I don't want to sleep alone

Bad time at the OK Corral

Time warp (click to enlarge)

I’d like to think my hosting skills have improved since 1980

We feed the pigeons where I come from

Pleased to have escaped the bowl cut my classmates uniformly suffered

The sound of two hands clapping

I got sick of looking at my ugly mug up there on my banner, so I exchanged it for a side profile with big hair, and then added some fancy duplicate paneling I ripped from my old digs. You like? You will, when you get here.

This morning I made an executive decision and turned the television off. Hartley is much more likely to engage in play if there is something to distract him from the fact that he is not on my breast or eating dead leaves off the welcome mat, and so I usually pander to his love of brightly coloured moving images set to music that, given enough time, would make your sweet old Nan turn to throttle the nearest fluffy quadruped.

But today I said: enough! In my brain I said that, and Hartley seemed much more invested in the floor from that point onward. We sat together amidst piles of giant Lego pieces, and for a while he held one in each hand, bashing them together rhythmically for the noise and the sensation. Then, for reasons unknown probably even to him, he set the blocks down and started to clap his hands in the same rhythmic fashion: bash bash bash begat clap clap clap, and so it was.

The hand clap is a momentous occasion in a baby’s development, partly because their fists have been permanently clenched for so long, but also because it shows they understand the difference between object and subject; work and play.

I encouraged him to do this a few more times to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, and once he got the hang of it, he could hardly bring himself to stop. He’d be in the midst of pulling himself up on the sofa when, suddenly, he would have to sit down again in order to free up his hands for a clap. Or he’d be gumming on a teething biscuit and end up flinging it aside as the clapping spirit took hold of him.

Just as when he learned how to mimic using a brush and then tried brushing the side of his head with my iPhone, a DVD case, a shoe, or what have you, he still doesn’t really know what clapping is for. But he’s added this new talent to his roster, and will now do a convoluted series of mouth, arm and hand movements that most outsiders would find perplexing if they didn’t know that he was proud of each and every one of these, so why not do them in succession?

He’s also cutting a new tooth, an eye tooth I think, on the upper left side. He’s had two bottom teeth for ages, and now his gummy smile is erupting with small, white welts that suggest the emergence of more teeth. I’m going to miss those little gums an awful lot, but trust that I have even more to look forward to in the coming months.

Why I wanted to stomp a toddler

Sometimes I feel as though I’m about due to burn out on my profound love and constant concern for the baby, but it never happens. I guess I worry about this now and again because, in all other aspects of my life, I have a poor track record for longevity.

Like I can only do something perfectly and/or responsibly for a certain length of time and then I either have to drop the ball in a major way (like putting off an essay for so long that I nearly No Paper the class) when fear of failure sets in, or my resolve to continue something without obvious rewards just sort of fizzles out after a while.

But parenting, mothering especially I think - and they tell you this again and again, but only because it’s true – is like nothing else you will ever experience. It is almost outside experience, and I’m not sure why that is. I think that a lot of what we do in life (hobbies, school, work, socialising), and how much of it we do, is dependant on ambition - a kind of extra bonus to the givens; the things we do for survival, on the other hand, are nearly invisible in Western culture, and we do these things unthinkingly.

I’m not saying that the mothering instinct is purely one of survival (in as much as you can argue that love and sex are more complicated than the furtherance of the species), but it is so very primal that doing it becomes second nature.

Hartley has a limited vocabulary of words he doesn’t yet understand, but he has a language that’s fairly easy to read if you spend every waking moment at his side, as I do. The way he interacts with me and with his father, the way he anticipates food, his milk, a nap, and the way he experiments with the world – it’s all carried out with the same smiling enthusiasm, and sometimes he can’t help but draw a giddy, shuddering breath inward because he has difficulty containing his excitement.

This doesn’t just warm my heart to the melting point – the existence of that spirit in Hartley is so very crucial, I feel, that sometimes I think I would probably die to defend it. It breaks my heart to watch him do his thing in the world outside our home, where everything is geared to make him feel important and accomplished. You don’t realise how much you come to depend on a child’s certainty about himself until you see that certainty threatened. It takes no more than a toddler misunderstanding his happy noise as he reaches out to clutchy clutchy grab at that child’s trouser. Any unkind gesture his natural goodwill might provoke is bound to perplex and even hurt him.

Today, for instance, we were at an overcrowded play group nearby, where there is no barrier between the walking/talking toddlers and the more vulnerable, less mobile babies. I’ve always hated this about the group, and I must track Hartley very carefully or risk him picking up a toy that’s small enough for him to choke on, or getting himself into a social situation with a bigger child that he can’t handle. Sometimes, like today, I will let him approach a child I don’t know because I feel I am being overly protective when I run up to him and pull him out of potential harm’s way.

I should really trust that instinct more, because one boy, who was very possessive of some toy trucks he was holding onto, actually took a swing with his foot in the vicinity of Hartley’s head, when he’d only reached out to touch the boy’s knee, to pull himself up - I know, because I’ve watched him do this a thousand times to family and friends. I guess the boy didn’t know this, and maybe thought Hartley was after his toys. And I know that Hartley looks like he knows what he’s doing, as he’s quite large and also sentient for his age.

But actually, he’s still small enough to believe that everyone he encounters feels the same conviviality, and that the world is nothing more than a series of opportunities to smile at someone, or to try and stand up.

I grabbed Hartley the instant I saw that boy’s intention, and I looked for an obvious caregiver, though one did not emerge until the end of group – a crotchety looking grandmother, not even a mother – when it seemed pointless to bring up the incident, which both parties had long forgotten anyway.

Later, the song-leader’s child seemed to be bullying Hartley, but again I waited it out to see if he could handle himself. The child was old enough to know, I’d assumed, the limits of fending off a baby, and he was in plain sight of his mother. Regardless, he kept snatching away toys, or blocking Hartley’s attempt to get at other toys, and finally rapped Hartley on the knuckles with a plastic noisemaker.

Hartley cried in that shocked, heartfelt way he has of crying when the world unexpectedly bares its teeth, and I swept him up in my arms and held him for a very long time. It wasn’t until about five minutes later that I finally noticed we were still sitting quietly together with the same defeated expression. And then I realised that, actually, I need to work out how to empower him in social situations, even though I don’t feel empowered myself most times.

I’m hoping there’s a book.

Such uplifting posts

This evening we watched Anatomy of Hell, which even by my standards goes a bit beyond an accessible feminist text. I like a bit of entertainment with my films, but apart from some fairly grotesque scenes depicting menstrual blood and farm implements going where no farm implement should ever go, mostly the characters were compliant puppets mindlessly spouting Catherine Breillat’s extreme views.

What I really want to write about is a clip I saw of The Seventh Continent, which is the first film I watched of Michael Haneke’s after stumbling into Funny Games U.S. at the London Film Festival a few years back. The story, in brief, is about a family who plan to commit suicide, without any real consent from their young daughter, and then go about methodically destroying everything they own before committing the act with (nearly) the same conviction.

It’s as disturbing as it sounds, but Haneke based it on an actual news article he read about a German family who committed suicide after destroying all their possessions. I’m not sure if there was much more to the real story, but Haneke does a good job in envisioning the psychological landscape of these individuals, though he offers no easy answers as to why they are so determined to end their lives.

One of the clips we watched last evening was of the family getting their car washed. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it encapsulates everything that the film is about.

The mother and father sit inert in the front of the vehicle while the child sits behind them, observing their speechless interactions. They inch along through the mechanics of the car wash, their vehicle buffeted by the noisy brushes, their view of the outside world obscured by suds and water.

As they near the end, the wife begins to cry uncontrollably, muffling her sobs with her fist. She reaches behind her and her daughter takes her hand, the husband looking over at her with a mixture of pity and confusion. The mother lets go of the child’s hand as the father tries to console her, to no avail. The heating bar begins to dry the car and they slowly emerge from the garage. The daughter stares mutely ahead, drawing her hands deeper into her lap and clasping them there.

The car wash describes the agonising, relentless forward motion of their lives, which the family (or at least the couple) suffers without motivation or agency. They are insular - at once protected from the senselessness of the world around them and detached from any comfort or joy they could possibly derive therein.

To the wife, the wash represents their inalterable, terrible decision; there is no other way to escape the unacceptable condition of their lives (be it depression or something less accessible, more existential), though this does not prevent her from feeling compassion for herself and her family, and fearing the uncertainty of what they face in committing this act.

Of course, in Haneke’s films, children are the most vulnerable of any character, and in choosing death, the little girl’s parents have in a sense already abandoned her. She tries to offer comfort, to parent her irrational, emotionally indulgent mother, but even this small effort is rejected, and she withdraws again, left with no one to console but herself.

These kinds of scenes play out again and again, though I’d need to watch it over to draw parallels. Short of writing an essay, I didn’t really know where to put this initial revelation, and then remembered that I needed another post for NaBloPoMo, so here it went. Um, enjoy?

Cold unknown

I went to a ‘Conversation with Michael Haneke’ this evening, which was actually more like an undergraduate class with guest lecturer, replete with clips and the interviewer’s misguided attempt to construct thoughtful questions from his own personal interpretation.

The theatre was stuffy - not unbearably so, though I did worry at being dead centre and unable to sneak out should temperature become an issue. Which it soon did, as Haneke complained that it was too cold and made a shivering motion that compelled someone to turn the dial to High Noon in Belize.

I was wearing a jumper to disguise the unflattering neckline of my dress (Orla Kiely was on poor form the day she cobbled that atrocity) so I couldn’t very well remove another layer. This resulted in much fidgeting and compulsive glancing down at my phone to see that, yes, time had indeed crept ahead by another minute, surely not many more to go, ah yes, another notch in my minute belt achieved, and if I’m not mistaken, that makes nearly another…yes, another minute, &ct. I didn’t really hear too many more answers which, to be fair, were delivered by Haneke’s translator long after we’d all forgotten the initial question.

Afterwards I had the fastest noodles in history at a nearby Japanese restaurant chain and headed home on the underground, where I saw my first underground rats – tiny, black and running with such fluidity they seemed like nothing more than toy mice on wheels.

So the evening wasn’t quite as exciting as I’d hoped, though having seen what London has to offer the starry eyed film student, I can now appreciate how difficult it must have been for the professors of my small university to try and bring that caliber of culture to our humble front door.

I also couldn’t help but recall how reluctant I used to be about leaving the house to see a film on my own, or to have dinner out in some restaurant by myself, even though I eventually did begin to do these things, having realised that I prefer my own company to most other people’s. I think I might have just been living in the wrong city.