, whichever one it is' she soothed. And so they did. Just got on, marched to the top seat made of win, and 'drove' to Kentish Town. And then, in the stroke of genius from Friend C, they just got off and got on another, fairly happily trundling up and down a section of the city for another hour.<br />
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I tell that, merely to present one of the happiest days of his life; his passion was simple and true and specific, as all the most honourable passions should be.<br />
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And he had a collector's eye for specifics. It wasn't just the bus number he wanted to remember and discuss, Oh No. IT WAS THE ADVERT ON THE BACK which was the way he decided how to rank his spots. And there was only one advert that would do: The Lion King. Nursery staff who he has long since left behind still tell me about the days where he would stand by the window on tip toes waiting for a lion all through lunchtime. They eventually printed out a copy of the poster, so he could hold it tight and be persuaded to come and eat with the other children.<br />
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It was a fever, an obsession, and it was infectious. I became both addled with nerves and throbbing with joy, depending on what the back of a bus looked like. The worst, of course, were buses with nothing on. Then there were those with 'just a lady' (Mamma Mia!), 'horse' (War Horse), 'just writing' (several productions which dared to only show their title).<br />
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Husband and I started to live in fear that The Lion King would end its run, and we'd be damned to standing at the bottom of Turnpike Lane in the rain and mist for all eternity. How I cursed that fucking lion, intoxicatingly beautiful though his abstract design maybe.<br />
<br />
And then one day, 2.5 years after it started, it stopped. A lion went past, and he didn't say anything. He smiled, benignly, not unkindly, but with something like sympathy, when I said: 'Yay LION' and went to high five him. Buses drifted off into the distance. He sometimes notes they are quite cool, and the best vehicle, but he's given half of his collection to his brother already, and re-utilised the others as enclosures in a zoo and props in gross out magic shows.<br />
<br />
I on the other hand am left bemused and bereft. I sometimes forgive myself and point out a bus on the horizon. I tell him titbits - 'I saw a ghost bus today' I enthuse after seeing a learner driver one morning, and am greeted with gentle repetitious reprimands:<br />
<br />
'Did you forget? Did you not remember that I don't like buses any more'.<br />
<br />
His knowledge of the bus routes has faded, he's no longer bothered and more concerned to learn which Big cats can't roar or why some jokes are funny. But I still can't shake it, and feel slightly perturbed that newborn likes fire engines and making up rock songs. My son's easy transition is not so for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm no busspotter, but I was so immersed in that which gave him joy, that I feel oddly bereft. It was a sad day, and a salutary reminder that I'll always be playing catch up. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Always one step behind. Today he went with his father to the zoo. Big cats have been replaced with horrific insects and arachnids. Fodder for pranks and playground boasting. It makes me feel terrible for all the times as a youth I poured scorn on adults trying to be 'in with the kids'. For sure some are pretending they aren't ageing, which is self-deluding and therefore futile and boring for others. But some? I think they are just trying to enjoy the easy rapour and shared enthusiasm, the vital interest and fun that you can experience with the young.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The very young are incapable of hiding their love, their one track mind obsessions with things. They are often bores on their favourite subject and yet the brutal sincerity of their early love, is something I can only envy as I scrabble to keep up, and mourn with fitful transport nostalgia.</div>
</div>
Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-13027409504152508642013-11-28T18:23:00.000+00:002013-11-28T18:23:05.347+00:00Home Coming<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-w2GJNz44vWU/UpeJrDGBbBI/AAAAAAAAAZI/1GOP3iB6q0w/s1600/Sophie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-w2GJNz44vWU/UpeJrDGBbBI/AAAAAAAAAZI/1GOP3iB6q0w/s320/Sophie.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">In Belfast airport this evening, on the return
leg of a work trip, I was confronted with my son’s first love. Sophie The
Giraffe! There she was, a tiny statue version of herself, dancing on a music
box in a tourist shop. A last minute gift for a busy parent like me to grab at;
she’ll be gone by Christmas Eve.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-repeat: initial initial; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">I let out a gasp and said, ‘Hello Sophie!’ with such an air of mad
recognition that two assistants asked if I needed any help.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-repeat: initial initial; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-repeat: initial initial; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Our Sophie, so important once, so key to my baby’s happiness that I felt
jealous of a plastic toy, is now forgotten, her squeak no longer heard, her
rouged up cheeks and rubber neck no longer needed for nibbling. She’s been
usurped by Fireman Sam and the fine upstanding members of Pontypandy’s rescue
service and it almost makes me sad.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Kids are so casual with their passions. Time is theirs to waste; they
can’t imagine a life without love and discovery around every corner. I am less
confident and elastic. I hoard my memories.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-repeat: initial initial; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">I suspect newborn wouldn’t know her name if he found her behind the sofa
– but I can still feel her, spit sticky, chewed up, consumed, adored.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">She’s on the list of cast aside toys. Next to trains and big red buses,
Iggle Piggle, the colour blue, the poster for The Lion King. Things my sons
loved so much that I fell for them myself now treated with crushing
indifference. Perhaps one day I will feel like this about their partners.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">But I was feeling maudlin anyway. I’d slipped into the Titanic
Experience on my way out of the city. I didn’t go all the way around, I just
got to peep through the artfully glistening dark glass, to check out the
educational 1:1 scale drawings of bolts and chains and wrenches (as big as
shire horses some of them) lining the silky corridors down to the loos. And to
eat a White Line muffin and ponder the gift shop.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vVwxJNIJpPQ/UpeJxwaFqzI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/KuYN6xCBuUY/s1600/White+Star+cafe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vVwxJNIJpPQ/UpeJxwaFqzI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/KuYN6xCBuUY/s320/White+Star+cafe.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Usually gift shops are my favourite bit of any museum or gallery, it
wouldn’t be the first time I’ve skipped an exhibition to loiter with the
merchandise. I should be ashamed but I don’t care. I like to see the rainbow
rubbers and over-priced tea-towels, the piles of tie pins, the plastic boxes of
pencils.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-repeat: initial initial; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Here, I felt odd though. My appropriate-o-meter was on overload. Is it
okay to buy a Titanic rubber duck? Is the lack of iceberg imagery proper or
disingenuous? Will I forgive myself for not buying a replica Heart-Of-The-Ocean
necklace for £4.99?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">I’ve been in Belfast
city for three days. I’ve asked every cabbie whether I should go, and heard
every view: yes, no, life-changing, meh. I’ve been told it is stunning, a
respectful tribute, something for the ladies, a weird celebration of failure.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Pn7yAPlnne4/UpeJ3VkW2kI/AAAAAAAAAZg/MXZ3jdC_sng/s1600/Titanic+buildin+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Pn7yAPlnne4/UpeJ3VkW2kI/AAAAAAAAAZg/MXZ3jdC_sng/s320/Titanic+buildin+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">The building itself is a heartbreakingly beautiful thing. Massive in
impact and height, simple in design, it cuts through you as it slices the
afternoon light and shimmers. It dares you to remember a night a century ago,
it ripples your gut with the recall of a stunning achievement, an enormous
feat, a terrible, terrible end. I could hardly bear to leave it as the sun set.
I wanted to stare at it at least until darkness fell, to feel the chill of it,
watch the jagged edges fade into a stark monolith.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HSOZL2VULqs/UpeJ2YkiOVI/AAAAAAAAAZc/cMRA6SNc5OY/s1600/Titanic+buildin+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HSOZL2VULqs/UpeJ2YkiOVI/AAAAAAAAAZc/cMRA6SNc5OY/s320/Titanic+buildin+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">I say I didn’t have the time but I suspect I didn’t have the stamina for
all that loss and memoriam. Fittingly at George Best
Belfast City
Airport some little
poppies shook their heads, wilting by the pavement, drowned out by the over-zealous
crunch of unnecessary salt on the tarmac. They shamed me in my idling over the
ship building.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">I am torn apart by Poppy Day these days, mostly by a blush that lasts
November through. I’m shamed by all the years I didn’t really try to understand
what those lists of names meant. All those little boys and people left who were
no different from me. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">The past is not a different country
after all, grief is just the same. I can’t believe I did so many Brownie
Sundays and never really felt as sorry and appalled as I should have done,
wrote all those essays on Sassoon, wept at all the novels and films but never
had the grace to acknowledge that time does nothing to change the banal and
horrific loss of it all. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Like geographical distance time
brings the worst privilege: a suggestion that being in the olden days when
death was closer made things easier. As if the fact that there were so many
left behind was easier. As I send a plaintive text reminding my husband to
spend my death in service on luxury items should my plane crash (a ritual of
mine) I can only think of mothers catching memories of their boys. Of rooms
haunted by toddlers crouched in love and concentration over their latest
passing fancy, blond heads flashing in the corner of an eye, like a mouse by
the fireplace, vanishing to dust on a second glance.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">I was so glad to come home.</span></div>
Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-61547483620049977602013-09-16T22:26:00.001+01:002013-09-16T22:48:36.852+01:00Pot(ty) Luck<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4oRO74QTK9A/Ujd4fhgychI/AAAAAAAAAYI/409zh18oMrw/s1600/potty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4oRO74QTK9A/Ujd4fhgychI/AAAAAAAAAYI/409zh18oMrw/s320/potty.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I loathe the phrase 'quality time'. Possibly because I can't work out what it means. And I am both suspicious and indignant about things when I don't know what they mean (and everyone else seems to). I'm told my husband and I should have more of it. And I should feel guilty for not spending enough of it with my children.<br />
<br />
<br />
Personally I think time is precious enough without fetishising some of it to the point of making people feel terrible. After all, I have to remind myself each day when I want to whine - whine like a toddler at half past seven whose mum is still fannying around trying to sort out tea and then presents me with a carrot, an untoasted bagel, some too garlic-y humous and an apple for 'pudding' as if I should be grateful (what?) - that however much I would like more hours in the day, that is never going to happen. There is no more time. There's just 24 hours. That is it.<br />
<br />
The massive flaw in the 'quality time' guilt trip is that no-one is admitting what they would really like to do with any extra hours some clock-God could throw at them. Well, maybe everyone else would climb Everest, or teach their kids Cantonese. I know what I would do: I would sleep. Sleep and maybe indulge a hangover with a morning in bed or just do a pee in peace whilst my children were somewhere else. And then, perhaps, just do a normal thing like playing with duplo without having to check my work email every five minutes or be on the phone to the plumber about the leaking bath, or rearranging a doctor's appointment or wondering where the HMRC letter that looked important is.<br />
<br />
I mean, I don't need more time. I just need less shit and boring things to do, which take the shine off the fun stuff, like teaching a toddler to gurn.<br />
<br />
But I am grumpy today. It might be because I haven't slept through the night for well over a week. It might be because I have a broken foot which makes me look like I'm turning into a stormtrooper. This may account for my furious mood. I am raging, incandescent, ready to cascade from one moment of fury to another this evening like a demented snookerball . But it isn't just being tired, really, really, really tired. So tired I've started to fantasise that John Lennon must have been a parent with a broken leg, a sick child and another with nightmares when he wrote his classic <i>I'm So Tired</i>, rather than a millionaire popstar on a retreat. <br />
<br />
It is knowing I'm wasting my time worrying about something I know is already a load of baloney. Time spent thinking and talking about the bit of parenting people lie about <i>even more than sleep</i>. Lie to others, lie online, lie in books they write, lie to themselves. Move over mums whose toddlers who cry it out once and never stir before 7 AM ever again; step away those folks with newborns who 'sleep right through'; make way for bullshitters to end all fucking bullshitters: the parents who find potty training easy.<br />
<br />
You know the ones. The ones who pretend merely having a potty around, making it normal is going to make it easy when you decide to introduce the hazard of defecation and puddles of piss to an already toy- and tantrum-strewn toddler landscape. The ones who assure you there is an optimum time to trip over a can of wee and kick it all over your socks.<br />
<br />
I've waited and waited with my second one. Putting it off because, just like moving house, I can remember nothing but a mauve mist of fear about the period of potty-ing Spider-boy. My conclusion, finally trying again, is that it (advice re potty training, that is) is all bullshit. That buying 'big boy pants' and endless readings of 'I want my potty' are as useful as dream catchers and those snoring lion things which you buy when you think you are going to fall down dead from exhaustion about nine months in.<br />
<br />
Big boy pants, for example, chosen with favourite characters just mean endless tantrums about who my son would prefer to piss on - 'Not bob the builder I WANT MONSTERS'. He has no pants with proper monsters on, just some slightly dogeared Primark ones I bought because someone had fiddled with the packs and two of the pairs were orange, his then 'favourite'.<br />
<br />
I hate a stealth-boasting parent but waiting until son was old enough to talk about what he did and didn't want or need to do in the little boy's room has done nothing to improve potty training. It has simply given him the vocab to turn weaning off nappies into some Greek dialogue play. Potty training was awful enough last time, when I wasn't working with a philosopher. One who could see me coming and was in the midst of the biggest hormone surge of his life, and the biggest bid for power.<br />
<br />
'We don't wee on the kitchen chair' I said, gamely, with only a hint of annoyance. 'I JUST DID' replied his nibs, looking at me with disdain. 'You can't just poo on the floor' I say, trying to remain up beat. 'YES I CAN' he says staring at his moussey offering as it seeps into the floorboards. 'Are you doing a poo or a trump?' I ask today as he crouches down ominously in my office, and I combine working and parenting like the multi-skilling deamon that I am. 'YES. YES IT IS A POO OR A TRUMP' he shouts as if he'll never meet a bigger moron.<br />
<br />
I have no idea how it will end. I'm hopeful with pants before school, but consoled with the wry knowledge people can remain witty, and kind, and useful people even if they aren't always in control, even when they are wet-knickered at 36. Mainly, for once, I'm hoping for shit luck.<br />
<br />
But at least I know the answer to one crucial question. What is the one thing that would improve the quality of my life? My youngest son being able to tell the difference between a shit and a fart.<br />
<br />
Well it would do for starters. Quality.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-53082666447096206782013-05-09T12:17:00.001+01:002013-05-16T17:33:00.519+01:00Don't Touch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vSjctUICGNA/UYuFmX8gkpI/AAAAAAAAAXI/ZFknDHc3Zk8/s1600/pollock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vSjctUICGNA/UYuFmX8gkpI/AAAAAAAAAXI/ZFknDHc3Zk8/s320/pollock.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
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'.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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, <i>appreciating</i>, liking, talking about but NOT TOUCHING, and a physical routine of manoeuvring and scooping up out of the way. He was unimpressed and grabby.<br />
<br />
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 <i>noclimb over</i> it?' he offers.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
'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'.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-51916521051505740402013-04-09T16:10:00.001+01:002013-05-14T14:11:17.085+01:00Wobble<br />
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<br />
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).<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
But nevertheless I feel a bit like my voice will crack when I talk over the tooth with my husband and make our plan.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-78136501553637859122013-01-22T20:53:00.001+00:002013-01-24T16:48:57.275+00:00To do<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<br />
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<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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'. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-72674913402260777332012-10-30T09:03:00.001+00:002012-10-31T15:43:46.114+00:00No shame...<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
I know, I know you must all be sitting at home thinking what
on earth happened to <i>thatwoman</i> 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?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The test, however, the <i>urodynamics</i> 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...</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.<br />
<br />
‘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’.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Charlie and The Chocolate
Factory</i> 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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘Don’t worry, Lucy, this is a wet room,’ says Carol. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘You mustn’t be embarrassed if you leak on the floor or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anywhere</i>,’ the radiographer concurs. ‘This
is why you are here.’</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘Awesome!’ I think. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘And your consultant is just around the corner.’ </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I feel rude. I’d turn to acknowledge him but I don’t want to move on the
bed in case I dislodge something.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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 <i>growing</i>, 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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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*. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Though I do crack them up when Carol asks if I’m allergic to
anything and I say ‘cats’ (true answer). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">material</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I emit a squeak.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘Don’t worry’ say the nice radiographer and Carol. ‘You
don’t have to, some women find it too embarrassing’.<br />
<br />
‘It would help’ says the
consultant, 'but there’s no pressure'. The room expects, though.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I’m still thinking: ‘SOME? Only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SOME</i> of them find it too embarrassing? Not ALL? Jesus, I’m far less
cool about this than I thought’. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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:<br />
<br />
'Um, okay…' </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They proffer me the bottle, useful for festivals I’m sure,
attached to something from <i>Chitty Chitty Bang Bang</i> or the TARDIS in the 80s. It
is to measure my flow. I get top marks. Go me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thatwoman</i> rises from the dead. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘I want you to do an operation and stop this now, because I can’t
bear it any more’ she says.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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.</div>
Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-90011899800245191902012-08-20T21:34:00.004+01:002013-05-16T17:31:53.715+01:00Shame<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RZhSPYLS2Ss/UDKguvut6RI/AAAAAAAAAVU/ZCPkABLqQnA/s1600/SIGN.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5778857996816607506" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RZhSPYLS2Ss/UDKguvut6RI/AAAAAAAAAVU/ZCPkABLqQnA/s400/SIGN.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
I loved the film <i>Shame</i>. 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
The truth of it in all its pissy, shameful and embarrassing tedious unglory<br />
<br />
And the fact that he may not, actually, be able to sort it<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?’<br />
<br />
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 <i>9 Songs</i> 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.<br />
<br />
I can’t even decide if that’s a shame, or just the only way to deal with it.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-50187819778076759982012-07-25T23:35:00.005+01:002012-07-26T08:11:38.787+01:00July / Birthdays<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cOJY6ZJH4Ds/UBB2ZDvZqzI/AAAAAAAAAVE/VlPFc2cYLmw/s1600/jag%2Bcake.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5769241295534533426" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cOJY6ZJH4Ds/UBB2ZDvZqzI/AAAAAAAAAVE/VlPFc2cYLmw/s400/jag%2Bcake.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?’<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-80894685960222376052012-06-30T21:15:00.000+01:002012-06-30T21:30:41.789+01:00Who is that? (Come on baby, the laugh’s on me...)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GijIdzOi12s/T-9bhasxndI/AAAAAAAAAUo/6U79lvzyoa4/s1600/sunglasses+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GijIdzOi12s/T-9bhasxndI/AAAAAAAAAUo/6U79lvzyoa4/s400/sunglasses+pic.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b><br /></b><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<h3>
<b><i>You sit around getting older. There’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on me…</i></b></h3>
<br />
It was my birthday last week. To celebrate I danced to <i>Horrible Histories </i>songs in the lounge and played Springsteen too loud for my own good. The quote above is, of course, Springsteen. It is from <i>Dancing In The Dark</i> 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.</div>
<br />
Things have been hazy. That’s why I used the picture above, but also the one below.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J1bK6mR9nlc/T-9cbE3HbWI/AAAAAAAAAUw/yv-gSSjZ7Vs/s1600/BLURRYBABY.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J1bK6mR9nlc/T-9cbE3HbWI/AAAAAAAAAUw/yv-gSSjZ7Vs/s400/BLURRYBABY.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
The reason I appreciate the stare and smile (mirthful? judging? anticipating? happy? confused? bossy? hungry? I don’t know) is this:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<h3>
<b>Sometimes I stare at my second child and I just have no idea who the fuck he is</b></h3>
</div>
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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 <i><b>worrier warrior mum</b></i>, I will keep him alive. I can’t shake this thought, I just can’t. But I can’t sustain the fear either. <br />
<br />
Three things dragged me out of it:<br />
<ol>
<li>Turning 35. Middle aged according to the stats I learned in primary school. MIDDLE AGED and still moping, for God’s sake</li>
<li>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</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ol>
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<b>WHO ARE YOU?</b></h3>
<br />
He stared straight back into my face and shouted: "Mummeeeeeeeeeeee". <br />
<br />
Then screamed with laughter.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-68517861715578470282012-06-30T11:21:00.006+01:002012-06-30T20:59:33.192+01:00In Memoriam - Part I<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aLK3QtZ3RcY/T-7YksHJcgI/AAAAAAAAAUc/nwkO4dIwC-4/s1600/photo%252812%2529.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5759779098281472514" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aLK3QtZ3RcY/T-7YksHJcgI/AAAAAAAAAUc/nwkO4dIwC-4/s400/photo%252812%2529.JPG" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
I'm interested, if not an expert, on how we use photography and social media and how it influences our lives and in my case both my experience of (and presentation to the world) of my parenting. Above is a picture I took a few months ago. I kept it on my phone despite feeling very strange and conflicted about how and why it existed and whether I should ever show anyone. I must state, clearly, and right now, that it is the foot of a baby, mine, who is very much alive and happy today. It is bloodied because he had some tests, for which the results were pretty good. I should also perhaps offer a warning that some of the reflections below are partly about death.<br />
<br />
When the photo had been on my phone a little while I met a blogger called Violet, just briefly, at a conference called Cybher. I feel I should give a warning here that her work is not, as she puts it, everyone's cup of tea and many may dislike even the premise of her blogging. I was very touched by her presentation and her blog.<br />
<br />
She has an <a href="http://www.theskullillusion.com/why-post-mortem/">amazing site if highly sensitive site in which she compiles post mortem photography, pictures of the dead</a>, especially, but not exclusively, from the early days of photography at the end of the 19th century.<br />
<br />
She says she envies the Victorians and their pragmatic approach to death, and her site seems to pay a tribute both to those whose images feature and to another time and experience. Many of the photographs, given the time, are of children. Both because child mortality was so high, but also because photography was so new and expensive that some images seep out a secondary sadness.<br />
<br />
Beyond their thundering blow of bereavement, they suggest that perhaps this photograph was the only one parents could afford of their child. The only one they had. And one taken once their child slept forever. A world away from the cacophony of everyday snapping we take for granted. Often the children and adults are dressed up – if you’ve seen the haunting film ghost story <i>The Others</i> you’ll have seen a riff on these sorts of images.<br />
<br />
I was struck by both her simple interest in compiling, restoring, displaying and responding to these pictures and by the notion which becomes apparent in the comments or with any research - that these photos are a commodity which hold so much interest. People collect them.<br />
<br />
The site, The Skull Illusion (<a href="http://www.theskullillusion.com/whypostmortem/">http://www.theskullillusion.com/</a>) is interesting partly because it offers a prurient insight into a great taboo, the ultimate window into others' lives: the thrill of their trauma, the sense of their importance and the simultaneous shock that all that was them is mushed in a fadedness into 'history'. But also because both the blog itself and the fact that it exists poses so many questions.<br />
<br />
Do the dead have no privacy? Perhaps not, once their living loved ones have also passed on. Or perhaps they should have? Or is that in and of itself a denial in all of us? An unwillingness to address what is behind the curtain (for all of us)?<br />
<br />
Conversely, is it not a honourable thing to display and cherish these pictures, home them and love them somehow, allow more to see their strange beauty? This beauty in itself is intense. It is partly the starkness of the images (like most things which move intensely they are both banal and deeply shocking) but also the love and reverence with which they are taken, and their sense of posterity and simultaneous hope and defeat.<br />
<br />
Mostly, ghoulishly, it is fascinating. Is the site's power as obvious as the thrill for readers of daring ourselves to stare at something we don’t want to see, or shouldn’t? The ultimate keyhole peeping without the fear of a pencil poked through it into our eye? Or is the threat of some nasty surprise for spying part of the appeal – do we have the balls to stare down death and will he jump out of us like a ghost girl in a Japanese movie?<br />
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The site’s author told me the most looked at photograph she has is one which has been widely printed the world over – a picture of Kurt Cobain. It isn’t gory, it isn’t detailed, it is of a door partly open with his foot and arm visible. If I remember correctly some detritus of life, a coffee cup for example, visible to the moment snatching paparrazo. Just a foot in a shoe, it could be a rockstar asleep, a teen languishing listening to headphones, but it isn’t. It is the dead limb of a man who has taken his own life in violence.<br />
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When people die we understandably struggle with the transition to the world without. There’s a beautiful eulogy written by a rocker to a friend, Terry, who toured and worked with him for years. It says:<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">They say you can’t take it with you</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;">But I think that they’re wrong</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">All I know is I woke up this morning and something big had gone</span>*<br />
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It most accurately distils every feeling and experience of grief I have ever had. The emptiness, the weirdness, the normalness, the everydayness, the bloody infernal ‘they’ telling us all what we should think and how we should react in good times and in shit ones.<br />
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I have never taken a photograph of a dead person. But I can understand the urge, not least as I am still a child in the face of death, coping with it mainly by simply pretending it doesn’t happen, and failing that pretending it doesn’t happen whenever I don’t have to address other people grieving and needing my support and sympathy, or sympathising with me in my grief when I have experienced it. Behind closed doors I pretend we’re all immortal.<br />
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I’m struck by the idea of Kurt Cobain’s foot (I saw the image when it was printed immediately after he died, I can’t look again, it would be too close to home). And curious about the many people finding it through google. Are they pleased or disappointed there’s no blood? I’ve seen dead bodies online and in films, I know the sensation of craning your neck, tilting your head to check if there is more to the picture, any grisly detail left unseen at first glance.<br />
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I'm mainly struck by the foot though, because of pale feet I too have seen. Once when my son really was very sick I found myself photographing him. I was appalled by the vagabond version of himself he was. Panting, stretched and strangled by wires, ribs pulling out of his chest, eyelids see-through, throat hoarse with trying, lying in a monstrous high raised infant hospital bed. It was the most frightened I have ever been as an adult, and all I wanted to do was take photographs. Endless snaps on my phone of his face, his feet, his nose, a profile and lips and teeth. Even though the very act was so intrusive on him, and unfair - he is beautiful when sick, but like all of us perhaps deserves the best of him, and his prettiest, to be on show.<br />
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I didn’t think at the time about why I was doing it, though I felt embarrassed later, ashamed even that people would think I had done something trivial at his time of need. I thought ‘they’ would think I had abdicated the proper mum's role of 'worrier warrior' merely to live up to the incessant over-sharing of the social media networking age.<br />
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Perhaps there was a touch of that (I wonder if I believed the situation was real more or less before I updated people online about his progress?) Mainly though I was torn between wanting to show people the images of him really sick, or edit them like holiday snaps and only show the ones where he looked beautiful or not upsetting, if occasionally covered in wires.<br />
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Now time has passed I think I know why I did it: because I felt like if I kept recording it I would keep hold of the moment/my son/my autonomy/my authorship of my life and hold the image of him somewhere somehow in time. And the moment wouldn’t end. And he would stay alive.<br />
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Violet, the author of The Skull Illustion cites becoming a parent as one of the reasons she developed her morbid curiosity. A desire to woman up to the big D in an attempt to cope with the horror that parenting brings, a clear and present sense of all the time danger of something going wrong with time and a child being lost. I think that is what I was doing too, and thankfully with a child who is now recovered, fat and well.<br />
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* from Terry's Song, by Bruce SpringsteenLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-38847514980275263912012-06-17T11:00:00.000+01:002012-06-18T00:11:13.495+01:00The elephant in the room<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PbTVMgzGF68/T921FVT-6LI/AAAAAAAAAUM/iy9eVaJNrPw/s1600/tortoise.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5754955002074294450" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PbTVMgzGF68/T921FVT-6LI/AAAAAAAAAUM/iy9eVaJNrPw/s400/tortoise.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
Father's Day is here. And the season of summer birthdays. When thinking about the former I realise someone is often missing from my blog, which talks a lot about sons and mothers, husbands and brothers, sisters and friends. I think this can often be the way with the big things in your life.<br />
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Big things are great. Take cats. Spider-boy prefers jaguars, but the entire family is pretty keen on lions and tigers. Even the soggy tigers, majestically walking on water whilst sodden at the Isle of Wight Zoo a couple of weeks ago. And especially the black-maned lion Lucifer at London Zoo, which Spider-boy has adopted and which we also visited last month.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5bJ6D6kVLms/T920V3WLsdI/AAAAAAAAAUA/kgOEdHWQIlo/s1600/tig.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5754954186576605650" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5bJ6D6kVLms/T920V3WLsdI/AAAAAAAAAUA/kgOEdHWQIlo/s400/tig.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>But despite our animal adventures Spider-boy feels hard done boy. He is, he declares with some considerable criticism of my parenting intended, <i>the only boy</i> in his <i>whole school</i> who has never seen an elephant. The only one. London Zoo no longer has them. And he's quite sure we have never taken him to Africa. (Or India. Or Whipsnade. These being the holy trinity of elephant-spotting).<br />
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He is impressed by elephants, as they are both vegetarian giants, but also fierce fighters (elephants, according to Steve on <i>Deadly 60</i>, are deadly). Especially the bulls with their huge tusks and clattering might. And though I am more sceptical than he of the apparent percentage of his class who have answered his question in the affirmative and claimed to have been on a safari, I understand the longing. Such magnificent beasts.<br />
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'I think you have seen an elephant!' I reassure thinking of a trip to a wildlife park when he was at the end of nappies, 'but it was a long time ago, when we went on holiday'.<br />
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His eyes narrow.<br />
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'How long ago?' he demands. 'Before or after we were all monkeys?'<br />
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I shouldn't be surprised at this. I think he has a good understanding of history, and his personal past. He can wax lyrical at length on his nostalgic views of nursery, can look at the big kids' room with a wistful sigh and declare his recent contemporaries as now 'cute' and 'the little boys'. But if being a mother has taught me anything it is to recognize the craziness of the world as we perceive it, and the strangeness of so much of the stuff that we adults feel is entirely logical, as revealed by little eyes.<br />
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Back in the bedroom he is sorting through some animal fact cards. This is something he does endlessly, though today I can see there is some frustration. I assume this is related to the elephants. 'I'm sure we can see an elephant one day soon' I soothe.<br />
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Nope. His mind has skipped on. He's cross now because he thinks elephants must be the oldest animals, (apart from blue whales) and something he's seen in his nature book has annoyed him - news that a giant tortoise can live for over a century.<br />
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I probe and am reminded to always listen carefully and to watch my assumptions that he's always following what I say. For today I find out this: my son (4, 106 cm) is convinced that age and height are directly related. There is little I can do to dissuade the conviction about this correlation. He offers he and his brother as proof, and then me and my husband. When questioned further he reveals the landscape of his imaginative understanding of the world, which is simultaneously charming and devastating.<br />
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His paternal grandmother, nanny, for example, who has told him she is shrinking with age, must be getting younger. He ponders whether she'll ever get to be five again or just stick where she is ('about seven? I'll definitely be older than her soon').<br />
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And looking around at grown ups in the street he reveals he is vexed by the complicated question of which age it would be best to stop at? Should he stop growing at 25? 35? 40? Which would be the better age to remain until he dies.<br />
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I note that many people have been similarly preoccupied with the retention of youth but then offer his great grandmother as living proof of 91 and just how old a person can get. This is greeted with a laugh. I think he's deriding the elderly, or girls, but he isn't. He just thinks it is hilarious I can misread the world.<br />
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'Who is the oldest person you know then?' I ask.<br />
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'You know him! Don't you remember? GRANDAD!' he snorts.<br />
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My father, six foot four plus hair, born 1956, not often in this blog.<br />
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'You<i> remember</i> your Daddy!' And now I will, always, noting he <i>must</i> be 'the oldest man that has ever been alive'.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-24640629203007744552012-05-28T11:38:00.002+01:002012-05-31T14:33:57.702+01:00HAPPY?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I sometimes think about when I die. @MindCharity and others fill my twitter with discussions of depression and suicide and other nasties in the name of raising awareness. I like these, they are usually messages of hope. And there have been a couple of terrible news stories lately; the worst, probably, a father coming home to dead babies. Bad, bad, bad days for other people.<br />
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Having had depression I think it is easy to feel that death is very close. Partly because my depression has tapped into my inner melodrama and angry dog. But also because if you can fall into depression, if your path has been shown to be a complacent walkway, then you know that there is far more 'but-for-the-grace-of-God-ness' about bad news than it is comfortable to believe. A mind which has once played tricks on you, will never be entirely trustworthy. In short, you won't ever exactly be able to trust yourself. And how do you move on? Find the force for good? Get over it? <br />
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I find it hardest to remember my depression and do something useful with it when I am closest to happiness. And when I am crossing the road. At my worst I never looked for traffic because I secretly hoped to be mown down and stopped. For time to freeze and the days to end. Brown Owl should take my Road Safety badge back - sometimes I used to close my eyes and step out. These days, feeling less shaky, it is all 'quickly carefully / wave to the nice driver / wait for the green person'. But then, there was recklessness and the taste of angry exhausts. What a wicked girl I was, but at least this means the kerb is always there to remind me.<br />
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And morbid isn't always bad. It can offer us a chance for simple reflection. Take today. If sentimental posturing is to be believed when I die my life will track back and forward through my head in edited highlights, like the most glorious facebook stream. As we embark on the ballache of the school run I wonder fleetingly what snapshots I'll settle on as I lie dying? The sight of my husband on our wedding day? Warm words, silly jokes, easy silence with friends? Cold beer? The might of a jaguar? The thrill of a new book? Leaving the cinema after my first Scorcese film? The breeze in my hair and sun on my face near a gravelly beach? The lilac evening glow of new bluebells in our first garden? The sight of a boy in sandals eating an apple? (That is probably my favourite view in all the world, if not my favourite sort of moment). <br />
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I'm pretty sure when the show is done the final shot, my happiest moment, will be this. Walking down a warm pavement, little sweaty hand in mine dragging my back because we aren't quite the right size for comfy hand holding just yet, another scampering creature running ahead (or holding forth from his father's shoulders) shouting out a stream of consciousness: animals, predators, transport, friends, birthday parties, facts and, mostly, questions.<br />
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We may be late, like today when we were ushered into the playground to the tolling of the dreaded bell. We may be early, like last week, loping and stopping to look at what specimens and curios Haringey has offered us (a dead bird, some chewing gum, a pair of shoes, WHAT'S THAT MUMMY? A FRIDGE?.. on the pavement). We may see a bus in the distance and know we'll miss it, or be licking ice cream dribble from our sticky chins, or just moments from the shadow of home. But we will be walking forwards, together, in an everyday scruffy way, looking both ways as we cross the road. That, to me, will always be what happy is.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-43540329948094440652012-05-21T10:17:00.004+01:002012-05-22T09:42:32.058+01:00Age Appropriate<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Sddf5iPdpQk/T7oPYL25diI/AAAAAAAAATE/pxohGaohC70/s1600/spot.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5744921182838814242" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Sddf5iPdpQk/T7oPYL25diI/AAAAAAAAATE/pxohGaohC70/s400/spot.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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I've written before about Spider-boy's attachments and obsessions when it comes to TV, notably his hearty love for <i>Fireman Sam</i> and later <i>Gigglebiz</i>, which have now also been consigned to the scrap yard for all things too babyish. He is now, with typical four-year-old full immersion, hooked on <span style="font-style: italic;">Horrible Histories</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Deadly 60</span>.<br />
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I think both are a good thing, and mercifully, just like <a href="http://whenyouarethatwoman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/power-of-chocolate-2-when-good-books-go.html">listening to more complicated stories at bedtime</a> I feel they are giving him something I simply cannot - a sense of autonomy and mastery over his own taste. Like the best TV for anyone they entertain and challenge, inform and explain, provoke thought and reactions. Only <span style="font-style: italic;">Deadly 60</span>'s charming presenter Steve could get away with throwing down the gauntlet to kids armed with Top Trumps predator packs by wickedly suggesting the natural genius of a Praying Mantis or a Venus Flytrap could be considered on a par with the might of a tiger. Spider-boy loves these ratings and top tens, the enthusiasm Steve has for the natural world and the hint he like his idol, should spend time thinking carefully about whether a honey badger could take a wolverine in a fight (it <i>so</i> could).<br />
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And only <span style="font-style: italic;">Horrible Histories</span> would have the balls to introduce the notion that history takes many forms, can be misunderstood and patronised, whilst also told from different perspectives, in a show which is instantly appealing and hilarious to preschoolers (not least for the focus on poo and all the uses made of it over time - dental cures, analysis of ability to rule through sniffingroyal stools, the houses build of pigshit).<br />
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The later is especially involving - go on any parenting forum and you are bound to find a thread talking about mum crushes on the guy who plays Charles II or the joy of rhyming 'imagine it' and 'I am the last Plantagenet' in Richard III's mournful lament for a reputation ruined by Shakespeare. You'll hear of grown women sniffling into the fish fingers at teatime when they think about the pathos and distress of Queen Victoria's anthem to lost love:<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">For 40 years I ruled alone</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Shed all those tears while on the throne</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">What got me through the pain and hurt</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Was clinging to the memory of Albert</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Oh V and A</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Oh A and V</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Each way it spells L O V E</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Oh A and V</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Oh V and A</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">They'll name a building after us one day</span><br />
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Try it yourself. Children or no, make your own day by looking up the hieroglyphics number (<span style="font-style: italic;">A-B-C</span> re imagined as 'eye foot basket'). And hear a fizz of pleasure from any human being who appreciates life and wit, with the RAF Battle of Britain boy band song. A tale of 10 hours training, Czechs, Poles and Brits fighting together, the strangeness of become history's 'few' and the desire to be back for good (like Robbie).<br />
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And good TV, like all good art, does that - unites, appals, invigorates, prompts more. With all things parenting the temptation is to help our children skip the steps towards finding the good stuff in life: help them miss our mistakes, to avoid the rubbish on the way. Which leads me to <i>Ben 10</i>, which to be fair, isn't the worst TV show ever, just not especially inspiring in any area other than the endemic marketing to little boys.<br />
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For over a year the spectre of <span style="font-style: italic;">Ben 10</span> has hovered around our remote control, always a fascination, a temptation, eventually a Holy Grail. I didn't especially want to encourage it but had to marry that protective desire with the wider picture - how could he fit in at school if he wasn't armed with the lexicon of the playground? How could he join in games with big boys (and almost everyone in his school is a big boy compared to him with his summer birthday) if he didn't understand the mechanics of a shape shift enabling alien watch like Ben's? These are difficult questions, and ring true with my history - one of the reasons my parents bought their first television, if family lore is to be believed, was because I didn't understand what <span style="font-style: italic;">Fame</span> was and my teacher thought I was fibbing.<br />
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Before it became a true fetish object we decided to relent. What would he make of it if we let him watch it for a treat, this Most Wanted cartoon about an alien boy? He thought it was okay. He's only asked for it once again, and that was because he knows how to spell it, speak the title as code as if his little brother might be interested. 'Perhaps tomorrow we can watch B-E-N-ONE-O?' he shouts conspiratorially at bath time. 'Newborn's not allowed because <i>he</i> isn't nearly five!'<br />
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Which underscores something about Newborn too - whatever rules we have for his brother, what ever gentle nudges we give him to watch TV which is good and fun and offers him a side of lasting knowledge and discernment with his entertainment, Newborn will always have seen more. He never gets to watch stuff which is purely age appropriate for him, he must filter for himself and fall back into his place in the wolfpack hierarchy of boy. No safe CBeebies island for him in his introduction to the popular arts, no haven of Iggle Piggle and quieter fare. He's seen the Tombliboo's once, on a day when I had him alone and put it on. He now takes a tie in book, discarded years ago by his brother, to bed saying proudly 'LOOK... lolliloo' to himself and laughing in genuine wonder. They are his special secret, I think he's still wondering if any other baby ever saw one.<br />
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Then today he saw an episode of <span style="font-style: italic;">Spot</span>. Such simple, old school little kid TV that I remember my younger sister watching it. He ran to the TV, towards the simple line drawings and gentle, gentle voices, and had what I think was an epiphany: someone, somewhere is making TV for him. He held the screen, nose on the lights. And then he ran away. Perhaps it was too overwhelming, to feel so personally addressed by the magic box corner. After all he must associate it primarily with being told to move out of the way of the picture or being admonished for switching it off. Or perhaps he was just disappointed with the simplicity of Spot, and craves the episode of <span style="font-style: italic;">Horrible Histories</span> where George IV explains his life long passion for actresses, duchesses and pies. I know I did.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">If you are interested in Kids and TV my husband writes <a href="http://bornwithsquareeyes.posterous.com/">a blog on this subject</a>.</span><br />
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Here is <a href="http://www.the-mule.com/2012/05/birth-special-endings-and-beginnings.html" target="_blank">the link to the birth story post I wrote for blogger The Mule</a>. I discussed the emotions stirred up by recounting birth <a href="http://tinyurl.com/bryaxjz" target="_blank">yesterday</a><br />
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Her blog is on my blog roll and can be found <a href="http://www.the-mule.com/" target="_blank">here</a>. She has always been supportive and kind to me, whilst producing a provocative, poetic, thought provoking body of work herself including activism, musing, challenges, calls to arms, questions and genuine celebrations of women, mothering and birth.<br />
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Interestingly I realise it is the first time I've written out Newborn's birth in one go. For the record, it really did go that fast.<br />
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You get some brilliant TS Eliot too, for your trouble if you visit it - such a wonderful piece of work I feel quite ashamed of what's below!Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-27592585187180852052012-05-13T20:34:00.000+01:002012-05-14T09:40:59.977+01:00Birth stories...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Two weeks ago we were back with my second son in the hospital where my first was born. More hours to think, gazing at our London, which now of course, five years on from my start at mothering, has a great shard across it, cutting up through the skyline.<br />
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While there I was mulling. A few weeks ago, another blogger (<a href="http://www.the-mule.com/">http://www.the-mule.com/</a>) asked me to write up a birth story for a week of guest posts she has been putting together. I have written about childbirth a great deal, of course, here but also on forums and in emails. I feel quite strange about 'my' birth stories, especially given I so easily refer to them as that, 'mine', when in fact they really belong to my sons. They are their stories, the beginning and end of our exclusive time together.<br />
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I don't know what I've encapsulated writing them out, or indeed editing them to fit the word count for the birth story season. Or that thinking too much about them and writing it out was even helpful or cathartic.<br />
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I feel I've bored people senseless with snatches from them: gory, funny, outrageous, warm and fuzzy. And yet I also found to my surprise that there wasn't any especially clear story of either birth which gave the full picture.<br />
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I went through my emails and my posts, I looked at the stories I've told, the narrative I've constructed about both births. It made me think a few things - any sense of narrative, any neatness to either story, was imposed by me. These were meandering, raging, boring, weird times: minutes crawled along majestically paced, hours zoomed, phrases stood out, entire conversations seemed to disappeared even as they happened. Perhaps all labours are like that - and necessarily become flashes of full colour in a sea of sensation.<br />
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Even (especially?) my medical notes were not helpful. They were a fragmented skeleton which didn't help me iron it out either time as they are jotting books, lacking depth of detail, written by multiple authors and occasionally contradictory.<br />
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Is it important, to have either story complete? I'm not sure. I wrote them out, every single thing, the first birth so seared to me and so upsetting, the second so fleeting and confusing. Everything I could remember now, the details I recorded then. It took more than 5000 words and neither properly held things together. They missed the real joy: the warm sun on my face the first time and the birdsong we could hear as I hit 10cm, the jokes and hopes and the moment a friend delivered a sandwich to our labour room. There seemed no way to explain the intensity or meaning of my first memory of my second child which is a mixture of:<br />
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relief he was alive<br />
recognition (as he looked so like his brother)<br />
shock (as I hadn't really realised he was about to be born)<br />
confusion (because the similarity I refer to was so acute, they were identical birth weights and length and as I stared at his fat cheeks and little face I couldn't understand if he was real or imaginary)<br />
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Perhaps there are no words for that kind of mirage of light joy and recognition, the old newness of an echoed face, the excitement of familiarity and its surprise.<br />
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They did fit a pattern though. The same pattern seen in @caitlinmoran's <i>How To Be A Woman</i> where she writes out both births: one shocking, leaving her speechless, the second leaving her asking why did no-one say it was so easy.<br />
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I could write mine like that - the horrid nasty damaging birth vs. the healing transformative birth. That is one reading, and the easiest to structure my life around. It doesn't tell all, not least as in my case it ignores the duplicity of birthing which I also find in parenting. I only just avoided calling this post A Tale of Two Births. A nice pun, an apt Dickensian allusion given that when in labour the first time, I felt trapped in a Victorian hospital in the dark, united with all those howling heroines in novels I read but never truly understood. It would have been an apt name for this post mostly though as they were the best of times and the worst of times for sure. Tonight my son asked what the best and worst day of my lives have been. It is hard to give him a truthful answer, not least because those days of delivery do sit there, side by side, but at the top of both lists.<br />
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I've written before about common phrases and things we hear - like how we should be grateful for a positive ending for birth and a healthy baby. This, of course, is true. A healthy baby is the holy grail and all we should hope for, though I've noted my annoyance. Just like descriptions of empowerment and rushes of love, I think it is unhelpful to generalise about childbirth, especially to people whose experience of labour and delivery is not a positive one. I think this sort of expectation of empowerment, for example, can create a terrible expectation of what birth 'should' be and suggestion of failure if it turns out to be something else.<br />
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As a feminist this makes me concerned - I do not want to scaremonger or upset, or to blemish or affect people's views of birth, to contribute to any school of thought which disempowers women in any way or encourages them to make choices based on fear rather than anything else. I know my experiences were deeply transformed by a model of birth which was positive, and yet didn't match mine. My pain, for example, did not feel positive once when I was giving birth the first time. Not once. I know for some it does; for me it didn't. I'm most empowered personally when I hear others too felt the same. But I also know that my experience throughout labour was not conducive to that model of birth anyway - too much was stressful, unexplained, and frightening, and that there is still much which transformed me for good and ill.<br />
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Yet I often feel in need of confirmation that it is okay to feel the visceral intensity of those memories, and their massive distance from me now, their beauty and their heartbreak, their difference from anything I've experienced and their drudge, their fear and their wonder. So I tried not to sugar the pill or make it too poisonous. I'm not sure if I succeeded but I will link to the post when it appears.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-58297114758821805922012-04-28T23:41:00.000+01:002012-04-29T23:35:07.003+01:00Technology baby: out of touch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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All children I know and have ever met have been obsessed with technology. I suspect it is somehow linked to their connection with the future - they are, of course, closer to it than us. Kicking off the edge of the past, as represented by us, floating out further than we can reach to find new depths and mysteries and magic.<br />
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This is why their mortality is so heartbreaking. Children are not the future, they are only the now as we are; they are just better at looking beyond it.<br />
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The holy grail of all toys in our house has always been the mobile phone. Both of my babies would have happily killed me dead to get their hands on one and I often catch the youngest copping a feel in my handbag just in case it is there.<br />
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When Spider-boy, well under a year, first actually got one to himself the first thing he did was lift it high, hold it an arms length from his face and look between the display screen and the distance. He was giving us a perfect lesson in our defunct-ness. For him, this lump of metal/plastic/glass was not a device for aural or oral communication: it was a device for capturing images of now. His experience of the world had taught him I had a special camera for him which I kept on me at all times.<br />
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I marvelled at this easy analysis of the actual uses and relevances of technology from his tiny brain. As someone old enough to remember university halls with just one payphone, I have had to get used to smart phones and learn to avoid the perils of too fat fingers and cheeks which cut off calls in between whilst harking back to a simpler time. I'm so bad I insisted on retro dial phones at home, as I so miss the safety of a heavy cupped receiver. But it is thrilling too.<br />
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They are helped, toddlers and babies especially, by many things. Their energy and lack of things to bore and worry them. Also their limited grasp of linguistic device and their developmental stages which, whilst holding them back, also allow them to see things for what they 'really' are. Take early obsessions, for example. Things little ones get mad for when they are first learning to gesticulate and speak: to say a word, or better ask 'what's that?' Their awed cheeks every time they see a cat, say, or a car, or a train, or a dolly is brilliant. Unable (or unwilling?) to group things as we do, every cat is a new individual object to them. They are able and eager to fill their brains with new images and words and experiences for comparisons. This is how they learn. No wonder it is so exciting, and on occasion terrifying for them.<br />
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What grown ups gain in simplifying the world into known things grouped together, they lose in the simple spark of wonder that comes from being conscious of something they haven't seen before. So complacent are we in the too-much-to-know-ness of our exhilarating world that we miss out or even become annoyed.<br />
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I knew I'd reached my saturation point when it came to planets. I was taught nine: NINE. I was taught that as a fundamental of the vast universe, and grounded it made me too. I even learned the nattiest bloody mnemonic to remember them and was eager to pass it on (My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets, in case you are interested). But now there are eight. EIGHT. I felt an electrical crackle and pfft as that part of my brain shut down when I heard this cataclysmic planetary reduction on the radio. I'm too old, too old for there to be eight planets. That synaptic hissy fit at least ignited a burst of empathy - for all the times I groaned inside when my parents and grandparents persisted in long dead names for countries and capitals.<br />
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We adults, inundated and drowning in new things and old things must emphasis the collective to keep the world manageable. And we must hanker after the old and recognisable even when it no longer fits - we still call our mobiles 'phones', even though for many of us they have different functionality (they are for writing, drafting, reading, emailing, recording, media centres holding music, video, radio, games, creating wireless networks, sat navs and on and on and on). 'Phones' relates to communication, which these objects allow, but they are a slither of battery life which offer something more complex: a rendering of ourselves externally (by creating our image, doctoring it with filters, defying geography, editorialising our social image and space, and making us chameleons in our multitasking).<br />
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My mobile is rarely for making and taking calls, it is for exchanging pictures, taking them, displaying them, for storing ideas and playing scrabble, condensing thoughts/instructions/itineraries/jokes into brief text messaging, sometimes in code, checking in on the million social media streams which filter a view of the world back to me dependent on what I've done in the past (who I've liked and followed, what I've bought) rather than who I could be. Ironically, given my reliance on googlemaps to get me to new places, it is also for defying time and space so I can work and 'interact' regardless of where I am. I can't work out how any of this works and at times must 'learn' to be 'intuitive' with my complex gizmos.<br />
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Newborn can. He is 3.5 years younger than his brother, but he rendered Spider-boy as archaic as me and my husband when he first fingered a phone. His mitts on my lowly BlackBerry and the first thing he did was hold it down in front of his chest, pause for a second then drag the second finger of his right hand across the screen with meaning. My little Smartie, he knows iPhones and iPads are the things to aspire to. Steve Jobs would be proud.<br />
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He then picked up my Kindle. He dragged his finger and the image didn't even flicker. He tipped the screen to see if the picture moved. Nothing. He tried again. Nada. He looked towards the window into the sun stream considered for a second and tossed aside an object 5mm thick which can hold every book we'd house in our home. To him a qwerty keyboard and a 3G enabled library in his pocket: too old and out of touch.<br />
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And what was I doing, as he made this analysis? Taking his photo of course. On my phone.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-46874536774525170962012-04-18T22:57:00.009+01:002012-04-20T11:19:40.245+01:00The Power of Chocolate 2: When good books go bad<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sZ76lERGlLs/T5CcGnfH62I/AAAAAAAAASA/eQ0ra5UASLE/s1600/CHOCOLATE.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sZ76lERGlLs/T5CcGnfH62I/AAAAAAAAASA/eQ0ra5UASLE/s400/CHOCOLATE.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5733253963135314786" border="0" /></a><br />Spider-boy has finally discovered the joy of a proper bedtime story. One that stretches out over a week or more, a longer narrative worming into your brain as you snuggle up to someone you love. It is one of the things about parenting I was most excited about. I am still. I don't even care that mostly daddy is the go to reading guy, my sentimental side swells anyway, our boy: curled on the sofa, listening, waiting, scoffing up words and tropes and brave new worlds.<br /><br />But books at bedtime can bring many perils. <a href="http://whenyouarethatwoman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/what-do-you-look-like-reflections.html">I've noted before a pamphlet I adore by Roald Dahl, in which he explores the world of the child and dismisses the way many adults talk to children </a>saying they have completely forgotten what being a kid is really like. I think this can be very true - most interestingly when we are trying to foist onto our offspring things we loved or enjoyed ourselves, the hallmarks of our own childhood passed on down.<br /><br />There's a disconnect (often by a year or two), in my experience, in our recollection of age. We think we remember being four, but do we really? This is why, I think, people often tell toddlers off for whinging, bemoan three-year-olds for being boystrous and chastise four-year-olds for being physical and impatient and babyish. Hardly any of us truly remember those ages that well, we have fuzzy snap shots, but because of those pictures and the familiarity of our children (echoes of ourselves and siblings) we feel like we have the whole picture.<br /><br />In our parental fervour to pass down the stuff we so cherish now, many of us jump too early. So keen are we to introduce our child to the things we enjoyed - films, books, toys, games, places to go - we often do it when the child is just a bit too young. This said, the opposite can be true. We can be too fearful of letting them learn life's lessons, of finding out there's more to everything than <span style="font-style: italic;">Guess How Much I Love You</span>.<br /><a href="http://whenyouarethatwoman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/shared-un-conciousness.html"><br /></a><a>I have done this with book</a><a href="http://whenyouarethatwoman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/shared-un-conciousness.html">s</a>, books which I remember loving, and therefore were probably books I had when I was at least Spider-boy's age now, not when I bought them for him (when he was in my tummy!) And with reading aloud books, we tried to be careful. He bedded in for <span style="font-style: italic;">The Animals Of Farthing Wood</span>, and prepared for the grim and gross by <span style="font-style: italic;">Horrible Histories</span> and the like, had a rapturous rapport with <span style="font-style: italic;">The Twits</span>. His imagination ballooned and his eyes jumped out when we told him about George and his crazy dad, marvellous medicine and grandma with a mouth that was puckered like a dog's bum.<br /><br />And so we moved on to Charlie (he of the chocolate factory). I was reticent, Husband was terribly keen. Tantalising chapters of chocolate waterfalls and minty grass, snapping candy memories of words that fizzed your brain like Refreshers in CocaCola. But I was wrong. As things began, the fudge whippled magic took hold: Spiderboy was hooked. Charlie is so lovely. Grandpa Joe is such a treat and Wonka, so crazy and odd and mythical and, like Dahl, unpredictable. It was only once we were a couple of chapters in that I realised what was going to happen: I was going to watch hope die. I had to have faith it was worth it.<br /><br />The great thing about hearing more complicated stories than you could manage to read on your own is being sworn in to the mysteries and magic of playing the long game. My son was being pushed on to revel in adjectives by Dahl's linguistic fiddling and made up words, and forced out of his comfort zone in terms of suspense, narrative, literary devices like metaphors, and the confusion of reliable and unreliable narrators. The relationship between author and reader (or in his case, the bit in daddy's normal voice and how that speaks directly to the little listener) was especially novel. Trust is on the line too. Spider-boy's books up until then are mostly short and no author has ever dared to disappoint him. Books for young children are usually sweet and quickly resolved.<br /><br />The gratification is deferred, of course, but only really for a page or two, and that at most is a couple of paragraphs, if not only a couple of words. Bobo gets his mummy soon enough in <span style="font-style: italic;">Hug. </span>If the suspense is longer, that isn't because something bad has happened - and the wait is rewarded with picture flaps as in <span style="font-style: italic;">Dear Zoo</span> or humour, as in <span style="font-style: italic;">Pooh Is That You Bertie? </span>or <span style="font-style: italic;">The Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business</span>.<br /><br />The trouble with<span style="font-style: italic;"> Charlie And The Chocolate Factory</span> is the build up is so confectionery sweet - Charlie's starving, he gets one chocolate bar a year, there are golden tickets to A CHOCOLATE FACTORY in chocolate bars, he's nice and sweet and deserving and hopeful. It is like anticipation for Christmas - we all know our mums are fibbing when they tell us about kids who really did get a stocking full of coal!<br /><br />Spider-boy started to talk incessantly each breakfast time about whether 'tonight is the night Charlie gets his ticket'. He's enjoyed the build up, now it is time for Charlie's birthday when he can win his golden passport in to a building full of sweeties. Mr Thatwoman and my sister who was staying with us got excited too. But they had forgotten who they were dealing with. They had left Roald Dahl behind in childhood, to allow it to get a rosy glow and fudgey memory defined by the final satisfaction of his twists. They now only remembered the best bits of his books not the specifics: they were as naive as Spider-boy. (<a href="http://whenyouarethatwoman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/only-connect.html">I had the foresight to write my dissertation at uni on Dahl.</a> I knew he doesn't give you your sweetness straight away; he's not that stupid or that condescending, he's interested in toughening up his readers and is a pretty good judge of what they are tough enough to take - see also his descriptions of war and death in <span style="font-style: italic;">Boy</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Going Solo</span>).<br /><br />As Charlie opened his chocolate bar, to find just chocolate I felt the room shift: Spider-boy's eyes flickering with all the stages of grief and back to anger. The sacred pact of spoon-feeding from all his other books and television and film was broken. He had been cruelly crushed in his expectation of happy endings (or in this case Charlie's happy beginning). He'd learned that <span style="font-style: italic;">things don't always work out as they should</span>. See:<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5TYcSk_Q5EE/T5CKUtKUD7I/AAAAAAAAARo/rrtrNKqSkOY/s1600/No%2BTicket.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5TYcSk_Q5EE/T5CKUtKUD7I/AAAAAAAAARo/rrtrNKqSkOY/s400/No%2BTicket.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5733234413967511474" border="0" /></a>Furious!<br /><br />Husband and sister exchanged the 'eek' face. I mouthed '<span style="font-style: italic;">told you</span>'. Spider-boy dared to push on. I knew at this point I would have to leave the room. As I knew, again what was coming. Grandpa Joe made a plan. A plan to buy another bar, I could smell the (misguided) relief from the other adults. An old man, a starving child, one chance thwarted, the <span style="font-style: italic;">daus ex machina</span> of a secret coin saved under the covers of a bed of dying pensioners: we all know how that should work out. Spider-boy latched on to the literary device of a gift from the Gods, and to his faith in goodies and baddies and who should triumph. And he, the foolish darling boy, he hoped. Bam: no ticket.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MyJ5I2jNNKE/T5CKGrNmkGI/AAAAAAAAARc/pokdSp7LWUg/s1600/No%2Bticket%2BAGAIN.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MyJ5I2jNNKE/T5CKGrNmkGI/AAAAAAAAARc/pokdSp7LWUg/s400/No%2Bticket%2BAGAIN.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5733234172926267490" border="0" /></a>My heart was nearly torn in two. And it was gone 8pm. Time for bed.<br /><br />The next day son woke with a slightly broken voice. 'I just don't <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span>' he confessed, '<span style="font-style: italic;">how</span> Charlie will get a ticket!' It was as if he'd been thrown into confusion over what books would and could do: challenge, fib, upset us. It was a foundation stage version of John Fowles - had he been hoodwinked by a lying cover, was this book anything it promised to be?<br /><br />Thank God for the next night and Dahl's final surrender. Not without another hiccup - even the luckiest bar bought with the luckiest find for a starving schoolboy: a coin in the snow, even that doesn't yield a ticket straight away. I have a theory that by making Charlie give in to baser instincts and buy two bars not one Dahl was underscoring punitive theories of surveillance - somebody somewhere notices when you aren't as good as you could be (Charlie after all should save the second bar's worth of money for his folks). But in practice the real lesson was for Spider-boy - he had to learn to be teased. A better life lesson that, even better than the bitter truth that sometimes people as nice like Charlie don't get the nice things that should come to them.<br /><br />He learned that really good books might do more than just give you a happy ending straight away. He now knows that some bets are off in literature, that stories have twists in their tales. And he's experienced a writer prepared to toy with him a bit. Which is good because it has forced him to a point of being discerning. When he picks a book he has an inkling he had better be bloody sure he's in a safe pair of hands. He might not get what he wants or what he expects from Dahl, but for all the fear that you have to ride out with books which don't kowtow to sentiment on every page, the rewards (whether it is laughing out-loud at something ruder than you can believe a grown up would write, bubbling with mirth over a witty observation you can tie in with your life, reading out a long word like c-h-o-c-o-l-a-t-e, or good triumphing in the end) can be astonishing when it comes.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l1edBt90QLQ/T5CMG_Am8qI/AAAAAAAAAR0/GNWZvt0BldM/s1600/TICKET%2521.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l1edBt90QLQ/T5CMG_Am8qI/AAAAAAAAAR0/GNWZvt0BldM/s400/TICKET%2521.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5733236377263731362" border="0" /></a>And I've learned that<a href="http://whenyouarethatwoman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/power-of-chocolate-part-one.html"> chocolate has a magic power for him, as it does for his brother</a>, even when it is only a long word written down.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-74366286685628534922012-04-13T19:36:00.000+01:002012-04-18T00:06:02.522+01:00The power of chocolate - Part One<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uXbdMk9DFc0/T43IaoLd1QI/AAAAAAAAARQ/MQo0pAt1ETs/s1600/photo%25288%2529.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5732458260500174082" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uXbdMk9DFc0/T43IaoLd1QI/AAAAAAAAARQ/MQo0pAt1ETs/s400/photo%25288%2529.JPG" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
Easter. So much sweet stuff; so little time. My lads love chocolate, though Newborn has a faith of sorts in cocoa. He attacks eggs and bunnies, crams so much in his mouth. He's prepared to let a third dribble away to get the rest in, and he scoffs with suspicious eyes. They are live with triumph, and you can almost hear his mind: <span style="font-style: italic;">if I just keep eating it and don't say a word, *they* won't realise they've given me so MUCH</span>.<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>Reading their mind is a fool's errand, but so tempting. Talking to a friend today, we speculated on what the hell *they* are thinking. I'd love to believe it was a fantastical dreamlike place, all precocious interpretation with a hallowed view of me; I fancy it is something far more brutal. That what goes on in a toddler's mind is probably even more punitive than my inner mummy critic.<br />
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Take this week. Post egg hunts we came home to London a baby light - Spider-boy was staying with Aunties for his school holiday. I was so sad, my walk from work devoid of endless questions. While he stayed away, the rest of us made an odd threesome. There have been times when I've been alone with Newborn, but they've usually been horrible times when he's been ill. And there have been fleeting moments between play dates, and the worst of times of all (hospital) when it has just been Mr Thatwoman, Newborn and I. I've tried to find the good in those situations (afterwards at least, I'm no Pollyanna) and enjoy the moments with this strange, beautiful other one. And I fret he's often relegated to ever-bridesmaid: trailing behind, looking cute, always getting sloppy seconds.<br />
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He's so fond of his brother right now, though, and I was convinced, so sure, that he would pine. Just like he pines for Mr Thatwoman on the nights that I collect from nursery (which he does with toddler subtlety, by standing at the front door sobbing till he hiccups and shouting 'Dada' with increasingly hysterical volume).<br />
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Newborn's capacity for novelty remained, however. He developed a strut. He surveyed his new command posts, seconded a kitchen stool, worked out how to drag it round and reach the saucepans and the Calpol. He honed new skills, hijacking the telephone, learned to step forwards, not back, down the stairs. By the second night, he'd climbed into his brother's bed.<br />
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He sat, smiling, all cheek and bedtime eyes, my Goldilocks. I thought: wow, usurping something as painfully symbolic as a bed in our house is pretty cool. But there was something else in his sleepy dimples: a question. When he's querying me or the world he pulls his chin down,and exaggerates the angle he has to look up. It was as if he was saying: <span style="font-style: italic;">have I done it?</span><br />
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I was minded of Spider-boy's assertive look when he asked: 'And who will be <span style="font-style: italic;">his</span> mummy?' after grudgingly conceding he was going to have a sibling. And his later, semi-hopeful, probing in the last weeks of my maternity leave: 'Now you are going back to work, is he going back in your tummy?'<br />
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Next day: the same look. Newborn is especially keen to get his hands on the chocolate tin. And so proud he squeals when he realises the small chair can also be used mount the worktop though I've confiscated the stool. His sigh of pleasure and furtive glancing round while he snaffles a shard of egg makes me wonder if he has his own magical thinking. Perhaps, I think with slight horror and awe, he thinks the chocolate is a magic force, keeping his brother away?<br />
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Today after completing his round, touching every single thing his brother has ever owned, he finds the last bit of chocolate in the house. We're a household of instant gratification: the Friday after Easter is way past the stage where a smashed Lindt bunny might be hiding in the fridge. He points at my handbag for 10 minutes making a guttural, insistent groan. I fish out toys, and a travel card, my phone, a purse, a pen. He screams at kettle pitch. I pass the bag and say: 'OK. What do you <span style="font-style: italic;">want</span>? You find it!' He discards the trove of tickets and loose pennies and unearths a <span style="font-style: italic;">Finger of Fudge</span> which has been there so long, I'd forgotten it exists.<br />
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He crouches like a monk and eats, bowing his head and glancing up through his lashes: once more with feeling. He moans with pleasure, chuckles to himself and opens an eye. Maybe he imagines that if he eats even more chocolate his brother will come back, I hope.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-2343120046071575512012-04-02T19:38:00.000+01:002012-04-20T11:21:55.648+01:00Mother Tongue: Only connect...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This weekend I had a fleeting online chat with Michael Rosen , a massive hero of mine. We tweeted about the inner meanings of Roald Dahl's The Twits. It was one of my proudest moments when he retweeted my undergraduate analysis (that The Twits is all Foucault innit, a parable on internal flaws exposed). Or it would have been the proudest moment of my online career, had I not described the story as a tail. He graciously made a Freudian pun. The slipperiness of language, and my grasp on it, even in my 34th year, exposed. I know the spelling but my fingers and brains fudged up in their haste to record a thought and send it to someone whom I wanted to engage.<br />
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I love language. And I love the way having young people grappling, exploring, building, questioning, embracing it makes you re-think what a connection really means. I try to embrace my fortune in this role of introduction.<br />
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Take phonics. Sound blocks. Building each word, distilling a language. I don't know exactly what I think of phonics, though I've enjoyed the explosive introduction of them in a multilingual inner London classroom lead by a teacher with a Mancunian accent. I've seen my son soar with some of the ideas - hand signal a-a-ants, making rhymes with similar sounds, the general games, the confidence building at the beginning. Also, in a funny sort of way, I've seen him soar higher with the phonic frustrations - he glows white hot with creation when he hits up against the magpie (thanks @rykalski) nature of his mother tongue.<br />
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My son speaks English and is learning to read and write it. English is a language which absorbs and builds on others - pick your metaphor about how it has created and evolved: melting pot, scavenger, survivor, conqueror, patchwork quilt, evolutionary gene.<br />
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What I've always loved about this, the fact that English is such a mish mashed, congealed pile of delicious and often unguessable left overs from a pot luck linguistic dinner, is that I feel the evolutionary force of it empowers its users. It practically demands they create, reinvent, reinvigorate it themselves every day. This is why I don't like snobs or those immediately down on linguistic play and challenge (eg automatic txtspk haters). English is the language I live in and speak in and she invites me to play. Every day.<br />
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I see my son fathoming her unmappable depths, his assertions so bold and enticing. For example, as he bounds along at my side while we try to catch a train:<br />
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<i>The thing about the word gate, Mummy, is it is very tricky. It has a naughty letter. A hiding letter. G-A-I-T, see, the I is there but you don't know it</i><br />
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His confidence is awesome: he's telling me. But his language has provided a double bluff. He's right and he's wrong. I tell him gait is a word, but it means the way we walk, illustrated as we gambol over a pelican crossing and then run to the station's ticket gate. I explain that gate does have a tricky bit, but that's the missing 'y'. He takes this, because he's moved beyond looking at me like a lunatic and started to expect his language, so easy and malleable but as hard to catch as the moon on a millpond, to surprise him. Every day, every hour we spend brings another surprise. My world is as much one of sticky chins and small warm hands in mine, as one of half rhymes: one part Clarks advert, three parts English Lit all Chaucer-style gobbling up of what we can see, chewing out the meaning.<br />
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I love hearing him sounding out words, and then producing for me his spittle lisped best guess as he takes a punt on how a word should or could be. It is invigorating watching him relabel the world all around, and the world of metaphor and feeling from the humming sounding out in his head as he concentrates on tearing apart a sound and remaking it with others- it reminds me of the bit in Hamlet:<br />
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<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-size: 85%;">He keeps them, like an ape, an apple, in the corner of his jaw, first mouthed to be last swallowed</span><br />
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My son the master and king, working out which working-outs are worth keeping and which should be quashed. These murmurs used to rebuild from scratch old sound signs - this is what buzzwords should mean.<br />
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Learning to read, write, speak, create in English (I'm guessing any language, but I only have this one to go on) doesn't start from ground zero, after all. Language has surrounded you forever; your task becomes to master it and develop a way of exchanging your bursts of meaning with others.<br />
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And you hit it running in a sort of attack at precisely the developmental stage where you are craving and embracing rules (show me a four year-old, I'll show you the world's most accomplished and certain judge and jury) and trying to break them to work out whether you and those around you are as solid as you hope or as weak as you fear.<br />
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As this goes on, the other child, my one year-old word warrior, continues on his journey, forcing into the open his need to connect and his need to be encouraged. With him, my task is affirming his linguistic mastery. Showing him I understand (which can mean giving him the chocolates he's spied and pointed out) and letting him show he understands me. But how? He has already reached a level of irony and challenge which complicates things. His mimicry is loaded.<br />
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Take today, as he climbed up and stood on every obstacle in his path: every stool, chair, table, speaker, toy. On his third ascent of a picnic bench, twice thwarted and told off by me already, he reaches the plate. He turns to check I'm running, again, to stop him. Before I can open my mouth to repeat my 'no', he addresses me and my friend from his mount:<br />
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'Yeah, yeah!' he shouts, eyeballs on me to be sure I get his meaning: 'NO'<br />
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And what I want to shout is <b>YES</b>.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-68771667202096452572012-03-08T14:44:00.015+00:002012-04-18T00:00:04.340+01:00Fun with medicine?<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8zw1q7I9S4w/T1jp5M1oLPI/AAAAAAAAAPk/vb8HDv3LBJ0/s1600/medical.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5717576895854816498" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8zw1q7I9S4w/T1jp5M1oLPI/AAAAAAAAAPk/vb8HDv3LBJ0/s400/medical.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>I love <span style="font-style: italic;">Citizen Kane</span>. I've been round the houses in formulating my view, seen its bombastic flaws and stupid overindulgence and returned to loving the audacity of the hero and, furthermore, the way this chimes with the audacity of the film-maker behind it. It is hard to watch this canonical film, though it is utterly <span style="font-style: italic;">watchable</span>, and not be rendered slightly breathless (and jealous) by the brash, stylish, competent, overconfident, zeal of the youth on display. It is like a glorious impertinence both from the lead character, Kane, and the director behind the lens (also playing Kane, obviously) Orson Welles. The whole picture (front, back and centre) is oozing and itching with reckless talent.<br />
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Most people sum it up with a quote from Welles himself which runs along the lines of a film set being the biggest and most brilliant train set a lad ever had. It captures the playfulness and excitement of the whole movie. I prefer a line from the film, in which the fresh faced upstart (who will become the destroyed and destructive newspaper magnate the film is lampooning) remarks: 'I thought it might be fun to run a newspaper'.<br />
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Understatement and overstatement, wisdom and ignorance, intuition, initiative, self-belief, self-deception. There they are, all in one line, which I have possibly misquoted. Awesome. I don't bring this up to show off that I (genuinely, no really) love a film often cited as one of the <span style="font-style: italic;">best ever made</span> in high faluting critical circles. But because the idea of fun has been playing on my mind. More specifically this idea of thinking something might be fun, and getting an kick in the tits for your hubris in doing so.<br />
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During <a href="http://whenyouarethatwoman.blogspot.com/2012/03/blurred-no-choices-pink-ribbons-white.html">one of my hospital appointments this week</a>, I was told I was run down. This isn't the first time this year, or this month. Getting un-run-down is now very close to the top of my To Do List. I'm starting to listen because I don't much like passing out, unnecessary complications or cancer scares. When I was told this, though, the consultant surgeon also asked: 'have you been under much stress lately?'<br />
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Of course I have, though I think most people are. We live in a crazed world. For many of us our responsibilities (work, dependents, partners, financial commitments, social life) are stuck together with the slightly flawed entanglement of half-chewed Stickle Bricks. All entwined, slightly wobbly and holding fast only but for the grace of God. But I duly listed some highlights.<br />
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She asked, 'And Mr Thatwoman? How's he?'<br />
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'Pretty tired and sad about it all too' I acknowledged.<br />
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'Hmmm,' she said, drifting off into space: 'I bet there was a time a few years ago when the two of you thought it might be fun to start a family'.<br />
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Fuck, I thought, yes we did. That is it. We did see it as an adventure. We were excited. How did it get so scary and downbeat? Is it our <span style="font-style: italic;">fault</span> for looking for fun, hoping for it, wanting our family gang to be exciting? Shit. I cried, once in the toilets, though that was also about the humiliation of kindness from the mammogram lady, a second time at lunch with my wise best friend just before faint-gate, and a third, later this week, again in the hospital toilets, because I returned for a physiotherapy appointment coincidentally in the same building and felt entirely sorry for myself.<br />
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The doctor wasn't being quite as tactless as it first seemed though. And having, after a relatively uneventful 20s, spent my 30s so excessively in medical company, I am interested in how much value I place in what doctors say, their possible judgement and the strange truth that sometimes their lack of certainty or answers is the most refreshing thing of all.<br />
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I almost think to quote directly as above misrepresents her. The comment was imbued with empathy, and a sort of softly sad, wry knowingness about the toughness of the best of times - it came, after all, from someone who presumably spends half her days looking at knockers and the rest talking about cutting them up and off and telling people the shittiest news imaginable.<br />
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I think it was a form of empathy not just about expectation and reality but about strings of events and the weary wariness they give us about hoping for joy, the perils of thinking too much on outcomes and the endless hurdling of life itself. We all know how one slightly unlucky thing (in my case a shit birth) can lead to another (complications) can lead to another (depression) can lead to another (a shit pregnancy) and so on. But when that happens to you, you feel boring and stupid and like your life is a sitcom, or saga (well, I did). And though we know that once you've had a run of rum luck you get less and less able to handle more unpredictable developments like sudden illness or injury, we carry on and enable ourselves to do that with increasingly vain hope that no more shit will come our way and things will 'be okay'. This will be our year, we think. We deserve a bloody break. Come on life, give me my lemonade ready-made today, no more sour fruit for Christ's sake.<br />
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I mean really we know she's a cruel and vicious creature, Fate. Her that throws poor health down (and misfortune) with such ardent arbitrary force. And it is easy to forget that we often have little agency in dodging her thunderstrikes. But we also know the sun shines, nice stuff happens and so we are almost immune to seeing karma as the insidious bitch she is. And so we hope. And we carry on.<br />
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Being a doctor must be very hard. People look to you for reassurance which, presumably, you often just can't give. And answers which are complicated or incomplete. But they sit there, on plastic chairs, in their best bra and knickers, clutching a test result, and ask why, and how and when and what for and what if? I suspect most of the time there's little you can say, however much you'd like to offer something. There are crass doctors - who dehumanise you. And others who are ultimately almost friends - my own GP screamed with laughter in all the right places when I told her about fainting in the noodle bar after a cancer scare last week, though she also checked my BP and made ooh and ahh noises too (and once, a few years ago, sang me a song when I hit rock bottom).<br />
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Though more often I think doctors are merely immersed in their world of answers and procedures, to protect themselves from the chaos of your world, that world filled with illness and ignorance and panic. I guess they do it so they are better able to help, even if it distances their world of the curers from ours, the world of the afflicted.<br />
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Like the very nice one I met last December when my son was v sick, who remarked (sense a theme?) on how wrung out I looked. 'It has been a busy week,' I said. 'My son has been at the GPs most days and to A&E twice. Yesterday in an ambulance. It was pretty awful'<br />
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'Why?' he asked. 'What happened in the ambulance?'<br />
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'There was a panda with fucking a machete!' I reply (in my head when I think about it now). At the time I just faltered a bit and made a cracking sound.<br />
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'Oh God' he muttered, snapped out by my cracking. 'Sorry. Yes. Must have been awful'.<br />
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And such a child am I that this affirmation almost made my day. Because apart from a definitive - your examination is clear (WHOOP) - maybe the best you can be offered is the truth, inconclusive though it is.<br />
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A few weeks ago we got a letter about Newborn from a boss man consultant we saw about the whole sorry sack of shit of his health-life. He, the Professor, had been personable, kind, relatively reassuring (if realistic) about possible future problems. He had the confidence of grey hairs and experience and wrangled us as well as he wrangled our son. His letter outlined our visit and his assessment of our child. His conclusion? The only thing second to a clear bill of health: 'I think he has had bad luck...' followed by the statement that underneath this annoying veneer of calamity he is a perfectly normal, well-developed lovely little boy. When we read it my husband and I were standing on the landing and laughing. We reminisced about the day of the appointment when our son had charged around wheezing and flirting and throwing stuff, precociously drinking water from a glass, stealing pens, shouting 'HIYA' and roaring with laughter. We remarked that regardless of his 'no medical answers' state, Newborn has found his own. His favourite toy of late is a Calpol box and an empty syringe.<br />
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'He's a lot of fun too,' Mr Thatwoman said.Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-85300789461207031392012-03-06T10:16:00.010+00:002012-03-06T21:17:48.289+00:00Blurred signposts: pink ribbons, white rabbits, orange bras<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I had an important hospital appointment yesterday at the Breast Clinic. Tests, examinations, a scan for which I thankfully got a resounding <span style="font-weight: bold;">all clear</span>. But it wasn't a day to be sniffed at. Not least because the relief of good news can force us to forge forwards without really taking care to collect and protect ourselves from the wit-ending worry we've been straining under. I, for example, felt so pumped after my good news I decided to head for a speedy lunch before back to work and a meeting. The result? I promptly fainted onto a male stranger's lap as he was quietly eating some noodles making a terrific crunch as I smashed into his bench and my head hit his knees.<br />
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I wish there was a wittier end to the story, rather than a bruised back and a long-lasting sense of humiliation and discombobulation on my part, but the humour is only there if I tell it like it was an adventure not a black out: in a brash way, preferably with actions. In reality I'm wondering if my head was teaching me a lesson, my brain saying: there's only so much stressful preoccupation I can endure these days on no sleep Mrs, and this one could do with more than 30 minutes to collect yourself, so if you are going to charge around as if super-powered underwear will protect you from everything in the world I am going to stop you in your tracks by turning off the lights!<br />
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My poor head though, I can't blame it for having a tantrum. It turns out, worrying about dying young and everything in your life falling apart finally and forever is, actually, just too much for any tiny mind (well, my tiny mind at least).<br />
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Especially a twisty dark tiny mind which tiptoes round the tipping point. For example, I caught my brain seeing this as a perfectly logical analysis last week as I waited for my referral letter: because the last few months have been stressful, my son has been sick and things have been feeling so tough it is both unthinkable, being seriously/terminally ill, but also an <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">inevitable</span> conclusion to my life. What depressive conditioning!<br />
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It felt for a while there that my capacity for making, or even seeing, choices open to me and recognising where I may have an agency for changing anything myself was fused shut and rotten, like a broken root-canal. And yet, though in a response to powerlessness we assert our desire for choices, when chips are down and dirty enough, choices themselves are the worst thing of all. They become fascinatingly frightening and elusive: banal refuges and untameable monsters for us to pick a careful route between.<br />
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Before the appointment my mind had been a blur. Blurred like a Gerhard Richter painting. My thoughts razor clear slices of life exquisitely rubbed out round the edges, or outrageously down the middle, normal scenes obscured by tilted glass, reality and clarity placed near enough to smell it but shown only viewed from askance.<br />
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Worse, though I am normally pretty clear that I don't (or can't) believe in symbolism (divine or otherwise) from the universe, my mind's eye was wearing very wonky glasses. I couldn't sleep without a montage of critical illness cover documents I may or may not have signed zipping past my eyes, I couldn't dream without wisps of pink ribbon everywhere around me, and ghosts of past To Do Lists turning up to berate me for plans unfinished and all my failures: social, economic, health wise, intellectual, creative - white rabbits all in their crushing fury at my endless waste of time. Christ, I couldn't even walk into the kitchen or turn on the TV without hearing or seeing tales of tits, orphans, coffins or dead mothers.<br />
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I am told this is a variant on a phenomenon called the 'Baader-Meinhof syndrome' although that is more clearly a cognitive function in which a novel or obscure and previously undiscovered idea is presented, and then you realise it is not new at all because everywhere you look it is glaring out at you. And it can be linked with ideas of the Zeitgeist, whereby a similar idea or way of thinking becomes prevalent as if we all share an unconscious.<br />
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It is also, the seeing such phenomena as signs of how life might turn out given mercifully by some deus ex machina, raging bullshit, which we should really avoid. For me I think my perceptions of reality and my imagination were bleeding into each other and doing an intensely provocative dance which was certainly gliding in the direction of madness.<br />
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My field of vision became a sponge for 'signs' but my sense of self had just enough 'sense' to move on and instead I immersed myself in the sort of silly illusion of choice which is just as distressing as making massive life changes. Lucky (over) thinking and tempting fates. I became focussed and obsessed by which bra I should wear and properly upset and wired about it. A sorry sight I was, standing in front of my smalls drawer, rendered speechless and immobile in the face of my underwear.<br />
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Choices, monstrous choices all ears of corn and strands of straw breaking my back. Should I go sensible, strappy, attractive? Should my bangers be nondescript, fashionable, functional? Would it be better to wear a breastfeeding bra or under-wired balcony? And what about colour: black, white, orange, nude?<br />
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Should I display my décolletage defiantly and gloriously, hold them up on a mango coloured lacy platter hoping that this last minute cherishing would protect them from harm? Or would that be a rather sordid, and impertinent response... a challenge to ye Gods who may think such frivolity worthy of punishment? Would the doctor think I was a sexual menace if I wore scarlet? And spinning further out of orbit, I began to wonder, Gods aside, which bra would make the consultant surgeon be nicest to me, even if it couldn't guarantee good news?<br />
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In the end, after some wise words from a midwife and sonographer I wore an orange bra which made me feel fleetingly good about myself. This, I decided, as I made my way on wobbly legs, was probably as good a way of making a choice (in a situation where I was ultimately powerless) as I was going to get.<br />
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<i><b>As a CODA, and perhaps I should do a full post on this but it goes without saying, firstly the NHS were absolutely marvellous and kind and nothing was embarrassing or awful at all at the bangers clinic. And secondly, ladies and gents reading, always check your knockers - this is the only thatwoman - her who went early and her who got checked, even if the news isn't so marvellous, that you ever want to be x</b></i>Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-689941570590851112.post-43120099224170148692012-02-22T12:00:00.000+00:002012-02-24T22:15:11.674+00:00Snow joking matterDon't worry, this isn't an obligatory 'we had a charming day in the snow' post. Not that I didn't enjoy some blogs over the last few weeks, or see some amazing pictures posted all over t'interweb showing kids in cute wellies, cheeks glowing in the cold, tableaux after tableaux of smiling through damp socks. On twitter and Facebook my timelines were filled: so many all-in-ones and woolly hats, so many snowmen - from the sculptural to the silly, via icy knobs and famous figures.<br />
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Some icy frolics featured people I know and love, others people I'm loosely linked in with via online forum and groups, by being a tag-along friend of friends, by being on the photo sharing applications and social media networks - like instagram and twitter they allow me to act out a fantasy that by seeing into someone else's life (even someone famous) in this weird way I am connected to other human beings.<br />
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I'm not entirely sure I've come to a conclusion about social media but the recent snowy days did give me pause about the occasional way they tap into my own peculiar cocktail of social neurosis. Snapshots suggest all and nothing, we know this - from pictures of Charles & Di which on the surface suggested a marriage in trouble but when shown <i>in context</i> revealed ambassadors on a sombre occasion, through every other celebrity stitch up in press history via the occasional shot of ourselves which misrepresents us to brilliant or appalling effect. Any 5 year old whose played on almost any educational website or children's digital camera is well versed in manipulation, and in the digital camera age we are far more used to taking more pictures than we need and then sifting through, editing and gatekeeping to tell a particular story, than our parents were. Their family shots could be argued to have more validity for that - at least they seem to tell a more honest story.<br />
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The cheap nature of digital imagery, stored on hard-drives and websites, the possibility for millions of images where previously it was 12 or 24 (or 36 if you were really lucky/extravagant) means we use images with more editorialising. More, the shift to public albums which are shared, rather than plastic books gathering dust in the living room, means we do that editorialising publicly. In the facebook age part of our role in communicating with the world seems to be creating an image (using images) of ourselves, our families, our relationships, for the express purpose of others to see.<br />
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And yet pictures do seem to hold their false value for all of us, we still have faith in them to give us a truth, and more still to present a truth about ourselves. Despite knowing the opportunities for fakery and manipulation we put up profile pictures (of us, or something amazing or witty or classy we've seen) in the hope of showing something of ourselves to others.<br />
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I'm musing on this because when it snowed we ventured into the garden, but we have no pictures of the snow to show off. No family album of frozen fun to hold the moment and preserve it for a memory. Firstly because Newborn hates the snow. Who knew? Well, us, within about 10 seconds. He didn't like to stand in it, despite his gorgeous wellies. He didn't like to touch it. He didn't like to look at it and he didn't like it anywhere near his face. And hating something forcefully does play to his tyrannical modes of expression.<br />
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Secondly because even when we did try to get a snap Spider-boy was more keen on perfecting his slapstick by diving into the fluffy boarders (our garden became the ultimate crash mat) than shivering into a lens.<br />
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And thirdly because it had been a stressful week at work and home, medical bullshit, dreary money worries, thoughts with others in trouble, all the *stuff* that can make Sunday some impassive mediator between the struggle of the last few days and the dread of the next seven to come.<br />
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As the boys go, I see both their points of view. So does my husband. And it was clear within minutes that there would be no Thathousehold portrait of the cold snap, but we persevered (in vain) until our fingers were numb. Why? To feel that we were getting family life right by being like everyone else. To feel we could say 'look we are normal too' and we have so much fun, and we're so cool and relaxed and great at being a family. And that's the bit I really can't understand properly - I know, right, that if we'd got a good pic it wouldn't have been representative, but I'm so easily seduced by the idea that I am failing at mothering and family and other people are getting it right, that I was prepared to see the lack of a snow shot as disaster.<br />
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<b>I don't normally add notes, but a very kind friend @Laflafster donated a snow picture to me. It needs no particular introduction, apart from her lad and mine would be very good friends:</b><br />
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<b> </b>Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05319479661111193584noreply@blogger.com0