Archive for 2007
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
The volume on bhalababy has been muted for too long so I have decided to turn it up with a sample of freewriting from baby’s first photograph.
‘Please wipe my cheek’, she asks as another tear rolls down, dragged in the wake of the one that has gone before. Her husband leans in and, as he does so, a tear of his own drops down to meet those he is wiping away. These are not sad tears but tears of relief and joy and love. The mound on her belly has been slit open to release the yell of a tiny baby; and not only that but it has released the anticipation and apprehension that has been mounting for the six months since they had discovered their lives were going to change forever. The theatre, a usually sterile, white, odourless and lifeless place is transformed. Her joy bubbles into laughter; her head flicking from side to side attempting to make eye contact with someone; anyone she can focus on; anyone she can share another anecdote with to disperse these overwhelming emotions. The doctors and theatre nurses squelch in their wellington boots through the river of blood and amniotic fluid which is turning the floor her favourite colour. She takes the swaddled baby and smiles. Her nose wrinkles but the tears no longer flow.
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Tags: baby, childbirth, hospital
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Monday, November 12th, 2007
They are there, the only rules of the house, stuck on the fridge where no one could miss them. What draws your attention to look closer is the old birthday card stuck with the same magnet: the picture is of a twin-set-clad 50s housewife with a sugar-coated smile and the caption reads ‘I tried to be kind but it was easier to be cruel’. A coincidence? Yes. Fitting? You bet!
But, I digress. There were rules in place; rules that would keep the home and family together; seemingly the only thing I could cling to with that claim. And it seems I was the only one who could cling to The Rules. Granted, I am a process person and my husband, he is not … but, hey, is that any reason to come home every evening and criticize the rules … criticize my job?
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Tags: criticism, housewife, rules
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Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
No matter how good you are at your job … and I was good at my job … there’s no preparing you for doing a job that no one feels there is any need to get any significant training in. This is an unknown field. Yes, there are plenty of theories and everyone thinks they can do it better than the next person. But, let’s face it, most people are just winging in and hoping that they don’t totally fuck it up.
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Tags: inexperienced, job
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Monday, October 22nd, 2007
Every parent likes to believe that their child is unique and that what works for someone else’s child won’t work for theirs. This has nothing to do with individuality and everything to do with pride. Parents don’t like to admit that they are doing anything wrong or that there is anything that can be improved on using another parent’s advice or experience.
But most children are exactly the same. They all need sleep, milk, love and a clean nappy. They all crawl then walk, chatter then talk, eat mush and then solids, and they all get a full head of teeth as some stage before they are classified as toddlers. The only thing that differs (and ever so slightly) is when exactly they do all this … and whether or not the parent can make it through the first year.
And most mothers are exactly the same. They all enthuse about their children, talk about how wonderful the latest childcare manual is and how well they are coping with their method of childrearing. You can join in, discuss the joys of motherhood and exchange baby food recipes (smile and nod; smile and nod), or you can bitch and moan about the horror of it all and weed out the imposters.
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Tags: advice, childcare, collective, development, stages
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Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
Deepak Chopra and Gina Ford – you figure out who’s who … All I can say is that when you are truly out to lunch emotionally and you don’t know which way to swing, you buy both the books and hope to find middle ground.
But hoping to find middle ground between these two is … er … hopeful. There is no middle ground. And I like Deepak, I really do, and I like his principles, I really do. But when you are forced to do whatever you have to in order to cope … there’s no question but to go with Gina … and stick with her through thick and thin. ‘To the point of Obsession?’ I hear you ask. Yes, to the point of Obsession.
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Tags: advice, books, Deepak Chopra, gina ford, obsession, parenting
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Thursday, September 20th, 2007
A baby’s brain is growing at an alarming rate. I’m not speaking from medical knowledge, but it stands to reason that while the brain is growing, and despite the fact that there is no sensible uttering from the mouth of your babe, one should talk to the baby. And I mean actually talk … sense. It puzzled me that most parents believe their babies will understand cooey, gooey crap until I realized that it was the cooey, gooey crap they wanted as their children’s first words. Most parents think it’s cute for their kids to say ‘ta ta’ instead of goodbye. I find it annoying.
I used to live in hope that my child’s first words would be something along the lines of dada, cat or woof. But based on his later exposure to the spoken word, there became a higher likelihood that the first coherent uttering would be more along the lines of fuck or bloody hell. His first real word turned out to be ‘bugger’, repeated several times in quick succession. With his first swear word under his belt, the rest was easy.
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Tags: baby, baby talk, first words, swearing, talking, words
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Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
I’m 35 … ish … but am I really old enough for this. Anyone is old enough to soothe a baby back to sleep, bath a baby and feed it, read storybooks and sing songs. But what of the future child, teenager and adult I have brought into the world. As I coo in my son’s ear and tell him all will be OK, all I can hear is my child inside; the voice that tells me that I am too young to have this kind of responsibility, to be the guardian of such purity.
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Tags: inner child, motherhood, responsibility
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Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
But, having said that, there are things you aren’t told when schedules are being done and options are being narrowed down and made, and I will have to list them to distance myself as much as possible from these admissions:
- It’s a totally freaky experience being fully awake and knowing that your insides are spilling all over the operating table and there is blood and fluid flowing like a fountain from your belly – the gynae and theatre nurses have to wear wellies (enough said). Don’t ever look at the overhead light, as you will be terrified by the reflection.
- You are given your baby at about the same time as a shot of morphine in your thigh – the effect of the drug is not conducive with (a) safety and (b) bonding.
- It’s fucking sore when the drugs wear off.
- It’s fucking sore when you have to get up to go to the toilet for the first time after they take the catheter out.
- You get a suppository – this is supposedly for the alleviation of the pain but, when you are crapping your guts out, it is revealed that it is all a cover and it is really to prevent you clogging up, getting constipated and having to push so hard that your stitches pop out.
- You are incapable of coping with a tiny baby at home when your husband only has three days of paternity leave (RSA Labour Law sucks … believe me, I know).
- You are incapable of coping without your parents or in-laws around.
- You are incapable of coping WITH your parents or in-laws around.
- It is perfectly normal to have permanent nerve damage in your coccyx – my feeling in that area disappeared totally for over a year and now the pain is making up for the long-term loss.
- The entry point of the spinal block needle comes back to haunt you by causing the most excruciating pain – this when you are constantly having to pick up a 13kg bundle.
Perhaps the NHS should change their propaganda slogan. Or perhaps they tried … but, admittedly, the above list doesn’t make for a particularly catchy slogan.
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Tags: caesarian, childbirth, hospital, in-laws, list, NHS, parents, spinal block, too posh to push
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Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
One of the reasons I left the UK was because I could no longer deal with the NHS propaganda that made women feel like they were either failures as women or just weren’t particularly interested in breaking
a sweat during the birthing process. The former touches a nerve in even the most non-maternal woman and the latter conjures up images of a woman who hands her baby to a wet nurse as soon as it emerges from the bloody wound.
Not particularly into the whole maternal, mother nature thing (which, one has to admit, is not so much mother nature as total fad these days), I knew I would have a c-section – it’s unnatural to try and get
something that big out of such a small exit. Whether the gynae was looking after his schedule or my continence is irrelevant. When he told me the head of my foetus was too large to exit ‘naturally’, I was relieved to have the medical back-up for my instinctual beliefs – after all who said a small slice across the lower abdomen to extract a living being isn’t natural.
There are revelations that follow. I do, however, have to pre-empt them with a disclaimer: I still believe in the advances of medical science enough to believe that a c-section is the only way and I would never go back and change a thing.
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Tags: caesarian, childbirth, criticism, instinct, NHS, too posh to push, vaginal birth
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Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
An avid campaigner against the need to have a child has reached a stage of her biology that she is battling to hold at bay. As the last of her peers to be childless, she feels her life is lacking something and that this indicates that she needs a baby.
Nobody needs a baby; most people just want one. It’s immaterial what your motives are for either wanting one or not but you have to be very clear on what you actually need.
Wanting a baby requires you to want it badly enough to compensate for the loss of freedom, mobility, travel, late-night parties and the halving of your relationships.
But when you choose the alternative, you have to be strong enough in the face of the social pressures, the emotional guilt and the need to know if it will ever be enough to not have one.
Having a baby is like upgrading or downgrading your neighbourhood … whichever way you choose to look at it. It’s a lifestyle choice. Take it or leave it but never feel it is so integral to life that you will feel incomplete without it.
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Tags: choices, compromise, motherhood, needs
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Monday, August 20th, 2007
Since the moment I went public with my pregnancy, people have been asking about the ‘next one’. I endured the baby question through nine years of marriage and genuinely hoped that, through falling pregnant, people would consider my duty done and let me be. It’s just not that simple. People feel a sense of duty around the need to procreate to the point that one person’s advice was, ‘Just don’t think about it, just do it.’ Helpful? I think not. Perfect strangers will ask how old my son is and immediately offer advice on how far apart I should have my children to birth methods for the next.
I feel a great sense of relief when I chance upon someone who is stopping at one. A kindred spirit for no other reason than that their desire to have only one translates into a willingness to expand their social boundaries. People who have a second, third (and sometimes fourth), because they feel their first needs a friend or because their first is becoming too spoilt, are not only delusional (because there are no guarantees of either being resolved), but are also saying, ‘I’m not bothered with looking outside of my family unit for companionship for my offspring as they are better off getting it all from within the ‘unit’.’
I am slowly beginning to realise that this question is not meant as an affront about my abilities as a non-mother but is perhaps the only question mumsy mums can muster – the only thing they feel they have in common with me now that I have joined the ranks.
As a reader of my outwardly expressed inner thoughts, don’t take it personally if you have/want more than one … and I’ll try not to take it personally that I am expected to have/want more than one.
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Tags: advice, only child, second child, sociable
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Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
I’ve got two words for you. Norman Bates. A product of Hollywood, he has become the quintessential only child, a benchmark upon which to base the desperate need of couples to have more children.
Is it really so terribly sad and lonely being an only child? With the world as big as it is and the pool of children out there to play with, can anyone really believe that all only children will grow up bored, depressed and likely to murder their parents. The way I see it; the more children you have, the greater your chances are of producing a psychopath.
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Tags: Norman Bates, only child, procreating
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Sunday, August 12th, 2007
I missed three birthdays in one week. It’s not that I forgot about the birthdays, it’s that I forgot what week I was in. This was the point when I realised I might have post-natal depression.
This was not the baby blues – I wasn’t blue, I was red. I didn’t feel like crying, I felt like screaming; I didn’t feel like curling up in a ball under the covers, I felt like bolting and never looking back; I didn’t feel like driving fast, I felt like driving fast over a cliff. You get the picture – blue is too passive to be my colour. This is the reason so much red has found its way into my child’s wardrobe – it’s a matter of projecting.
My gynae became a colour victim too – I see red when I’m not getting my greens – for making all of this possible. I had tried blaming the baby, my husband, my hormones, my motherhood. It wasn’t working. The gynae, conditioned to field hormonal abuse, suggested I phone the PND (post-natal depression) Hotline. This hotline evidently mirrors its SLAs on the 911 switchboard – I left a desperate message but no one ever returned my call.
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Tags: baby blues, hormones, Post Natal Depression, sex
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Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
It’s a sex thing
The few post-child-sex stories you hear revolve around a man’s rejection; his needs not being satisfied by the new woman in his life … the woman with engorged breasts that cannot be fondled, the woman who doesn’t put his needs first, the woman who is ratty, hormonal and with whom he is now expected to share his bed. I sympathise with this man, I really do.
But what about the man who uses this sympathy to convince himself that it’s OK to not want his wife. He wanted the child so desperately that there was bound to be an anti-climax … he sure didn’t buy into any of this. I actually sympathise with this man too.
There is so much at play here. But the bottom line is that the sex thing gets in the way of unraveling all the expectations and disappointments. I felt that all I wanted was sex and all my husband wanted was sex with someone else. The thing is, we both just wanted sex. The only difference was that my problem with sex was physical: my husband’s purely emotional.
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Tags: hormones, relationships, sex
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