Good Enough Mum

If you've just found this blog...

2006-10-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

...then hello, welcome, and please do join me over at http://www.goodenoughmummy.typepad.com, which is where I blog these days. (However, if you want my archives from summer 2005 to early 2006, then you're in the right place right here.)

(Quick addendum for anyone who finds me from the comments on Raising My Boychick - Sorry about using this blog as a link rather than my regular blog. For some reason, I can't use the Typepad blog as a URL in comments on that particular blog. If anyone else has had that problem and come up with any solutions, I'm all ears and gratitude.)

Onwards and sideways, Take Two

2006-02-05T10:40:00.000-08:00

I do hope the ether found the first version of this post to be tasty and satisfying. Oh, well. I'm just glad it was only this post that mysteriously and completely disappeared after I wrote it, and not the last one - after three bloody months of writing that one, I would have been distinctly unamused if the internet had picked that one when it got the munchies.

Oh, well. Second attempt at writing this:

I was originally going to write a detailed version of the reasons why I used Blogger rather than Typepad to do my blogging, but fortunately I realised in time that it was actually extremely boring and it wouldn't have been fair of me to inflict it on you. (Of course, in retrospect, maybe it would have given the ether indigestion. Maybe if I posted that one it wouldn't have been eaten.) So I will skip directly to the salient point - Those days are now a thing of the past. I have now set up my new Typepad account, and I do hope you'll all join me over there for continued discussion.

In which I ramble on at some considerable length about Tricia Smith Vaughan's adoption article

2006-01-31T22:32:00.000-08:00

Many moons ago, an online author named Tricia Smith Vaughan posted this article about adoption.

It offended large sections of the adoption blogging community to the point of spluttering incoherence - I'm tellin' ya, the Great Parking Spot Wars paled into insignificance beside this one. So, of course, I had to comment. I hadn't actually intended to be quite this late to the party, but this was not a simple post to write. Under the crust of objectionable views, high-handed tone, and implied homophobia, there lurked some crucial points on which I do actually agree with Tricia. And, as I tried to write a post that had originally been intended to be a few pithy comments pointing out her errors, I faced the fact that the areas on which we agreed were too important to be ignored.

Tricia Smith Vaughan is against adoption. She is against adoption in much the same way that the Pope is against condoms or Germaine Greer is against the patriarchy - with passion, with rhetoric, and with a conviction that brooks any chance of considering the feelings of the opposition. This is, in large part, for a poignant personal reason - she is herself the daughter of a woman who was pressured into giving her up for closed adoption, back in the 60s. It's a soul-tearing story, and one of the harshest things about it is the realisation of just how many other stories like it there are. As Tricia highlights, there are frightening numbers of women out there who yielded to pressure from adoption agencies or society's mores and relinquished babies that, given some support or even just the space to decide for themselves, they could have kept.

As important as it is for us to be aware of these abuses, I'm not sure discussing stories and statistics from several decades back was the best way to highlight them. There is too much of a temptation to dismiss such things as being examples of how terrible adoption used to be - but, hey, aren't we lucky that it's so much better now? I, too, would love to believe that no-one in these enlightened days would ever pressure a woman facing such an important decision. Unfortunately,that would be a naive denial of the evidence.

What irked me somewhat about the picture Tricia painted of helpless birthmothers exploited by the Evil Adoption Industry is not so much that I disagreed with it, but that it was far too simplistic. There was no acknowledgement of any other face of adoption. Quite apart from the fact that this doesn't allow for the equally thorny yet distinctly different ethical issues raised by other facets of adoption such as international adoption or adoption from foster care, it also doesn't acknowledge the existence of women who do decide for themselves, independently and unpressured, to place babies for adoption. There is something a little too patronising in this sweeping categorisation of birthmother-as-victim - I wasn't sure that it was ultimately much less demeaning than the more familiar birthmother-as-villain or birthmother-as-vessel stereotypes.

However, Tricia is concerned with the treatment of first mothers not just prior to the adoption, but also afterwards. Society's traditional view has been that a mother who has relinquished her baby for adoption stops being a mother. The damage that this belief does to both mothers and children is now much more widely recognised, but not nearly widely enough, and Tricia is quite right to highlight this. But her concerns are not just with the direct effects on the mothers and children whose most fundamental bond has been denied by society, but with the wider implications of believing that parenthood is revocable. "Today's mother may become tomorrow's non-mother. And who decides?" she asks rhetorically.

Tricia Smith Vaughan does, it would appear. Tricia, like so many would-be social reformers, falls into the trap of believing that the behaviour she denounces in others is quite acceptable for her. Tricia is more ready than any social worker or adoption agency to reclassify certain mothers as non-mothers. At least the label 'birthmother' allows a woman a qualified degree of motherhood: Tricia Smith Vaughan does not believe we should allow adoptive mothers even that much. Anyone not sharing that crucial genetic link with their child should, she believes, be promptly stripped of all claims to parenthood and demoted to the status of 'legal guardian'.

This, of course, is why she incensed adoptive mothers so. Tricia, for her part, seems to have taken the outrage as proof of the rightness of her cause. After all, why on earth would someone object to being told that they're not really a mother to their much-loved child? Clearly evidence of a guilty conscience, thinks Tricia.

Amidst all the furore, what seems to have gone largely unremarked upon is the premise behind Tricia's beliefs - her 'Highlander' philosophy of parenting. According to Tricia, there can be only one mother and only one father in a child's life. End of story. It's a view that, by its very nature, automatically sets birthmothers and adoptive mothers in competition with each other, such that the debate then becomes over who wins and who loses in the fight for the exclusive, and elusive, title. It's easy to see how, backed into an either-or choice by this belief, an adoptee might reject years of loving upbringing in favour of a few strands of matching DNA. After all, most of us value the things we feel we missed out on more highly than the things we had the luxury of being able to take for granted.

And that assumption of Tricia's is what doesn't seem to have been disputed. Why should we believe that a child can have only one mother and one father? Why does that make any more sense than believing that a mother can have only one child? Given that we easily accept that children can love two parents as much as one and that, all else being equal, they are better off for having the chance to do so, why do we have so much difficulty accepting that they might have room in their hearts and their lives for more than that? Why do we insist on thinking about the parent-child bond as though we were three-year-olds who can't believe that Mummy could love a new baby yet still keep loving the old one as well? Why do we act as though a child's love were a limited resource that we need to hoard?

And this is the deepest, most fundamental reason why I disagreed with Tricia's article. The reason I do not agree with her that 'adoptive mother' is an oxymoron is not because I believe that adoptive parents replace first parents, but because I believe they add to them. I believe that an adopted child does have more than one mother and more than one father, and that it is in the child's best interests if we can accept that and learn to celebrate it instead of denying it. And I find it a terrible shame that Tricia's view on this topic is so narrow, not to mention phrased so arrogantly, that she offended people too much to make herself heard even on those points where she had something to say worth hearing.

Addendum

2006-01-24T16:15:00.000-08:00

It would appear that Jamie's message at the end of my last post was, in fact, toddler language for "Mummy, you're forgetting hand cream containers! Honestly, after eight months of wrestling Vaseline bottles back from me, I'd expect you to remember that entry on the list of Things I Like!"

The peculiar thing is that it's not just Vaseline bottles, but any kind of hand cream container. You wouldn't think the small dark blue tubes that Dove comes in looked anything like the large white jars of E45 cream, would you? Without knowing the contents, how could you know that they both belonged to the same general category of objects? Jamie, apparently, does. All hand cream containers are Things To Be Lunged For.

They are also, unfortunately, Things Not Suitable For Babies, at least while they still contain hand cream. (All our empty ones are now recategorised as Jamie toys, which allows for some distraction.) This predilection of Jamie's has led to some fierce struggles and a certain amount of hand cream consumption on his part when we haven't managed to wrest the tubes away from him quickly enough. Oh, well, at least he's probably got the softest silkiest intestinal walls of any baby in town.

Button, button, who's got the button?

2006-01-21T16:49:00.000-08:00

Well, in this house, it's probably Jamie.

Jamie loves buttons. Not the ones that do up clothes, but the ones that you can press that sometimes make interesting things like lights or noises happen. Of course, some buttons don't do anything obvious, but it's worth pressing them anyway - I mean, you just never know when it might have an exciting effect. Which is why, in recent months, his parents keep finding that the house is suddenly and unexpectedly roasting because the thermostat has mysteriously been turned up a few degrees, or that the television amplifier is on some strange new echoey setting that makes the dialogue impossible to follow, or that the printer is displaying instructions in Japanese.

In the past few days, I've decided that he might as well compensate for this by making himself useful. So Jamie now has the job of Official Light-Switcher. When I go from one room to another with him, I hold him up to the light switch and ask him please to switch it on. Or off, if we're leaving the room. And he does. For a while I think he was mainly understanding the context rather than the words themselves, but I do think now he may have learned what the words mean. The past couple of times I did this, I tried standing so that, although he could reach the switch from where I was holding him, he wasn't looking at it - and he promptly turned round when I asked him and worked the switch. Parenthood brings such amazing rewards, doesn't it? Just think of all those tedious milliseconds I would still be wasting on pressing switches for myself if I were childless!

Other things Jamie enjoys:

Opening and closing doors. Or drawers. This has therefore become included in the Official Light-Switcher's tasks. Thus I now move around the house with a steady commentary of "Open the microwave door, please, Jamie... Open the cupboard door, please, Jamie...." My husband is just waiting for his first sentences to be "I'm sorry, Mummy, I'm afraid I can't do that. I know that you and Daddy were planning to disconnect me."

Climbing. He can now climb onto the dining room table (via the chairs) and, as for mastering the stairs, that's old news. The number of places in the house where it's possible to leave anything that is either dangerous or breakable is shrinking faster than Jamie's common sense is growing.

Pulling books off the shelves. This is a pastime that he only discovered when we moved. Prior to that, we were in quite a small rented house and stored as much stuff as possible in the garage, still packed, so we only unpacked three boxes of books. (We were in the house for nearly five months! Thank goodness the town we were living in has a good library.) So, it wasn't hard to leave the bottom couple of shelves on the living room bookcase free, and Jamie just didn't get into the dining room much in that house. But when we started unpacking the books here, he was delighted at Mummy's obligingness in not only putting all those books on the shelf for him to pull off, but putting them back again so that he could pull them off again. And then again and again and again.

The Hat Game. This consists of Mummy putting an old bobble hat on her head and then taking it off again, to a hyper-enthused running commentary. Sometimes, Mummy puts the hat on Jamie's head instead. Mummy has also, in increasingly desperate attempts to inject a passing molecule of variety into this, tried putting the hat on her feet, but that just isn't the vintage Hat Game, it appears. Jamie regularly signifies his desire for the Hat Game by picking up the hat and crawling over to Mummy with a huge grin on his face. Oh, look! Guess what I found, Mummy! We can play the Hat Game again, Mummy! Isn't that exciting? Oh, well, Mummy can always knit extra padding into the hat, to protect her tiny brain when next she's driven to beating her head against the wall.

Ham, bananas, and peaches. He likes lots of other foods as well (rice cakes are the most recent discovery) but those are his top favourites. On one occasion, Barry was getting some ham slices ready for him to eat once he'd finished whatever was currently on the tray in front of him, and on seeing that ham was an imminent possibility he simply cleared his tray with a sweep of his arm and sat there expectantly waiting for the ham course to be put before him without further ado.

Being a shoulder baby. Since Jamie's getting quite heavy to carry around and Barry never had much interest in using slings, Barry carries him on his shoulders when we're in the supermarket (we do occasionally persuade him to sit in the trolley seat, but that isn't nearly as much fun as being carried by Mummy or Daddy). This is a much superior way to travel - not only does Jamie get to observe the world from a greater height than most babies that age ever achieve (even among other shoulder babies, there can't be that many with a father who's 6'4"), but he gets to grab Daddy's hair and nose as well when he gets bored. (When he's on Mummy's shoulders, it gets even more fun because he can grab glasses as well. Strangely enough, Mummy rarely puts him on her shoulders.) This is also the way we deal with the evenings when he refuses to go to sleep before dinner but is then exhausted and whingy during dinner. "You see, you must now forever bear the shame of being a shoulder baby," Barry tells him as he swings him up to his shoulders and proceeds to eat his dinner as best as possible one-handed.

Keys. Since he's a baby, this one goes without saying, and the main reason I mention it is to indulge in a brief moment of parental bragging about my child's genius - a few weeks back, while playing with an old bunch of keys which we have no use for and which thus has been redesignated a Jamie toy, he crawled over to the conservatory door and started trying to place the key next to the lock. While he still clearly has a few finer details in the process to work out, we are most impressed by the fact that he has figured this much out. (Since then, he has been seen to watch us very intently as we unlock the front door, clearly determined to figure out this whole unlocking deal.)

Remote controls. Lots of buttons for Jamie. Unfortunately, Mummy and Daddy insist on being unreasonable and restricting him to just the one (from a TV that died a few months back and thus left us with a spare) despite the fact that remote controls are so obviously meant to be a Jamie toy.

Things Jamie doesn't like:

Having his teeth brushed. (He has eight so far - a full set of front teeth, which were already present when he reached his first birthday but which have remained as yet unsupplemented by canines and molars.) He really enjoys brushing them for himself (as we shall charitably describe his fiddling around with and randomly chewing on the toothbrush) but screams his head off when it's time for Mummy to brush them properly.

Being prevented from exploring the many, many, many wonderful buttons and climbing opportunities and generally interesting things that Mummy and Daddy keep all round the house but won't let him look at.

Talking. He does use the occasional word - 'mih' for 'milk', 'Dada', possibly 'Mum' - but, by and large, he's not a very verbal baby.

Going to sleep. Though he is now a lot better at this, thanks in large part to Tracey Hogg's 'The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems' (good god, the woman is irritating, but she does have some helpful advice in amongst the rubbish, the patronising and the overflowing Englishness).

Um - not a lot else, really. Two months into the official toddler period, he's still very good-natured, on the whole. He will complain loudly about something, but forget it within a minute or two and get happily on with something else interesting.

ZCXXXXXCXXXXCCXV VVVVBBVBVCVB

That was Jamie's comment on the matter, since he woke up from his nap at this point and wished to join in. He is somewhat unhappy with my wish to a) reclaim my keyboard and b) put finishing touches to this instead of playing with him, so I must go and investigate the joys of Duplo blocks.

And if this is you, STOP IT

2006-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

It has recently been brought back to my attention that people will say things to the non-doctor staff around here that they don't, apparently, feel able to say to the doctors.

By this, I do not mean "Oh, dear, I've really been wanting to get this off my chest, but I don't feel I can trouble the doctor - what do you think I should do, Nurse?" It's a fair bet that that happens as well, but it isn't what I am currently venting about. (Though, since I brought it up - if that's you, then DO come and trouble the doctor. What do you think we're here for, and whose taxes are paying our salaries anyway?)

What I mean is "I am not happy with the service I am receiving here/the service I have received at a hospital that has nothing to do with you/some random area in my sorry little life, but I am too chickenshit to discuss it with anyone who actually appears to be an authority figure, so I am going to take out my frustrations on people who are further down the food chain."

And hence I will get patients who are nice as pie to me (well, probably not as nice as Key Lime or lemon meringue or anything, but at least in the general league of apple and blackcurrant with slightly singed crust), and I will only find out by chance, later, that they've left an upset and stressed-out nursing assistant or receptionist in their wake.

Now, personally I would prefer that you do not indulge in this sort of behaviour towards any of our team. I'm certainly not in a mood to deal with it either. We are, by and large, doing the best we can with fairly inadequate resources. I can assure you that our lack of perfection is something that frustrates us greatly as well and is not an attribute we've adopted as part of our malicious plot to annoy you.

But if you really feel compelled to act like an arse, at least have the courage of your convictions about it. If you would not feel comfortable talking in this way to the doctor, ask yourself why the hell you feel comfortable talking this way to someone who doesn't even have the consolation of a decent salary in return. (The answer, in case you need a clue, would be "Because I am a jerk.") Take your issues out on me or shut the hell up about them. Me, I'm voting for the latter, but those two choices are the choices you get.

Gah

2006-01-18T07:05:00.000-08:00

Well, honestly. Hmph. Everyone who uses Word at all regularly knows that Ctrl+S=Save. That it is, indeed, the appropriate shortcut for those who have no time to faff around with menu bars due to being subject to getting called away from the keyboard at short notice half way through their writing by, say, the needs of a dependent toddler, and who need to be able to hit a couple of keys by reflex and know that their mental labours will be preserved without the need of further thought on their part. It's obvious, isn't it? "S" stands for "Save". How much simpler could it be?

So why, I ask you, why does Blogger insist on making that the shortcut for "Publish! Publish and be damned. Fling this post to the tender mercies of the Internet without so much as a further consultation, are-you-sure-you-want-to pop-up window, or by-your-leave!"?

I mean, it's like the time they reversed the standard colours for the salt'n'vinegar and the cheese'n'onion crisp packets [1]. It's just wilfully confusing.

So, er, if any of you happen to have been cruising past my webpage during the hours of yesterday evening (GMT) and were confused by the appearance of an apparently half-finished post, followed by its hasty retirement from polite society a scant few hours later, then, um, whoops.

[1] I mean, not that that was Blogger. Well, not as far as I know, anyway. Maybe the people who run it were in the crisp business in their former life before the Internet got big. Who knows? But 'they' in that sentence wasn't meant to indicate Blogger specifically, it was meant in the generic 'those people out there who run things of this sort, whoever they may be' sense.

Happy Week-After-National-Delurking-Week!

2006-01-17T10:50:00.000-08:00

Boy, you can't turn your back for a minute around here. Last week I went for a few days without reading my regular blogs, figuring I'd catch up on all the gossip in a bit, and what do I miss? National Delurking Week, that's what. All sorts of bloggers have been inviting me to delurk in their comments section. (Well, all right, not me personally. Me as a member of the lurking world in general. Hey, with my social life I'll take what invitations I can get.) I have missed invitations to introduce myself and let my favourite bloggers know about my life, hopes, dreams, and grandparent-decorating history. Looks like we missed the party over here.

Well, since we missed the party, maybe you can join me in the taxi queue home. Or maybe I could just improve my metaphors. Whatever. Look, the point is - if you're lurking on here, why not take this chance to delurk? Tell me who you are, how you found this blog, and what you think of it. Ask me probing questions about my life. Smile enigmatically. Make yourself known!

Walkin' Dude

2006-01-15T23:20:00.000-08:00

In the past few days, Jamie's walking has really taken off. (I am so glad I don't mean that literally. A mobile baby is hard enough to deal with. A flying baby? Let's not even go there.) He's been able to stagger a few steps by himself for the past couple of months (in fact, I can remember the precise date of his first independent steps - November 7th, a couple of weeks before his first birthday and the day before we moved house. I listened to his grandparents enthusing over him as I packed dishes into boxes across the hall.) But, although he's become slightly more willing to do so as time goes by, he's not been too keen on that method of locomotion and has much preferred crawling.

Barry has been urging him at every opportunity to try walking (an endeavour in which I did not join him - quite apart from the whole I-will-allow-my-child-to-achieve-at-his-own-unpressured-pace philosophy, I really couldn't see the point of being in a rush for him to increase the speed with which he can dash towards things he's not supposed to have), but it didn't make much difference. His standing improved gradually but noticeably over this time, to the point where he can now not only stand alone for several seconds but can actually bend down to pick something up and then straighten up again (I know all the baby books tell me that this is going to happen around now, but it seems so amazing when it's your own wobbly-legged infant doing it), but he hasn't really been walking beyond the occasional couple of steps. His former record was six steps on his birthday when encouraged by the collective cheering squad of both sides of his extended family, but he didn't show any immediate inclination to repeat that.

However, it now seems he's decided he's ready. He's still more of a crawler than a walker, but in the past few days he's shown much more inclination to practice his toddling, and he's been taking a lot more steps in one go. Good job we've got the walking reins that a neighbour of my in-laws passed on to us, because I really don't think it'll be too much longer before we need them.

The downside of this is that his sleeping pattern has been all over the place. One of the interesting things about babies that I didn't realise until I had one is that developmental milestones can send their sleep to hell in a handbasket. You know how it feels when you're involved in some kind of big project and all hyped up with working on it to the point that, at night, you can't switch off and fall asleep? Did you know that happened to babies as well? Uh-huh.

Even this has its silver lining - yesterday, he was tired enough after a couple of late nights and poor naps that he conked out for a totally unexpected morning nap, thus giving me a blissful and much-needed break and accounting for the appearance of my second blog post of the day. However, it does mean that not only is it difficult getting him to sleep right now, but he's also showing the effects of overtiredness during the day. So, he is now living up to the 'toddler' designation not only in the literal sense, but also by fulfilling the reputation for being a moody little so-and-so.

Ah, well. This too shall pass. Which is just as well, because to keep up with an increasingly mobile version of the child I already have, I think I'm going to need all the sleep I can get.

I never wrote about Christmas, did I?

2006-01-14T13:56:00.000-08:00

So, belatedly and for the records, a brief account of my Christmas:

We all got together. Barry's parents and brother travelled down to our house on Christmas Eve. Then, on Christmas morning, we all piled into our respective cars and drove down to my mother's house, where my mother and sister were frantically rushing round trying to get Christmas lunch on the go. And the eight of us had a huge late Christmas meal and then sat round and opened our presents and generally relaxed.

We stayed over Monday, all but my sister, who had to head back - Mom drove Barry's family around London to show them the sights, while Barry and I headed into town with Jamie to browse the stores. On Tuesday, we hugged goodbye and all headed our separate ways, ready to resume the daily grind on Wednesday.

Jamie's reaction to his presents:

He absolutely loves the Fisher Price Little People toys, because they have buttons that can be pressed to make noises and lights happen, and this is very exciting. Lots of electronic wails and screeches and noises that are meant to represent children laughing and playing at a park or a funfair but actually sound disturbingly like the background to a horror show. He also, for some reason, is utterly fascinated by the set of mamushka dolls my mother got him. He keeps picking them up and turning them over and over and just looking at them.

He also seems to like his ride-on, although he hasn't yet figured out how to use it as a ride-on - he doesn't sit on it to scoot about. But it has an open-and-shut bit (in the seat) and wheels to spin and a thing that goes squeak when you press it, and all of these are definite attractions, so all in all, it's a success.

The ride-on has a purple plastic phone receiver behind the wheel, for Baby to have his first car phone, but Jamie doesn't try to talk on it. (I'd be surprised if he did. In almost fourteen months of "Will you say 'Hi' to Nana, Jamie? Say 'Hi' to Nana!", he has never yet been willing to talk on a real phone. He will stare at them in fascination, he will grab them when not in use and enjoy the beeping sounds that the buttons make when you press them, but placing a handset in proximity to his head is a foolproof way of reducing him to silence.) What he does with it is to shove it against the side of a parent's head in traditional phone position, looking expectantly at said parent. Then, as soon as we pretend to talk into it, he grins hugely and grabs it back again with a satisfied look of "Well, that's that job done, then." It's interesting that he's so rapidly grasped the basic points that phones are for adults to place next to their heads and talk into, and that a baby's role in this, as in anything, is to try to grab whatever Mummy or Daddy is currently trying to use.

He seemed quite interested in his hammer-and-peg toy, as well, although all he's actually done is to tap the hammer against the bench a few times and then try to eat the pegs. When it comes to the ring-stacker, though, it appears that not only does he not wish to stack rings, he actually objects on principle to the whole idea of rings being stacked. When I stack the rings up (I'm not trying to get all educational with him - they're just a bit tidier that way, and, besides, I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder to satisfy), he carefully removes the wooden knob from the top, then removes the central rod (which isn't attached to the base, so can be pulled right out). Sometimes he uses his teeth to extract the rod. Then he scatters the rings hither and yon with a quick, decisive back-and-forth movement of his hand, and, with the satisfied expression of a job well done, turns his attention to something more worthy.

As for me, I got all the books I asked for for Christmas, apart from a few which appear to be out of print and one which is still on its way (but that one's only a recipe book, so I'm in no particular rush there). So I've had some happy minutes of reading, squeezed around work and babycare. All in all, I would say it was a good Christmas.

But the best moment of my Christmas was when my sister picked Jamie up and he objected "Mum-mum!". So she passed him to me, and he repeated with satisfaction "Mum-mum".

It might very easily have been a coincidence. He makes that sound a lot, and it usually either just means 'milk' (as a variation on mih-mih, which is his more usual choice) or is one of his random sounds. He's used it since then at times when it might have meant 'Mummy', but, all in all, it's entirely possible that he still is just using it as a random sound and just happened to use it at an appropriate moment right then. It could easily have been a coincidence.

But if so, it was a heartwarming coincidence. And it finds a place high on the list of 'Moments of Maternal Satisfaction'. It was an even better present than the books.

Why can't the medical profession teach their midwives how to teach breastfeeding?

2006-01-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

That was, on the off-chance that you didn't get it, meant to be a take-off of "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?", from My Fair Lady. I may have to work on the scansion.

Anyway, Joyus's experience, as described in the comments to my last post, is one I've heard of before, and it can be really off-putting for mothers who are just getting the hang of breastfeeding. And that is unnecessary enough and sad enough that it inspired me to post on the topic.

As I understand it - and I haven't had any formal training in breastfeeding counselling, so anyone who has is welcome to set me straight on this - helping a newly breastfeeding woman to get her baby latched on is like helping someone to park their car. Your role in the matter is to observe matters and offer the benefit of a vantage point that allows you to see things at a different angle. Which enables you to offer directions: "Put your hand behind her head. Now bring her in with her nose level... Right hand down...."

What you do not do, however, is grab the woman's breast and try to take over getting the baby latched on. In terms of establishing breastfeeding, this probably works about as well as jumping into the car and trying to wrest the wheel from the driver works in terms of parking.

Now, I knew this just from reading a book I found about breastfeeding on the shelves at the local library as part of my research prior to the baby's birth. So why are there still midwives who don't know it?

Joyus - good for you for persevering and for getting breastfeeding going anyway. Unfortunately, not all mothers are so patient. I do feel this lack of proper training is something that may be making quite a difference to breastfeeding rates in this country.

On not knowing

2006-01-07T02:00:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Kateri's post about a woman who developed breastfeeding problems because her doctors didn't know enough about breastfeeding and thus gave her poor advice.

That one sentence could describe so many, many, many stories that I've read out there. As soon as you start finding out anything about breastfeeding, you start to hear the horror stories about the sheer ignorance in the medical profession about anything breastfeeding-related. This particular woman had an unusual problem - there aren't many women trying to breastfeed after breast reductions. But there are thousands upon thousands of women who have been given equally poor advice about much more common problems, problems that anyone who has anything to do with lactating women should damn well know something about.
Kateri laments this ignorance, and quite rightly so. It is execrable. Do you know how much teaching I've had on the topic of breastfeeding I've had in my career? In five years in medical school, a year as a junior paediatrician, a year of more specialist general practice training? None. That's how much. And it wouldn't even take much, for God's sake. Just one lecture in medical school would cover enough of the basics for what we need to be aware of as doctors. We could easily have spared that much time from learning about Krebs' cycle and the nine causes of clubbing and all the other obscure things that you never need once qualified. But I doubt if it ever occurred to the people designing the syllabus. Same thing in the postgraduate training - we had a lot of say in what topics we got taught about as trainee doctors, but none of us asked for a talk on breastfeeding because it never occurred to any of us.

Kateri thinks that this is because it's seen as unimportant - if breastfeeding doesn't work out, what's the big deal? Just use formula. I have certainly heard stories of women encountering this attitude, which I will not recount here due to having insufficient time and tooth enamel to spare on them. But I also think that a lot of it is that people don't even know what they don't know. If you don't know anything about breastfeeding, it never occurs to you that it might prove difficult for some people, that there might be things that doctors need to know about it, even if it's just stuff like how to treat thrush and that nipple pain is not normal and indicates a problem. So, nobody thinks of putting it in the syllabus.

But there's a deeper issue here that Kateri didn't comment on, but that springs out at me because I've been through medical training. It's the fact that, as junior doctors, we are discouraged from admitting that we don't know something and trying to learn more.

At least - I put that in the present tense, and I would love to feel that I'm wrong in doing so. It'll be eleven years this year since I graduated, and that's actually quite a long time in the fast-moving field of medical education, so maybe attitudes are changing. Maybe, these days, students who ask their consultants questions are less likely to be met with a frown and a growl of "You should know that by now!" Maybe more consultants are finally catching on to the fact that students who ask about something know perfectly well that they should know it, and that's why they're taking the sensible step of asking the person who is, after all, meant to be teaching them. Maybe the people doing the teaching are realising that questions should be met with answers rather than accusations.

I hope that's happening, and I think that, little by little, it probably is. I think that the underlying culture - the attitude that lack of knowledge is something so embarrassing and shameful that hiding it must take priority over trying to correct it - is changing. But I do know that old habits die hard, and that it may take a while before that attitude disappears altogether among some of the older-school hospital consultants who teach students and junior doctors as part of their job. There are still too many doctors out there who have learned to guess, to bluff, to do what they can to hide any lack of knowledge rather than admitting it and approaching someone who can put it right.

And I think it's that attitude that is the root cause of the problems Kateri's acquaintance had. I do actually think that it's perfectly reasonable for your average doctor not to know anything about breastfeeding after reduction. It's an unusual and specialised problem that a doctor is not going to encounter very often, and believe you me, there is no shortage of more common things that we need to know about. But what is not reasonable is that none of the doctors that this woman saw felt able to say to her "You know, I actually don't have a clue about that. Let me read up on it, or find somebody who does and ask their advice about it, and I'll get back to you."

Resolutions

2006-01-04T07:30:00.000-08:00

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions. However, this year, as I hurriedly scribbled out a pile of Christmas cards at some time after the last minute and thought back to all the Flylady e-mails I'd been getting for the past six weeks promising me that if I only followed Flylady's do-a-bit-at-a-time plan I could be ready comfortably in advance, I thought "That's it. Next year, I will actually do the whole Flylady Christmas thing and Cruise Comfortably Through The Holidays, as promised. In fact, I will make it my New Year's Resolution."

Thus inspired, I went ahead and made a few more.

2. To be a bit more assiduous about doing Flylady generally. I joined up on 24th August, and since then I've been a lacklustre maggot (I am not going to start describing myself as a Flybaby in writing on my own blog, so I'll go with 'maggot', which may mean the same thing but has much more character to it). I don't wear shoes in the house because being psychologically primed for maximum efficiency is less important to me than the longevity of my carpets and the comfort of my feet. When I first joined, I did the Super-Duper-Uber-Sink Shine to mark my official initiation into the Flylady Cult, but it's been pretty much an as-and-when thing since then. As has been the decluttering and the other things. It all depends on when I've got time, when I feel like it, and so on. Flylady would not be proud of me. (Which is not something that bothers me - I've still got a huge amount of decluttering done even with the bits and pieces of her regime that I've been doing, and that feels a bloody sight better than having a complete stranger be proud of me.)

What I mean by 'assiduous' here is something I had a bit of a hard time specifying to myself - to claim that I was going to stick perfectly to her system from now on would be both self-deceptive and ironic, considering how adamantly the Flycrew are against perfectionism. In practice, I know perfectly well that I'm still only going to be doing bits on an as-and-when basis according to when I have time and when I feel like it, so it was hard to see why I was bothering to put it on the list of resolutions at all. (I know that I'm defying all tradition by refusing to make any resolutions that I don't think I've got at least some remote chance of keeping, but that just isn't how I do things. You will, for example, observe the absence of any promises of reduced chocolate consumption from this list.)

Eventually, I realised that what I was after was the fresh start feeling that is the whole reason why we make New Year's Resolutions, instead of just, say, Random Wednesday Resolutions. Sure, I'll still only be doing Flylady on a when-I-feel-like-it basis. But, with the psychological boost of that seductive fresh start, I'll feel like it more often. Or so I can hope.

3. To do regular abdominal exercises. This is not because I am any longer harbouring the least illusion that I am ever going to look good in a bikini (even if I still believed my abdominal wall was ever going to be flat, there is still now the small matter of the stretch marks). It's slightly more complex than that.

In around about a year's time, Barry and I would like to start trying for Child The Second. I think we all know the chanciness of those sorts of plans. I'm very far from oblivious to the possibility that we won't even get far enough for this to be a worry, but... let's optimistically suppose that we're lucky enough to get that second line once more. I really, really won't want to announce that to the world until this hypothetical future fetus makes it through those first crucial three months, as confirmed by scan, and thus appears to have a reasonable probability of becoming an actual future child. There's many a slip 'twixt blastocyst and uterine wall, and all that. Maybe I'd feel differently if it came to the point - I know that a lot of people in such a situation find the sympathy of people around them is all that pulls them through. But it's a thought I've always found intensely off-putting. I really do feel that if I ever have a miscarriage, I will not really want to have to deal with everyone I speak to telling me how sorry they are.

So, I have strong feelings about not announcing pregnancies until over three months. However, my understanding from various anecdotal sources (Vicki Iovine and several of the people on the Internet pregnancy group I read) is that, in the case of second and subsequent pregnancies, your body tends not to allow you this option. Apparently, if you're pregnant for the second time, your belly will start appearing almost as soon as the second line does, because those abdominal muscles will be too weakened by being formerly stretched to accommodate a full-term baby.

So, if I want to keep this hypothetical hoped-for future pregnancy a secret, I've got around a year to be sure my stomach muscles are in a fit state to do it. And that, ladies and gentlebirds, is the reasoning behind that particular resolution.

4. To spend some time with my husband for a change. This is a much trickier one, because I have very limited time what with the job and the baby and everything and so I feared this resolution might actually involve me having to give up some of my Internet time. Fortunately, I have now surveyed my accounts and discovered that they look rosier than I'd expected (sorry - I know it's in very bad taste for me not only to post that but to do so straight after Christmas), and so it appears that I can afford a new laptop. This means that I'll be able to sit in the same room as him while doing my blogging, which will represent a quantum leap forward in social interaction. I do hope he appreciates these efforts on my part.

So, dear readers (a phrase I have wanted to use - it sounds so delightfully Miss Mannersish) - any good resolutions out there? C'mon, confess all. I promise I won't hold it against you on 31.12.06.

A whole lot better than good enough

2005-12-31T22:29:00.000-08:00

Actually, that could lead to confusion. To clarify - this post's title actually refers not to my blog title, but to the last sentence I wrote in my 2004 journal, this time last year. The full paragraph says:

"So where will I be this time next year? Hopefully in the South-West of England, since that's where we want to move to (there just aren't really any job prospects here for Barry if he ever wants to get back into design engineering, and what with the proximity to London sending house prices soaring and the poor quality of the houses you get for that money, it generally isn't a great place to live long-term). So, if things go the way we hope and want them to, we'll be spending next New Year's Eve in yet another new house, but this one will be ours. I'll have a new job, although since next New Year's Eve will be a Saturday I won't be working that day. And I'll be lucky if I have the time to write a similar bit of waffle for that New Year's Eve, because I'll be spending all my time chasing around after a mini chaos monster hell-bent on wrecking the place. And if that's where I am in my life by then, that'll be good enough for me. "

Check, check, check, check, and check.

Which I guess brings us to where I'll be next New Year's Eve. (In my life in general, that is. As far as where I'll be geographically - right here, I damn well hope. I haven't the least intention of moving again. Probably ever.)

Hmmm. You know what? Barring unforeseen disaster, I'll still be in this house, still be in this job, and still chasing a mini chaos monster, though hopefully one who's a bit more verbal and showing some faint glimmers of the approach of rationality. This has been a year of enormous changes - two new jobs, two new houses, one new blog, and one child developing from six-week-old bundle to thirteen-month-old toddler - and it has brought me to just where, literally and metaphorically, I want to be in my life.

Sure, there are things I'd like to have happen over the next year. By this time next year, I'd like to have a child who's learnt to a) talk, and b) sleep through the night. I'd like to get involved in some student teaching during the year. I'd like to get round to doing something for the proposed evidence-based-parenting website that somebody asked me to get involved with much earlier in the year and that then never came to anything as nobody else had any spare time either. And I'd like to meet Magpie and Evie.

But, on the whole - if I can sit here this time next year feeling as happy, as fulfilled, as satisfied with my life as I am now, it will have been a good and worthwhile year.

Some general Christmas-related ramblings

2005-12-24T23:25:00.000-08:00

The answer to the question everyone keeps asking me is that, yes, I am ready for Christmas. "Somebody's organised, then," the receptionist commented when I gave her this answer on Thursday. "Yes," I agreed, "my husband." The dear man has done half my ordering/picking up of presents and nearly all of my wrapping, as well as the cleaning. I knew there was some reason I married him apart from his good looks, dazzling intelligence, sense of humour, warm-hearted compassion, sexual prowess and gorgeous arse.

The other question people keep asking me is whether this is my son's first Christmas. It isn't, of course, but it feels as if it is. Last Christmas he was just five weeks old - more of a permanently feeding little blob than a person. Even though everyone talked beforehand about how much he would enjoy Christmas, with all those amazing lights to look at, he really didn't give any sign of noticing that it was any different from any other day. There weren't many presents that he could enjoy, either - he was too young even for rattles. (Not that such considerations stopped my mother from buying him a train set and a set of alphabet blocks.) I fixed my eyes on the far-off Next Christmas when he would be a proper little person, a toddler running around the house and into everything, driving us crazy by trying to grab ornaments off the tree, but it all seemed so far-off and unreal.

And now, of course, it's real. Well, not the running round the house, not quite - for about six weeks now he's been able to wobble a few steps at a time, but it's still quite an endeavour for him and, although his standing is improving noticeably, he still prefers crawling when he wants to get anywhere. But the active-exploring-into-everything-driving-Mummy-and-Daddy-nuts bit - yup, that's happening, all right. He's been far better than we expected about not attacking the tree (Daddy's laptop and the television amplifier are much more interesting) but he is interested in the lights, and on one occasion tried banging two of the red ones together to see what would happen. It was quite a disappointment - really didn't prove to make the kind of satisfying noises that other things make when they're banged together.

He's also developed a liking for an ornament I bought last week on a whim when I saw it on a day out - a wooden mitten shape with a Santa Claus picture on it. He keeps crawling over and taking this one off the tree to look at, then trying to put it back (and getting rather bewildered and frustrated by its infuriating refusal to go back onto the branch and stay there). My advent calendar this year has tiny board books for each day which each tell a fragment of Dickens' "Christmas Carol" and which are designed to be hung on the tree, and he loves those as well. (They're books. Books are good. Board books aren't as good as books with proper pages, which he loves riffling, but board book pages are still good fun to turn.)

He had his first present this afternoon. (We're going to try the same plan that we did for his birthday, giving him his presents at intervals throughout the day rather than all in one overwhelming go.) I'd got him a ride-on, since Libby Purves says they're indispensable for the toddler period. He was quite interested in it, but since it wasn't dangerous or fragile the interest value was somewhat limited. However, he did like the squeaky thing in the steering wheel, and the plastic phone that came with it (though it was a disappointment that none of the buttons on the phone did anything. Not nearly as good as Mummy's radio alarm clock.) I've also got him a stacking toy and a hammer-and-peg toy, which were recommended in Nanny Knows Best as being very popular with this age group (yes, I am a complete sheep who cannot buy a present for her own child unless it's recommended in a book. Sue me.) I think he may well be bemused by the stacker, but he's really going to like the hammer-and-peg toy. I may live to regret that one. However, it turned out MIL had bought him the same toy, so one of them is going to live at Granny's house and one of them at home.

So what will he be like next Christmas? How much more will he have changed and grown? He'll be two years old then. He'll be walking properly, talking more, maybe even helping put the ornaments on the tree. We may well be struggling with potty training. Hell, he might even be sleeping at night. (I can hope....)

Talking of sleep, I'm in dire need of some, and will head off to bed before this degenerates into even more drivel. Merry Christmas, and may you all get what you wish for this Christmas. And for people like Magpie and Karen, who won't be getting what they most want this year - what I wish for you is that this will be the last year when that's so. I'm so looking forward to the things your blogs will say this time next year, the rushed postings you'll make when you can spare a few minutes from running after Evie and Maya, the postings about what motherhood is like and how amazing it is to have that first Christmas with your respective daughters. Just think - this time next year, you're going to be just as incoherent with exhaustion as I am right now. Happy Christmas to you all, and the very, very best of years to come.

Send three and fourpence....

2005-12-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I made passing mention of people who felt that it was an optional extra to read what they were giving an opinion about before giving said opinion. It may not have been clear from that brief comment that this was the bit that I objected to by far the most in the whole Parking Spot Wars shebang.

The rest of that post was just a case of "OK, our opinions differ and here, for the record, is mine". But when it comes to people sounding off about something they haven't bothered to check out for themselves - well, that's against my principles. I really wish I could be sure I wasn't being a total hypocrite about that, but, of course, the odds are against it, because it's bloody difficult to remember to check out the data before jumping to conclusions, and I'm sure there are plenty of times I've omitted that step myself. But it's still a Bad Idea. The fact is that second-hand stories do get garbled. If you haven't checked a source out for yourself, all bets are off as to whether you've picked up anything like an accurate impression of what it says.

The particular reason why I'm commenting on this now is because one of the people who commented on my last post admitted to not yet having read Karen's blog, but didn't let this stop her from expressing an opinion that Karen might be too bitter to be 'in the right place emotionally to adopt'. She was concerned that the fact that Karen still wanted to go through pregnancy, or at the very least to get treated in the same way as pregnant women, might mean that she was seeing adoption 'as a consolation prize or second best'.

Apart from the general 'giving-an-opinion-without-reading-it-for-yourself=Bad' concept, here are my more specific thoughts on that.

Firstly, having actually read the blog in question, I would say that Karen has now been in the right emotional place to adopt for so long that she's getting cabin fever from being there. And she's still stuck with staying there for an unknown number of months before being able to move on to the next and much more fun place of actually being a mother. So, quite apart from anything else, she is rather understandably frustrated. That comes through in a lot of her posts (to put it mildly), but it isn't the same thing as bitterness.

Secondly, I can understand that the idea of adoption as second-best can be, rightly, a major sore point with a mother who's happy with having adopted. But I think that the main reason for that is that it gets confused with another common, but entirely different, belief - the idea that an adopted child is somehow second-best. And I think it's very important to realise that there's a difference. The means aren't the same as the end here. If you really wanted to experience pregnancy and birth, then adoption is a second-best - not because the child is in any way second-best, but because the way of getting that child was.

Reading Karen's blog, and the other amazing infertility blogs out there, has taught me (among other things) that fertility is not a single loss but a whole collection of linked losses. The absence of motherhood is far and away the greatest of those losses, and that's the one that adoption is a path out of - in spite of her infertility, Karen will eventually be a mother, and there will be nothing second-best about that. But she still won't get to be pregnant, to give birth, to breast-feed, or even to experience the first few months of her baby's life (her daughter will be at least six months old, and probably older, by the time she's given to Karen). And, because those are things Karen wanted to experience, not getting to experience them is a loss for her, and one that should not be lightly brushed aside.

These things have different levels of importance for different people - the person who commented on my blog apparently wasn't bothered at all by missing out on those experiences, and that's nice for her. (I wish I could think of a way of saying that that sounded less sarcastic, because it was sincerely meant - I genuinely am glad that this unknown woman wasn't bothered about that aspect of adoption.) But that doesn't mean that they are going to be unimportant to every woman. I know that they were important to me, and that if I had not been able to get pregnant, I certainly would have felt that I'd missed out on something in my life, though I have no doubt that I would have loved whichever child I would then have gone on to adopt just as much as I love the one I was lucky enough to give birth to. I've realised how important it is to recognise that difference. Karen's love for the daughter she will get next year will not be any less for her grief over having missed the chance to give birth to that daughter. It is perfectly possible to feel both emotions simultaneously.

But, thirdly - I don't think Karen is exactly bitter, any longer, over having missed out on the chance to be pregnant. I think the main issue for her now, apart from her frustration over having to wait so long for her daughter, is not so much over adoption being 'second-best', but over having to live in a world that sees not only adoption, but the adopted child, as second-best.

Karen has had to deal with this in all sorts of ways, and will spend the rest of her life dealing with it in all sorts of ways. The post about the perks of a pregnant woman was a joke, and clearly meant as such. The experiences that inspired it - the times she's told other people she's adopting only to be met with blank looks or commiserations or none-of-your-goddamn-business questions instead of with the congratulations that would be automatically considered her due if she had, instead, announced a pregnancy - are no joke. Adoption leaves you dealing with the torture of the clueless. It leaves you dealing with an endless succession of "But what about her real parents?", and "Couldn't you have your own children?", and "Well, if you're adopting, that means that now you'll get pregnant!" and so many other subtle denigrations of your motherhood, so many assumptions that an adopted child is just a fake, borrowed, fertility aid.

Karen faces a lifetime of dealing with this sort of ignorance not only on her own behalf, but also on behalf of the very real child to whom she will, some day in a few months time, become a very real mother. I'm bitter about this on her behalf, and I haven't adopted and probably never will. If Karen is managing to deal with this without any bitterness at all, then she's a better woman than I am.

So - if you want to pass judgement on Karen or her blog, read that blog first. Actually, even if you don't want to pass judgement, read her blog anyway. For one thing, unless you're more than usually clued up about adoption you're likely to learn quite a bit from it. For another, it's a bloody good read.

Some thoughts on the Great Parking Spot Wars Of 2005

2005-11-29T17:59:00.000-08:00

This all happened over on Karen's blog.

Karen, just in case there's anyone in blogworld who hasn't yet encountered her, is a high-school teacher in (I think) NYC, who, after a long struggle with infertility and a fair bit of unsuccessful treatment, is now adopting from China. She's now sent off the enormously complicated collection of paperwork that needs to be sent off in such cases, and is on some kind of eternal jam-tomorrow waiting list that will allegedly ultimately result in her getting a daughter, although she's finding that increasingly difficult to believe.

Adoption gets you a child, but it doesn't, of course, get you the experience of pregnancy and birth. Karen is having to face the fact that, barring a miracle, she won't get to go through these things. Ever. And this is rough enough for her in itself. It just adds insult to injury that she also misses out on the associated perks.

So, the other day/week/month (delete as appropriate according to when I get this damn post finished) I clicked on her blog for my regular fix of Karenness and found she'd written a Bill Of Rights for the expectant adopting mother. Which basically boils down to: she demands the same rights as any other expectant mother. The right to claim hormones as an excuse for everything, the right to eat chocolate whenever she wants it because her cravings must be indulged, and so on and so forth. I skimmed through it thinking yeah, right on, hope you get all the consideration and chocolate that you most certainly deserve, and with one or two of my brain cells probably noting briefly in passing that I still didn't think she was really entitled to an Expectant Mother parking space, since those spaces are presumably aimed at easing the difficulty a heavily pregnant woman might have in walking across a large parking lot. None of it got all that much thought from me - next blog, please, and I got on with my day.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch... Posted comments pretty much echoed those views. A lot of "You go, girl!", and one person who, while expressing appreciation for the general humour, did politely voice an opinion that the parking spot entitlement claim didn't really hold up. And that was how it went. Until another commenter announced that not only was Karen fully entitled to claim Expectant Mother spots whenever she wanted them, but she herself made a point of taking them, and had, ha-ha, successfully cut a heavily pregnant woman out of one of them just the other day. She didn't quite go so far as actually to type "And the bitch deserved it for daring to be fertile when I'm not! Hooray for justice!" but the sentiment certainly appeared to be there.

This disturbed some people. One person criticised this attitude. Karen took this as a criticism of her own post, and said so. The critic got upset that Karen was objecting to her post but not the I-cut-pregnant-women-out-of-parking-spots-yay-for-me post, and said that in view of Karen's increasing bitterness she felt she'd rather avoid the blog in future. Some women who'd had the nerve to be pregnant at some point in the past dared to mention difficulties that they'd had in walking across parking lots at the time, and were shouted down. Umbrage was taken, the lines of Fertile vs. Infertile were drawn, the accusations were hurled - oh, well, you know how these things go.

While the ire actually appeared to have been triggered by the I-cut-pregnant-women-out-of-parking-spots-yay-for-me comment, Karen took it as a reaction to her post and got upset. People promptly rushed to her defense, declaring how silly and humourless all those evil previous commenters must have been to be offended by her post. Fertile women were accused of wanting to be treated with 'blind saccharine devotion'. For most people, it seemed actually reading the comments in question before criticising them was an optional extra.

I was going to post my own views in the comments, but in light of further events I decided it was probably better just to let it drop. So instead, I'm posting them here. I have no deep conclusion to draw as a result of all this - just wanted to give my take on it and round off with some of the things I've learned.

1. Shops in the USA give Expectant Mother spots instead of Parent and Child spots. Yup. Baby to lug around in your belly? Have a parking spot close to the store! That same baby to lug around in a car seat a few months later and a few months heavier, plus the weight of the car seat, plus the cumbersomeness of manoeuvring said car seat out of the car door without denting the car door of the person in the next parking spot? Fend for yourself in this dog-eat-dog world!

I'm glad my parents brought me up in the UK. (Though, of course, that did mean that I also missed out on an Expectant Mother spot, if that makes any infertile Americans out there feel any better.)

2. I was naive and foolish to think that an Expectant Mother parking spot was simply aimed at making life easier for someone who might be having some physical difficulties. It is actually, it appears, a Special Award for Services to Reproduction. ("Thank you for contributing to the next generation. We would like to show our appreciation by presenting you with this parking spot.") Or at least, that's how a number of infertile people seem to see it.

(Alternatively, there may be a sort of Karmic Equivalence Theory Of Parking Spots, in which spots are allocated to those who are suffering the most ("Swollen ankles and having to get up at night to pee? Here, have this parking spot to make it up to you") and infertile women thus deserve them more, as their suffering is greater than that of pregnant women. This was what I originally took to be the theory behind decisions as to who 'deserves' a parking spot, but on reading further I decided it was actually the Special Award theory. However, I included this one anyway, since it's possible that some time may elapse before I next get an opportunity to use the phrase 'Karmic Equivalence Theory Of Parking Spots', and I thus felt I shouldn't pass up the chance while I had it.)

3. There is a Fertile Illuminati out there, dedicated to denying infertile women their happiness in life. By virtue of making it through most of a pregnancy, you are automatically considered to have joined that Illuminati and to have volunteered to be one of their representatives. You are therefore personally to blame for the heartbreak an infertile woman is experiencing, and she is therefore fully entitled to take her frustrations out on you and to ste... ahem, to take the parking spot that you shouldn't have had in the first place as it was rightfully hers. Which left me wondering - so why didn't I get the decoder ring, dammit? That would have been even cooler than a parking spot.

And many happy returns

2005-11-24T05:57:00.000-08:00

We had a minor drama on Jamie's birthday when Rosie, Barry's parents' dog, decided to race through a hole in the hedge when let out into the garden last thing at night and promptly encountered some barbed wire. My mother-in-law originally planned to take her to their own vet for stitches once they got home on Monday, but, based on my marginally relevant knowledge of treating humans, I suggested this might not be a great idea and we should really give the local emergency vet a ring. So we did, and they were very helpful and stitched Rosie's leg under sedation, and she had to spend the rest of Jamie's birthday with a plastic bag on her leg.

Jamie had a considerably better day, fortunately. He was quite interested by being repeatedly given boxes wrapped in funny paper (as previously planned, we gave him his presents at intervals throughout the day rather than all in a big mountain, so as not to overwhelm him). He didn't really catch on to the concept of unwrapping despite our best efforts, but he found all those big boxes very interesting to climb on. And several of the touch-sensitive ones made interesting noises when he did, which was even better.

The list of things Jamie got:

From me and Barry: The aforementioned noisy plastic dashboard thingy (which I have now managed to find a link to), and an electronic drum, which makes interesting electronic sounds and flashing lights when you bang it or roll it (it's much less hideous than it sounds).

From Nana and Granddad (Barry's parents): A toddle truck with blocks. (He was very pleased when we showed him how to toddle pushing it, but it still wasn't nearly as interesting as the project of trying to taste every single block one at a time.)

From Uncle Simon (Barry's brother): A book designed to fit into a plastic board with electronic sensors, so when you touch the pages of the book you get various detailed comments on what the kitten is doing, how furry the rabbit is, and what other things are in the garden. Alternatively, if you just use the plastic board without the book, you can play notes in a variety of simulated musical instruments.

From Auntie Ruth (my sister): A dump truck with big Lego-style blocks.

From Granny Constance (my mother): A purple inflatable bouncy horse to sit on, and a wheelie thingummy that I'm quite glad to have found a link to online as I'd have had a bit of trouble describing it.

From Great-Grandma Martha (my grandmother): A fuzzy stuffed creature (we're not quite sure what it's meant to be, but it's gorgeously fuzzy) and, apparently, a drinking cup from Monterey Bay Casino that is waiting for us at my mother's house (my grandmother lives in Arizona and left the presents here when she visited earlier in the year).

From Rosie (the aforementioned dog, just in case you were inexplicably not fascinated enough by this post to give it your full attention): A 'First Words' baby book, with a wheel that you turn to make different pictures come up in the windows on the pages. (I'm very impressed that she managed to wrap it. Perhaps she had just a little help?)

From some friends of Barry's parents, who got our old dishwasher recently when my mother renovated her kitchen and we got her old one: Another plastic driving system, fortunately not quite the same as the one I got him, and a grey-and-black striped jumper.

From Grace, my friend from work, who helped us move house and thus earned our undying appreciation and, more concretely, an invitation to the party: A book called "That's Not My Puppy", a sort of puppy identity parade with textured bits of each picture to allow children reading it to confirm for themselves that, yes, the paws are bumpy or the tail fluffy or whatever.

We had Victoria sponge cake for tea, and a dinner of fish, baked potato and cauliflower so that Jamie could join in eating it. And, yes, he got thoroughly overtired and we are Bad Parents who should have got him to bed earlier. But he, and we, had an excellent day. And now, the toddler years await. I gird my loins and tremble at the thought.

Now I know....

2005-11-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

....why parents say they don't know where the time goes to, children grow up so quickly.

It can't be a whole year since that last day of pregnancy, the last day that I wasn't a mother. I can't type 'the last childless day' because, of course, the baby was pretty much in evidence, and letting my internal organs know all about it. But it was the last day that I got to wake up in my own bed, at my own pace, without having to get up and tend to anybody. That evening, I went into labour - Jamie arrived at 4 .33 the next morning, and life as I knew it changed and kept on changing.

The in-laws are arriving today ready for the birthday party tomorrow, and my mother and sister, who live nearer, are travelling up tomorrow morning. Barry's baked the first of the two sponge cakes he's making, and we're planning a dinner of fish, baked potatoes and cauliflower florets - things Jamie can join in eating. I was originally going to buy him a toddle truck with blocks in, but then Barry's parents decided that was what they wanted to buy him. So I went in search of anything that makes a good noise, and ended up buying the kind of ghastly one-trick plastic toy that mothers hate and manufacturers love, because Jamie seemed to be siding firmly with the manufacturers on this one - he played with it for ages in the shop, giving passing attention to the various other bits of plastic all around but always returning to this one. I tried to find an on-line link for it, but without success, so, for the benefit of anyone who was wondering, it's a toy dashboard with steering wheel, controls, and a little model of a bear in a car at the top of it, that makes an amazing array of electronic car sounds when you touch any of the controls. (Moving it from the old house to the new one was quite interesting.)

But - this time last year I was still huge, and believing it would probably be weeks yet (I was full-term, but the majority of first-timers go over the forty weeks). I didn't even have my hospital bag packed (I packed it that same evening, when the period-type cramps I was getting seemed to be getting stronger, and went into labour while I was packing). I only knew this little one as a big bulge and an active little pair of feet. Now, he's sitting on my study floor playing with the deflated mini-Rover I bought to use as a birthing ball (which turned out not to be a blind bit of help in labour, incidentally - a hot bath was far better).

I've learned how to do things one-handed, with the other hand supporting a baby on my hip, and how to to get nappies on a wriggly baby while he crawls away from me, and how to type/eat/live my life with a child attached to my nipple. He's learned how to walk with support (and apparently to lurch a step or two without, although he persists in only doing this when I'm not watching), and how to eat finger foods and drink from a spouty cup, and press small buttons to make Daddy's bedside radio or his musical star switch on and off, and how to climb up the back of the sofa, or the array of cardboard boxes that Mummy and Daddy have so obligingly been leaving around for him recently.

Which all leads on to the question: what will the next year bring? According to all accounts, we are now in for a year (absolute minimum if we're lucky) of hell, in which Jamie will mutate into a screaming, tantrumming, irrational little monster, and all we will be able to do is cling feebly to what remains of our sanity until he emerges at the other end of toddlerhood. By which time, we are planning and hoping to have started the whole thing again with another one, so things are only going to get more difficult from here on out.

I am so lucky. So very, incredibly, lucky.

Made: One day

2005-11-17T22:51:00.000-08:00

Wow! Lots of lovely comments. And including people I didn't even know were reading this. And apparently I have readers in Denmark, according to Trista (where on your blog? What are their names? Details!) And I've just realised I've been added to Trista's list of People Worth Reading!

So I am somewhat excited and overjoyed about all this.

And I now have a question. How did you all find this blog? Well, in a lot of cases I know the answer. I know some of you tracked me back from comments on your blogs, and I recognise Lisa and Mummyhaggis's names from a mailing list I'm on where I have this webpage in my .sig, and I know at least some people found me from Usenet groups I post to (which may well be where the Danish people come from).

But now Kateri has joined the list of commenters, and even though I've read her blog several times (and found it fascinating), I can't remember ever commenting there. Did I comment on your blog and just develop amnesia afterwards? Or did you find me some other way? And that question goes to other readers as well, not just Kateri. I love seeing strange names and knowing that I'm getting more readers, and I'd really love to know how you all found me.

Some comments about commenting on the comments

2005-11-15T15:20:00.000-08:00

I am a comment hypocrite.

I adore getting comments. I bounce with excitement when I see that I have gotten a new comment, clicking impatiently as I wait for it to load so that I can see what someone has written. I love knowing that people are not only actually! reading! my! blog, but are stirred enough by my words to consider them worthy of comment.

And do I ever get round to acknowledging these comments with any sort of response? Do I heck.

This is partly because of my extreme congenital disorganisation, and partly because I find myself a little uncertain of comment etiquette. Should I try to respond to all comments? If more than one person responds to a post and there's something I want to say about one comment but not the other(s), will those who are not responded to feel slighted by contrast? Is it fairer just to ignore everyone equally? So, I remain paralysed by indecision and procrastination and leave the comments unresponded to, despite the fact that I not only love getting them but also love it when I comment on someone else's blog and they respond. See? Comment hypocrite.

But if you've commented on this blog at any stage, do rest assured that even if I was so rude as to give no indication of this, I treasured your comment. I read it over and over with a thrill of "They want to comment on my blog!" And you have my sincere thanks. Well, unless you're that bloody spambot, in which case I hope you get toenail rot.

House opus

2005-11-15T15:12:00.000-08:00

Quick update: We've moved, we've unpacked the basics, the cardboard boxes have retreated somewhat although we still have a mountain of them in what will eventually be the baby's room, Barry is exhausted from having had to do all the technical stuff like getting the computers wired together and the network up and running and all the other cable-related stuff that I can't help him with as I don't have the first clue about it (good god, that sounds girly, I hate admitting it). The TV did not survive the move but we have a gorgeous new one. The baby has taken it all very much in his stride. The cavalry, in the shape of my mother and the in-laws, have been fantastically helpful. The house continues to be a work in progress, but is looking good.

And that's all I got to say about that.

This time.....

2005-11-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

Since our strategy of trying to unpack as little as possible at our last move actually seems to have worked, and the current packing job is consquently more manageable than I would ever have believed possible, and since Jamie's always tenuous routine is so topsy-turvy from all this that he's still sound asleep at a quarter to ten in the morning (something I suspect I will regret later, but the hell with it, later is later and can take care of itself), I find myself, unexpectedly, with some time on my hands. So I will spend it indulging in a little nostalgia, in honour of Jamie's eleven-month-oldness.

This time last year, I was on maternity leave. (Well, technically I was on holiday, since I used accumulated holiday to push the official date of my maternity leave as late as possible and hence to keep getting full pay for as much of my time off as possible.) Wondering how much bigger I could get. Discovering that Gaviscon absolutely rocks as a heartburn treatment, even if it tastes funny, and that carpal tunnel syndrome is a flaming nuisance when you're trying to sleep and are already out of comfortable positions. Trying to persuade the baby that he could find other comfortable places to lodge his left foot rather than my spleen. Trying to make myself do perineal massage every night even though, dear god, was it boring (and don't click on that link if you're squeamish about such things, by the way). Feeling hopelessly unready for parenthood in the practical as well as the psychological sense (but what about those forty-two reviews of different nappy types and seventy-eight articles on slings that I need to read before I can even decide what's best to order??). Facing the paradox that, despite this hopeless unreadiness, I was nevertheless stuck with hoping that I'd go into labour in the next few weeks, since the alternative presented distinct disadvantages both in terms of eating away at my maternity leave and thus diminishing the amount of time I could afford to spend at home after birth, and in terms of facing a possible induction and the consequent medicalised labour that I really hoped to avoid. Facing the fact that I was never going to feel ready, that there was just never going to be a morning when I woke up and thought "Aha! I now feel 100% confident about dealing with whatever challenges parenthood may present me. Bring on labour!" and so really, probably the best thing was for me just to go ahead and go into labour and find out that, like millions of parents before and after me, when it came to the crunch [1] I'd actually deal with parenthood perfectly well.

This time two years ago, I was filling my system with folic acid, in the form of huge red pills containing a dozen other nutritional goodies into the bargain and looking like the kind of thing you might give to a sick horse rather than to a healthy woman who's merely contemplating pregnancy. Waiting with bated breath to find out just how poor my fertility would be when finally put to the test. Feeling glad that at least I'd finally find out one way or the other, after all the am-I-leaving-it-too-late-and-what-if-I-can't-at-all years of my twenties and thirties. Feeling so boggled at the idea of me, me, being a parent that the alternative scenario of months of negative tests, increasing anxiety, increasing investigations, increasing unsuccessful treatment, that I'd read about so often, seemed much easier to picture.

And this time now? Everything I do is fitted around decisions of whether it will be compatible with taking care of a baby, whether Barry is available to mind the baby while I do something else, what the effect will be on Jamie. Having a shower is an exercise in logistics. Putting dangerous or delicate things out of reach is such a part of our lives it no longer needs commenting on. We have a gorgeous, exhausting, active, exploring, wonderfully adorable eleven-month-old baby making his way round furniture and grabbing/banging/mouthing everything he can. And life, while it has previously been considerably simpler and less frustrating, has never been happier.

[1] For a minute there, I was giong to write 'when push came to shove'. On balance, though, I decided against it.

Place your bets now, ladies and gentlemen!

2005-11-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

Following a somewhat heated argument between my husband and myself as to whether the overall effects of weaning Jamie at this stage are likely to be good (his view) or bad (my view), I felt it might be helpful to get as much information as possible on how it's worked out with other children. (Yes, I know the plural of 'anecdote' isn't 'data', but anecdotes can still be useful for giving a general idea of what sorts of things might happen.)

Anyway. That is just the essential background. The salient point is this: I have just made a post to an Internet parenting group explaining the above and stating, clearly, that what I am after here is experiences rather than opinions.

The question, dear readers, is this: How long will it be before someone decides that what that means is "But what I _really_ need is your opinion" and proceeds, accordingly, to give it?

Bets may be placed either on that, or on how many people will do so, or on both. There are probably other potential betting topics involved, such as how persistent people will be in insisting that their belief is the one and only objectively correct way to bring up a child and how long it will be before someone invokes the name of Dr Sears, but let's keep it simple here.

Place your bets now, ladies and gentlemen!

Remember, remember

2005-11-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

5th November is Bonfire Night in the UK. We'd intended to go to one of the public firework displays, but in the end, because it was cold rainy weather and our new house has a wonderful view over the town, we just went there.

The main bedroom now has:

A gorgeous thick squnchy-under-the-toes honey-coloured carpet

Two pine wardrobes, one for each of us

A super-duper-king-size bed, all ready made up with lovely fresh bedding.

What more could anyone want for sitting and watching fireworks?

Barry had seen all this before, as he'd taken delivery of it all (and made the bed up, of course), but I hadn't. So I had a wonderful time seeing how good the bedroom looked, as well as the new carpet in the living and dining room downstairs - light-coloured apart from the extension at the end of the dining room, which is going to be my study. I'd picked out a rich reddish-brown colour for that, and it looked even better once it was on the floor.

Then, after I'd admired all of that, we dimmed the lights in the bedroom and looked out over the lights of the town, watching all the fireworks going off in different places. Jamie watched them as well for a bit and then crawled round on the new carpet, pulling the under-bed drawers out and pushing them back and climbing into the suitcase of things that Barry had brought over from our rented house, and eventually lay in between the two of us nursing until he fell asleep peacefully in the middle of the huge bed. Barry and I talked about inconsequential stuff - where the furniture and other things would go, mostly. And we looked out at the dark night so full of lights. I pictured us doing the same thing on Bonfire Night time after time, in the years to come, children getting older and sitting with us to watch, just one of the many, many things we'll do together in this house, one of the many memories that Jamie and any younger brothers or sisters he has will grow up with, one of the uncountable things we will do together as a family.

House theme

2005-11-05T02:08:00.000-08:00

(The theme, unfortunately, being "Bloody HELL, the previous owners did a cruddy job on this house.")

Question: You have a wooden floor with a hole in. What do you use to fix it?

If you are currently thinking "Is that a trick question? Obviously you'd use wood - what else would you use, for goodness' sake?" then you aren't the people we bought the house from. Which is nice, because it means a) you're probably sane, and b) I don't have to stick pins in your effigy.

Let me backtrack. Having finally (hallelujiah) bought this house, we have some leeway about getting it in order, because the contract on the rented house we're currently living in lasts until December 28th. Which is very convenient, given the amount of stuff that needed doing. However, we don't particularly want to stay in the rented house for all that long - it's quite small, lots of our stuff is in storage, and there isn't enough room to have all the immediate relatives to stay for Jamie's upcoming birthday, which would cause some disappointment. So, we've set our moving date for November 8th (ulp) which will give us time to be at least somewhat settled in time for Jamie to have a birthday party. Hence, my husband has been working rather hard to get things sorted out before then.

One of the things we wanted to get sorted was the carpets. The main bedroom has (well, had until Tuesday) one of those inlaid wooden floors that looks rather attractive but doesn't really give the place the nice cosy feel that we want for our bedroom, particularly with the baby crawling around. So changing that was high on our list of things to do. When the previous owners moved out and the living room was cleared, we discovered that the carpet in there was rucked up and could do with changing as well, and given the obvious advantages in doing this while the house was still empty and there was no furniture to be moved out of the way, we decided we might as well go ahead and do that too. And, in for a penny, in for getting on for a couple of thousand - we also decided to change the dining room carpet, which was a somewhat icky colour and had seen better days.

We also wanted to buy a super-duper large new bed and get that delivered prior to the move, along with some new bedroom wardrobes, since there weren't any fitted cupboards. This meant that the timing of things started getting somewhat important, since clearly there would be certain flaws in a plan to have the carpet put down after the bedroom furniture was in place. So, we booked the carpet fitters for Wednesday so that the furniture could be delivered later in the week. As you may or may not know, removal of previous floor covering is not included in carpet fitting services, so we (meaning Barry) had to get that done before Wednesday - a procedure that involves leaving a border of nails sticking out of the floor, and is therefore incompatible with caring for an eleven-month-old child. So this was going to have to be on a day when I was home to take care of Jamie. On the weekend, we had a non-negotiable appointment to visit my mother for a major lunch in honour of my cousin, who was visiting from South Africa. The fairly inexorable conclusion from all this was that the one and only day Barry could rip up the existing carpets and wooden flooring was Tuesday. No leeway, no wiggle room - the job had to be done that day, and be completed before day's end.

Which was perfectly doable. Ripping up that amount of carpet and flooring in a day is not the kind of pleasant, relaxing experience that's ever going to make it onto the Red Letter Days list, but it's manageable. Barry set off confidently expecting to have completed that and a couple of other small technicalities involving phone lines by the end of the day and still make it home in time to cook supper at a reasonable hour.

All was proceeding on schedule until he finished ripping up the bedroom underlay. And discovered that the previous owners had patched a hole in the floor with a piece of cheap drywall.

(I don't know if the USA has that word. It's the stuff you use for putting up partition-type walls. Walls, that is, as opposed to floors. You know - those bits of the room that don't generally have people walking on them on a regular basis, and therefore do not have to display anything much in the way of strength or structural integrity.)

(OK, OK, before certain friends of mine comment on that last - most of the time they don't, anyway. I know there are exceptions. But the whole Fanfic Filming Fiasco story is a different one for another day, and anyway I had nothing to do with it and didn't even know Barry at the time and was miles away when it happened and you CAN'T PROVE OTHERWISE. So there.)

Cheap drywall, ladies and gentlemen. Not even good quality. One good stamp, and it was ex-drywall. Fortunately my husband has excellent reflexes, and was able to yank his foot out before it hit the downstairs ceiling.

So there we were, sixteen hours away from carpet delivery, with a hole in the floor.

Which entailed a mad rush to the local DIY store, hoping desperately all the way that they'd actually still be open when we got there, because we weren't altogether sure what we'd do if they weren't. The good news is, they were. The bad news is, their wood cutting service wasn't. Barry's saw is currently one of the many things packed away inaccessibly in the garage, since we hadn't actually expected to have to saw anything in the time we spent in rented accommodation.

We charged round the aisles, buying wood and a saw and a drill, and headed back to the house. Barry cut the piece of wood to size and fitted it. Since this left him unavailable for vacuuming up rotted underlay from the floors, I got that job. Since the whole nails-sticking-out-of-the-floor thing was still an issue, the baby had to spend this time in a carrier on my back.

I cannot tell you how wonderful Jamie was. He was in that carrier for upwards of an hour while I did this, and he put up with it beautifully. He did try the Let's Grab Mummy's Hair game once, but after that he resigned himself to his fate and just uttered the occasional pitiful whimper. Or maybe that was my husband.

By the time we finished floor-related activities at the house, it was nearly nine o'clock and whatever it was Barry had been planning to do with phone lines (something technical, don't ask me, I am so embarrassingly girly when it comes to that sort of stuff) had ended up on the already overcrowded to-do list for another day. And we still had to do the food shopping. So we did. As quickly as possible. Then we went home and Barry left me cooking the simplest dinner possible according to his explicit instructions while he had a desperately-needed shower. (My girliness unfortunately doesn't include cooking skills. Bah. Worst of both worlds.) And, since the baby is unfortunately not of the variety that will go to sleep on his own in his cot when put down, he and I finally made it to bed around 1 a.m. What wondrous parents we are.

So that's how we spent Tuesday evening. That, and speculating on what kind of mental illness leads one to believe that drywall makes a feasible patch in a floor.

On the plus side, we should be spending _next_ Tuesday evening in the house. Overwhelmed by unpacking, mind you, but at least we'll be there. I may or may not have time to post before then. Given that we still have all our packing to do before then and it is now after 2 a.m. in the early hours of Saturday, I'm guessing that 'not' is the key word there. So, the half-dozen or so posts I keep meaning to make on various aspects of life, the universe, and everything, will just have to wait once more.

A resolution

2005-10-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

I realised something today. I realised I'm too much of a blogging perfectionist, and I'm allowing that to spoil my blogging pleasure.

I take a fair bit of pride in my writing - it's something that on a good day, when the planets align correctly and I put a lot of work into it, I can actually do pretty well. This was a large part of the reason why I started a blog. But, of course, once I'd started it, the pressure was on. If I'm writing for public consumption, I ought to get it Right. That means interesting, well-written posts only.

Unfortunately, I've realised that it's come to mean a degree of perfectionism that just isn't fun any more. Not only do I not make posts about the minutiae of my life because they don't seem interesting to anyone who doesn't happen to be me, I don't even blog about deeper topics because there's so much work involved in writing and rewriting to get them to be the perfect incisive critiques I want. I've stopped the kind of writing I used to do in my journal before I got this blog, the general rambles where I just wrote down whatever was happening in my life without caring all that much about how good the writing was. Any thoughts of doing that are submerged instantly in the mental image of people shaking their heads and tutting "Well, for a minute there I actually thought she was interesting and worth reading. Boy, was I ever wrong! Oh, well, one to cut from the blogroll."

And I've realised I'm losing something enjoyable here. Not even just the writing, but the reading it back a month or a year later to remember what I was up to at the time and chuckle or nod over it. All that's been sacrificed on the altar of perfectionism. I'm letting the best be the enemy of the good, or of the (heaven forfend) OK.

Which is ironic, really, given the title of this blog. I'm fine on the whole concept of good-enough mothering. I resist with most of the fibres of my being any notion that I should be perfectionist as a mother. Now it looks as though I need to concentrate on the concept of good-enough writing.

So, in future, I'm going to make a real effort just to write stuff down that I want to write down. If I really feel it's too boring (or too personal) to inflict on the on-line world, then I'll put it in my journal. But maybe I'll make more of an effort to put the mundane day-to-day stuff on here as well. If anyone doesn't like it - well, I might have to stop holding the gun to their head to make them read it. I guess they'll deal with that.

In honour of this resolution, I shall report that this evening we tried Jamie with some of our rice at dinnertime, and let him have a go with a spoon. (He figured out how to feed himself finger foods when he was eight months old, so finger foods have been what he's eaten from that point on. We're all about the low-intensity parenting here.) He actually did surprisingly well at getting the spoon into his mouth and getting food off it. What he couldn't figure out was the refilling bit of the procedure, and despite repeated attempts to demonstrate him, he just kept sucking on the empty spoon in an attempt to get the last molecules of flavour out of it. Until he got frustrated and started banging the plate on the high-chair tray and yelling.

All of which may not be of general interest, but was nevertheless exceedingly cute and impressive.

Well, pull up a chair and call the cat a bastard

2005-10-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

I just did one of those 'What Character From Series Such-And-Such Are You' quizzes, this one for Discworld characters. To my considerable pleasure, it appears I am my all-time favourite character, Nanny Ogg.

I shall now paste in the code that the webpage assures me will make my results appear. So this post will now be completed either by a rather nice picture of Nanny Ogg with some text of dubious accuracy explaining why I'm her, or by a ghastly load of gibberish (cue jokes about being unable to tell the difference).

You scored as Gytha (Nanny) Ogg. You are Nanny Ogg! A talented witch, able to make yourself at home wherever you are, and insist that Greebo is just a big softie. You enjoy drinking, a lot, and singing about a hedgehog. You have a huge family, and get your daughters-in-law to do most of the housework. You are kind and gentle, and help put people at ease.

Gytha (Nanny) Ogg

69%

Lord Havelock Vetinari

63%

Carrot Ironfounderson

63%

Esmerelda (Granny) Weatherwax

44%

The Librarian

44%

Greebo

44%

Commander Samuel Vimes

38%

Death

38%

Cohen The Barbarian

25%

Rincewind

13%

Which Discworld Character are you like (with pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

Some more from Tunbridge Wells

2005-10-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

After posting the last post, I rather belatedly got round to doing something I'd been meaning to do for several days, which is write a reply to the recent article 'Lactose Intolerant' on public breastfeeding, by Christine Flowers.

(Edited even more belatedly, to a) get the title right and b) change the link, since the Philly Daily News seems to take you to a sign-in page rather than to the article itself, which is something I always find rather a pain. Instead, I've linked back to Hathor's blog, where I found it in the first place. With apologies to anyone who's been trying to read it in the past couple of weeks.)

Anyway, here is a copy of the e-mail I sent her:

Dear Ms Flowers,
I recently read your article on public breastfeeding in the Philadelphia Daily News, in which you expressed the view that breastfeeding women should either find places out of the public eye to do so, or else pump milk at home to take with them.

It's not quite clear to me whether you genuinely don't realise how much more difficult this would make breastfeeding, or whether you simply don't care. (If the former, I'd recommend 'Getting Off The Back Room Team' for a good account of the problems that caused one new mother, formerly of your way of thinking, to change her mind. And that's even before we get to the issue of what mothers breastfeeding a second or third baby are meant to do with their small children while sequestered in the toilets for the time it takes them to feed their baby.)

However, the simple fact is that preventing women from breastfeeding whereever they happen to be with their babies does, indeed, make breastfeeding much more difficult. The result of this is a marked reduction both in the number of women who breastfeed at all and in the length of time for which they breastfeed. Thus, far more babies are denied the health benefits of breastfeeding.

Your policy on public breastfeeding is, therefore, harmful to the health of babies. And, yes, I'm afraid that does indeed trump your discomfort at the thought that an infant might be attached to a nipple somewhere in your immediate vicinity.

If public breastfeeding is to be banned because people feel that they have an inalienable right not to be discomfited, there's also the small matter of where it stops. I have known people who, on identical grounds, feel that Bibles should be banned from hotel rooms, or even that shops selling religious items should be banned from public streets altogether. There are people who feel that couples of the same sex should not be allowed displays of affection, and there are people who feel this way about couples of the opposite sex. There are people who feel that women should never venture out in low-cut dresses or above-knee skirts, lest the eyes of others be offended by a glimpse of exposed flesh - there are, indeed, people who feel that women should appear in public only when veiled heavily from head to toe, or not appear in public at all.

And there are people who feel that it would be better if we all accepted that living in a free society means that people will sometimes do things that conflict with other people's personal preferences, and if we wish to be able to continue doing things that other people might dislike, we may have to accept that others will sometimes do things we dislike.

In response to the hackneyed analogies with smoking, loud music and urination that you were about to trot out again, I would like to point out the simple and obvious difference that seems to have escaped you: It is not possible to avert one's ears from sound waves or one's nostrils from smells. The laws of physics prevent it.

It is, however, perfectly possible, and indeed astonishingly easy, to avert one's eyes. Why not try it next time?

(I note that two weeks down the line, she still doesn't seem to have replied. Lost for words, maybe?)

Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells

2005-10-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

(I don't know whether they have that saying in other countries, so to avoid any confusion, I should probably explain that I'm not actually in Tunbridge Wells. Or, for that matter, all that disgusted. It's an expression for people who write to newspapers.)

Some weeks back, I wrote a letter to the Guardian in response to this article by Carol 'Oh, it's only other people who aren't allowed to be sanctimonious' Sarler.

It didn't get published, which is OK - other letters on the subject did, so at least her views weren't allowed to pass unchallenged, which is what I really cared about. (Though it's a shame that one of the letter-writers seemed to be out to prove Sarler right about the 'sanctimonious' tag. For the record, Ms Conway - my mother had a full-time paid job during my childhood, my sister and I were looked after by au pairs while she was at work, none of them would have been allowed to smoke in our house, and I don't know or care whether any of them were spotty, given the utter irrelevance of their skin condition to their ability to take care of small children. Nor do I know or care who, if anyone, watched me take my first steps. I do, however, care about the fact that I had two wonderful parents who left me in no doubt about their love for me, who were fully involved in my life, and who did an excellent job of bringing me up, jobs outside the home and all. And, as a bonus, somewhere along the way it seems they taught me not to stereotype or be rude about people just because they happen to work in the childcare professions. Shame you aren't teaching your children the same.)

Ahem. Sorry. Where was I?

Oh, yes - the letter I wrote. I wasn't really expecting it to get published, so I wasn't disappointed (sob, sniff). But, since I put a moderate amount of effort into it, I'd quite like it to be seen by someone other than me and whichever underling files 'em in the round file at the Guardian's offices (hmmm - that saying doesn't really work as well with the advent of e-mail, does it?) So, for your entertainment or lack thereof, my comments on Sarler's article.

I’m sorry to learn that Carol Sarler regrets her decision to work outside the home. (I’m presuming that that’s the reason for the sheer level of vitriol in ‘The mother of all excuses’, September 3rd. That level of anger at a harmless personal choice made by others is usually an indicator of deep-rooted insecurity about ones own life choices.)

Of course, it’s a shame that this has led her into the kind of ridiculous stereotyping she indulged in in the article. I suspect she already knows perfectly well how inaccurate her picture is of stay-home mothers spending their time in nail parlours while the children obligingly get on with their own pursuits. It bears no more resemblance to the average stay-home parent’s real life than the old image of the selfish, heartless corporate woman, abandoning her children to daycare while she climbs the career ladder, bears to the life of the average employed mother. Really, Sarler should have known better than to write such rubbish.

But, for her own sake as well as the sake of parents everywhere, I hope she finds a more constructive way of dealing with her insecurities in future. This sort of petty bitching about other people’s lifestyles helps nobody, harms many, and distracts all our attentions from the genuinely important issues that parents have to deal with.

Oh, and...

2005-10-08T22:25:00.000-07:00

...my appraisal went fine. As much as I dislike the idea of having to document the ways in which I go about keeping up to date (using all the appropriate jargon and buzz words) just so that someone can pat me on the head for it and tell me what a good little doctor I am, the appraisal itself is a rather nice chance just to sit and chat about stuff.

There was one moment that I will reiterate here, as it so encapsulates what I hate about appraisal. (That and having to faff around getting the paperwork ready, but at least the latter is just something I hate as a time-consuming nuisance, rather than something I hate on principle.) I'd mentioned to the appraiser that one of the things I really liked about this practice was that there were other GPs here of about my own age and experience level. At the place I previously worked for three years, both the partners were men of around 50, and we didn't have a lot in common beyond all being doctors at the same practice. I got on perfectly well with them, there were no problems, but we didn't exactly sit around and chat about things. Although it wasn't something I'd dwelt on, I did miss the kind of cameraderie that I remembered from my hospital days - just having other juniors around doing the same job that you could chat to, have lunch with, get together for an evening out with. (We haven't managed the last one yet, but we're working on it.)

So, when we got to the end of the appraisal and started filling out the form on which I was supposed to list my objectives for accomplishment before next year's appraisal, she suggested that in view of what I'd said, I could put down 'building a social support network' as one of my goals for next year.

The hell I will, sunshine. Making friends and getting a bit of a social life is something I'm doing for fun, not because I feel I ought to. I'm buggered if I'm going to put it on the to-do list of things I have to tick off to keep government bureaucrats happy that I'm giving full attention to my Personal And Professional Development. Let's keep that as Professional Development, thank you, and let's keep my personal development as my own business.

I found a polite way of saying this that didn't involve obscenities or predictions of sodomy (in fact, I think I said something dreadfully middle class and twee about how I 'rather loathed' the idea), and we left it at that.

Oh, well. That's that over with for another year, then.

House glee

2005-10-07T23:14:00.000-07:00

We are (about to be) homeowners.

Having never actually bought a house before (I did the girly thing and moved into Barry's), I'd forgotten that exchange of contracts isn't the point at which we actually own the house. It is, however, the point at which everything becomes legally binding. No backing out, no demands for a few thousand extra, no changing the terms, no swoppies back. As of the 20th October, this house will become ours.

After all the general messing around, worries, bad feeling and last-minute panics, I'm not sure if 'glee' is entirely the right word for what I'm feeling, but there didn't seem to be a musical term for 'worn down to numbness by it all and just distantly relieved that nothing else went wrong', so 'glee' will have to do. At least it didn't end up being 'House deceptive cadence'.

House progression

2005-10-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

Let us consign to the trashpits of memory the adrenalin build-up of this morning as I fought my way out of the traffic I was trapped in within a mile of work (major crash on the ring road up ahead, judging from the amount of time I was sitting there and the ambulance that dashed past us), arrived late at work, and discovered that I'd had two extra appointments booked for the slot of time that was supposed to be left free so that I'd be on time for my appraisal even if I overran, and, oh, by the way, dear old Mrs Jones is here to see you again wanting an emergency appointment, so when the hell am I going to find time to make this phone call and get the money transferred?

Let us, instead, skip forwards and focus on the fact that it was indeed transferred. Or so the very nice man on the other end of the bank's helpline assured me, before reading me some sort of Standard Disclaimer about their total lack of responsibility if 'system failures' then meant that the money mysteriously failed to show up in our solicitor's account before close of day. If it does go through and everything else goes according to plan (believe me, I am vividly aware of the size of that 'if'), then exchange of contracts will take place today. So I will get home tonight to find that either we're once again homeowners, or my husband has been reduced to a gibbering wreck and collapsed in a heap sobbing "The contracts! The terrible contracts!" I can hardly wait.

House accelerando

2005-10-06T23:10:00.000-07:00

Well, after finding out that some of the necessary work on the house was less necessary than we thought, due to a misunderstanding about the age of the boiler, and deciding that in view of that we'd agree to the vendor's asking price, and then getting into further disputes about indemnities for the road access and mains water supply and, by the way, just where was that document that the people doing the official searches were supposed to have come up with weeks ago... we were finally informed that, yes, the vendors would sign the indemnities their solicitor had been making a fuss about signing, and now that that was sorted out could we do exchange of contracts tomorrow.

You bet we could. Of course, it would mean coming up with ten per cent of the house price by tomorrow morning in order to make the downpayment, but that wasn't a problem thanks to that nice man at the BMA who talked to me all those years ago - ten, in fact - about investing some of my money, and actually overcame my phobia of all things financial for long enough to get me to sign on the dotted line of a ten-year investment plan. Which had duly matured last month. Payment had shown up in my account on Monday. We were all set to go.

I logged on to our bank's website for the formality of the few keystrokes and mouse clicks which would be needed to transfer the money from my account to Barry's so that he could pay the solicitor tomorrow, already planning the relaxing evening with my e-mails that would follow the sorting out of this detail.

The 'insufficient funds' screen came up.

Repeated attempts at transfer were made, with the same result.

A call to the bank's helpline yielded the information that, actually, transfers took seven working days to go through, and so we could expect the money by Wednesday. And, no, they couldn't arrange an overdraft in the meantime.

Increasingly panicked discussion with the nice lady on the helpline, who had probably been treasuring hopes of a quiet evening before we phoned, eventually clarified that this information was not entirely accurate. The seven days in question had actually started three working days before the payment showed up on the website. So, the funds should be available for transfer by tomorrow morning. In which case, one phone call from me should get it sorted out tomorrow (since I'm not sure how secure the work computers are as far as financial information goes).

If not - oh, well. Sufficient unto the day, and all that. Meanwhile, tomorrow I also have to deal with my appraisal, which is now nearly a year late (good going on an annual appraisal) and without the correct documents, since the ones I'm supposed to have are currently somewhere in storage hundreds of miles from here. And with a PDP that consists of a few words scribbled in biro on a scraggy piece of paper. Think my appraiser will get the message that I'm really not too bothered about appraisals?

But what about the maaaarriage phoooobic?

2005-10-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

The general Crud Quotient of Tuesday a couple of weeks back was reduced yet further by finding, on checking my comments, that I had a new reader. I love knowing that people are actually reading this.

Trista, the reader in question, is someone that I previously encountered when she commented on the Leery Polyp about her partner's labour. I was interested enough in her comment to track her back to her blog, where I was pleased to see that she not only has a lovely new daughter, but she is also a Harry Potter fan. So I left a comment about Book 6 on her blog. I'm presuming that it's from there that she found this blog. Either that, or she found it via some other route by total coincidence, which would mean the Internet is smaller and scarier than I thought.

I've had more comments since then, from new readers and old, and I'm delighted about those as well. However, the reason Trista is getting special mention (apart from the fact that I actually started this darned post two weeks ago when she was the only person who'd commented) is because, when I went back to her blog to see what was going on in her life, she'd just mentioned a theory that I thought was rather interesting. Namely, the idea that all homophobic rhetoric resides in a "But what about the children? We must protect the chiiiiiiildreeeeeeen!" mentality. (Mocking tone mine, BTW, original thought hers.)

Which, of course, got me thinking about to what extent this was true and whether I could think of any examples of incidences that didn't fit that pattern. Whereupon I promptly realised that this tied in beautifully with something I'd read the previous day in the Sun (one of our lower-level tabloids, for the non-UKian readers) and had vaguely wanted to rant about but hadn't quite figured out how to lead into. How's that for good timing? (Well, admittedly it would have been even better timing if I'd actually managed to finish writing this darned post at the time. But better late than never, and all that.)

The article in question was about the Army's latest decision concerning gays. In a refreshing deviation from expected tradition, that line is not going to be followed by a story of cringe-making homophobia. No - it seems the Army's latest plan is to allow 'married' gay couples to live in Army accommodation for married people.

(I put 'married' in quotes there because, although the Sun kept referring to married gay couples throughout the article, my understanding was that what's being legalised in the UK is not actual gay marriage but civil contracts, or something of the dull and official-sounding sort. Exactly what the difference is in practice, or whether there even is a difference in practice, I don't know. If anyone actually has a clue on this subject, by all means enlighten me.)

Anyway, regardless of whether or not it's the same as straight marriage in the eyes of the law, it seems it'll be the same in the eyes of the Army's accommodation offices. Gay couples who marry will be able to claim married accommodation in the same way as straight people can, it appears. Which had, of course, got the Sun's knickers in a bunch, because, well, can't go giving gay people the same rights as straight people, can we? But they hadn't - and I didn't think about this until now - taken the "But what about the chiiiiiiildreeeeeen?" line. Their line was that it Wasn't Fair.

It was unfair, they claimed, to committed but unmarried heterosexual couples. For example - what about a couple who want to marry but can't because one or the other is still encumbered by a previous marriage and the divorce is taking a long time to come through? As well as all the other disadvantages of this situation, they'd be unable to claim the same marital accommodation that a married gay couple can now claim. And this, say the Sun, is unfair.

And, yes, it is. But it's unfair in the general life-is-unfair sense. It's unfair that some couples are stuck in a situation where, however much they want to seal their lifelong commitment to each other with an official ceremony, they simply aren't allowed to do so, and it adds an extra dash of unfairness to the pot when they run into practical disadvantages as a result of being unmarried, such as losing out on the option to move into decent accommodation with most expenses paid. You know, it's really terribly obliging of the Sun to provide such a good illustration of why gay marriage should be allowed. (Oh. Wait.)

But the thing is - a straight couple who are already unable to get married and hence to claim married accommodation aren't any less able to do either of those things just because a gay couple now can. There isn't a finite amount of marriedness in the world that is being unfairly stolen from the straight couple by all those upstart gay couples who weren't really entitled to it. There is, admittedly, a finite amount of married Army accommodation in the world, but that doesn't mean an automatic cause-and-effect between the ban on straight unmarried couples and the new permission for gay couples. The ban on unmarried straight couples claiming married accommodation existed already, and allowing gay couples to claim that accommodation doesn't make unmarried straight couples less able to claim it than they already were.

There is absolutely no benefit involved to anyone in considering this to be a zero-sum game where, if one person isn't entitled to something they want, everyone else ought to be prevented from getting it as well because It's Not Fair otherwise. It's very natural to feel resentment on seeing someone else able to get what you desperately want but can't have. But assuming that other people ought to be prevented from getting something just because you can't have it - that's just childish.

I did at least feel some sympathy for people in that position, though, unlike those in the other example the Sun came out with. Plunging further into sheer silliness, the journalist asked rhetorically: what about couples who were simply living together, committed to each other lifelong, but who didn't see a need to make the position official by getting married?

Well, what about them? When they discover they can't get the accommodation they want without getting married they will, by definition, be transformed into couples who do see a need to get married, that's what about them. And it's then up to them to do the necessary. Considering that the necessary, in this case, is two visits to the local registry office (one to get the licence, one for the marriage ceremony) and a smallish fee, I think they'll find that this is perfectly feasible.

I was all set to rant about people who "don't see a need to get married" but expect to get the same privileges as married people anyway, before it occurred to me that there isn't really much point in ranting about figments of the Sun's imagination. I suspect that couples who plan to spend the rest of their lives together but refuse to make it official even if that's all it would take to get them a decent house don't actually exist outside these sorts of ill-thought-out articles. However, since the concept of people acting this way did at least provide me with a decent title to this post which I can't be bothered to change, I will say: just in case there's anyone out there who really is being that silly, get over it. And if you can't, then at least stop blaming gay couples for it.

(Come to think of it, maybe Trista was right after all. Maybe the link between her "But what about the chiiiiildreeeeen?" theory and the Sun's article is that the Sun's line was actually "But what about the people who just want to act like chiiiiiiildreeeeeen?")

"Bother!" said Pooh. "Eeyore, grab the paperwork and start inventing some sort of plausible-sounding Personal Development Plan."

2005-09-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

My absence has now been long enough that I figured I should write something explaining what I'm doing, so....

Last weekend the in-laws were visiting for Barry's birthday, and this weekend we were visiting the in-laws for Barry's uncle's birthday. Both of these were pleasant interludes (especially Barry's uncle's birthday, which was a surprise party arranged for his 70th, complete with disco and buffet meal, both excellent, and which gave us the chance to see people we haven't seen since the wedding and show Jamie off to the assembled hordes) but I am now even more severely behind than usual on all the blogging and other Internet-related activity I want to do. So, I was looking forward to catching up this coming Tuesday (my weekly day off) and next weekend.

And then, while driving home tonight, I suddenly remembered that my appraisal is the week after next, and I'm supposed to have completed a bunch of paperwork in preparation for this by Monday week. I'd planned to take the forms with me this weekend in order to get them done while the doting grandparents watched the baby, but unfortunately this otherwise brilliant plan was scuppered by me forgetting all about it at the crucial time. I am somewhat annoyed with myself for this.

Oh, well. I'll scribble something down before it has to be handed in, but it is yet one more thing keeping me from the dazzlingly incisive posts I was planning to make. (Yes, they would have been dazzlingly incisive, thank you very much. Hah. Prove otherwise.)

Meanwhile, it's extremely nice to know that people are reading this blog. Hello and welcome to the new people who've posted to the comments sections, and hello again to what now seem to be some regular readers. I do actually own the No-Cry Sleep Solution already, but thanks anyway to the person who offered to send it. And, Em, thanks for sharing the post about the different things you tried with Micah's sleep - excellent read. Did things ever improve with the 45 minutes of crying? (I remember you posting about it on the group, and someone suggesting putting him down earlier.) And the house... ah, yes, the house. Well, the story is now longer and more complicated than I can face going into, but currently we are going ahead with the purchase after sorting out just enough of the issues to make us feel that we didn't quite have grounds for a last-minute dropping-out. Things should be sorted, one way or t'other, within the next week. We hope.

House discord

2005-09-13T22:44:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether anyone remembers the story so far of our house-hunting troubles, but here is the latest less-than-thrilling instalment.

We knew there was several thousand pounds worth of work we wanted done on the house we bought, and we'd borne that in mind when bidding for it. Unfortunately, the survey showed up several thousand pounds worth of more work that needed doing. As in "If you don't get this done pronto the house is likely to burn down/blow up/fall apart."

Since the agreed price on the house, plus the price we had already anticipated paying for the work we wanted done, took us to our limit, we decided to ask the vendors to reduce the price by the amount needed to cover the cost of the stuff that absolutely needed doing just to get the house into liveable condition. We thought this was fair enough - quite apart from the small matter of what we could afford, the house simply wasn't worth what it would have cost once the extra repair costs were figured in on top of what we'd already agreed to pay. (It would also still leave us paying more than that amount out of our own pockets to cover work that we really wanted to have done, like getting a decent hot water system and a good quality driveway, but that wasn't absolutely essential). Strictly between me and this blog and the entire Internet, I will admit that we'd even have settled for slightly less of a price reduction than that.

That last is, however, a moot point, since the vendors are not prepared to knock anything off the price.

So, once again, we are house-hunting. And this time, with very little in the way of options. There just isn't much on the market at this time of year. Because of this, we haven't yet officially withdrawn from the sale, and did in fact seriously discuss just going ahead with it and getting the extra money from, um.... actually, we haven't worked that out yet. Taking out an even larger mortgage and busting our butts trying to pay it, I suppose.

I do not want to do this. It isn't just the practical aspect of not wanting to be stretched that far on the repayments, although that is a not inconsiderable point. It's also that I'm damned angry about their attitude, and do not see why they should get away with it.

On top of this, today I finally got round to ringing the local La Leche League leader (whose number I finally got from the health visitor) to get the details of the local meetings, and discovered that there was one this morning which I'd missed. And I checked the blog of a friend of ours to see what she and her SO had been up to lately, and what they had been up to, it appeared, was a trip last weekend to a town within driving distance of where we are now living. Not only that, but one of the attractions they went to was the same place we went to on Sunday. And we didn't know and missed a chance to meet up with them. We haven't seen them for more than a year, and probably won't get a chance for another several months, and it would have been lovely to go see this place together with them, if we'd only known.

(I don't think they were deliberately intending to ignore us. Though I suppose I can't be sure of that - maybe they think we'll have turned into boring parenting-oriented people who can't discuss anything other than the offspring, and they want to steer well clear. Hey - I might have done that, but Barry hasn't! Honestly!)

So, all in all, much of today fell under the general heading of 'Bah'.

Positive points about the day.... well, after the events of last week, I suppose that positive points about the day should include the fact that we're safe and well and in no danger of going hungry or thirsty or losing our entire worldly goods to rising flood waters. And I do indeed count my blessings on all those points. However, more mundane and specific positive points about the day include the following:

1. There is one available house that looks like exactly what we want, and that we've arranged to go and see Saturday. So it's possible that we could be sorted out by this weekend. (As a bonus, the house is available very quickly, and we would in fact have it before we'd have had the other one, so we might end up benefitting.)

2. It seems the house we are now renting, which we have on a six-month contract with option to renew, will definitely be available for the next six months as well. So, even if Saturday's house doesn't suit us or is sold before we get there, we could just go on renting and find somewhere next year, with the pressure off.

3. As far as the LLL thing goes, Jamie is apparently now at an age where the leader feels I could quite reasonably attend either the babies' or the toddlers' group, or both. So that means there are two meetings each month I could go to. And they're on my day off. So that's something to look forward to.

And, you know - Barry and I went for a walk into town today to post some letters, and just enjoyed the late afternoon sunshine and walking and chatting and being together, with our son. As cheesy as this is, I really do feel that the main thing is that the three of us are together and healthy and doing all right. I'm pretty darned content with the way my life is going.

No comment

2005-09-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

After my post last night, I came back a few minutes later and was quite surprised to see that I'd already got three comments. Not that many people read the blog, so the odds of having three people reading it just at the point the post was published had to be tiny. But I was quite touched at the thought of people being so quick to comment, and looked to see what they had to say.

AND IT WAS BLOODY COMMENT SPAM. Which would have been annoying enough on any post, but on that particular one it was just too much. Fuckwits.

I've now discovered that word verification is available on comments, so hopefully that won't happen again, but unfortunately I can't find a way to delete existing comments in Blogger. The only option I had was to hide them, which meant that I had to bar any new comments on the post as well.

So, if anyone wanted to comment on that post, I'm sorry you weren't able to. Blame it on the comment spam.

:(

2005-09-05T22:25:00.000-07:00

It seems the more I listen to the news about Katrina, the more sickening it sounds. I have nothing to say on the subject that hasn't been said over and over, eloquently and heartrendingly, elsewhere, but it just felt wrong to blog about the daily crap in my life without so much as according a mention to the thousands and thousands dead, homeless, bereaved, suffering, shellshocked. And then there was this link I found which isn't even about Katrina, but about the sheer horrific extent to which everyday life can suck for too many people in the world even minus natural disasters (the post itself is sad enough, but if your heart isn't quite ripped all the way out already, read the comments).

There is nothing I can say right now that isn't trite and useless. All I know is, I've been holding my son even closer than usual. And I can't put into words how choked up I feel for those parents who will never again be able to do the same.

All in the perspective, I guess......

2005-09-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't describe myself as an attachment parent. Not because I have any particular objections to the philosophy (in fact, in practice it pretty much is the way I parent), but because I have objections towards the whole idea of having a Parenting Philosophy as such, rather than just doing whatever seems to work best for your family. But I do like hearing about the way other parents do things, especially parents who've thought about what they're doing rather than just doing what everyone else is doing. So I subscribe to a mailing list for attachment parents. (I don't play one on the Internet, BTW - the people on there know how I feel on the subject, and have in fact read my 'objections to the whole idea of a Parenting Philosophy' speech so many times that they're probably bored sick of it.)

Anyway, the other day, one of the mothers on there e-mailed us this link, in an e-mail titled "I think we've all been there...".

And, when I read it, it did indeed look familiar. Cries of how you're abandoning your baby in response to the mere mention of sleep training. Instant advice on what you really should be doing, but no attempt made to listen to what the problems are or to what's already been tried. Yup, I have certainly been on that board.

Somehow, though, I don't think that's quite what she meant. Boink, boink.

A minor milestone

2005-08-24T21:09:00.000-07:00

Jamie turned nine months old this past Saturday, and he's still nursing. Doing so as I type, for that matter, although that's by-the-by. This means that, should I ever want to train as a La Leche League leader, I could now do so.

This is rather a moot point, since I don't want to. (I like the idea of the counselling part of it, but not the organisational part.) But I still like knowing that it's something I can do, now. After all, I'm the girl who once felt that the main drawback to losing her virginity would be that, even though I wasn't expecting to meet a unicorn that needed subduing, it would be a shame to lose the option of doing so. I like potentials, possibilities, the extra richness of life that comes from having extra paths open.

And I like knowing that we've made it this far.

Best laid plans

2005-08-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

When Barry and I got engaged, we both agreed we wanted the conventional style of wedding with all the trimmings. Well, pretty much all - I've never seen the point of getting a limousine or horse-drawn carriage just to deliver you to the wedding, and I was, in the event, driven to the hotel in question in the aging car of my soon-to-be-in-laws. But we both agreed that we wanted to mark our exchange of vows with a long fancy white dress that I'd never wear again, with bridesmaids, with expensive flower arrangements, with a three-course meal for the hordes of friends and family who were in attendance, with dancing the night away afterwards.

So we set out to make it happen. We spent more than a year on the planning, and more of my mother's money than I feel comfortable telling you about on the execution, and went through all the ups and downs and squabbles and how-are-we-going-to-get-everything-done panics that go along with such an endeavour. And, as we sat going over the projected timetable for the day with the assistant manager of the hotel where we were holding it, I felt increasingly nervous. Not for traditional bridal reasons - I felt nothing but delight at the prospect of committing the rest of my life to this man - but because talking as though we could plan something like this seemed, to me, to be tempting fate. Surely Fate would look down on us, attention drawn by all this uppity planning, and give us a fat ol' finger? So many things could play havoc with our big day. Barry or I could get food poisoning or appendicitis and be too ill for the ceremony, the place could burn down, or something as everyday as pelting rain could ruin the plans we had of enjoying canapés and photos in the stunningly beautiful grounds. Why on earth were we being so presumptuous as to think that we could plan anything?

Because, as Barry pointed out to me when I mentioned these fears to him, it wasn't going to happen at all if we didn't plan it. (If you're a Pratchett fan, this would be an apt place to insert the joke about arranged weddings from Nanny Ogg's cookbook.) Yes, things could go wrong. But, all in all, the chance of things going wrong enough to ruin our wedding wasn't that great. And, however superstitious I might feel about it, planning the way we wanted things to go was not decreasing the chances of having them actually turn out that way. Quite the reverse, in fact.

I don't know whether many brides feel the way I did. It isn't something I've seen mentioned in any wedding magazine or wedding planner that I've read (and, believe me, I read many that year). What I do know is that nobody else ever said anything to me to indicate that they held that attitude. No-one said "Well, you can't really plan these things, you know" or "Plans? What a joke. My plan for my wedding went completely out of the window when [insert disaster here] happened" or "Look, just plan to get married to the man you love. What does the rest matter?" No-one thought there was anything strange about the fact that I preferred the idea of the day happening one way rather than another and was prepared to put a lot of effort into trying to affect the outcome of something that, ultimately, I did not have 100% control over. It was considered completely normal for me to care quite a bit about how the day went. And, while it was understood that ultimately the important thing wasn't that one day but the happiness of the marriage that would follow it, it was also understood all round that it wasn't an either-or, and wanting a great wedding day didn't indicate a lack of perspective or gratitude for the happy marriage that I ended up with.

For some reason, though, the attitude seems to change if your plans are for your labour rather than for any other important event in your life. There's been some discussion about birth-related issues in the blog world in the past week or so, and one theme that was touched on now and again in the comments was the old chestnut of birth being so essentially unplannable that anyone who uses an oxymoron like 'birth plan' is clearly a) hopelessly naive, and b) destined for the labour-from-hell of complications, technology, an eventual Caesarean and a lifetime of I-told-you-sos from the anti-birth-planning brigade.

Birth is inherently more unplannable than most other things in life, it's true. Unless your birth plan involves an elective Caesarian, you're unlikely to be able to pencil a slot into your diary. You can't plan the type of labour you get in the same way that you can plan to have a civil or religious wedding. You're more vulnerable than at other special times in your life, and you're more likely to run into complications. But births aren't in a special category of unplannableness all their own, the way people often seem to think of them. If you really couldn't care less about anything other than ending up with a baby at the end, then I'm happy for you, because your chances of getting the birth you want are excellent. But if you have preferences in the matter - whether they're for a drug-free birth or a pain-free birth, to avoid surgery or to avoid labour - then why not take steps to improve your chances of getting what you want?

Having a birth plan doesn't mean that you have delusions of grandeur concerning just what you can or can't control. It doesn't mean you think of yourself as better than other women who have different or absent birth plans or whose births just don't go according to any plan. (WTF was that about, anyway???) And it doesn't mean that some malevolent fate is going to take this as a cue to swoop in on you. It just means that you find out about your available options, put thought into considering how you might react to particular circumstances, and relay this information to other people likely to be involved in the birth.

Barry and I had the wedding day we wanted, and, fourteen and a half months later, I had the labour and birth I wanted. And, while I would never discount the role that luck played in both of those, I think it's also fair to say that neither would have happened without the planning. Things went well not in spite of the plans, but, in large part, because of them. The best laid plans of mice, men, brides and pregnant women may often go whatever the Scottish dialect is. But, more often, they come to pass as planned.

House da-capo-al-fine

2005-08-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

We looked at houses.

We discussed the relative merits of said houses as we headed round the supermarket for our bi-weekly shop.

We got back home.

4 missed calls, all from the estate agents for Mr and Mrs We-Don't-Want-To-Move-Until-November.

Mr and Mrs We-Don't-Want-To-Move-Until-November have, it appears, agreed to move by 20th October.

We accepted this.

We have, it appears, an agreement.

If and when we exchange contracts, we may even feel free to start celebrating about it. Until then, we will wait with patient resignation for the next piece of fuckwittery to hit us.

House disharmony

2005-08-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

The weekend was filled with grandparental/great-grandparental adoration. It also contained some excellent meals (my mother can cook), a shopping trip for new clothes for Jamie, who is fast growing out of everything he owns, 37, 560 repetitions of "Peekaboo, I see you" from my grandmother, a lot of exhausting moving of Jamie away from enticing looking boxes and plastic bags (my mother is in the latter stages of getting a new kitchen, and there's still a lot of stuff sitting around waiting to be put away), and the discovery that Jamie does not like hummus. Not that this is likely to have any sort of impact on our menu choices, but I thought it was worthy of note, since it's the first thing we've discovered that he doesn't like.

What it did not contain, however, was a phone call from the R's assuring us that they had finally found a house.

So why should this bother us, you ask? Surely this continued silence simply means that we opt for Plan B and put in a bid for the other house? Yes, that was indeed what we did, last week. We agreed, after some debate, on their asking price. We waited for the estate agents to call us back confirming their acceptance so that we could breathe a huge sigh of relief and enjoy the sensation of having a clue where we were going to be living in the foreseeable future. And, indeed, on Friday they called Barry back to tell him that, yes, the offer had been accepted - and, oh, by the way, the owner had just accepted a big contract at work and didn't want to move in the middle of it, so he wouldn't be moving out until November.

That's nice for you, sunshine, and I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding someone to sell the house to at that time.

We, meanwhile, are looking elsewhere. Of course, by now we are running a bit short on elsewheres, and last night the prospects were looking bleak as Barry scanned estate agents' webpages, something he has now done even more times than my grandmother has repeated "Peekaboo, I see you" to Jamie. But he somehow managed to find three decent-sounding houses in our price range for us to go and see tomorrow, so we are hoping, against all odds, that at least one of them will not only meet our requirements but will be owned by someone who isn't trying to play silly buggers. Don't miss next week's excruciating instalment.

On the plus side, apparently somebody is actually reading this blog, which is a great ego boost (waves at Kitty). Thanks for the interest!

Well, after all that......

2005-08-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

.......yesterday Barry just fell asleep on the bed himself just before Jamie's naptime, and Jamie took the hint and fell asleep next to him. They both got a good couple of hours of sleep, and both seem a hell of a lot better for it.

It strikes me as a surprisingly diplomatic solution, since anyone with an opinion on the matter can now point to this story and claim that it proves their point. Anti-CIOers can say that, you see, the problem was just about to settle down anyway, given time, and Barry should have just toughed it out. Pro-CIOers can say that, you see, this proves how wonderfully successful it was - twenty minutes of crying, and Jamie was taking his nap just fine the next day. Or, if you're me, you can just say that, hooray, everyone is happy and we have no current worries. (Well, not about Jamie's sleep. The house situation is another matter, but one that I will post about on another occasion.)

Anyway, this being the situation, I didn't do any CIO in the evening - we're going away for the weekend anyway and it seemed a bit pointless to start anything now. We shall have to consider what we do next week.

Meanwhile, big weekend ahead - my grandmother is over from the States, visiting my mother, and this weekend we're going to see her and she's going to meet her first and so far only great-grandchild for the first time. So this looks set to be most cool. I shall hopefully blog about it when we get back.

To dream, perchance to sleep

2005-08-05T12:14:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has read my previous posts (anyone? anyone? Oh, well) may possibly have realised already that my reaction to any mention of CIO does not involve brandishing a cross to banish the eeeeevil far from me while simultaneously using my spare hand to stick pins in Richard Ferber's effigy. While I have minimal patience for the enthusiasts who claim that CIO is The Way, The Truth and The Light when it comes to bringing up children (because there's extremely little that I do feel that way about when it comes to bringing up children - I'm a horses-for-courses type), I have read enough personal stories to convince me that it's frequently a valid option and, in some cases, can even be the best thing for a child and/or his family as a whole.

However, I haven't done it with Jamie. Not because I think it's the road to perdition, but because so far, despite Jamie having been a pretty poor sleeper since birth, I never felt we'd quite reached the point where we had to. We've got by with other methods - co-sleeping, carrying him around, nursing him to sleep before putting him in the cot, and sometimes dealing with an overtired child who just wouldn't take a nap. It hasn't been ideal, and has often been somewhat stressful, but never to the point where I felt that things were unmanageable and that sleep training was the better option.

We have now, it appears, reached that point. Jamie has been napping poorly for the past few weeks, and Barry has been struggling to deal with an overtired child who won't let him take enough of a break to get anything else done, including eating. Lying with him on the bed and feeding him his bottle normally works, but not now. Nor does cuddling or patting or any other soothing. If he goes to sleep at all, he wakes up after about twenty minutes, still tired and upset.

Yesterday, driven to utter distraction by a wailing, desperately overtired child who just would not go to sleep despite clearly being in dire need of a nap and having a shattered father who was in dire need of a break, Barry finally, after an entire day of this, plonked him in his cot and walked out of the room, leaving him crying. He came back to check on him every five minutes, in accordance with the brief summary I'd given him of sleep training when I mentioned it as a possible option we might need ultimately to pursue, but left him in his cot. Jamie, who had been upset and overtired all afternoon, was asleep twenty minutes later.

He only slept for another twenty minutes, unfortunately, and he remained clearly fidgety and overtired when he woke up, but I was home by then to take him off Barry's hands. A couple of hours later Barry's teeth had unclenched and the manic twitch in his face had faded, but his insistence that things could not possibly go on the way they had been going was undimmed, and matched by mine. I am a firm believer in meeting my child's needs, and that includes his need for sleep. I'm also a firm believer in meeting my husband's needs, including his need for sanity.

So, the current plan is for Barry to do the same at Jamie's naptimes today. We haven't quite got as far as discussing what happens at bedtime (bedtime is less of a problem as I can still get him to sleep by nursing him, and since he was so exhausted last night I just went ahead and did that), but I think it's going to be best if we do the CIO there as well - he'll learn more quickly if he gets more practice, and it's not fair for all of this to fall on Barry. My main concern about that is the risk of the crying running into antisocial hours - we live in a semidetached house, and our bedroom is against the neighbouring wall. I'm really hoping it won't become that bad - the fact that it only took him twenty minutes to fall asleep this time is very promising, based on all the CIO stories I've read, and I'm hoping that that wasn't just a fluke. But since it has to be done, 'twere best 'twere done quickly.

So, wish us and the neighbours luck. Oh, and feel free to post any dissenting opinions, should you feel so moved. If they include offers to come round and take a screaming child off my husband's hands on a daily basis for however many months or years it would take for his sleep to improve of its own accord, I'll be happy to take them seriously.

House music

2005-07-31T02:25:00.000-07:00

When my current employers first informed me that I'd been successful at interview and the job would be mine, Barry and I promptly arranged to head off to the area in question for some house-hunting. We were in the best possible position for would-be buyers - having sold our house the previous year, we had no chain and a huge amount of ready cash, plus my upcoming steady job and salary slip. And, without too much ado, we found the house of our dreams. Unfortunately, the people who currently own it are aiming to break the world record for World's Slowest People At Completing A House Sale. Everybody needs an ambition in life, I suppose.

So, why has it taken them over three months to make, um, precisely no progress at all in finding somewhere to move into? Because they're looking for a good-quality house built within the last three years. Since these two conditions are almost completely mutually exclusive, they've already narrowed their options almost to zero. Unfortunately, three fruitless months have completely failed to get it through to them that good-quality houses just aren't being built any more, and they'd actually do a hell of a lot better to look for stuff built, say, ten years or more ago. Not only that, but until a few weeks back the husband couldn't even decide whether to stay with his current job or go for the new one, some distance away from the first, that was headhunting him, so for the couple of months it took him to dither over this they were limited to looking at houses that were a potentially commutable distance from either job. And, no, they can't rent. Because last year, despite knowing that they wanted to move in the imminent future (the husband's job is several hours drive away from where he lives, and he's currently spending half his day commuting), they took on a mortgage that they can't get out of for two years without paying a huge penalty clause. They can transfer it, but they can't pause it while they go into rented accommodation. So renting is out. Which is a handy excuse, since they don't really want to rent. They want us to rent, so that they can find a house in their own time, at their own convenience, and move into it and sell theirs without any awkward hassle.

As Barry points out, it's just as well we weren't in a chain. Our sale would have long since fallen through, and we'd be bloody furious by now.

Anyway, we were strung along for week after week after week after sodding week of this, with promises that the R's were looking at lots of places, they were really trying hard, they just weren't finding anything suitable. I'm sure all of that is true - unfortunately, they seemed incapable of getting the idea that they needed to alter their expectations. By the time we faced the fact that they weren't going to get their act together in time, it was far too late for us to find another house to buy before the date I had to start work, and we ended up in a panicky last-minute dash to get a rental sorted out in time. It's just as well we got this one, or we'd have been seriously stuck.

So, Barry gave the R's a deadline of the end of July, and we started house-hunting again.

Last weekend, we saw a place that, with a fair bit of work, could end up being just what we wanted - and since the price is considerably lower than the one we were originally going for, and since we're now paying for this rented house until late December regardless of what happens, we'd be in an excellent position to arrange the work. So that's a possible option, although Barry is not at all keen on the hassle of trying to organise the work, and I can't really say I blame him. But this Saturday, we found the ideal place - same road as the one we're currently trying to buy, but even closer to the various amenities, and with a much better garden. What's more, I actually prefer this one - the bedrooms are closer together, which is going to be a damn sight more convenient for the years of getting up for child-related stuff that lie depressingly lurking in my immediate future. Barry still has a slight preference for the original house, but he'd be happy to take this one.

So, the ball is now in the Rs' court (I'm still trying to work out how to do the apostrophe for that one. Suggestions?). If we hear back from them before the end of July (which would be, ahem, today) with a definite commitment to a moving date, then the deal's still on. Reluctantly, on my part, but what the hell - we made a promise. If not, then on Monday Barry gets in touch with the estate agents for the house we saw yesterday and starts discussing offers.

Talking of strive

2005-07-31T01:56:00.000-07:00

The other day, I got one of those "You Too Can Build A Better Child Through Weekly Get-Togethers" leaflets through the door. This one was for Tumbletots. Amidst all the usual blah about how it would develop his physical development and language skills (sure it will - so will pulling himself up on the coffee table to cries of "Well, look what a big boy you are, standing up like that!", and that doesn't cost £4.50 a session), it pointed out that this was also a good way to meet other parents.

Seemed worth checking out. While I'm really not that good with the whole social life thing, I do, now and again, have a hankering towards meeting some people on a more close-up-and-personal basis than words appearing on my computer screen, and it would be interesting to meet some other parents and see what's going on in Parenthoodworld these days. So, recently, I've been looking into the possibility of doing the conventional middle-class thing and signing up for some sort of regular child-related activity.

I got quite excited when I checked the on-line listings for UK La Leche League groups and discovered there's one listed right here in the town I live in. I figured either I'd go along and discover a group of wonderful, like-minded women who would become bosom friends (pun not initially intended, but it was so good I left it in), or I'd go along and discover the kind of ghastly breastfeeding Nazis that people complain about, who spent their time plotting up new ways to make formula-feeding mothers feel guilty and inferior, and I would have tremendous satisfaction cutting them down to size with Very Polite Irony (I want to be Albus Dumbledore when I grow up). Either way, it was bound to be fun, and well worth trying out. What actually happened, alas, was that I e-mailed them several weeks back to ask for the details, and never heard a darned thing in return. There is a number I could ring to find out more, but it seems to be the national helpline number, and my concern is that I might ring at the precise moment that some desperate, exhausted mother with smarting nipples and a screaming baby is trying to get through for some badly-needed advice and when she can't manage it due to me tying up the line she will dissolve into a sobbing heap and send the nearest person running for the formula. So, I've been avoiding phoning them. Maybe I should e-mail them again, but I've got a feeling that, unfortunately, the rumoured local group will never come to anything more than a rumour.

I've had more luck checking out the details of babysigning classes, since they actually post details of the times and places of their meetings on line. And, yes, to my delight, there is a group within a half-hour's drive from here on my weekly day off. I haven't yet had a chance to get to it, since so far there always seems to have been something else I've needed to spend that day doing (recovering from the move, taking Jamie to the GP about his squint, taking the car to be serviced, and spending the day with the visiting in-laws, respectively), but I definitely mean to go this week.

However, the Tumbletots leaflet provided me with a possible alternative, as they also have a local class on the appropriate day. While it sounded less interesting and less useful (Jamie's physical development and language skills are likely to develop just fine without needing any teaching, but the same isn't true of sign language, and that would be a cool thing to know), it still sounded worth checking out, and does have the advantage of being closer. Besides, let's face it, I suspect I'm overestimating the amount of sign language Jamie's likely to learn from the Tinytalk classes - yes, he'll probably learn such currently crucial terms as 'milk' and 'biscuit', and the lyrics to the odd nursery rhyme, but I doubt if he's actually going to learn enough of the language to be useful to him in the long run.

So, I checked out the Tumbletots website to see what they had to say. Tumbletots, apparently, is 'the springboard to developing children's skills for life', and 'instils in them, a healthy and active lifestyle and the confidence, to reach their maximum potential' (though not, apparently, appropriate usage of the comma). I was also assured that 'Child psychologists and educators agree that a structured program in movement should be a part of every child's education.' Sadly, I think that one is most likely true - there probably are child psychologists and educators out there who agree on that sort of rubbish, though I think it's less likely that any of them could, if pressed, come up with a satisfactory answer to the question of precisely what dire fate awaits those children so poor and underprivileged they don't have a structured program in movement to call their own. They did have a 'Click here to see what the experts have to say' link, which I clicked on, intrigued. What they have to say, apparently, is that National Tumbletots Day is on 11th September and is being celebrated by a 'funtastic' day at Legoland. Well, either that or somebody hooked up the wrong link on the webpage.

Anyway, I waded through all this and found the bit about dates, times, and places, only to discover that Tumbletots shut down a week ago for the summer holidays. So why anyone was choosing this time to push leaflets about it through people's doors is anyone's guess. Oh, well - I shall probably check it out when it reopens. Meanwhile, Tinytalk awaits.

In which I write the post that should really have gone with the last title

2005-07-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

The last post was getting so enormously long and unwieldy that I went ahead and posted it, which meant that I didn't get a chance to cover one of the most interesting points raised by the article. Namely: if your style of mothering was a Greek letter, which letter would it be?

Thought-provoking stuff. I rapidly rejected the idea of just going for 'Omega'. Too obvious, and I don't want to define myself solely by not being Isabel Kallman. I see that one blogger has gone for 'Zeta', which has a ring to it, but I wanted something with meaning.

At first, I thought I'd go for 'Pi', which came to mind because I'd just been doing the Geek Test. It's a number as well as a letter, it's geeky, it's got character. And if you just add an 'e', it becomes a tasty carbohydrate source.

Then I toyed with the idea of 'Sigma'. If my vague and scattered memories of Maths A-level are correct, this means 'sum of', which is fairly appropriate for my parenting philosophy - I believe that whatever effect your parenting has on your child will come from the overall sum of your parenting, rather than from the one day where you feel you really screwed up or that one thing you did that other people disapprove of. (Hence my scepticism about the claim that sleep training necessarily teaches your child that he's alone in a hostile world and Mummy won't come and get him when he cries; I can't help feeling that if, say, your child's experience of life is of loving attention during most of his waking hours and of fifteen minutes of crying in a cot, it's a bit of a stretch to think that he's going to base his conclusions about life solely on that fifteen minutes and not on the other 23 hours, 45 minutes of the day. What he'll probably learn is that Mummy will usually come and get him, but, now and again, in certain uncomfortable but non-life-threatening situations, he's going to have to deal with it himself. Which doesn't strike me as something likely to warp him for life.)

However, after due consideration, I now think I'll go for Delta. If I remember correctly (my geography was one heck of a lot worse than my maths), a delta is a large fertile area. That sounds pleasantly positive. It's also an airline, so it has associations with travel, broadening the horizons, and just generally getting away. And it has the advantage that if any mothers hate me or my child so much that they don't want their children to go near us, they can play recorded voices under their pillow during their sleep saying "Oh, no, I don't want to play with Delta children." (Hooray! For years I've wanted to find a way to use that quote in conversation. My work here is done.)

So, unless anyone has a better suggestion, Delta Mummy it is.

Motherhood by the Greek alphabet

2005-07-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

I found this interesting link on Julie's blog.

I wasn't sure whether it was real or a satire - it sounds like the plot of a badly written film. Plenty of stuff written about parenting these days implies that there's some sort of goal of Perfect Motherhood out there for which we should be aiming, and plenty of other stuff deplores this attitude (and some stuff even manages to do both simultaneously, but that's by-the-by). But I've never previously read anything that flat-out in-your-face states that perfect motherhood is a desirable and achievable aim, and, by god, did it sound like a satire, from one of the this-is-the-hell-that-the-world-of-parenting-is-heading-towards-so-tremble-in-your-boots brigade. However, this doesn't seem to be a satirical journal, so, no matter how much this woman might sound like an anthropomorphic personification of a stereotype, it looks as though she's actually for real. Bloody hell.

As you can hopefully deduce from my blog title and rather garbled summary (I keep meaning to rewrite it so that it actually sounds a bit more coherent), my attitude towards parenting is pretty much the antithesis of this mother's. The extent to which we're on different pages here is nicely summarised in my reaction to her business partner's quote on the subject of the whole striving-for-perfection issue: 'If not to become strong, for what should a modern mother strive? “Soft and mushy mom?”' The possibility of not actually striving for anything seems to be a concept beyond her ken.

As for me, my parenthood style just isn't really about the striving. Admittedly, I've had my strivey moments - there was the whole tongue tie saga and the subsequent breastfeeding problems, which meant I really had to strive to make the breastfeeding work. So, for that one, I strived. Um, strove. And I do feel that that was worth it. But, on the whole, when it comes to motherhood, I just don't do strive. My mothering is a strive-free zone. That is how far apart I am from this woman.

Reading the article, I realised I was having two rather contradictory reactions - "Why do people make so much fuss about how to mother when their kids are likely to turn out fine pretty much whatever they do?" and "How the hell can she get it so wrong?" My firm belief that most children can deal perfectly well with a range of almost any form of childrearing without suffering permanent damage was sorely tested by this article, and, yes, my initial reaction was that this poor child was being Damaged For Life. I still think that that possibility is fairly high on the cards, because I don't think it's healthy to grow up being the litmus paper for your parent's sense of achievement. Still, after further thought, I have had to conclude that this boy's future breakdown and disintegration aren't actually the given that I at first thought they were. This child has a mother who genuinely loves him and lets him know it, even if it is in a rather scary manic back-away-closer kind of way; a father who seems to have the calm instinctive approach to parenting that's just what his mother lacks; and a village, albeit a hired one, watching out for him and helping out. I suspect he's actually in with a reasonable shot at doing OK.

The other thing that initially really concerned me about her method of bringing him up was that she seemed to be raising New York's answer to Verruca Salt. On further thought, I've realised that this may not be the case. The acerbic comments I planned to make about how odd it was that her extensive reading on the subject of parenthood had somehow missed any half-decent text on basic issues of toddler discipline dissolved into a realisation that, actually, yes, that was odd, and it was actually less odd, when I thought about it, that a journalist might have simply got something wrong. The paragraph about Isabel giving Ryland everything he wants to make him happy comes right after a paragraph about her seeing limit-setting as one of the crucial parts of parenthood, and one that she feels she gets right 80 - 90% of the time. Which is probably better than a lot of us poor saps manage. So, maybe the things she's described as giving in on are things that she genuinely feels don't matter very much (the occasional cookie is not going to doom the child, and so what if he wants to take his shoes off in the car?) and the idea that she's giving in on absolutely everything is either a genuine misunderstanding or a deliberate misrepresentation on the part of the author of this article. So, one "She's putting too much pressure on that child" on rye, hold the "She's spoiling him rotten".

My main reaction, though, was that I didn't know whether I felt more sorry for the child or his mother. Having thought about that one again, I decided it was, in fact, reasonably obvious that it should be the child. He has rather less say about any of what's going on, and he is not currently making programmes that, however well-meant (and, yes, I do believe they're well-meant), are destined to send countless mothers spiralling into gloom and despondency.

But while Ryland wins out in the sympathy stakes, Isabel does come in a close second. This is obviously a desperately insecure woman. She doesn't ever seem to have learnt how to rely on herself for validation. What invisible, faceless Parenting Authority does she fear is going to come along and grade her, on what scale? She is constantly trying to measure up to some nonexistent benchmark, because she simply doesn't know how to say "We're all happy with this way of doing things, so sod whether it scores appropriately on the GoodMommyommeter."

If this child's life does indeed go seriously wrong in any of the clichéd and expected ways, then she will not only be devastated in the way that any of us would be devastated to have a child go off the rails. She will also lose a huge chunk of her soul, her identity, because it's so tied up in her achievements, and Ryland is one of those achievements. She will, in her own eyes, be a Failure and a Bad Mommy from that point on.

It's slightly disturbing how many of the commenters on Julie's blog seem positively to relish this thought. A minority of them also sympathised with her, but the prevailing reaction seemed to be that of dieters offered calorie-free chocolate. Hooray! We get to have all the fun of being judgemental about another mother! Even though that's normally a Really Bad Thing, it's quite all right in this case, because the bitch deserves it! Just as she deserves the devastation that will fall on her family, because it's All Her Fault! It's a witch! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her!!

I'm being hypocritical. I love a good judgementing as much as the next self-righteous bitch. I just didn't feel moved to take that line in this case. Which got me thinking about why my reaction differed from that of so many others.

I think most of it comes down to that darned Perfect Mother channel she's trying to set up (or whatever the hell she's calling it). I totally agree that this is a terrible, ghastly idea that is going to do considerably more harm than good, but somehow I don't see it as what Grrrl labeled a 'mommy drive-by'. Which led to a whole new and interesting train of thought - what is so totally obnoxious about mommy drive-bys? Why, the implication of "You are doing a Bad Job of parenting your child, and need my sage counsel in order to do a Good Job". And I think that's the message a lot of people are getting from the existence of Isabel's parenting channel.

Except that I somehow didn't hear it that way. I don't think that Isabel actually is judging her target audience and concluding that, in the absence of her needed input, they are doing a Bad Job. I doubt if she has enough mental energy left over from her own dread of doing a Bad Job herself, and her efforts to do a Good Job, to have much of an opinion about what all those other mothers out there are doing.

What I think is that her mental picture of her audience is of women who are going through exactly what she went through - passionate desire to Do It Right, panicky terror that they're not managing that, and a desperate need for some support. Which is, in fact, completely realistic. If anything, it's laudable that she wants to help.

Her fatal error, of course, is her belief that what these women most need is someone to come along and tell them how to Do It Right. When, in fact, what they most need (apart from sleep) is to a) realise that there just isn't a Right, and b) find their way to whatever parenting style works for them, their children, and anyone else in the immediate family without actually having dire long-term consequences. It's Isabel's tragedy that this is a concept that she just can't get. And it's the misfortune of New York's mothers that she is, with the best of intentions, rushing in with a solution to the problem that is, in fact, set to perpetuate it.

And yet, as convinced as I am that this channel is a disaster in the making, I can't find it in myself to be angry with her rather than sorry for her. She genuinely is trying to help other women out, by supplying them with what she really felt she needed at her time of crisis. (Which is, of course, why the Golden Rule is a frighteningly dangerous idea.) Given the amount of harm done throughout history by people rushing in with that attitude, I'm not even sure why I don't feel as disgusted by her as the people on Julie's blog. But, right now, I just can't stop myself from thinking - if people who get it wrong with the best of intentions can't be cut a little slack, then heaven help the lot of us.

The naming of wives

2005-07-22T22:38:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Amber wrote a blog entry about her reasons for keeping her maiden name when she got married, and invited other married women to explain why they'd made whatever decision they'd made on the issue. There seemed to be a good blog entry here, and I've been meaning to get round to writing it, and here it is.

My feelings? I firmly believe that it's outdated and sexist to expect a woman to change her name just because she gets married. Personally, I would have been outraged at any attempt to force me to do so. I'm fortunate enough, however, to live in a society where this viewpoint is generally accepted, and nobody would have dreamed of trying to make me do any such thing. So it was completely my choice to change my name, and I did so.

This decision probably surprised quite a few people - I believe money changed hands between members of my immediate family over the issue of what decision I'd make. But it was something I'd thought about and was quite clear on, and have never regretted. These are my reasons.

It was a decision I made, really, when I was working in paediatrics as part of my training, when I found myself getting to know women in labour who had one name, then taking care of babies born to them who had a different surname. It seemed a little.... disjointed. It didn't bother me that the women I met did things that way, but it did make me realise that it wasn't how I wanted to do things. It made me think about what it would be like to spend years of parent-teacher evenings explaining to the teacher that, yes, I was Jamie V's mother even though my name was Dr W.

And what would it be like? Well, a pretty minor nuisance as such things go. I couldn't imagine any teacher in this day and age raising an eyebrow about it, and wouldn't have cared if anyone had. The point was, it bothered me. I realised that I wanted us all - me, the man I married, and our future children - to have the same surname. Marriage was the start of the new family we were creating. Having the same name was my way of showing the world that this was the case.

Of course, that didn't mean that it had to be me who changed my name. However, the other available options were distinctly unfeasible.

Double-barrelled name? Struck me as an effective way of getting the worst of all possible worlds. For one thing, both my maiden name and his name are difficult to spell anyway. Subjecting myself to a lifetime of having to spell them both out was not on the cards. For another, unless my children wanted to end up with triple or quadruple-barrelled names, somebody was eventually going to have to make the decision to drop something. It seemed better to me just to tidy things up properly at the start and leave the name in a fit state for usage by others.

And, for a third, it would singularly fail to solve anything. Not only would I still be subject to all the hassle of a name change, but my husband would be subjected to it all as well. Even if he had been prepared to agree to that (which he wouldn't have been), I wouldn't have put him through it. Why on earth would I have wanted to? Just to make the situation superficially more equal? That's the sort of muddled thinking that Jerome K. Jerome satirised in his story about limbs being cut off larger people in order to make them more equal to smaller people. Seeing equality as some kind of be-all-and-end-all rather distracts the focus, in my opinion, from realising that the whole point of equality is to equalise out the good things. Trying to ensure that my husband underwent the same amount of inconvenience as me in the name of equality struck me as a major perversion of the whole idea.

That latter disadvantage also applied to the possibility of combining both our surnames to form a new one. Besides, as it happens, we had surnames that simply didn't go together well to form anything that anyone would ever want to spend the rest of their life being called.

One possible other option that I had, and one that a lot of female doctors use, was to change my name for personal use and keep my maiden name for professional use - Dr W. at work, Mrs V. at home. Thinking about this option made me realise that, while I did have a certain amount of attachment to my surname and felt a pang at the thought of giving it up, I actually had a much stronger attachment to my title. My surname wasn't a fundamental part of my identity, just something I was used to having around - but my title, my label of 'Doctor', was a fundamental part of my identity. When it came to the point, I preferred the idea of giving up my surname completely to the idea of giving up my title part of the time. I just didn't want to be a Mrs.

Besides, it struck me as more confusion than I wanted to put myself through. I preferred the idea of just going through one huge lump of hassle right at the start getting my name changed all the way across the board, and then spending the rest of my life knowing what the hell I was called.

So, the only options I was OK with were for me to change my name to his, or for him to change his name to mine. I'd have been perfectly happy with either. Barry wouldn't. The options he was OK with were for me to change my name to his, or for us both to keep our own names, and he was perfectly happy with either. So the solution to that one was pretty obvious. Besides, although neither of the two names was a great option (after living with my maiden name for thirty-three years, couldn't I for crying out loud have got one that wasn't off at the tail end of the alphabet and was easy for other people to spell? I earned that, dammit), it was fair to say that his was the better option of the two. (Some of the people in the comments section on Amber's blog who also gave this as a reason seemed quite embarrassed about it, saying that they knew it was a pretty superficial reason. I don't get that at all - after all, your name is a pretty important part of your life. What's so superficial about wanting to have one you like, given the choice?)

So I changed my name. And while I did, as I've said, feel a deep pang of nostalgia about it, I didn't, as I've also said, feel that I was losing part of my identity. My identity is quite secure, thankyouverymuch, and, while it depends on all sorts of things, my surname is not one of them. The staff and patients at my job got used to it more quickly than I'd have believed possible, and I got used to it more quickly than I'd have believed possible.

And, although it was a fair bit of hassle having to send off marriage certificate copies left, right, and centre to everybody I could think of (almost two years later, I've only just got round to changing the last of the official records), I've also got to say that there were things I rather liked about changing it. For one thing, I liked the idea of having a new name to represent a new phase in my life - it was like some kind of tribal ritual, or like the Ursula Le Guin book whose name is currently escaping me in which everyone changes their name in early adulthood and then again in old age to reflect wherever they're at in their lives at the time. For another, I have to admit to getting a kick out of the very fact that it wasn't really the expected thing to do. I've lived my life to a general theme of "One of these things is not like the other one.....", and I don't like fitting neatly into an expected box. I'd rather strike out across categories, defy labelling, confound people's expectations. Otherwise, it just gets boring. And, for a third thing, it did mean that I got at least something of an upgrade in my quality of name.

Shakes rattles and rolls

2005-07-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

Jamie is eight months old today, so here's the post I've been planning to make about him. So, if boring/gushy parental posts aren't your cup of tea, now is the time to go and read somebody else's blog entry for the day instead.

I thought of this title for a post about Jamie's development back when this blog was just a twinkle in my eye, and it was too good to waste, but it's way out of date - he mastered both those skills months ago. Now, he crawls on his belly like a reptile, as well. (Which nearly became the title, but I decided it wasn't quite as good.) He isn't wobbly any more when he's sitting up, and he's pulled himself up to standing a few times, and even took a step sideways at one point while he was holding onto the sofa. All of which is making it much easier for him to get hold of suitably dangerous/important things he can shove in his mouth. (On which subject - why is it that babies react to unfamiliar objects by trying to eat them? It really doesn't strike me as an evolutionarily optimised survival strategy.)

He also yells 'Ning ning ning' a lot, which makes him sound like a related order to the Knights That Say Ni. Come to think of it, most of what he says is just about as comprehensible and reproducible as whatever it was they said after they moved on from saying Ni. Before I had a baby, I thought of baby talk as being a less developed version of adult talk (well, without all the syntax and meaning and stuff, obviously - I'm talking purely about the kinds of sounds they make). So it came as quite a revelation to me to realise that it's an entire separate set of sounds in its own right. It's an amazing set of trills and aspirates and hints of consonants and gurgly shrieks that my adult larynx can't reproduce any more than he can reproduce my sounds. He does come out with the occasional transcribable sound like 'Harrooooo!' and 'Hab-a-bu!' and now 'Ning ning ning ning ning', but mostly he comes out with sounds you would need a completely new alphabet to record.

He loves lights. He has to be prevented from burning his eyes out staring at the little green light on the back of Barry's laptop, but he loves staring at the front of the laptop as well, since this involves lots of flickering changing images. (The other day, Barry downloaded some photos to the laptop while he was holding Jamie, and Jamie was so astonished by seeing a photo of himself appear on the computer screen that he lunged madly towards it, unfortunately managing to hit a combination of keys that - and we are still not sure how he did this - erased the picture for good. Which was rather a shame, since apparently it was a cute one. But then, he has an inexhaustible supply of cuteness should we wish to take replacement photos.) He has a giant piano keyboard with lights that flash on and off when you hit the keys, and a baby gym thingummy which rotates and flashes on and off and plays manic electronic music when anyone moves in the immediate vicinity, and either of these will keep him happy for ages, probably melting his little brain in the process. However, he's now decided that the new toothbrush we bought him for his first two teeth is an even better toy, and he screams his head off when we try to take it away from him. It's good to know that he cares about his personal hygiene.

He also loves food. Before having him I was determined that I would stay laid-back over the inevitable food battles. I would be one of those mothers who wouldn't get all stressed out about their child only eating three things one of which is chocolate. No, I would retain my calm in the face of food refusal and fads, just offering the food and not getting into any battles over him taking it. I was all genned up to do the calm-retaining, battle-avoiding thing. And, as it turned out, the only battle is whether we can spoon the food into him fast enough to meet his demands. We have yet to find anything he dislikes - he has happily eaten everything we've tried him with, including a wedge of lemon that my husband fed him over my strenuous protests. And he can now feed himself with baby biscuits while sitting in his chair, which is an amazing step forward from my viewpoint because it keeps him busy for long enough for us to eat supper and means that I can actually - get this - eat entire meals with both hands. I think you have to have tried being a parent of a small baby to realise just how cool this is. Well worth all the work of sponging smeary chewed-up biscuit off his entire body after dinner and then finding dried-up bits of biscuit lurking in the chair crevices the next day.

He has a smile so gorgeous I can't think of anything to say about it that isn't clichéd. His face lights up when he sees me at the end of the workday and he throws his arms round my neck in a massive hug. When he's nursing, he reaches up to grab random bits of my face and neck. He's worked out that if he sticks his fingers into my mouth and then pulls my lower lip outwards while I suck inwards, it makes a funny sucking sound, and he finds this so marvellously hilarious that I can't even bring myself to be bothered that he thinks clawing at my lower lip is a fun pastime.

Parenthood is getting so much better as it goes along. For me, the first few months were a necessary but dull and difficult precursor to all the good bits. Sure, he was incredibly cute from the start, but cuteness takes you only so far. I used to think - enough with all this lying there and being cute, kid. Do something! Develop! Pass some milestones already! What with him not only doing interesting things, but actually taking short pauses between feeds when I can do something else, like take a shower without having to sprint, I must say that - in spite of all the hassles involved in taking care of a person who has limited communication skills, no reasoning skills, and regards it as his mission in life to shove the universe into his mouth one piece at a time - the second half of his first year is a huge improvement on the first half.

I've had better days

2005-07-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

Today is my weekly day off, and, as usual, I have about a million things I either want or need to do - including, yes, writing something for this blog that's marginally more interesting than watching paint dry. (Got several posts I've been meaning to write but, yes, I was one of the many who spent a significant chunk of the weekend revisiting Hogwarts. And, my god, but those books are getting darker with each one.) Unfortunately, one of the things at the top of the 'need to do' list was getting my car serviced/MOT'd in time to avoid getting hauled off to jail, or fined, or whatever it is they do to people who don't pay their car tax on time. So I did that. By the time Barry and I had fought our way, driving in tandem, through the appalling traffic jams to the garage that had looked so easy to get to when Barry checked it on the on-line Yellow Pages map, and then back again in his car, and then reversed the process at the end of the day to pick my car up, and, oh, yes, fitted in a trip to the supermarket as well, and then a second trip to the supermarket because we'd forgotten tea bags, there wasn't an enormous amount of the day left. Add in the prospect of doing the trip yet again in the imminent future to pick up the radio front that I had to order from them because I've lost mine, a depressingly large bill for the expensive things they found wrong and had to fix (including almost £60 for aforementioned replacement radio front), and a baby who spent the evening in a more irritated mood than me after having a large proportion of his nap time replaced by time spent howling in traffic jams (yes, that was him, not us), and, all in all, the day falls pretty much under the category of 'Bah'.

I will actually try to get round to writing some proper posts some time in the not-too-distant future. Hell, if I'm really feeling inspired they might even have paragraph breaks.

In which I actually write about something other than sleep training for a change

2005-07-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Today was my day off. I took Jamie to the doctors about his squint, and I did the healthy thing and walked there, so I got to have a bit more of a look at our general environs.

The house we are renting is in a large new estate in a small town, twenty-two miles away from where I work. It is, eventually, going to be rather a nice estate. At the moment, it's bits of rather nice estate interspersed with bits of building site, but that's OK - it means we're getting a discount on the rent, which is fine by me.

The house itself is smaller than the last one we lived in, and smaller than we really need long-term - right now we have a huge amount of stuff in storage and a huge amount more packed into the garage that comes with the house - but what we lack in quantity of house we're making up for in quality. The last place we lived in looked great at first glance - in fact, I liked the layout of the house so much that if we ever do end up building our own place, I think I might well base the design on that - but there were so many horrible, shoddy things about it. The poor-quality plumbing that meant your shower wouldn't stay hot if someone was running a hot tap anywhere else in the house (and I always managed to forget this and douse my poor husband with cold water by turning a tap on somewhere else while he was in the shower - he was not impressed, I can tell you). The dreadful drains that were forever backing up no matter how often Barry put drain cleaner down them. The doors that didn't hang properly and hence didn't shut properly. The kitchen sink tap that didn't swivel from side to side, but did wobble on its base, leaving me feeling I was living in a doll house. The malfunctioning gas meter that meant we ended up with a horrible exorbitant bill because the gas company refused to believe that something could possibly be wrong with the calibration of one of their meters. And let's not forget (shudder) the horrible heavy blinds that took two hands to raise (not easy when you're carrying a baby) and, worst of all, the cold stone floors that looked so good but meant there was NOWHERE to put a baby down. Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh.

So, while living in this house might be more crowded, it's also a damn sight more livable. I can't tell you how good it is to be able to put the baby down.

As for the general area, it's really beautiful. I thought the commute to work and back would be a drag, but this area has a rare and wonderful combination of good quality roads, minimal traffic and astonishing views make it a positive pleasure. And there's loads to see and do. I meant to go into town this afternoon to have more of a look around and do the walk round the town centre checking out all the interesting historical/architectural bits as recommended in the leaflet in the 'Welcome to Town X' pack some nice group sent us when we moved in, but when I'd nursed the baby to sleep on our bed for his afternoon nap I suddenly felt so tired that I just closed my eyes and napped next to him. I just nursed him whenever he woke up and he settled really well, so I had an absolutely mammoth nap of about four hours. He'll probably never get to sleep tonight, but by god it was worth it.

And I think that's about it for today's ramble through my life. Oh, yes - the doctor thought the squint probably wasn't going to be a problem and would settle with time, but she's going to get in touch with the squint experts to see whether they think it's worth seeing him, and refer him if so.

Some things just aren't meant to be said aloud.....

2005-07-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

The other night, my husband had cooked the peas for slightly less time than usual and felt that this had left them with a slightly stronger flavour.

He commented on the fact that they tasted more of pea than usual. That, in fact, they had a stronger-than-usual pea-ness.

And the consequence was.....

2005-07-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

......that some rather nice, pleasant people came over here and stated moderate views on the subject in a polite and respectful way. And the people who'd compared CIO to abuse/refused to believe that Julie might actually know her own child better than they do/thought it was terrible that she'd admitted to a friend that she found the early months of motherhood really hard? Nope. No sign of them. Bah. And there was me really looking forward to telling people just what I thought of their comments.

On the plus side, it does mean that there's been some nice, civil, amicable discussion, and I appreciate that greatly. Thank you all.

Anyway, some comments on things people have said, both here and back on the mama-drama forum:

Yes, I agree that whatever your feelings on CIO, actually advising a parent to go where they can't hear the child at all is worrying. Fair point. Regardless of what Julie did, that does seem to be what the neonatologist advised. Though I suppose it's quite possible that she and Julie knew each other well enough to know that this was meant tongue-in-cheek.

No, I do not agree that Julie 'changed her story'. She clarified her story. There's a difference. Both versions of her story are completely consistent - we just had a couple of extra bits of crucial information in the second bit. Some people on the mama-drama forum seem determined to think Julie's a liar, just because they don't agree with her over the CIO thing. Yes, of course, because posting something as contentious as the fact that you let your son CIO (under a title that shows that you know perfectly well the kind of reaction it's going to get) is exactly what you do if you're the kind of person who's so desperate for approval that you're willing to lie about your actions to avoid opprobium from random strangers.

From reading Julie's blog for quite a while now, I do think she may well have had clinical PPD in the past (she was certainly going through a very rough time). She seems to be doing a lot better now, though. I didn't read her reaction to letting Charlie cry as being indicative of PPD. I think it's more likely that she genuinely has good instincts for his distress levels and can tell the difference between an "I need help!" cry and an "I want playtime!" cry, and I found her reaction to be reassuring evidence that, yes, this is what's working OK for her and Charlie.

No objection at all to people posting whatever links they want to post (well, as long as they're not to child porn or anything like that), but the Sears link that was posted doesn't seem to work. It may not be worth you posting a corrected version - I can pretty much guarantee you that the only people currently reading this blog are the ones who came here from mama-drama and have read that stuff already, plus two friends of mine who have no children and are probably so bored with this debate already they'll never visit this blog again - but you're more than welcome to do so if you want to.

Thanks for the invite, but, no, there isn't the slightest chance of me becoming a regular poster on mama-drama. Right now, I need another forum to spend my time reading somewhat less than I need a hole in the head. Even an interesting, friendly, witty forum. Sorry.

Thanks also to the people who said they'd love to read more about me. I do plan to post stuff about my life at some point, but one of the fundamental things about me is that I love debate, and I love giving my opinion on contentious topics. And that was really the main reason I went ahead and got this blog, now that I think about it. But, yes, I will hopefully get round to actually writing stuff about me in between spouting off about my disagreements with various bits of the world.

And thank you for the sympathy about the London bombings. My mother and sister live in London, but fortunately are fine, as is a friend of mine who was in London at the time. I am so sorry for those who were not as lucky.

Cat, pigeons....

2005-07-09T00:07:00.000-07:00

I finally found the link on Julie's blog to one of the forums where she was reportedly getting excoriated, and went along to see what it was all about, and walked in on the tail end of a massive debate. Being me, I couldn't resist joining in, so rather than try to follow up on a zillion points of contention on there I posted a couple of questions and invited people back to this blog for follow-up. This could get interesting. Well, for certain very specific values of interesting that actually equate to extremely boring for most people apart from me.

And, yes, people were excoriating Julie. In fairness, a lot of that was in reaction to a badly-phrased post on her part which did make it sound as though she'd simply left him for an hour with no way to tell how hard he was screaming and whether he'd vomited, shit himself, or even choked. She's since clarified that she could actually hear him through the open window the whole time and hence knew that he was sleeping for the first three-quarters of that hour and grumbling for the rest of it, which is a rather different kettle of fish. But, even once she posted that, people accused her of backpeddling and claimed the fact that she was bothering to explain this proved she must be feeling guilty about her terrible misdeeds. Then there were all the people who compared it to child abuse. And a couple of people who blamed her for even daring to utter negative sentiments about the experience of parenthood (or maybe for daring to feel those sentiments in the first place, who knows). And, when she'd had enough of the discussion & turned off the comments section on her blog, she got criticised for that as well. You get the picture.

To be fair, there were more thoughtful and sensitive posters as well. We shall see how this goes.

At some point, I probably should post about something other than CIO. I do actually have a life, though I wouldn't blame anyone for doubting it at this point. I just get distracted from it by my addiction to debate, which is far more interesting.

In which I venture forth into the murky waters of the sleep training debate, and see whether I can find anyone left to alienate

2005-07-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

In the week that I spent without having a chance to update this, it seems the scandal of the blogworld (or the small part of it which I read, anyway) is that Julie, brave lady, let us know that she’s been letting her seven-month-old son Charlie CIO.

Since the only people remotely likely to be reading this are non-parents and not au fait with the jargon, here is the translation: CIO stands for ‘cry[ing] it out’, and is one of various methods for getting children to sleep. Basically, if the kid wakes up before nap and/or night-time is over, instead of going to get them you leave them crying until getting-up time, and repeat this as needed until either you crack or the child figures out that he’s not going to get picked up right then and had better just deal with it and go to sleep. Or, according to other ideologies, figures out that he’s been abandoned in a hostile world and enters a state of learned helplessness where he no longer bothers to cry because he knows his needs won’t be met.

You will gather that the method is a source of some contention.

Basically, telling people that you’ve done CIO with your kid is the equivalent of telling people that you support the war in Iraq, or that anyone who hasn’t accepted Jesus Christ as their personal lord and saviour won’t make it to heaven, or…… You get the idea? It’s light-the-blue-touch-paper talk.

Actually, most of the people who disagree with Julie have stayed off her blog – I gather from another blogger that she’s been excoriated on various other blogs and forums, but most of the comments on her blog simply expressed delight that she’d found something that worked for her. However, inevitably, there was the occasional dissent.

There was, for example, the anonymous commentator who stated herself to have been ‘alienated’ by what Julie did. After all, Charlie was learning that “when he cries, mommy may not come and get him”. Um, yes, sounds as if that’s pretty much the idea. But, you see, this is apparently a Very Bad Thing. “He feels abandoned and his primal instincts kick in for self-preservation (I’m alone in the world, I must conserve energy or die).” And seeing Mommy turn up again at the end of the nap with a bottle and a cuddle doesn’t clue him in that, phew, he was wrong in that conclusion and he can actually survive a short stint in his crib perfectly well? Apparently not. ‘[H]e will trust you less and that will carry on into adulthood’, the psychic Anonymous assures us. Fortunately, we don’t have to abandon all hope for Charlie’s emotional well-being quite yet – “It’s not too late. Maybe you can rebuild his trust.” Phew. I bet Julie’s relieved to hear that.

Then there was Ellen, the psychologist who gave it as her “clinical belief” that CIO was “the start of a slippery slope into justifying all kinds of parenting choices…. which ultimately are about getting the adult's needs met at the cost of the child's”. Yes, because, of course, a parent couldn’t possibly manage to respond differently in different circumstances. Just in case anyone thought that kind of thinking was the preserve of the anti-CIO brigade, Susan weighed in with “Take a moment and look around you in a grocery store. The child who is screaming because his mother initially said no about a candy bar, who then escalates his cries to the aforementioned ear-splitting shrieks and eventually gets his way... Those parents did absolutely no one any favors by letting that child train them so long ago while the kid was still in the crib, that louder = I get what I want.”

Rounding it all off with probably the strongest contender for the ‘Oh, please’ award, was nzmom: “These babies are your skin, your bones, your cells. They have evolved to thrive on touch, skin to skin contact, the sound of their mother's heart beating, the warm milky rush of breastmilk and the strength of your arms in the night.” I suspect they’ve also evolved to be tough enough to handle worse things than being left in a cot on their own for a bit.

All of this is pretty much business as usual in the perennially long-running series of “A Mother’s Place Is In The Wrong”, and, given that the dust has now well and truly settled on this particular episode, I probably should just leave it settled. The reason why I’m posting my two cents – apart from the whole congenital-inability-to-shut-the-fuck-up-at-times-of-contention thing – is because Julie said something in her entry that has barely been commented on, and that I thought was worth highlighting:

See, I don't interpret those premature-end-of-nap cries as "Help me, I'm alone and frightened and I'm worried you'll never come back." I hear it more as, "Hey, here I am, ready to play! Hey! It's time to wake up! Heeeeeeey! Big lady-shaped person! C'mere! I've had enough sleep!"

To read the vast majority of the whole sleep training debate, you would think that a child’s crying in his cot could only indicate a single possible response. The ‘gentle sleep solution’ advocates insist that the crying must indicate terror, despair, loneliness. The CIO advocates don’t think it means anything of the sort. And there is remarkably little acknowledgement of the fact that, actually, it could quite possibly be either. Or it could actually mean that the child’s overtired and desperately needs to sleep. Or it could mean that they’re hungry earlier than normal, or thirsty, or in pain…. but the point is, it will depend on the child’s personality and developmental stage, and, even then, it’ll vary from day to day. Just because Charlie is currently crying at the end of naps because he wants more playtime rather than more sleep doesn’t mean that he won’t, at some point in the future, have a nightmare and cry out of genuine fear. I suspect that, if and when that happens, Julie will pick up on that just as she has picked up on his current lack of fear, and respond appropriately. (I also suspect that if she’s being a bit slow on the uptake that day and doesn’t do so, any trauma incurred by Charlie as a result will be of a level that takes a few days of extra cuddling rather than a few years of therapy to sort out. JMNSHO.)

And I think that a near-complete failure to recognise this underlies quite a lot of the passionately heated debates. Parents who are leaving their children to cry because they want more playtime are being excoriated by people who can’t imagine that those children could be crying for reasons other than abject fear. Parents who recognise that their children are crying from abject fear and just aren’t suitable for CIO are being excoriated by people who can’t imagine that those children could be crying for reasons more serious than wanting more playtime. A lot of people are making money writing a lot of books on The OneTrueWay™ to deal with children’s sleep. And there is a quite astonishing lack of flexibility about the whole thing. Thinking about it, it’s ironic how much of the failure to appreciate the individuality of children in this regard comes from the camp who are loudest in insisting that Children Are Just Little People.

Goodness knows I can understand this kind of rigidity – I haven’t exactly been any better myself. I have also wasted more time than I like to think on the search for the OneTrueWay™ that’s guaranteed to work for all kids and produce perfect upbringing. What I don’t really understand is how that kind of mindset survives contact with real mothers, real children. Well, I suppose by the law of averages a lot of people must end up with babies who happen to thrive on the methods that their parents happen to espouse, and I think a lot of babies are flexible enough to fit in with whatever their parents are doing anyway. But don’t these OneTrueWayers ever listen to the stories of parents who’ve found that a different way turned out to be what worked better for them?

I guess a lot of them just don’t.

Oh, and in case you were interested – Charlie, who hasn’t yet read any attachment parenting theory and doesn’t quite realise how traumatised he’s meant to be by his time fussing in his crib, is apparently doing just fine, thank you. And, these days, his mother’s doing a lot better as well.

Some background

2005-07-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

Since we have now moved (phew), and unpacked a reasonable amount of stuff, and have an Internet connection up and running (no thanks to BT, who were aiming for the Chocolate Teapot award of usefulness), I thought I'd write about what decided me to start blogging.

When I was on maternity leave, and spending my time browsing through maternity-related newsgroups, I found a link to Julie's blog, and via her to the rest of the Vagina Posse (believe me, it isn't what you're thinking) and to a bunch of other, related blogs, and thus I discovered an entire, hitherto unsuspected, community of blogging mothers/expectant mothers/would-be mothers who have the following in common:

1. They achieved motherhood (or, to date, didn't achieve it) by an unusual, and frequently rocky and torturous, road. They had infertility problems, and/or recurrent miscarriages, and/or underwent fertility treatment, and/or sought adoption. All of which, plus the actual experience of motherhood itself, left them with unusual, thought-provoking perspectives on motherhood in its many varieties.

2. They can write. I don't know whether there's some sort of inverse correlation between fertility and writing ability, but, dammit, there are some seriously good writers out there in blogdom. More than one of them could simply send her blog off to a publisher with extremely minimal editing and get it published just like that, and it would be a bestseller.

The result of 1 and 2 combined is that there are some inspiring, soul-stirring, moving, hilariously funny and extremely readable blogs out there, and I have a new addiction to feed.

I don't (still to my own astonishment) qualify for 1. I'm embarrassed to admit this, because I know how dull and how disgustingly lucky it makes me sound, but I achieved motherhood in the completely conventional way - stopped the Pill, had sex with my husband now and again, found myself staring in astonishment at that magic second line a mere three months later, proceeded to have an entirely straightforward pregnancy and birth, and now have an extremely gorgeous seven-and-a-half-month-old son. Um. Sorry. Don't hate me 'cause my ovaries are beautiful.

So, if my inverse-correlation theory in 2. above holds true, this will probably be a boring, uninspiring, dismally badly written blog. But I've been inspired enough by the blogs out there that I eventually decided to go for it. After all, however I got here, I'm a mother too, and have occasional thoughts to publish on the matter. And I'm also a doctor, which, as my friend Emms pointed out, gives me some other stuff to write about. And, most of all, I'm an opinionated loudmouth. Ultimately, I couldn't resist the temptation of having my own forum in which to be opinionated.

The Curse of Rah

2005-06-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

(Title changed in honour of my first ever comment. Besides, this one is a much better title.)

I have waaaaaaay too much of what a friend of mine refers to as 'rah'. Rah is stuff. The sort of general stuff you accrete while going through life. And I have too much of it. Ridiculously, absurdly too much.

The reason this has come to my attention is because I am currently in the middle of moving 300 miles, and so we have been packing. Well, my husband has mainly been doing the packing while I've been taking care of the baby. Today, a team of removal men spent the entire day shifting most of our house contents onto two lorries (one to go into storage, one to meet us at the new place tomorrow) and left us with just a few minor essentials for getting through the hours until tomorrow morning when another lorry will come and pick up the last bits of stuff and we will then drive all the way to the new house. And reverse the process.

We went through all this last September, when we moved here. (I was seven months pregnant and had a 40-minute commute to work and didn't want to be spending that much of my day commuting when I had a baby to get home to. Unfortunately, the houses in the area in question (Essex - I feel quite safe saying that, since by this time tomorrow we won't be here any more and thus, even in the somewhat unlikely event of someone discovering this blog and deciding that their goal in life is to be my stalker, they'll be out of luck) are all shit. Unless you happen to be a millionaire, which, unfortunately, neither of us do. It's also way too far from the in-laws, and not really that convenient to get to anywhere decent from, and offers nothing very much in the way of employment opportunities for my husband (who currently looks after our son, but might want to get back onto some kind of payroll at sometime in the future) and, well, it's just generally rather crap. So we decided that we'd just rent for now and then, once I was no longer pregnant, I would find a job in a nicer area of the country (again, I feel quite safe saying that, given how little that narrows the field) and we would move once again. In retrospect, this was not the smartest of decisions - we should just have stayed where we were and I should have put up with the commute for a few months. It would have saved trouble overall, not to mention a lot of expense.)

Sorry. That aside rather took on a life of its own. In fact, it sprouted several little asides and you were probably wondering whether it was going to start an entire new dynasty. Anyway. Where was I?

Oh, yes. The previous move. Well, before that happened we went through a giant sort-out and threw out massive amounts of rubbish (I mean, we hired a skip at one point and filled that up) and we still had so much stuff the removal men had to put in an emergency call for an extra lorry. My husband decided that we should just refrain from buying anything at all in the next few months. If you've been paying attention, you'll recall that I was seven months pregnant at the time. I can't actually remember whether or not I broke it to him that the not-buying-more-stuff plan wasn't really an option, but never mind - I think he's noticed now. So, on top of the ridiculously large amount of stuff we had already, we now have baby stuff. I actually did try really hard not to acquire too much baby stuff, but that isn't too feasible an option either when your child is the first grandchild/nephew on both sides of a babyfond family. So. Yet more stuff.

It seems ridiculous to me. I mean, how can three people, one of them still fairly small, possibly have so much stuff? Because, the answer is, we are squirrels. Somehow, when I go through it, all of it seems to be either stuff that I actually do find useful (even if only occasionally) or stuff that I might feasibly find useful at some point in the future, or stuff that I keep around for nostalgic reasons (lots of that - I'm big on nostalgia). We stored loads of the inessential stuff in the garage after the last move, didn't even bother to unpack it, and we still had ridiculous amounts to pack.

Some people dream of being rich, or beautiful, or famous, or talented, or witty. Well, OK, I dream of that sort of stuff too. But what I really dream of is being the sort of person whose packing would simply involve throwing the contents of a few drawers into a bag, packing several shelves worth of books into boxes, loading the whole lot into the back of a van, and simply setting off into the wide blue yonder.

Holy literary inspiration, Batman!

2005-06-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

I did it. Went ahead and got myself a blog.

Now all I have to do is think of witty, soul-stirringly inspirational things to put in it. Um, I'll work on that at a later date.