friday films

500 days of nonsense

2011-07-11T14:05:00.003+01:00

I’m finding this whole ageing* business a bit of a nightmare. The older people get, the further into themselves they seem to tunnel. I used to think that tunnelling into others was a viable solution to an identity crisis, but these days I’m just trying to dig my way out and into the light. I’m not sure if anyone or anything lives up there, or whether I’m actually tumbling disoriented inside a dark sea, swimming my way down, the air and answers at my feet steadily gaining distance.

This weekend I watched a film called It’s Kind of a Funny Story – it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets 500 Days of Summer, if you can imagine such a thing. It was at once heartening and completely irritating to see a film try so earnestly to normalise the experience of being admitted to a psych ward. There were familiar elements to the story (Who is that figure beneath the blanket, are they dead, and do I really have to share a room with him/her?) and elements that make a mockery of mental illness, however unintentional (the David Bowie sing along, and the Hasidic-Jew-with-sensitive-hearing shtick, for instance).

As I said, I did enjoy the film, and I think it’s a fairly good primer for the uninitiated, but if you come away thinking that suicidal feelings, mental illness, depression and personality disorders are the binding agents of universal solidarity in an institutional setting, you’d be wrong about that.

I’m not going to arrive at an actual point, or weave these into an afghan to hide beneath, in case you were holding out for something of that nature. This is simply an unhelpful map of my tunnelling – a kind of You Are Here for anyone who crash-landed on Planet Me today. Apologies, Earthlings - themes and variations, themes and variations.

I’ve been busily inventing new forms of self-alienation (I don’t know, I’m not Freud, am I?) and one thing that occurred to me before the weekend hit, which I think might be true, is that some houses are dead. Am I right? Just as it would be wrong to manipulate the arms and legs of a corpse and call that corpse alive, I also think that people mistakenly believe that moving their shit into an accommodation that died decades ago will somehow turn that place into a home**.

Wanna come over and watch movies? Didn’t think so.

*‘Aging,’ not ‘getting old,’ I hasten to add; it’s an important distinction. Especially if you’re old. Which I am not. (Yet.)

**I don’t believe my house is dead, but I’ve lived in a fair few dead homes, and this is the only explanation. Shut up and let me have my explanation.

Systematic unpicking

2011-06-25T22:11:00.001+01:00

Other people frighten me. I approach them and pull faces and they react and I back away slowly. Sometimes I’ll lie right up against the glass and trace their topography for hours, imagining they spent their childhoods hypnotised by the dirt clods that sprung off their bicycle wheels as they bounced over broken tarmac slightly faster than their reaction times dictated, and then I can almost feel the barrier dissolving.

Our lives are predicated on this underlying assumption that we are known, and that we can know others. We think that because we can agree to certain fundamentals that keep the motorway generally unclogged, we must also conduct more or less the same symphony beneath our shirts. But regardless of which parade we succumb to, amidst the props and paints and perfumes, the vagaries of continuity will invariably betray a lie that remains most invisible to even ourselves. I’m talking about our souls here.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a religious person. I don’t think you can peel away the pragmatic layers of a human to reveal the frightened inner specter of their gossamer truth. Life winds its expert fingers around the lip of our trembling essence and we emit a tone that answers in the only way that it can. Others glimpse our identity through a whirling zoetrope that blurs our static moments into a unified narrative, into a seamless 'you', until one day...

Well, one day I discover that you’ve saved every tissue your mother has ever sneezed into inside a desk drawer. And there is nothing in my toolbox of experience that can answer the 'why?' of this one anomaly. I’ve pulled a thread, and the entire fantasy of knowing you unravels and spools around my feet. A realisation swims up from the deep: You are not me. And, furthermore, I am alone. This gives me a terrific sense of vertigo, and then I must wait for the normalising properties of time + space to whitewash the graffiti this notion produced.

If ever you find yourself seeking your reflection in the shallow pool of someone else, instead see if you can appreciate the illusion that you’re not buried alive inside a fiction of your own making. Scatter the crumbs of your history and watch the birds make off with them, one by one.

Not waving

2011-06-22T12:47:00.004+01:00

I’m meant to be writing a blog for work, but it’s not happening just now.

How do you say "I had a strange dream last night" without a hundred ears tuning out before you’ve even gotten to the significant bit? Nightmares, wet dreams, dreams specifically about the listener – you might entice a few more ears to stick around, but not many. I’ll listen to your dreams, in as much detail as you can provide, because I enjoy the thought processes that go into the telling, and you can sometimes even glimpse a hidden feeling that marbles the convex underbelly of its imagery. Dream imagery is certainly more stunning than any I’ve experienced tangibly.

But I had this strange dream last night (goodbye, gentle readers, until next time); it was terrible, actually. My niece and nephew were little children again, and I could see by my tracking system that they were still on the beach playing, and specifically where they were playing (in the tide, and Christopher is only a toddler), so I went to check on them. I knew before reaching the shore that my nephew wouldn’t be there, and my mind scrambled to assemble the narrative - abduction.

I spent many hours crying and shouting and looking inside horrible containers, all the while knowing that he’d never be found. At some point he stopped being Christopher and started being Hartley, and then I had to wake myself up.

Sometimes my dreams will trail their coattails through my waking life, and their details can inform things that I feel or think about. I once thought I was in love with a real person because of a dream, and I acted on it, and that’s the last time I will ever do something so foolish. If anything, now I worry that the symbolic sediment left to dry on the surface of consciousness may prove fatally prophetic, if ignored. I’ll tell Bruce to keep a more careful eye on Hartley or I’ll wait for the green man before crossing a familiar intersection, and I’ll still wish I’d kept everyone at home, wrapped in cotton wool.

On the flip side, real life issues can find monstrous architectural counterparts in dream threads that get woven into the fabric of one's psyche, so that you don’t always know if you’re awake or asleep or somewhere in between. Though life has a way of dispersing the clouds and making that distinction immediately, and sometimes even painfully, apparent.

Killing tigers

2011-06-11T19:38:00.003+01:00

I read somewhere that there are only 3,500 tigers left in the world. Could that be true? We haven’t even brought about the extinction of whales, and look how long we’ve been in the process of saving them. How did tigers manage to slip through unnoticed? Those blunt, vicious heads of dusty pumpkin whorled with salt liquorice, mouths open and dripping black gums – can you even imagine the absence of tigers?

Today on the bus, I watched Hartley sleeping and tried to visualise the world in another thirty years. It frightens me to think of all the things he might lose, even though I’ve only the faintest idea of what we’ve inherited from centuries of civilisation. What will he fear? What will he love, and how? His atoms will weld themselves to the circumstances of whatever shapes them until the two are indecipherable, and we will spend our final years palming that smooth obelisk without any hope of penetrating its mysteries a second time.

Last night I fell asleep thinking: The social media celebrities are the pied pipers of the counterculture, leading the rats straight to us - to the beating heart of our secret inner lives. When I woke up, I had an entirely different thought, which was: humans are essentially here to die and replenish the earth’s resources; we are this planet’s living fertiliser. Gee, thanks brain! I deprive you of alcohol for weeks at a time and you repay me with nihilism.

If you thought that children could throw mortality off your scent while you hid out in the countryside of familial paralysis, think again. Now you need answers faster than you can keep up with the questions, and each day that angelic clay you threw with such hope and abandon just hardens around the features of everything you still can’t account for. Your son is human, and one day he might never see a tiger. One day...

You try to pull back from these thoughts but you rub them in faster, and they explode into a million points of ink. You use that ink to write love poems in the dark, and you hope that it’s enough.

Blog of Revelations

2011-06-06T17:24:00.003+01:00

Have you ever gone to bed for a month wishing that you could just wake up a saner person? That happened to me today. It was awesome.

Unrelatedly (perhaps), I spent Sunday alone, and in spite of still feeling flu-ish (on top of the effects of a late night out) I managed to propel myself out of bed for breakfast and an early-morning film on television. I chose Un Poison Violent - a coming-of-age story that sounded a bit saucy (young girl explores her sexuality amidst family drama), but which actually turned out to be much better than it sounded.

The narrative explores themes of flesh/spirit, mind/body, old/young and the necessary tensions of these apparent dichotomies when called upon to behave themselves. Unexpectedly, the most poignant scene involves neither the young girl nor the dying grandfather, but the parish priest - a peripheral character that by rights should have had these issues tied up tight.

Early on, the film lays the groundwork for his impending crisis (he spends a lot of time silently ruminating in wet or dripping locales), and demonstrates that although he’s serious about his vocation, he’s also human, and especially invested in the mother (with whom he shares a [chastened] past) and her fast-blossoming daughter. You don’t see much evidence of his internal struggles until quite a bit later on, when he lies on top of his single bed and begins fervently praying for God to bring him peace, an activity that ends with him curled up and weeping.

The characters all spend a lot of time holding each other up to these rigid codes of conduct with varying degrees of dismay and alarm when expectations are thwarted, but with none so much as they reserve for their own perceived shortcomings (except maybe the father, who only seems repentant towards the end, after his father dies).

I suppose the idea is that no matter how good we try to be, not one of us is godlike in nature, and we are ever in danger of being thrown off our paths by these so-called sins of the flesh.

Hello Blog

2011-05-31T13:35:00.002+01:00

It's been a while. Yep.

For those of you waiting for something more, you'll be waiting a while yet. I'm actually composing this in Blogger's unreliable editor, if that tells you anything about my commitment to these words.

There is nothing inside me that I want to transcribe here. Furthermore, I'm not sure that what's inside me is transcribable. Evenfurthermore, each time an untranscribable issue emerges that I'm not comfortable *sharing, I tend to create an anonymous journal for that issue...and then it magically disappears (the issue, not the journal, though I wish they would).

So it appears that by concretising my tempestuous insides by way of transcription, I can make issues disappear. Good to know for the long term, but there are things I'm not ready to let go of yet. I'm terrible at living without something resistant to push against, and hence I must reserve a little, purely for **pedantic purposes.

Now that you're wishing you could go back in time and unread these cryptic and senseless-to-all-but-me sentences, I'll leave you with one final thought:

I'm starting to fear old age. I've never given it much thought, because I've always been young, but in the last twelve months, the fact that I'm aging has finally dawned on me, and it's terrifying. I've always known that I'd make a terrible old person, and I'm not someone who is going to celebrate ***laugh lines and grey hairs, because all of these things signal the end of what little I feel I have that's worth celebrating. I'm not saying I dislike the aged as a whole, but in the same way I feel I wouldn't suit blonde hair, I don't think that I will suit old age. But I will wear it like a moth-eaten suit and that will be that.

Anyway, so if you think I'm behaving strangely, it's just me working out a way to own the old. I guess? Fuck, I'm starting to wish I hadn't bothered with this entry either.

Okay, ending on a positive:

I'm very much in love with my job, my town, England and all their ensuing complexities. It makes the hard stuff a lot easier to cope with.

*of course I mean ' sharing with my mother,' who I strongly suspect reads here now. Hi mom! Nothing personal. It's just, you know. Well...hi!

**untrue

***well, grimace

9 hours

2011-03-09T13:52:00.005Z

Hot air balloon mishap
Freefalling and looking through a bag for instructions on how to land

A play w/ 3 new characters related to The Talented Mr Ripley

A dead kitten on the sidewalk

The bus is threatening to leave and I can’t find my case

A man helps me down the awkward steps of the bus

Remembering that I forgot my travel case on the bus

A hidden stash of notes and clean clothes in the slotted drawers of my caravan

Disco vomiting up a pile of dry cat food

Unable to see the time on our mobiles

Asking why electronics never work in dreams

Combing giant nit eggs out of the baby’s hair

A cloaked figure, like an Orc with long metal gloves, on a deserted road at 6AM

It’s death up the road and I can’t shake him

It’s 9AM and I’m going to be late for work

It’s 8AM and I’m going to be late for work

It’s 8AM and I ask Bruce to call me a taxi so I won’t be late for work

The shower is broken and the bathroom is massive

There’s nothing to wear; the drawers are full of baby clothes

Mosh pit of rubbish

2011-03-03T13:58:00.004Z

It’s funny how something you really want to say in the morning can become irrelevant by lunch. I know you’re supposed to be lucid and inspired during the earlier hours, but that’s the time I’m more likely to come up with a phrase like “Mosh pit of flowers” and then share it earnestly with others. If you want to feel like you’re getting anywhere, with documentation and whatever else, please don’t waste your inspiration on describing what tulips do on your way to work.

I’ve been eating lunch at my desk against my better judgment, so that I have more time to bash these out, but instead I have interested parties staring over my shoulder because they assume that I’m still working. And then I hope they’re short-sighted and can’t easily read text at 30%. I certainly can’t. Also, I have one ear to the office and suspect that they are right at this very moment having an impromptu web meeting without me, which cannot happen. Just a second.

Nope, it’s 'hideous stuff,' apparently. So where was I?

Oh yes, I was going to tell you about the little girl I saw emerging from the station; this singular, sensational figure who moved steadily against the grain of early morning commuters rushing in to catch their train to London. I wanted to stop her and say, “Wait! Don’t do a single thing more, because I am going to make you very, very famous.” Except, of course, I’m nobody, and know nobody who is anybody who is making movies in need of child stars. Not as far as I know, anyway.

Then I became obsessed with why she was coming into Hitchin at that strange hour on her own, when it’s most common to see children commuting in groups, closer to the time when school begins. I started to imagine that she was being stalked online by a sexual predator, and that she was on her way to meet him on the pretext of him being a child himself. And I took note of the time (8.07AM) and the date (3.03.11), and then wondered if there was something inherently creepy in that. So of course I came straight to you with the information. Maybe she was on her way to an audition.

I am going to see Deerhunter in 28 days and I’m very excited about this still. Do you remember how, when I first moved to the UK, I bought tickets to see The Sea and Cake on my birthday and then forgot about the show by the time it came around? And they haven’t played in London since? Yeah, that isn’t ever happening again.

Girl I see on the train

2011-03-02T14:53:00.004Z

Now might be a good time to tell you about this girl I see on the train every morning. I’ve been wanting to write about her for ages, because I find her intriguing in a way that I can’t put my finger on, at least off-paper.

The first time I saw her, I thought she might be drugged. Her head rested against the window, and her face mimicked an expression of sleep (glazed, narrowed eyes; a drowsy, permanent smirk), even when she occasionally sat up straight, or stood to disembark. It worried me a bit, because she was clearly school-aged, maybe fourteen or fifteen, but when I saw her again the following morning, I realised that this was simply her natural expression (at least before 9AM).

Other aspects of her appearance lend themselves to an overall impression of a sleep-walker, such as the blonde tendrils of hair that escape a hastily trussed ponytail and the soft, worn fabric of her leggings and t-shirts, outward-turned feet nested inside slouching UGGs. Her telephone number “in case of loss” is printed in black marker directly onto the cotton of her pink, drawstring rucksack (one of three that she uses – none of the others bear a visible number), and has bled and turned purplish in the wash, or the rain.

And that’s it, really. I’m not sure why this lanky teenaged girl with an odd dress sense and enigmatic fatigue has made such an impression on my imagination, but maybe that’s all it takes. I see her so often now that I almost feel I know her; part of me hopes that she’s somewhere across town in a classroom, sketching her own private portrait of that strange woman who steals glances at her while she time-releases the universe into her consciousness.

Since I left you (I've not found a convenient coffee stop)

2011-03-01T13:30:00.009Z

Recently, a friend on Facebook posted a video to my wall for a song that I used to listen to obsessively back in 2004. A pixie-like girl - who was obsessed with all things to do with Iceland, and who did data entry with me for a few months between semesters - first introduced me to Avalanches that summer, and I never looked back (to a time before Avalanches, I guess). Anyway, in contrast to the light and exotic scenarios my imagination painted around that island-beach-party noise you hear thumping away in the background, the video does something dreamlike and far more substantial:

I don’t often enjoy music videos (I quite liked Grizzly Bear’s ‘Two Weeks’ until I saw this video, for instance), but sometimes I get lucky.

Speaking of dreams (don’t worry, I’m not going to describe them), I’d like to find out why mine thematically revolve around distance lately. (Fine, I lied, but I promise I won’t bore you with superfluous detail). For instance:

-- I must return to work (in Hertfordshire) on foot from Vancouver, which becomes Regina and then turns into a steep, red-earthed logging road in Oregon.

-- I have to find my way back home (in Hertfordshire) from work (Regina) by city bus. I get off at the Cornwall Centre and then panic once I realise the enormity of my journey.

-- I have to find my way to a McDonalds across town in order to do a coffee run for work, and I have to take Hartley with me. (Town = home = central London in this scenario.)

Okay, so that last one was negligible. And fortunately, even my dream self recognised that there is a McDonalds on every corner, because I chose to invent one just up the road. Also, I stepped on a pizza that was displayed on the steps leading up to the cashier. (I thought I'd add that in because it's at least an interesting dream detail.)

So what have we learned?

Unexpected music videos can reveal a familiar song’s hidden depth.
My subconscious is anxiously preoccupied with distance and conflicting notions of home.
I am a cheapskate who would rather buy my colleagues shitty McDonalds coffee than spend an extra tenner at Costa.

Pop quiz next week, fellow dreamers.

Welcome Citizens of 2011

2011-02-28T14:01:00.003Z

I am back at work, and goodness knows I don’t have nearly as much time or energy to expend on extracurricular anything – even things I find enjoyable. When you fill ten hours of your day with work (including commute) and then glue these hours together with full-time child-rearing, your actual free-time priorities become very apparent very quickly:

1. Sleep
2. Eat
3. Television/Angry Birds.

Agitate the Magic 8-ball as often as you’d like, but those are the only three answers that could conceivably surface as a working parent, at least in the first years.

Last week, whilst eating lunch in the communal area, I thought to myself, You know, I really miss writing. I wish I could fit it in somewhere. And then I looked up from my sandwich and realised that you are not actually required to socialise with colleagues over your lunch hour. I’d been out of the loop for so long that this minor-but-contextually-massive stipulation had somehow slipped my mind, and so today I’m at my desk, typing for my life, the remnants of pickle and avocado still tacky between my blurred fingers.

I don’t have an entire hour to spend on an entry, so you might only get a few paragraphs like this. But it’s a start, and with more practice, I may work up to telling you about my sandwich in greater detail, or a myriad of other things you’d be interested in knowing, if you know me. Which, chances are, if you’re reading this, you do. I am covert like that.

December 18 - Try

2010-12-30T23:25:00.003Z

What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn’t go for it?

Yeah, okay. So next year, I’d like to try...

I’m drawing a blank. A blank has been drawn, and my poor pillaged Advent calendar rests eternally in that great recycling facility in the sky.

Next year, I’d like to try putting action before thought. As someone who lives almost exclusively in their own head, I can tell you that I probably spend about 90% of my time imagining, projecting, fantasising and a whole host of other unhelpful frontal lobe activity that only gets in the way of clean dishes and a tidy house.

Of course, once I begin stumbling through life like some Frankenstein’s monster of poor impulse control, the humiliation factor is guaranteed to increase exponentially, which is not something I will document here. So although my resolve might not make me wildly popular online, I’m sure I will reap the rewards of this hasty promise tenfold in my real life. Yes.

There was something I wanted to try in 2010. Nothing happened though, because I didn’t go for it. There’s a lesson here somewhere. Oop, right there.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 17 - Lesson Learned

2010-12-30T23:01:00.002Z

What was the best thing you learned about yourself this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward?

It was really great to discover that I’m not actually required to put up with people who make me feel bad about myself, or who try to take advantage of my congenial nature. Going forward, I vow to spend no energy whatsoever on these types, who turn up rather too often in my life, but thankfully not so often that their presence would overwhelm the vast majority of sane people who either like me or stay out of my face if they don’t. I think that by having more boundaries, I can probably sidestep these gate crashers altogether, though I’m still working out the difference between boundaries and bullet-proof glass. That can easily backfire if I'm not careful.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 16 - Friendship

2010-12-29T23:12:00.009Z

How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year? Was this change gradual, or a sudden burst?

I learned very early on that if you continuously stew your brain in a stock made up of old ideas, you will one day open your mouth to speak and nobody will understand a fucking thing you say. Because your mouth will be full of crazy soup. To keep crazy soup off the menu, you need a kitchen full of diverse, competent chefs, which is to say that I may deal in lousy metaphors, but my friends are like saffron to my life. You know – a rare and expensive seasoning you sometimes have to go to Southwest Asia to find. That’s actually not too far off the mark.

My most important perspective shifts have almost always come from friends. Boyfriends (and fiancées and husbands) are stuffed into the same perspective pot as you within about thirty seconds of your toothbrushes mating in a cup on the bathroom windowsill, by which time you should be finishing each other’s sentences and arguing about whose turn it is to use the communal brain. So whilst you can rely on your partner to tell you that No, you are not getting fatter, that doorway is just contracting because it's cold in here you certainly wouldn’t expect them to come home one day and hand you the meaning of life. That would be inconceivable, and also wrong, as it is your job to retain the upper hand at any cost.

The first time I can remember another human being seriously changing my perspective on life (which in turn changed me into a whole new person, practically) was in university. We were actually in the university. I’d just skipped another one of my electives to sip coffee sludge and smoke cigarettes in the student’s union bar and he was on his way to class. I was trying to be cool about the fact that I was wasting my tuition money, and he told me that, actually, he really liked school. I thought this was a novel idea, or maybe I was just being polite, so I asked him to elaborate. He said something along the lines of enjoying being able to amass as much knowledge about the world as he could. And I was like: huh.

And that ‘Huh’ stayed with me all day, until I too was eager to become a vessel for enlightenment, and to see how far I could stretch my mind. It turned out to be much further than I ever thought possible, actually, and to this day I still believe that anyone can learn anything they want, if they go into it with the right mindset. Determination is important, but mostly you need to give yourself over to the fact that you don’t yet know something, and then (here’s the tricky part) make a home of indeterminate dimensions for that something, because whatever it turns out to be, you’ll want it to feel welcome when it arrives. Wax on, wax off. That sort of thing.

Anyway. All this to say: friends can change your perspective in both small and profound ways, and that’s something you have to be open to as well. It’s also something you need to make time for, which I’ve been rubbish at doing this year. It’s mainly because I’ve got this kid to look after. I love him to bits, and soon I will need to learn how to live my life as though that love doesn’t take up every metric inch of space I own. So I’m looking at ways in which other mothers achieve that balance, and I’m taking notes. Mentally, in my big old empty pot of soup, which by now is a reduction of Thomas the Tank Engine and Sudocrem. It’s also because of social anxiety, and soon I guess I will need to learn how to deal with this in ways that don’t involve resveratrol.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 15 - 5 Minutes

2010-12-22T19:45:00.009Z

Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010.

Thankfully, I am an expert archivist.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 14 - Appreciate

2010-12-20T20:46:00.002Z

What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?

We have been in the shit now for almost two years. Perhaps that’s not the most gracious way to describe parenthood, but sometimes it really does feel like all-out war. We battle with sleep and diet (Hartley’s and our own), during nappy changes and baths, with staying on top of dishes, laundry and toy cars, in and out of shops and push chairs, cots and high chairs, in the bedroom and in the kitchen. Life is made up of long strings of days chock full of such battles, at the end of which we put our small dictator to bed and throw ourselves into a black hole of television. It’s the only logical way to cope with the complete loss of perspective.

So when I occasionally lift my head and notice that the dishes are washed, the laundry folded and put away, and Bruce and Hartley are peacefully coexisting without any need of me whatsoever, I really do appreciate the sudden harmony. In these moments, I try to just enjoy the vista of calm and recognise that although it’s rare, it is also possible. This is what I signed on for when I first made the decision to start a family, and although it’s not the minefield of golden moments I was expecting, I feel all the more thankful whenever I come across one of these precious gems.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 13 - Action

2010-12-17T20:55:00.005Z

When it comes to aspirations, it’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step?

What is this new obsession with ideas and making things happen? When did a nice way of delving into the hearts and minds of regular people turn into a rat race for some hazy, distant prize of...what? I’m still trying to figure this out. Is it money? Fame? Recognition? It’s not enough that we get to live a life largely without constant hunger, pain, grief or hopelessness – we want our big fat future reward too. We want a trophy that will prove to ourselves, and to those around us, that this life of ours really means something.

I’ll tell you what: my biggest idea that I want to make happen in 2011 is to get us through another year alive. Not because we’re poor or unhealthy, and not because we live in a country with appalling human rights or natural-disaster-prone geography, but for the simple fact that life is fucking random. Pardon my language, but this is something that has yet to cease mattering more to me than anything else I can distract myself with. You could be standing on solid rock or hanging by a thread, but you will never know which it is; the treadmill stops for nobody, and it’s both hard and easy to put a foot wrong when you’re perpetually stepping into the future.

If I can make it through the next fifty years without dying (or losing the people that matter most to me before I do), then I will consider that my greatest achievement. My next biggest idea-turned-action is to raise a boy who can know all this without having it break his heart; who can live as though each day matters, and be grateful if that’s the only thing he has to feel grateful for.

I've been forgetting to include my advent calendar prompts, which are meant to propel these ideas along. Today's calendar door revealed a pair of chintzy, glass ornaments. So there you go.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 11 - 11 Things

2010-12-16T13:04:00.005Z

What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?

1. Self-importance – been there, done that. Bring on the silent struggles and mindless telly!

2. That sort of eliminates any potential the rest of this list might have had. Oh well. Let’s see though.

3. Unwanted advice – I am going to take unwanted advice much less seriously, when it comes to Hartley. Like if someone says: do not feed him red foods, red foods will make him spin in circles and lose muscle mass, then I will feed him nothing but beetroot and lipstick. So you’d better think very carefully before you offer unwanted advice about child-rearing. Think in opposites, for instance.

4. Self-recrimination – I am the queen of over-thinking, but only if it means I get to be the bad guy. This next year, I will stop listening to the voices inside my head (metaphorical voices, not crazy ones!) and instead remember that I am actually a kind, polite and caring person who would rather swallow my own handbag than harm another human being. I think I should probably add /worrying to this item.

5. People who drain the life out of me –I’ve made one or two cuts this year and haven’t regretted my decision. In fact, I feel a whole lot better. To all the people I’ve yet to meet: the drawbridge will remain in an upright position unless I’m positive you’re not here to trash the place.

6. Rules – I live my life by rules. These rules are self-imposed and mostly arbitrary, and lately I’ve been breaking one or two, just to see if they’re meaningful. I quit smoking in 2006, and in the last six months, I have smoked two cigarettes. Did the world come to an end? No. Am I going to start up again? No. Will I smoke another cigarette? Maybe. I will make up my mind on a case-by-case basis, and that’s how I plan to do pretty much everything for now.

7. Pining – What a completely useless activity!

8. Empty promises to myself – Who am I trying to fool? I accomplish far more when I go behind my own back and just do something, rather than intimate that I’ll do something and instead watch five episodes of The Hills.

9. Conflict – Life with a toddler is hard enough without additional drama. I am going to do my best to avoid situations that could escalate and eat up what precious little time I have for myself and for Hartley, even if it means backing down and washing ten loads of dishes when it’s not even my night to wash them. Did I just put that in writing?

10. Mind reading – Did I go to psychic school? No? Well then I don’t know what you’re thinking, and I’m just going to assume that we’re tight, unless you tell me otherwise. Deal? Great. No, just the bill, thanks.

11. Complaining – This is a hard one for me, because I spent my childhood squashing negative emotions wayyyy down, for a variety of reasons. Now I want the world to know that I’m miserable! Even though I’m actually quite happy! What’s up with that? If you know, maybe you have a psychology degree. Or maybe you went to psychic school. Yup, in 2011, I am going to be one little happy ray of sunshine. Just see if I’m not.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 10 - Wisdom

2010-12-16T13:02:00.002Z

What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

(I've skipped a few prompts, mainly because they felt too cheesy to contemplate, but also because I wanted to catch up. Which is clearly working out great!)

There is a marked difference between ‘wisdom’ and all other words that imply thoughtfulness; to be wise is to make choices in life based on experience, which is something I still feel I’m amassing in most respects.

Our decision to move out of London in early March was the best decision we made this year, though it was a bit of a crap shoot, since we didn’t actually know how things would pan out. All the reasons we could think of to stay (friends, nightlife, proximity to work) were pretty flimsy in comparison to what we got by leaving (3x the space, proximity to family, better amenities for Hartley). Our lives have improved drastically since moving out of our tiny, expensive flat, and although Hartley is generally easier to manage now that he is older, I still can’t imagine what we would have done in that filthy, roaring sprawl. Though I do miss that filthy, roaring sprawl sometimes.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

December 6 - Make

2010-12-08T23:38:00.018Z

What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

I think we won't bother with the advent prompt this time around, as the last thing I made needs no prompting. It also needs no repeating, but I spent a small fortune on some tubes of oil paint and should probably make some time to squeeze out their contents. So without further ado...

The last thing I made was a poor oil-on-canvas reproduction of Landscape, Outskirts of Paris (Christopher Wood, 1901-1930). I am not even sure if this is the proper way to cite a painting, which, as you can see, is the least of my problems.

I can't tell you why I took the class, or even what I expected to get out of it. The last thing I painted prior to this was – I shit you not – a winged unicorn flying above its own reflection in a lake, the laboured arc of a rainbow dominating much of the background (in acrylics, none the less). I was seven, and didn't know that paintings had names. If I did, I might have called mine Flying Unicorn Sees Himself, With Rainbow. All unicorns are boys, FYI. It's why they dig the young virgins and have horns and whatnot. Filthy, filthy beasts.

SO. I did this art class, which I was fairly confident would cater to my inexperience, it being called Oils for All and not Oils for Experienced Artists Looking For Reassurance, for instance. The room was small, the instructor said things like “Mm, 'tis” when faced with assertions like “It's a lovely light coming over that hillock now,” and actually, everyone else had a talent for saying very little and yet somehow still managing to squeeze in painting terminology that made me feel inadequate, such as “knock it back” (no whisky, no comprende) and “that's coming on well.” There were five of us in all - mostly women over the age of 50 (well over, in some cases) and all were properly what you'd call artists. All but one.

Fortunately, I intuited that there would be little to no actual instruction in these lessons and chose a painting that I thought I'd have a slim chance in Hell of blagging my way through from beginning to end. I tore Chris Wood out of a book and thanked the Baby Jesus on a skateboard that I'd recently watched an instructional video on how to block in objects with a pencil - for scale, and a general idea of where to put paint down. I thought I could get away with overworking my background over the course of four weeks (skylines require a deceptively large amount of detail), but after my first lesson, she brandished her number 2 paintbrush at me and commanded me to paint faster.

By lesson three, she'd wrestled my brush from me and was showing me how to put paint on the canvas with an eye to efficiency and completion - it was THAT painful for her to stand and watch me drizzle smoke from my tiny smokestacks and edge in blue highlights hour after hour. Eventually I saw that in order to get this woman off my back, I was going to have to try to tackle the wild jungle of the foreground – jagged cliff, impressionistic figure and all. I launched into it with a kind of recklessness I didn't know I was capable of, and at one point she leaned over my painting and said, “You've really cracked that.” I've never felt more proud of something in my life, and that includes my 100% final mark in Film Theory and Aesthetics – a bit of trivia I like to pull out every five years to remind people of how exceptional I once was.

A moment of silence for that person.

It was at the eleventh hour, after several failed attempts to make brown by mixing cobalt blue, lamp black and yellow ochre that I finally squeaked, “Excuse me? I think I might need another colour.” She looked at my canvas and nodded and said “Yes, I do believe you're ready to add another colour,” and she daubed a bit of 'light red' onto my palette paper so that I could do a rock.

It wasn't until I took the painting home (still wet, carried gingerly at one edge between thumb and forefinger), and mustered enough enthusiasm to purchase some oils of my own several weeks later, that I realised the original painting was pervaded by a kind of subtle, purplish hue, whereas my own was – from sky to the sandy beaches of my foreground - a wash of atonal greens. This is the peril of painting as a non-artist who does not realise she is missing out on an entire wheel of the colour spectrum, and so I sheepishly reworked these parts for a few hours one evening, having lost the magic of that so-called lesson, which really only taught me that painters are a strange bunch of people that don't use the internet and are afraid of mobile phones because of radiation poisoning.

The end?

This post was brought to you by the colours Lamp Black, Yellow Ochre, Light Red, Cobalt Blue (Hue), Titanium White and the smallest bit of Lemon Yellow.

Materials:

10x14” stretched canvas
G24 round brush
G36 short flat brush
No. 27 palette knife
Glass jar of white spirit
Paper towel
A lotta nerve

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.

Day 5 - Let Go

2010-12-07T22:26:00.006Z

What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

Advent calendar says...Christmas cracker.

If you let go of your end on a Christmas cracker, you will fail to activate its distinct noise, followed by a toy, a terrible joke and a funny paper crown.

If you let go of adolescent ideas about fulfillment and instead focus on taking what’s in front of you and making it into the best possible life, you won’t fail in that respect, or many others.

This year I let go of the idea that we would move to Canada, and that doing so would magically make life easier. Once I took this on board, I had to own up to the fact that I’ve been putting up a lot of resistance when it comes to adapting to my new home.

I’ve always considered myself to be spontaneous and open-minded, though in practice I’ve been anything but. Rather than embrace England and my new peers, I measured them against the friends and familiar landscapes I left behind, and let their perceived shortcomings brand a skull and crossbones into my heart. This slogan became the basis of a campaign, one that I sold to myself over and over again, about why I could never be happy here. After a while, it didn’t occur to me to wonder if this propaganda was true in any sense. It also didn’t occur to me that I might be depressed.

Anyway, long story short – I am now relaxing my death grip on the past and am determined to make the most of my time in England. I don’t know how long we’ll stay here for – it might only be another year or two, or it might be forever. Whatever we decide, what I don’t want is to look back on this time in our lives and wish that I hadn’t spent so much of it fighting invisible foes and plotting escape routes from imaginary dungeons. I’d like to visit the London dungeon one day. That could be fun.

Written in participation with #Reverb10

December 1st - One Word
December 2nd - Writing
December 3rd - Moment
December 4th - Wonder

December 4 - Wonder

2010-12-07T00:23:00.004Z

How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

Advent calendar says...candelabra.

Cultivate is a very good word choice. As adults, we tend not to moon about wide-eyed and agog over every new experience because we’ve spent our lives building templates that efficiently process and file away information. It’s how we survive as a species, the tradeoff being that we lose some of that magic which came naturally to us as children. I think you probably know where I’m going with this, but in case not, I’ll beat around the bush some more until you’ve forgotten why you came here and buy my knock-off handbags.

I don’t really have knock-off handbags for sale, but I bet every spider on the internet just did a double-take and is poised for a feeding frenzy the likes of which have never been indexed.

I once read an article that described the process whereby the pathways for receptiveness to certain types of experience are systematically blocked off in an infant’s brain if they aren’t utilized. This is partially what determines where our interests and skills lie as adults, and explains why some of us become archeologists while others like to make tiny houses out of their own skin. Once, I told my old NCT group that I intended to expose Hartley to as many different types of experiences as I could before this happened to him, an idea that had barely made it past my lips before they jumped all over me and then unanimously hailed a cardboard box as the ultimate toy and learning tool. I am not sure when and where my cardboard box pathway was interrupted, but I think my mummy group pathway sustained permanent damage as a result of that incident.

But back to the original assertion: if there is wonder to be had in life, and you are over the age of five, how do you go about cultivating a sense of it? I’m lucky because I think that after falling madly in love and moving to one of the most thrilling cities on earth, there was nowhere else to go but down, in the wonderment sense...and then along came Hartley. Hartley creates an ever-present sense of wonder in me: in how he speaks and behaves; what he likes and dislikes; his growing independence and strengthening character - it’s all endlessly fascinating.

It’s also true that children encourage us to take one more look at the world without our self-imposed blinders on - to approach every new experience from that initial place of small beginnings, and even to stop and recognise when a new experience is taking place. I have no idea how this relates to a candelabra. Maybe we just need to be vigilant, and not allow ourselves to snuff out these flames of wonder before we’ve had a chance to feel their little light.

Written in participation with #Reverb10

December 1st - One Word
December 2nd - Writing
December 3rd - Moment

December 3 - Moment

2010-12-05T20:05:00.003Z

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

Advent calendar says...fruitcake.

See? I told you this was coming.

I think it may actually be illegal to diss fruitcake in England, but let’s just say that if I had an exhilarating moment this year, fruitcake was off doing something vaguely gross with candied orange peel and couldn’t make the event. Aw, too bad.

Perhaps the general property of fruitcake will call up such a moment: a medley of textured pieces barely contained by crumbly, fragrant dessert.

...

Well this is awkward. I really can’t think of a moment this year where I felt notably 'alive,' to be honest. Maybe it was June, when we touched down at Vancouver airport and I knew that I had two full weeks to completely saturate myself in a familiar element. Actually, yes – let me tell you about that.

I was exhausted. I was more tired than I could remember ever feeling, and if you’d told me that this fatigue would be tripled upon landing in England a few weeks later, I might have torn up the return ticket then and there. But for now, I was holding a 23lb toddler who’d been forced to condense twelve hours of sleep into a three-hour nap (and looked it) whilst forming a kind of echo chamber of weak, plaintive sounds with Bruce, who was humping two toy/snack/technology-laden carry-on bags, second only to my hospital bag in their near uselessness.

We followed the current of other travelers through the filtered sunlit passages of the arrivals gate, and below us I could see the clean lines and familiar signage of optimistic industry, already promising a taste of the efficient, friendly customer experience that awaited us beyond the doors of this self-admittedly artificial environment.

Coming home always feels a bit like what I imagine returning from the dead might be like. You shrug off all earthly vestiges - the people, places and objects that once defined you as a person - and learn to accept that although these things still exist, they will never belong to you again. Your new home takes on the quality of a surreal afterlife, and turning up on your old doorstep to finger abandoned books and photographs, and to live superficially among friends and family as you once did, serves only to amplify the sense that you’re really just a friendly spook, haunting the halls of memory for a short time before you vanish again.

In the lead-up to this annual paradox, however, my life, my body, and the boundaries against which each were pushing were never more apparent to me.

Written in participation with #Reverb10

December 1st - One Word
December 2nd - Writing

December 2 - Writing

2010-12-04T19:49:00.005Z

What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

Advent calendar says...star.

Stars, stars, stars. Hartley often sings 'digger digger digger dig' to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle. As the prisoner of a toddler, I am allowed two bathroom breaks, as long as they don't exceed three minutes, and the occasional foray into the kitchen for sustenance, provided young sir is allowed to accompany me and dictate what I prepare for us. Otherwise, I am chauffeuring him around the city and trying to come up with inventive ways of avoiding that part of the main street where the soft play area lives. Unless I'm prepared to spend all afternoon chasing him around that hothouse of recreational plastic and Other People's Children, it's best to walk everywhere but straight past it. Including dinner, bath, dishes, bedtime routine, tidy up and unwind, I'd say that basically everything I do each day does not much contribute to a productive atmosphere for writing. Can I eliminate life? Technically, yes. But that won't solve my problem.

Even one day in the future, when the ghost limb of our conjoined umbilical cord has been completely severed from memory and we are wearing aluminium space suits, I would still have my daily fear of failure to combat. I wouldn't say that fear of failure is something I 'do' in my day, but it certainly prevents me from doing the things that mean the most. If my writing were actually out in the world, being there in front of many, many eyes, and those eyes narrowed and hid themselves beneath the furrowed brows of their readers, I would crumple into a little pile of sad and disappear into the floor forever. So I do everything I can to stay under the radar (it's surprisingly easy) and write no more than a page of nonsense at a time, just to relieve a bit of the pressure that tends to build from not writing.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but this year I've decided to stop worrying about it. There are plenty of really good writers out there, and I am happy to count myself among one of their most avid, accomplished readers.

Written in participation with #Reverb10

Read my entry for December 1st here.

December 1 - One Word

2010-12-03T19:30:00.007Z

In order to initiate Hartley into the developmental pleasures of anticipation, and also to ensure that these crucial days leading up to Christmas and an overseas visit from my parents are not misspent, we bought an Advent calendar. I know as little about Advent now as I did when my parents made the mistake of first introducing me to the daily expectation of chocolate thirty years ago, but it forms an essential holly bow of my Christmas-decked memories, and so it shall for our son.

Earlier today, a friend of mine who is living her dream of world travel, coupled with location independent (read: online freelance) work, alerted me to this interesting 'manifest your dreams'-type exercise, which encourages you to come up with single words/ideas that will help you guide your way to nirvana or unparalleled wealth or something. Actually, I think it's more of a kōan for you to contemplate while you tally up your life thus far and visualise the ways in which you plan to better it in 2011. No pressure there.

2010 can be metaphorically summed up by the way my life looks and functions at present, which is: go and take a peek inside your fridge. No that isn't a metaphor, I'm asking you to look inside your fridge. Do it now; I'll wait here. Okay, so did you notice the hair dryer in and amongst the empty milk bottles and tendril-y potatoes? How did that even get there? More importantly, why are you still thinking about it? Because you should really go and investigate that dull thud and splash followed by MUMMAYYY?! rather immediately. Oop, don't step there! You meant to clean that up yesterday, ha ha, oh and those are your last pair of socks. Were; were your last pair of socks.

Okay, I tricked you - that was a metaphor. And I really do plan to make time to do this #Reverb10 thing, so that I can at least say I am taking a consistent approach to life, and not the pasty consistency of masticated toast abandoned beneath a kitchen table. You would think that a daily prompt to write about oneself would be adequate, but not in my case. I need a marquee with a flashing arrow and travelling script and maybe some sort of embedded subliminal messaging to keep me on track. I need...

...an ADVENT CALENDAR.

So here is what I'm prepared to do: for every day in December, I will open a new Advent calendar door with Hartley, and whatever that door reveals I shall use as a trigger to help me think of an idea that relates to the exercise. Here, I'll demonstrate.

The first exercise is this:

December 1 – One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? (Author: Gwen Bell)

According to the calendar, my first picture prompt of the month shall be (drum-roll, please)...a drum. So with that in mind, the word that I would use to describe 2010 is: Chaos.

But what does chaos have to do with a drum?, I hear some of you (not many of you) asking your computer screens. Now you're getting it! If it helps, you can picture me trying to locate my totem animal while Henry Rollins screams at me from the breakfast table and Sim Cain breaks another drumstick against the taut, pitted polyethylene of my brain. Or something.

This year I've been thrown off the beat by personal tragedy (quietly dealt with and stored away), in-the-round successions of cold, flu and infection, a surprise visit from my old friend Depression (followed by a threatening letter from his line-manager, Nervous Breakdown), extreme weight loss (thyroid-related), extreme weight gain (Doritos-related), a major move out of London and the pressures that accompany an impending career change. I am pretty sure that chaos is par for the course when you are living with someone whose age can still be tallied in months, but let's leave that aside for the minute, because lord knows I am not the only person on earth who is trying to raise a toddler and do other things too.

The word I would use to describe my vision for 2011, when paired with last year's word, should bring to mind the double-sided Kandinsky of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation – Control. (“Chaos, control; chaos, control: You like? You like?”) So not a clean representation of how I think a life should appear, but my own big, beautiful mess as it stands; a vivid abstraction guided slightly more by intention than circumstance. That's how I want 2011 to play out: with me on a kick-drum, keeping time for the bitter-sweet symphony of life that sold Verve tickets back in 1998. But with even fewer mixed-metaphors than I'm wont to use.

Oof. Did I really say I'd do this every day? I may need to think smaller, and catch up again tomorrow. I do wonder what I'll do with fruit cake though.

A Worksheet for Girls

2010-11-21T00:36:00.005Z

Drain away sweetness, just slide
the blade of shattered polkagris
beneath your gums and, when you grow,
you'll thank hard boiled lessons for the complex
mouth of Campari and espresso;

For the poisoned notes of a carousel,
and a faltering reach, a slip
of fingertips that whisper against -
but never catch -
the unravelling sleeve of la belle dame Regret.

(This and more you'll come to know.)

Hartley: Twenty-One Months

2010-10-24T23:10:00.009+01:00

Hello little wiener!

It’s your mummy here. You turned 21 months old on the 11^th of October, which isn’t too long ago now. There seems to be a massive difference between this month and the last, and if I could be bothered to go back and read my terrible scribblings on the matter, I could possibly discern what those differences might entail. Alas, no. Re-reading things I’ve written is one of my least favourite pastimes, somewhere in the vicinity of trying to scour the remnants of sausage from a pan so badly scorched it is practically painted over with a slick new coat of charcoal. Somewhere down there.

Okay, so presently you are a tiny, adorable, highly-strung madman who breathes heavily through your mouth as you concentrate on clicking magnetic train cars together, sometimes snorting because of the pressure your bowed head is exerting on your nasal passages (I don’t know, I’m not a biophysicist [is there even such a thing?]), and then starts to hyperventilate when it all goes pear shaped and one of the cars detaches and then derails as you’re feeding it through a tunnel. I’m glad to see you take after me with your near-autistic approach to projects, and hope that you don’t become even more like me and abandon them altogether when you see that the potential for failure and limited enjoyment is not only possible but imminent. Until such time, I will be sitting right next to you, popping the caboose back in place before you turn around and notice, and probably making things worse somehow.

You are a funny little thing, and now you display habits I was either not around for or just not paying attention to (more likely) when you invented them, which makes them extra hilarious. Such as that noise you make when you are about to do something naughty - like make a play for my non-existent breast milk, or examine the contents from Under The Sink - that ‘Sssssss’ sound as you delve into the forbidden activity with impish delight. I’m not sure what the noise is meant to accomplish, but it’s almost placating enough that I’ll let you snake your hand into my top briefly, or pull out a foil wrapped tablet of laundry detergent from the cupboard before putting an end to your indiscretion.

You remember things from weeks ago and turn them into little songs: one afternoon I got fed up with bruising the soles of my bare feet on your many scattered miniature cars and began to whisk them off into their basket. You shouted NA NA NO! at me as I did this, and I said Tidy! We’re going to tidy your cars now! and you slapped my hand away from the basket and tipped out the contents, saying NA NA NO! until I laughed and gave up. Now, you’ll stop in your tracks suddenly, and out of nowhere do the I’m Not Going to Tidy Up song, which goes as follows:

Tidy…NnnA Na no.

&ct.

It’s really quite catchy, and now I just get you to sing it whenever I remember, or you just sing it whenever you remember, and nothing will ever be tidy ever again. But oh how we laugh, you and I.

Or is it you and me?

Anyway.

I’m trying not to get too caught up in the particulars of each month, or I will scare myself off from doing these letters, and I really don’t want to stop doing them. My therapist says that I often discredit my achievements, and she’s probably right, but what I don’t want to do is to let my own negative core beliefs ruin my memories of what it was like to be your mother in these early years, and to not write them down to the best of my ability. What a shame that would be – to let all of this go because I was too wrapped up in my own issues to acknowledge the importance of what I’m trying to accomplish for us. I should just write the letters, at least until I can commemorate your existence in a more productive way, like making sure I stay on top of laundry so that you don’t have to wear the same pair of socks too many days in a row.

I might edit this down somewhat when you’re old enough to read.

Your bedtime routine is set in stone, with the bun-bun-bun and the squirrel and the neighbours and the stars and apple tree being the mainstay of what we say goodnight to each evening after you’ve been bathed and soft-bagged and we’re standing at the window. Though the other evening you stopped us after squirrel and turned our nightly adieu into an inventory of things you could recall of our garden: “Aaaand…rocks. Aaaand…slide. Aaaand…other house.”

Ah yes – your penchant for counting. You are a natural with numbers, and sometimes I don’t even think you realise you’re counting. Like you’ll sift through the contents of your car basket and slowly count up to ten as you separate them out, which isn’t the same as counting them, I admit, but I won’t come down on you too hard about this until you’re at least two. You’ve finally worked out which of your cars are blue, and now you’ll approach me with one in each hand and say “Two blue cars.” And you know that something is more than one when you say ‘other one,’ which sounds like ‘ah uhn.’ There is a large abacus in the park we took you to over the weekend, and your father and I watched while you pulled each bead away from the group as you counted to ten. It didn’t matter that sometimes you pulled off two at a time, or skipped out on reciting the number five or nine. We know you’re a maths genius at heart and that’s good enough for us.

Sometimes I get very stressed out and anxious about your wellbeing, though it’s usually over things that are unlikely or out of my control. The things I don’t worry about are things I worry that I should be worried about, in case not worrying about them makes me a bad parent. I wonder if I should worry if you have dyslexia, for instance, because you often reverse sounds for words you know, like ‘Ickbits.’ That’s what you call ‘Biscuits.’ Is that normal? Probably, but who has time to read up on this stuff? (Everyone but me; I’m failing you! Haha…) You can say ‘Trousers,’ sort of (you say ‘sousas’) but you still call ‘Jeans’ ‘Eeniss.’ I guess I will worry about this in earnest when you start nursery next year, and all the other children are at a Year-3 reading level while you’re still bashing your head against the floor to let people know you wanted juice instead of water.

That head-banging thing has to stop now, by the way. The low, warning growl you do is more than enough to let us know you’re displeased with the situation at hand, and escalating it to self-harm will not accomplish anything. I know you understand this and are probably just too upset in the moment to care about consequence (or lack thereof) but I’m hoping you get it through your head sometime soon. I’m not being literal when I say that.

Okay Chicken, I think that just about covers it for now. I really wanted to put across how you’ve grown into a little boy, even though the back of your head gets that nested look from sleeping on wet hair, which reminds me of when it looked like that all the time because you didn’t really have hair yet. I do so love you as a baby, and really mourn the passing of these months, even as I look forward to learning more and more about you as you continue to grow and figure yourself out.

Happy 21^st month, my tiny boo. I love you so very much.

Recollections on madness

2010-10-23T12:12:00.002+01:00

Sometimes if I know that I have a short amount of time for writing, I'll try to amass some sentences to start me off for when I'm washed and dressed and sat in front of my screen. Then by the time I've finished my shower, all the words have rinsed straight off me, the last of them wicked away by the towel I use to dry myself off with, and I come out clean - clean of my sleepy disarray and clean of words.

Today I've decided that I'm going to sit and write something anyway. This morning my thoughts turned again to that short period of nearly ten years ago when I went mad. I don't like to talk about that openly with people, and it occurred to me this morning that even though mental illness is a prevalent thing in society - and something that is much better understood than it used to be - it's still a shameful thing for those of us who have ever suffered at its hand. Shameful because it does two things very well: its appearance subverts the parameters of what is socially acceptable and, more importantly, it reminds us of what we mistrust most about human nature (helping to relegate certain kinds of experience to the shadowy realm of taboo) – loss of control.

My intellect isn't nearly as good as it was ten years ago. Motherhood changes you physically, but nobody tells you how it reshapes your mind into a primal calculator, stripping it of all but the barest pragmatic functions. Streamlined and reactionary, it churns up the gravel of each real moment and interprets our best chances of survival. Before motherhood, before adulthood even, my mind was a furious thing, like a wasp trapped inside an overturned glass. When I went mad, that wasp began to consume itself. I was under attack, on a level so microscopic I didn't realise that I was the source.

Some pretty frightening things happened during that time, but a few interesting things happened too. I felt very powerful for a while. The night I spiralled out of control, for instance, I was convinced that I was a genius. To prove this to myself, I did what film and television depicted mad geniuses doing a few years later: I made spidery charts out of bits and pieces from my train of thought, connecting these up with arrows, isolating some in cloud bubbles, until I reached the epicentre of the storm. I can't remember what this chart revealed to me, but it shamed me to come across it once I was feeling a little better, and I threw it away. I made so many charts and diagrams, even from my hospital bed, where I was convinced that I was being lied to about what time of day it was. I was trying to prove this by diagramming the trajectory of the sun in relation to the direction I believed my window to be facing.

The thing is, I don't know what to do with any of these recollections. Sometimes I wish I could harvest the energy from these ancient, muscular delusions; rinse them of their toxicity and put them to good use. I can put them down here as an example of something that happened to a person you wouldn't glance at twice now, with her fingers wrapped around the handles of a push chair, making steady progress from one place of stability to the next. I can mount their heads above my mantelpiece as a reminder of why I no longer tap against the sides of the overturned glass; why I no longer capture venomous creatures, however small.

Last looks

2010-10-15T22:55:00.000+01:00

Turning the lights off on our living space, its objects so exhaustively sifted through life's fingers as to render even the simplest charged with a purposeful continuity.

Midnight

2010-10-14T20:59:00.002+01:00

It was 12.00 AM and Hartley woke up crying. Earlier in the night, I lay awake worrying about him, and wished we were still bed-sharing so that I could put that worry to one side and fall asleep with him next to me. So when he woke up crying, I maybe didn’t try very hard to settle him in his own bed, and brought him back to ours. In the past, he would have used this opportunity to play and sing and keep us awake until we admitted defeat and returned him to his cot. In the wee hours of this morning, I said, "Okay, go to sleep now, baby," and he sighed and smacked his lips gently and stroked the contours of my face with the palm of his hand for a while. Then put his arm around my neck, curled his body into mine and fell asleep.

Thrill

2010-10-12T23:33:00.001+01:00

I made it through my first job interview in almost four years, and for a while, the idea of being back in London every day, all day, and in control of my own thoughts and actions made everything feel a bit different. I headed to the duck pond where Bruce and Hartley were waiting for me, and as I passed two mothers strolling with their indeterminately-aged babies, I thought That's not going to be me anymore. It was thrilling.

In pictures

2010-10-11T19:53:00.006+01:00

The few out-of-doors hours, leading up to Canadian Thanksgiving dinner (click to enlarge).

Nowhere

2010-10-10T00:12:00.000+01:00

How can I explain?

Red on white

2010-10-08T23:22:00.004+01:00

Nothing seems real for me anymore. I'm not saying this in a dramatic or awe-struck sense; it's just that living in England feels similar to playing Monopoly at times. The currency appears bogus, the decisions I make no better or worse than any others, so long as I'm still playing. I turned a corner and saw a shock of red against a white stucco house, so I took its photo. A van made a U-turn at that exact moment, doubling back towards me, and I panicked and put away the camera. I half expected someone to ask me what I was doing, or try to confiscate my phone. You just never know these days. But nobody erased my shitty photograph of a stunning autumn ivy, and no other moment stood out particularly, so.

In the sun

2010-10-07T18:16:00.004+01:00

Outside the cafe that overlooks the church, where I ate warm tea cakes with butter and apricot jam, and sipped my cappuccino in the sun.

Hands

2010-10-04T22:58:00.002+01:00

I reached down and took Hartley's hand in mine, and this time he did not let go. He held my hand and I held his and we walked down cobbled lanes, past shops and straight through the town centre - a mother and her tiny boy, walking together, hand-in-hand.

Lights

2010-10-03T23:32:00.000+01:00

Some cross, boss-eyed girl shoved Hartley for touching a toy on a walker that her little brother was occupying. Then she feigned great concern for her brother, even though I could see that her real aim had been to push my son to the ground. That wasn't the best moment of my day. Not by a long shot. My best moment was the lights coming back on after three hours of thinking we'd damaged the wiring behind a wall where we'd hung a painting. That would have been terrible.

Boss

2010-10-02T23:09:00.003+01:00

An epiphany: He. Is. Not. The. Boss.

And we wouldn't be doing him any favours if we allowed him to believe this. Such was my revelation at the halfway mark during a full day of shopping with my sister-in-law. She has been an unexpected reserve of strength for me during some pivotal moments in the UK, including the birth of my son. I feel very lucky to be a part of this family, who have all done so much for me over the past few years.

Tea

2010-10-01T19:39:00.001+01:00

Well this certainly didn't suck.

Pallet

2010-09-30T23:53:00.001+01:00

The sun pressed its face against the cobblestones and I held the crinkly kraft paper bag into which, minutes earlier, the shop keeper had fed a slim historical biography about this very town. I was walking to my final lesson, where Kate would tell us to get our own paints and I would root around inside various sandwich bags for colours I could remember the names of, and put them on pallet paper like I hadn't only heard of pallet paper three weeks ago. "You've cracked that, finally," Kate would say about my landscape, which is a compliment of the highest order, whether or not she means it. Everything about the afternoon was building to this moment, and I could feel it.

Faces

2010-09-29T22:47:00.005+01:00

This face, at bedtime, squashed in a face sandwich by the nursery window, as we say goodnight to the bun-bun, and to the squirrel, "Who went (insert the noise a squirrel would make if it scurried over your fence but paused long enough to eat a nut)," and to the stars in the sky, the apples in the tree, the neighbours doing their washing up, &ct. We do this routine at the window every single night, but tonight he squashed our faces together for quite a few long moments, and grinned, and laughed through his nose.

Lies

2010-09-28T19:22:00.000+01:00

Not every one is going to be a winner, and some days you’ll be in no frame of mind to spot your best moment. In fact, what the narrator of The Anthologist doesn’t realise is that many of his gems – at least from a reader’s perspective – derive not from his best moments, but from his most painful memories and encounters. I don’t want to share my worst moments with you, because they have no basis in reality. They all take place inside my head, and all of them are lies. (I hope they are lies.)

Spider webs

2010-09-27T22:59:00.001+01:00

It's raining and I'm washing dishes. I glance up and see two spider webs clinging to the hawthorn in the back garden. The webs are like delicate necklaces, or faery handbags, their silk textured and weighted by points of rain so exacting it's as though someone has painstakingly strung them with the tiniest of jewels. They swing and glitter there in the dusk as I wash dishes, and give the impression that someone might stop by later to retrieve them.

Beekeeper

2010-09-26T20:53:00.001+01:00

At the market, the honey merchant told me to put my hand against the pane of glass separating me from a shallow wall of bees on a comb. “It's warm,” he said. It was warm. “They're generating the heat,” I said. “They're generating heat from all the work they're doing,” he said.

Our town

2010-09-25T19:55:00.001+01:00

I was wrapped up in a fluffy dressing gown and shivering beneath the duvet. The curtains were open and I watched the clouds scaling the blue skin of a chilled autumn sky. The mock Tudor façade of the terraced houses across the road begged to be part of a sinister historical drama, so I obliged by thinking up bits of narration for one, spooling variations through my internal projector: "Our town...The people of our town...And when we thought back on it...Our town...It was our town..."

An introduction to an idea of best moments

2010-09-24T10:38:00.001+01:00

Okay, so here’s the deal. I finished reading Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, and in addition to being one of the best novels I’ve read in a long while, it gave me a great idea about how I can raise a toddler and still keep this blog alive. When asked how he achieves the presence of mind to write poetry, the narrator replies:

"'I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?' The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something that I hadn’t known was important will leap up and hover there in front of me, saying I am – I am the best moment of the day."

He goes on for a while, but in those few sentences, I was already a convert. I know that a blog isn’t poetry, or even prose, but if you look back in your archives, you’ll see that on any given day, your writing often depends on the lifting of these best moments.

My day has only just started, and not very well, but I will write down my best moment from yesterday so that you can see that I’m committed to doing this...

Wait - I haven’t told you what I’m doing yet!

Okay, so I plan to write down the best moment of my day, in whatever shape it takes. That’s it. Simple, right? It will allow me to keep up my end of the bargain (i.e. – I write a post, you read a post) without compromising too much of our precious time on this earth.

I hope you enjoy reading about these moments as much as I enjoy remembering them.

23.09.2010

It was four o’clock and I’d just finished my painting lesson. The pink stucco house across the street had a bit of the weak, autumnal sun smeared across its face and I wished that I could have painted it. I don’t know how to paint, which so far is the only thing I’ve learned in my painting class, but I felt good knowing that I could see this pink house and its light and feel that I wanted to do something like that. I’ve never been capable of seeing colour, light and shadow in this way before, and I’m happy for this new gift.

Hartley: Twenty Months

2010-09-12T21:04:00.007+01:00

A dictionary of your favourite words or phrases, on your 20th month:

Ah-aye (-pronoun): ‘Hartley,’ if said in combination with an index finger aimed at your throat.

Ah-mudum (-verb): It used to mean ‘living room,’ but now it basically means ‘follow me,’ ‘come this way’ or ‘please stop washing dishes and come and play; this is boring.’

Ah-munamunamunamuhBODEE (-verb): I’m going to ask you about this when you’re older, because right now nobody has a CLUE what you’re saying, though it never varies.

All-room (-noun): your new word for ‘living room,’ which I’m sorry to say is where you eat all your snacks and meals. A bad habit I’m trying to rid you of without starving you.

App duce (-noun): ‘Apple juice’ which is how you’ve begun to refer to all forms of juice, which you’re not even supposed to be drinking, because it will ruin your teeth.

Beh-puss (-noun): Breakfast, not to be confused with toothpaste. Easy to do, first thing in the morning

Boo-bat (-noun): aka ‘Boo bag’, aka sleeping bag. As we nicknamed you ‘Boo’ for some reason, we thought it apt to refer to the bag you sleep in as a ‘Boo bag.’ We did this consistently for such a long period of time that you’ve taken to calling it this yourself. In fact, you refer to yourself as ‘Boo’ when you see a photo of you, or of any baby (though you also refer to babies as ‘baby’). You sort of extend the ‘oo’ so that it sounds more like ‘Booo-ah’ which I find unbearably cute.

Buh-puss (-noun): Toothpaste. Often preceded by TEESS! You’re only meant to have a pea sized amount, but I think your father probably gives you more.

BUN (-verb): Bounce!

Dadoo (-noun): or ‘thank you.’ You’ve since learned to say ‘thank you, daddy’, though you apply this gratitude indiscriminately. So for example, were I to hand you an apple, you might say ‘dadoo, daddy!’ This morning I taught you to say ‘thank you, mummy,’ and you nearly managed it (‘dadoo, da-….dadoo mummy’), but not quite.

Duh-do (-noun): ‘Play-doh’ which you mainly want to squish into the carpet or eat, which is why it’s currently stored on a high shelf.

Ee-ee-doon (-noun): Upsidedown. You say this if something is upsidedown, like a toy, or a book character, though you also like to lean your head as far back as you can while saying ‘ee-ee-doon,’ I guess because that’s how the world looks to you. I’ve even watched you do a downward dog and look between your own legs as you say this, which is impressive on a number of levels.

Eenis (-noun): Jeans. You say this each time you see that I’m about to put them on you.

Hudoh (-verb): ‘Huggle,’ which is what people in England call a cuddle. It’s actually a cross between a cuddle and a hug, and when you say it, you squeeze your arms around my neck and drag out the word like you’ve heard us do so many times now.

Mo (-adj.): As in ‘mo, mo?’ as in ‘more, more?’ The deadpan way you say this with chocolate sauce smeared on your chin after you’ve demolished a Cornetto cracks us up.

Mun (-noun): which is what you call the gingerbread man we bought you once, and must now buy for you each time we pass Gregg’s. You mainly want to eat the candy buttons off his chest, but sometimes you will deign to chew a bit of biscuit when those three buttons are bitten off and swallowed.

Nu-ck (-noun): ‘Milk,’ which you don’t say anymore, now that you’ve been weaned. I was really sad that first night we put you to bed without it, since you said ‘milk’ properly for the first time ever. You might say it now when we give you cereal, but if we give it to you in a cup, you spit it down your shirtfront in disgust. I don’t blame you at all.

Ole dun (-adj.): ‘All done,’ which you say when you’ve finished a meal, when you want to get down from your chair, or when you’re finished with any scenario, really (eg. if you tire of a nursery rhyme and want me to stop singing it too, you’ll say ‘Ole dun!’).

Papet (-noun): ‘Packet,’ which is what you call the packages containing pureed vegetable matter.

Pat pat, niss niss (-noun or -verb): ‘Feet feet, knees knees’ – my instructions to you when you’re crawling backwards down stairs, but now you repeat this mantra anytime you’re negotiating stairs, up or down, however you manage them.

Pease (-noun): Can mean please, but it can also refer to a specific packet of baby food, which contains broccoli, pears and peas. Thank god you don’t really know what you’re saying, as I’d be hard-pressed to get a vegetable - other than string beans - into you any other way.

Peepo (-noun): refers, of course, to Peepo, your favourite storybook right now.

Piss (-noun): Fish, which you love in finger form, or breaded and baked. You haven’t yet clued into the fact that it also refers to the living creature, and I dread the day you realise I sometimes refer to you as poultry. You also like to use this in place of your usual word for ‘crisps,’ just to make things a bit confusing for us.

Puhpa (-noun): Pizza

Shit (-noun): Sit or shirt or shorts. I hope.

Sit dare (-verb): ‘Sit there,’ which is what you say when you want us to get down and play on your level. You often illustrate exactly where you’d like us to be, by stabbing your index finger at the floor. Usually you are pretty forgiving if we miss the mark by about a foot or so.

TAIN (-noun): which is how you say ‘train!’which you cannot say unenthusiastically, ever.

Tess (-noun or -verb): an approximate sound that could mean cheese, teeth, toast, kiss, juice, crisps (baby puffs) or chase, depending on the context. If I’m in the kitchen and you’re shouting this on the other side of the safety gate, I can be almost certain you mean cheese, juice, toast or crisps, but I’ve been wrong before.

Tetsup (-noun): Ketchup. Anything that’s a sauce or spread, in fact, though you only want it to be ketchup.

Tits (...): I’m not sure about this one, but I do know that nobody has ever said this word (aloud) in your presence, so.

Too tie (-adv.): ‘Too tight,’ which is what I asked you once when you didn’t want me to put jeans on you. I’m still not sure if you understand what it means, but you say it every time I do up the top button of your jeans, which makes me worry and then loosen the waistband so that it sits around your middle like a hoola-hoop.

Touses (-noun): Trousers.

Tsitsin (-noun): which means ‘kitchen’ which is something you say about 90 times per day. Usually you will put your arms up and demand I carry you there, but sometimes you will say ‘hand!’ and reach up for my hand, which means we are going to walk there together.

Up-taz (-verb): ‘Upstairs,’ which usually means ‘let’s go upstairs,’ though sometimes you say it when you’re already upstairs, and then we know you mean ‘downstairs,’ which I guess you don’t have a word for yet.

Okay, tiny boo. This list is officially ole dun. I love you more than all the words in the dictionary – yours, mine and every other dictionary imaginable. So there.

Hartley: Eighteen and Nineteen Months

2010-08-19T20:46:00.006+01:00

Hello my darling,

You know how they say with jet lag that you need one whole day to readjust for every hour of time difference? I’m not actually sure that this is true, but I’ve been thinking: for every month of your life beyond, say, seventeen, I contend that anyone wishing to document this period requires an additional three – not only because the developmental milestones begin to take on a half life, but because this acceleration necessarily occupies much of the documenter’s time. In other words, Chicken: you’re a handful.

I might have been tempted to allow myself to become totally consumed by the hourly theatre of our engagement, but then something happened to make me realise that getting these things down is essential, and that something was muh-mon.

Let me explain. You’ve been a very lucky baby in the sense that mummy has not, until very recently, come up with an adequate argument for weaning you. Not the tactful and tactless remarks about how it appears to others, not the time it takes nor the fear of co-dependency has managed to convince me to suddenly stop giving you milk in the way you’re accustomed to having it. Because this bond has stretched into speech, you are able to not only ask for it (duck) but also determine which side your next sip is coming from (muh-mon - an approximation of ‘other one’).

Yesterday, after a short discussion, your father and I decided that now would be a good time to wean you. I am still trying not to feel selfish in wanting to do this, as you so plainly love your milk, whereas other weaned babies were growing bored of it anyway. But it has to be done sometime, and we were prepared to drop the morning feed for a week to see how you got on. You adjusted so well that, by breakfast, your daddy got excited and figured we may as well drop the evening feed too.

The morning feed was daddy’s favourite one because you’ve always been a little comedian within that first hour of waking, and you’d intersperse your drink with many surprising antics, such as when you decided to start speaking in a whisper, or when you said nonsensical things using that scary redrum! voice we taught you to use when saying daddy. I guess you had to be there.

The nighttime feed has always been my personal favourite though, because you’re just as silly, but in a sleepy, sweet way, and there are few greater pleasures than gently lowering you into your cot as you yawn and sigh and giggle and sing to try and make me stay a few seconds longer. I very nearly let your father talk me into dropping the nighttime feed too, but in the end I had to insist on another week - partly due to my own discomfort, but mainly because I want to say good-bye to this lovely phase in our relationship. It is very hard, if not impossible, to say good-bye to something that is already gone, Hartley.

So that night I sat with you in my arms, in the wicker chair by the window, and when you were finished with one side of your feed, you sat up and said muh-mon. I couldn’t believe that it had only taken me a single day to forget this little Hartley-ism, which surely would have been lost had I gone ahead with the plan of full-out weaning. This is what I mean about it being important to get these things down in the moment. I think some people believe that if you forget something, it wasn’t useful or important enough to keep in mind to begin with. I happen to believe that human beings have very poor memories, even those who have good ones, so. Muh-mon. I promise I won’t forget.

So in the spirit of remembering, and perhaps doing what the Impressionists did best, I will try to employ a lighter stroke and more movement in this next, broader sketch of your life thus far.

You know zillions of words, and if you can’t easily pronounce something, you simply replace it with another word you like better. I am your best translator because I’m almost always a witness to these syntactical inventions, though sometimes even I struggle to work out what you’re saying. It took me a long while to figure out that when you say Ahmudam (like Ah, madame but less French), what you mean is: Mother, please follow me – I’ve something to show you. And when you say mudam and stab your index finger at the ground, it means you want me to settle in and watch you. If you see something you want, you often indicate your desire by saying I dedit (I’ll get it) rather delicately, which sometimes means that I should get it for you, and when you’re climbing backwards downstairs you say pat pat, knee knee (feet feet, knees knees), which is our climbing-down-the-stairs mantra.

It didn’t take you long to work out that if you come to me with your hands atop your head in a gesture of alarm and shout OHHH NOOOO, I will follow you back to the living room where you’ve tipped your bowl of cereal onto the floor because you were finished your breakfast and didn’t know what to do with the remnants. One time you went very silent, and I came in and saw that you’d poured an entire bottle of water onto the coffee table and were trying to mop it up with a wet wipe. You looked up from your work and said OHHH NOOOO as though we were both the victims of a terrible misfortune, perhaps some natural disaster, like a flood that only hit certain parts of England – specifically our coffee table. In these instances, I say Oh no! right along with you and quickly help you clean up your mess. I’m not sure if I’m meant to be telling you that you’ve done wrong, but I figure there’s plenty of time for the naughty corner or whatever.

Your father has already taught you the merits of the naughty corner. If you colour on the telly, for instance, he will say in his best gruff voice: HARTLEY. DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THE NAUGHTY CORNER? And you grin and say Yeah. And then you toddle off to park yourself at the designated seat of naughtiness (the front entrance), and wait with great anticipation for him to appear so that you can scream and giggle. It’s a lovely game that completely undermines the purpose of a naughty corner, and we may have to think up some other way of discouraging bad behaviour in the future, when presumably we’ve worked out the difference between ‘bad’ and ‘normal for this age.’ Possibly when you’re sixteen and you set fire to someone’s garage, we will ask you if the garage deserved it. Was it at least empty? And then maybe delete a few apps off your phone.

What else, what else? All dogs are Pippin (Puh-Pun) because for you that shaggy mop from Come Outside is the only non-threatening beast on four legs, and I don’t want you to spend your adolescence cowering from the distant sound of amicable barking. Every time we encounter a dog, be it extradiegetic or in person, I say, “Look! A Pippin!” and you say Puh-Pun, and then moan in abject horror as I try to get you as far and fast away from that doggy vibe as possible. I guess it’s a work in progress.

You can say your own name, in a sense. You point at your throat when you say it, which is how we realised you were indicating yourself in the first place, and you leave out all but a few vowels, so that the end result is something like: ah-aye. You aren’t pronouncing it wrong – you just say it with an English accent, which I guess makes sense, seeing as you’re part English. You could be honouring your Canadian heritage for all I know, in which case you are actually saying ah-eh? We’ll never know, because one day you’ll go off to nursery and your only influence on speech will be a roomful of limeys, and that’s what you’ll best remember. Memory gets better with age, even as parts of it worsen (I’ve no idea if that’s true, but thought this might be another good place to impart wisdom).

Oh and you can run. You can run and you can clomp around slowly in my shoes and you can hit other children over the head with a toy train... Can we skip that last bit actually? Okay good. Your physical confidence is sometimes greater than your agility, though you nearly always manage to stay upright, calculating obstacles and adjusting for them at the last moment. It’s only when you’re tired that you start falling all over the place, though I’ve become very good at anticipating nap time, which we’ve finally pushed to the afternoon, where it belongs. This leaves ample time for play groups and the soft play area in the morning, where my only concern involves you flapping your little chicken wings at somebody who maybe holds a toy you’d quite like – flapping them very close to their face and heads, some might even say making contact in a less-than-gentle fashion...*trails off into a strangled cough*.

So you see: you are coming into your own. A true toddler bursting forth and causing real things to happen in the world: sometimes tears, but far more often smiles and laughter and awe and so much love. I want to bite your little chin because it sticks out when you grin and that invites me to pinch it, which in turn tickles you and so you laugh. I hope you will always laugh easily. It’s a skill that people tend to lose over time. That is actually true.

Okay my little chick. OH. One more thing: you know the melody and lyrics to “Twinkle Twinkle” and you sing it all the time. You also know “Old MacDonald”, “Horsy, Horsy” and a wealth of children’s television programme material that would probably impress no one but your future psychiatrist. And you hold out your hand when there’s a bit of sand or food on it and say Oh, dirty like a posh little Englishman. And just this afternoon, as you negotiated a perilous part of the garden walk, you shot out your arm and yelled hand! So I put my hand out too and you gripped my finger with your five little cold ones and off we went.

See what happens when I leave these letters too long?

Oh darling, I’m so sorry I didn’t mark your 18th month, which you spent in Canada with your Grandma (“GG Bijou” we called her, so we wouldn’t confuse you with your grandma here) (Don’t ask me, she chose it) and grandpa. That was such a big one. But I promise I will try to make more time to get these memories down for us from now on, even if they only serve to sustain my vision of you as a baby, which I think you’ll always be, in my heart.

Happy eighteenth and nineteenth month, Chicken. I love you very, very much.

An excerpt of a story I will never write - not about babies

2010-08-03T12:47:00.002+01:00

Here’s the last assignment I did for my writing class, which ended in July. I’m posting it here because originally we were supposed to turn it into a story, or even a novel. We were meant to do this on our own time, but as you know, I can’t accomplish anything unless there is a toddler standing directly over me with an empty bowl of fruit and screaming BUBBIES; and then I might refill that bowl with berries, if there’s any in the fridge to be had.

And since this excerpt will most likely only gather space dust in my virtual documents folder on our PC, I thought I’d give it a slightly less dusty home on this here disused blog. Enjoy, time-travelers and future occupants of planet Earth!

Assignment #8 - Untitled

Doug kisses Bonnie on his way out the door, and she slaps his backside and makes her usual quip about his pajamas. They are rather like pajamas, these hospital-issued garbs all staff are required to wear, and Doug often wonders why, as one who occupies a role in the perpetual staunching of physiological turmoil, they are not kitted out in costumes better suited to the gory drama of life-in-crisis - like maybe chain mail, or grease paint and camouflage.

His daydream about being stationed on the roof of Ward B and peering through the scope of a sniper rifle as he picks off the degenerative diseases and gangrenous limbs of patients who stumble towards the double doors of A&E is quickly suffused by the sight of Jenny, who is actually standing outside the double doors of A&E and delicately puffing on a Pall Mall menthol, extra-light. He swings his Volvo into a reserved spot in the emptying staff lot and checks his mirror to see if she’s noticed him pull in, but she’s already blowing her last, minted stream of smoke skyward and disappearing into the refrigerated jaws of the hospital.

Doug is by no means a one-trick custodian. He has polished, buffed and waxed every square inch of available floor space in this sterile house of horrors, and knows that there is no more glory in a vicious slash of arterial matter than in the bleak trickle of urine that escapes an abandoned catheter. His is not to question this erratic release of human detritus, but to simply pass over it with his humming, undulating brushes, leaving in their wake a smooth, uniform gloss. In the six years he has spent polishing floors, Doug has learned that the great equalizer is nothing more or less than the ground you walk on. Heaven or hell, as long as you keep your eyes planted squarely on your feet, you could be anywhere at all.

This evening, Doug’s anywhere happens to be back in Ward B with the schizos and depressives, the suicidally watched and, more sadly, the lifeless dummies they rotate in and out of the electroconvulsive therapy unit on level zero. These are the messes Doug prefers least, as the stains are not of human making, but the sweet, sticky remnants of melted Popsicle, juice spilled by a shaking hand on level zero or sometimes the sputtered tail-end of an antidepressant in liquid form. Bodies are by nature permeable, inwardly sodden and therefore subject to leaks; it’s when the fluids cease to make the return journey home that you know you’re in for a spot of bother, and that is a reminder Doug does not especially cherish.

Besides, he would much prefer to glance up every now and again to see Jenny striding purposefully through A&E inside her floating pajamas, the tail-end of her stethoscope switching against the place where her navel would be, were he to look beneath the pale pink shirt she wore tucked into her drawstring scrub bottoms. He likes the way she runs her fingers through her white-blonde hair, twisting it with surgical precision into a no-nonsense knot at the nape of her neck, her elbows askew and palely freckled. Her skin gives the impression of having been freshly scrubbed and expertly dried, though he supposes she does this often enough anyway, given her line of work. Doug finds it heartening to know that however harried the glistening, patchy floors of Saint Mary’s hospital might become, Jenny will always remain uniquely, wholesomely untainted.

--

Or so I imagine

2010-07-17T11:59:00.008+01:00

So much to say, no time to say it!

Whenever non-parents try to visualise what life might be like with a child, I have to try very hard not to bite my fists and scream into them.

Bruce once told me about a dream he had a very long time ago - a nightmare, wherein he was in hell, on a kind of circular conveyor belt, and studded throughout the belt were knee-high razor blades. He had to jump over the razors as the conveyor belt rotated, because if he didn't, well... Anyway, the belt never stopped rotating, the razors never stopped coming, and that is a fairly good analogy for what it feels like to bring up a baby, obviously with some very nice moments thrown in.

It could be another two or three years before the conveyor belt finally slows down enough for me to catch my breath. I don't imagine it will ever stop, and even if it's going at the pace of a tortoise, you can't ever let your guard down entirely. On your quietest day, with your child somewhere very far away, perhaps in university, you will put down your book and wonder why you haven't heard from him in a while.

Your feet will propel the conveyor belt of their own volition as you make your way to the telephone, and even though you'll look very still as you pick up the receiver, dial the number and wait for someone to pick up at the other end, you are in actual fact calmly, expertly jumping for your life.

Hartley: Seventeen Months

2010-06-17T12:42:00.015+01:00

Dearest Love

You have been seventeen months for six days now. Every morning your daddy brings you into our bed so that you can have your first milk of the day, and each time it is like I am looking into a different face. You have more definition in the folds of your eyes and the lines around your mouth, and if I didn’t know better, I would think these were deepening from all the smiling and laughing you do. Unless I’ve got it backwards and you’ve been hiding a packet of fags beneath your cot mattress (your primary playgroup is located at the heart of a council estate so it’s in the realm of possibility).

This month you have really and truly grasped language, and repeat pretty well everything I say once, sometimes retaining words I didn’t even know you knew, and using them in the right context, which really blows my mind. Like one morning you stole my cereal bowl because I’d taught you how to drink the leftover milk and you’d already finished all of yours. You tipped the heavy ceramic bowl to your lips, slurped up a mouthful and finished off with an appreciative NICE!, except it sounded more like NOICE! which I guess is down to you being British and all (more on that later).

(More on that now, actually.) The very first word I watched you learn with my own two ears was ‘happy.’ You learned it off the telly, I’m not ashamed to say (maybe a little), and it was mainly because one of the characters kept slamming that word home: “Panzee is happy because she jumped around a lot; Drum is happy because she found a nice yellow banana; Tang is happy because he’s a big dumb ape.” I’m just paraphrasing here – the point is, you watched with mild interest, and when the gorilla’s monologue came to a finish, you looked at me, smiled shyly and said in a lilting voice: Happy. Except you said it like: Hah-pay. Because you are British, and because even though you are meant to have my accent until such time as you are in school and thus mainly influenced by the accent of your peers, you watch an awful lot of CBeebies.

Actually though, we only have the telly on for background noise these days, because for the short amount of time you spend not engrossed in eating meals (0.5 seconds) or brushing your teeth (20 minutes) or napping (it varies) or purposeful outings (…) you are usually playing with your many, many trucks and pointedly ignoring the bubble-eyed, squeaky-voiced, motley-coloured characters aimed at your demographic. To be honest, you’d be perfectly hah-pay to spend the entire day at the sink swirling your toothbrush around the plughole and demanding more paste on your brush, which you do by pointing at your toddler toothpaste tube and squealing Teeeef?! Teeeef?! until I give in and dab a bit more on the bristles.

You really surprised me the other week when you climbed up the steps of your own slide and sat at the top, and when I said “Ready?” you responded with “Stiddy (steady)…DOH! (Go!)” and then “DA DA DOH!” which you deliver as a run-on sentence, and which I think is your approximation of “Get set go!” We asked everyone we could think of to determine where you picked that up, but virtually nobody we spend time with says Ready, steady, go. It wasn’t until I heard another mum at playgroup say it as her own son went down the slide that I realised you have been paying more attention to your environment than even I can claim, and I pay a lot of attention now that you are running full tilt towards the Next Big Thing, and away from your mummy.

I read a heartbreaking article about how, at this age, you are actively pursuing your own aims, even if they conflict with mine, and that this conflict feels desperately dangerous to you. I didn’t know that your fits of head-butting and clawing, spitting rage and flailing limbs were simultaneously tinged with fear that I might not love you for it, so I have been extra careful not to let my frustration or dismay show when you have a full-on tantrum because I wouldn’t let you play with the printer ink cartridges. I want you to take it for granted that we are on solid enough footing that you can make these claims on your agency and literally fight me tooth-and-nail to be your own boss, because in the end, this confidence in yourself will be more important than any inconvenience it might cause me. (I’m still not giving in about the printer ink though.) Thankfully 'yes' has made its way into your repertoire.

You still wake up constantly in the night, though it’s no wonder, as your little mouth is absolutely bursting with new teeth! I bet that hurts. Still, when I come into your room to feed you in the wicker chair by the window, you never take what is more than necessary. You go from one breast to the other, holding your arms up in between so that I can lift you just high enough for you to swing both your legs around like a little gymnast on the pommel horse, and we do that until you’ve had your fill. If I interrupt you too soon, you’ll whimper and cry until we sit back down; once you are finished though, you lift your arms one last time and point at your cot, which I carry you to and gently lower you into. For some reason, these past few nights, as soon as your head hits the pillow, you giggle through your nose and grin your way into sleep. This has become one of my favourite moments of our day.

What can I say, chicken? What will sum you up best this month? Your softest baby skin when you push your face into mine and breathe kisses into my upper lip? The way you set your mouth and then form the letter ‘y’ in your throat seconds before you say ‘yoyo’ when I ask you if you want yogurt? The way you run with your arms outstretched like a drunken zombie, or look people in the eye when you smile at them, as though there’s no doubt in your mind that they’ll love you to bits like we do? I could write an entire novel about your seventeenth month and it would only elucidate your loveliness by a nano-something-or-other. That's a very small amount, if you must know.

I wish I could write more, actually, but I’ve got to keep this short. We’re going to Canada tomorrow, to see your other half (half of the family, that is) and to experience the red carpet treatment like nowhere else. You’ll see what I mean when you’re older.

Hah-pay seventeenth month, chicken. I love you to bits.

Hartley: Sixteen Months

2010-05-31T22:52:00.005+01:00

Hello my baby,

I just wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten about this month’s letter to you; in fact, I think about it every day. I keep waiting for those free hours to appear and instead I am blind sighted by another time-waster (your father and I have lost our passports mere weeks before our trip to Canada, of all things).

In a little while you will be seventeen months old, but today you are sixteen months, and although time is running out on this benchmark, there is time enough to say what’s important for right now.

As ever, you grow more and more beautiful with each passing day, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. You wake up in the morning and somehow you are happier and more animated than even the morning before. This month you are learning new words at an astounding rate and have shown me that you know how to climb to the top of a ladder and float to the base of a slide on your belly, all on your own.

I have always loved you, Hartley, but these past few weeks, and maybe for the first time, I have also really loved being a mother. I think this might mean that I’m getting better at it, and I hope that this is true. I want to give you the best of everything, including myself, because you give us so very much, without asking for a single thing in return (except juice - the answer is almost always water).

Okay my darling. I’m sorry this is so short, but I promise I will tell you everything next time.

All my love,

Your little mummy

Exuberance and My Child

2010-05-08T19:46:00.003+01:00

I've been featured on a few different websites over the past while:

My Child parenting website, which interviewed me about this here blog and my experiences as a first-time mother.

Exuberance blog, where I try to summarise what motherhood is like for me in the lead-up to Mothers Day, which already took place in the UK, but which falls on 9th May in Canada (which reminds me: I'd better call my mother tomorrow).

That's a lot of mommy blogging!

The Ten Things Meme

2010-04-21T22:59:00.017+01:00

Taken from Making Strange

1. Favorite hobby

image by gizzypooh

2. Favorite TV show

Big Love

Image from spaceperson.net

3. Favorite restaurant food

image by steamykitchen

4. Favorite thing to shop for

Orla Kiely

image by Beth Maher

5. Favorite animal

image from cuteoverload

6. Favorite song

7. Favorite word

Furtive

image from BBC North and South

8. Recent Favorite YouTube video

9. Favorite movie

10. Favorite childhood memory

Gingerly perched atop the soft, yellow leather seats of my best friend’s father’s Jaguar, our heads out the sunroof, as he drove wildly around a curvaceous, lakeside road and up towards their cabin.

image from Dave the Haligonian

Hartley: Fifteen Months

2010-04-11T18:57:00.009+01:00

Hello Tiny Boo!

You’ve reached your fifteenth month of life and I do so wish you’d stay still for just a moment so that I can get my head round what and who you are. Life is like that generally for us, though, and I am coming to terms with the fact that I may never again have the presence of mind to collect these moments that mount, ebb and completely dissolve into the essential nutrients that help to fuel each and every day with you.

I would love nothing more than to sit down for a few hours and regularly take stock of all the ways in which you, me and your father continue to grow and change – as individuals and as a family - but the fact of the matter is, whenever I get a bit of time to myself now I am faced with three conflicting options: sleep/relax, clean/organise or read/write. That sounds more like six options, doesn’t it? But they seem less daunting when I pair them up like that, so let’s say three. And when you take into account the amount of dishes and splattered/crumbing foodstuff and toys and dirty nappies of which a day consists, there’s little doubt as to which option mummy is going to chose.

But these letters are so important to me because I don’t want to lose you, and sometimes it feels as though I’m losing you on a daily basis. You leave me breathless with the volume and scale of your development, and even though I can still remember those early days when you sometimes looked to me like a stern, miniature farmer squinting across the vastness of his wheat fields with an equal mixture of weariness and resolve, those memories are always in a state of being dismantled by the startling immediacy of today. I want to remember you just as you are, because even though I know I will love you at every stage of your growth, I know that I will miss the baby you are right at this very moment with all my heart. I also want to be able to share these aspects of you with you when you’re old enough to want to hear about them from me.

This month we were meant to be moving into a two-bedroom flat in the house you’d always known, in London. We were all set to go, and then illness struck for what seemed like the hundredth time - first me and then you and then your father - and life ground to a bit of a halt. It was during that halt that your auntie Kelly called and planted the seed of a solution that we’d heard before but never really listened to. One day you’ll learn that there are plans and ideals that exist in the imagination, and these rarely ever correspond to the organic experience of living. You need more imagination to overcome these invisible patterns of thought, which, come to think of it, has a name: ‘thinking outside the box.’

It wasn’t until I’d processed what auntie Kelly was proposing - not London, but a big house, more varied and accessible amenities, family and the chance at discovering a community and a support network for us all – that I realised how amiss we were in our ideals for what we’d always considered the perfect life. London was fine for two people with a predictable schedule and a certain number of guaranteed hours of free time per week – it was not fine for a new family that was struggling hourly to find its feet, and that needed a simple, easy foundation from which to begin and end each day. For over fourteen months, we’d been wrestling to fit ourselves inside an outdated mold of what we thought life should be like without ever stopping to consider what life was actually like. Once you know what your life is actually like, Hartley, the things you need to do in order to help that life along become apparent quite quickly.

So we put this idea into motion and, within three weeks, a conversation became a concrete plan and you, me and your father were moving to a town just outside of London, called Hitchin (which, incidentally, is where your father and I were married). We now live in a great big house with three bedrooms, three living rooms and a massive long garden for you to play in. More importantly, we live very close to your aunties, uncles, cousins and grandma, all of whom have helped us to settle in and have taken it in turn to bring you into the fold, giving you experiences that no two individuals, however much they love you, could have given you on their own.

While your father and I are enmeshed in the drama of acquiring and assembling the elements of a home, you’ve had to come to grips with learning an unfamiliar environment and the bare bones of a new routine on top of the learning you already do as a baby. This is probably why you’ve been a bit anxious lately, and why, up until a few days ago, you insisted on being carried everywhere, to the extent that if your feet touched the floor for even a few seconds you would scream and cry and head-butt the wall so that I would have to pick you straight back up again. You hadn’t yet committed the layout of the house to memory, much less established where I was likely to be if we weren’t in the same room, and so we suffered a short regression where I think both of us wished you could still fit into your front-facing carrier.

It is difficult to quantify the extent to which these circumstances have come to bear on all the new things you’ve been up to, but I think it’s safe to say that the different and bigger environment has launched you into areas of verbal and physical development heretofore unknown to us all. You don’t just mimic sounds anymore - you understand that words and action have meaning and consequence, and you’ve mastered these tools to the best of your abilities in order to communicate your needs.

Before, if you were full and wanted to get out of your high chair, you would chuck your food on the floor and cry. Now you fling your arms open and declare “Ah duh!” which means “All done!” - which means I’d better get you out of that chair quickly before you lose all faith in the notion that you’ve been understood and get really pissed off. You’ve also sussed somehow that shaking your head means ‘no’ and so if I ask “Do you want nana?” before you’re feeling hungry, you will say “Na?” and shake your head emphatically at me. Sometimes you will even pair this with “Ah duh!” to make your meaning extra clear.

You don’t really let me feed you anymore, and insist on using a fork or spoon in order to put what’s before you in your mouth, with varied success. You’re very good at yogurt, for instance, and not so good with grape halves, which you like to spear with a fork or scoop up with a large, flat spoon, though you will eventually resort to fingers if you’re hungrier than you are interested in studying for your Utensils 101 exam. However self-sufficient you’ve become at meal time, you still believe that there is no greater crime than the post-dinner face and hand wipe, and struggle against these as though undergoing the worst torture imaginable. It’s just a little moisture, darling, it wouldn’t kill you to sit through it.

Your walking has progressed to the extent that you are largely on your feet now, and about half the time you will resort to walking in that wide, shuffling way of yours in order to get from Point A to Point B. Point B, by the way, mainly consists of the cable box, which you turn off shortly after you shoot me a meaningful look and say “Na?” We must try very hard not to laugh at your antics, lest you stop taking us seriously, though you’ve perfected the art of comedy now, and with a well-timed expression could just about get away with putting ham slices on your father’s best comic books.

Your aptitude for demonstrating love and affection is boundless, and if you’re not coming at me with an enthusiastic, open-mouthed baby smile that gets closer and closer until it – “hum” – licks the tip of my nose, or puckering your lips into a fish mouth and releasing them with a tiny smack on my cheek (your auntie Cher taught you this), you’re squeezing my neck in a forceful hug and rub-patting my shoulder to let me know you’re glad I’m here with you.

I am ever so glad that you’re here with me too, little Boo. I have a very good feeling about this new beginning, and I hope that even as we’re busy throwing ourselves into things as we are currently – me, rushing to finish this off; you, screeching with laughter in the living room while daddy swings you around and sings along to his new Roxy Music album – we’ll find time now and again to catch our breath and just take in the vast landscape of our wondrous life, which you’ve shaped and inspired so much more than you can know.

Happy fifteenth month, Walkaconda. I love you extremely very much.

Hartley: Fourteen Months

2010-03-11T23:18:00.015Z

Hello little love,

This month you were sick and then I was sick and then your father was sick, which made me sick all over again, and so I passed it back to you and then we collectively decided to end it all. Let me explain:

We've been slogging it out in a dirty big city for all the wrong reasons, or reasons that no longer make sense in the context of this family. Do you know how many times over the past thirty days we've stolen into town on the underground to push your buggy through millions of tourists so that mummy can buy a new jumper that will probably end up encrusted with apple puree and then tossed into the bottom of the wardrobe where it will remain until we move out, for example? Go on, have a guess.

The part of our brain that was telling us that we could not move away from London because London is where the exceptional museums and photography galleries and music venues and restaurants live also failed to inform us that, actually, we don't often make use of these opportunities anymore. We're too busy trying to hold our heads up at eight o'clock once you've fallen asleep so that anybody who happens to glance in on us from outside will think we are still alive in here.

And on a particularly difficult evening, after I'd been sending distress signals out over the netwaves (ie - whinging on Facebook), your aunty Kelly called to say that she wanted to take you for the day sometime in the next week to give us a chance to recuperate. Although this didn't happen in the end (our mutant illness can leap over entire townships, it's that powerful), it took her less than an hour to convince me that it might be best for all of us if we moved out of London and closer to family. It took me less than a second to convince your father of that idea the following day, once he'd taken his antibiotic and managed to choke down some toast.

So that is what we are going to do. We cancelled the overpriced 2-bedroom flat we'd found for the end of the month and instead began looking for a house in a village situated just outside London, a half hour away by train. After five days of searching we found a house so magnificent, so far beyond our wildest dreams, that the skin on my arm is virtually blue from the pinching, and all I do now is plan out exactly how I will safely navigate us through the next few weeks so that we can enjoy at least one day in that heavenly place, where we will live like kings with no furniture. Hopefully we will live for more than a day though, and with a mattress.

Apart from the extra space (we have three of nearly everything, including three fireplaces! Who needs three fireplaces? Who cares! We have three of them!), I just know that this decision is going to vastly improve the quality of life for all of us, and especially you. The town is pretty, quiet and slow-paced, and you will be surrounded by even more people that love you, that love all of us. We no longer need to visit church halls and community centres where a hundred children trample one another to claim a few filthy toys, or travel long distances on public transport so that you can catch a tummy bug in someone else's playroom. You'll have a playroom of your own soon. Heck, we'll all have our own playroom, and our own bedroom even, if your father doesn't sort out his snoring.

You won't remember your time in London if we fall in love with our new surroundings and forget to return, but we will have so many photos, so many stories to tell you, and your mummy still remembers what she was wearing on her fifth birthday, so you can bet she'll fill you in on every last detail of this remarkable year and two months you’ve spent here with us.

While it’s fresh though, let me fill you in on your fourteenth month, which you celebrated by being an even lovelier baby than you were last month. You already know your own mind, and you are constantly asserting yourself in new and bigger ways. Now when you are about to do something you know you shouldn't, you give me a meaningful look, wag your finger at me and say NA! before dipping your head down to bite my nipple. There are few contrabands you enjoy more than a nipple bite. I'm just grateful you give me fair warning now before you indulge.

If we don’t give you what you want (usually for lack of understanding), or if the world doesn’t work in the way that you expect or hope, you get a pained expression, hold your breath and go all red and shaky, which sometimes culminates in a little head-to-floor action, but mostly it results in me trying not to smile, because I want you to know that I take you very seriously.

You've developed an acute sense of empathy, and you remember to feed me and your father an equal amount of blanket lint which you painstakingly harvest from one of our throws for this purpose. One day you were drinking milk when suddenly you sat up, pinched my nipple and held your thumb and forefinger to my lips in an act of generosity that you later repeated with your father. You've also pinched invisible food off your tongue in order to retroactively share your good fortune with us. I find this more endearing than disturbing, though I think your father might lean the other way.

You've appropriated the word 'nana' (once indicative of your desire for bananas) to express hunger, so that if your father is looking after you on Saturday morning while I try to sleep a bit longer, he knows exactly when you'd like your breakfast. You're still using 'deedee' as your primary signifier, though you like to point to various objects around the house to hear me call them by name so that you can repeat an approximation of what you’ve heard. So 'Timmy' becomes 'Tee' and 'Hello' becomes 'Ah Oh', the latter of which you use often and in the right context too. You know what a phone is for, and you love to place objects (sometimes a phone, sometimes not) next to your ear to see if anyone is on the other end. You have even lifted your hand to your head and enquired 'Ah Oh?' of your open palm, which is pretty cute, I have to say.

I think too that you must love me, and not only in the way that a person dependent on someone for food loves that someone. Once we were at the duck pond and you were sat next to your two closest baby friends, the three of you in highchairs all in a row, when suddenly you leaned your torso towards me and I leaned towards you and put my arms around you, expecting for you to resist the brief imprisonment of my affection, except you put your little arms as far around me as they would go and lay your head against my shoulder, and we stayed like that for a little while. It was lovely, and I think you were trying to tell me that you were happy.

In terms of surprises, you had two in store for us this month - one good and one terrifying. Let's get the scary one out of the way so that we can end this letter on a good note, yes?

A few evenings ago, you woke up soon after we'd put you in your cot, and as it was your father's turn to look in on you (let's be honest - between the hours of seven and ten, it's always your father's turn), I sent him in to see if he could soothe you back to sleep. Instead, he began calling for me in a voice I'd never heard before, and in a way that made my legs turn to rubber.

We met at the door to the bedroom, where you lay in your father's arms, your face covered in blood.

It took me a millisecond to work out that you had a nosebleed, and thank goodness I had chronic nosebleeds as a child or we might have called an ambulance. We did call the NHS direct line just to see if the bleed was linked to something more serious, but sometimes a nosebleed is just a nosebleed. And I will never say 'just' in relation to blood ever again, when it comes to you, because I'm still trying to scrape my blood pressure off the ceiling where it stuck when I heard your father call for me like that and I thought something unthinkable had happened to you. I’d really like to minimise those kinds of surprises, if at all possible.

The nice surprise took place last week, when I watched you let go of the armchair and take two small steps towards the coffee table, which you touched like it was 'home free' in a game of hide-and-seek. You've taken thirty such unaided, forward-moving steps since that day, in various configurations and for various reasons, and each time you do, I am as proud as I was the very first time I saw you walk. This event, this walking business, was surprising not only because you pulled it out of seemingly nowhere, but because of how natural it looked on you. Something you've never done before, and you already look like you've been doing it your whole life, which has amounted to fourteen wonderful months, to the day.

I'm sorry these letters don't hang together better, Anaconda. Your mummy still exists in a perpetual fog, though hopefully that will change soon, now that we've finally come to our senses and are moving somewhere with a proper support system in place. It's also the place your father and I were married. We didn't know then that one day in the near-future we'd be returning to that small, cobblestoned village with a tiny boo (you!) in tow.

Happy fourteenth month, darling. I love you more than I know how to say.

A conversation with Friday Films weblog

2010-02-27T14:25:00.004Z

Picks up the phone, dials her Blog...

Blog: Hello?

Friday: Don’t hang up.

Blog: Who is this?

Friday: It’s me, Blog. Friday.

Blog: Friday who?

Friday: Have you been drinking?

Blog: I’m hanging up now.

Friday: WAIT! Blog. Look, I’m sorry. I meant to call sooner, honestly. I’ve just been really busy.

Blog: Too busy to call your blog, I know. Do you think you’re the only person in the world with a free online platform who gets treated like a doormat by its ungrateful SLUT of a writer?

Friday: Blog!

Blog: Well, it’s true, isn’t it? I’ve heard tell you’re on Facebook now. Nice going, Morals Girl.

Friday: There didn’t seem to be any harm in it, on second thought…

Blog: Even Twitter is seeing more of you these days than the application that gave you life.

Friday: It's nothing personal - that’s just the way things are right now. And it seemed disingenuous of me to visit when I don’t actually feel like talking about stuff with you.

Blog: If only your father could hear you.

Friday: What does my dad have to do with this?

Blog: I don’t know, it seemed like the right thing to say.

Friday: So...

Blog: You okay? You need money?

Friday: No, I'm good. I just wanted to hear your voice.

Blog: Well you’ve heard it. So off you go.

Friday: I wish it didn’t have to be this way.

Blog: Me too. Now piss off, I’m watching Eastenders.

Friday: K, sorry. Bye.

Blog: *click*

Hartley: Thirteen Months

2010-02-11T17:56:00.005Z

So, you little monkey: thirteen months today! You sure know how to grow up. I thought we’d never reach a year, and now look at us – one month over the 1-year mark and still going strong!

I forgot to mention in my last newsletter that your father taught you to do something very funny and, at times, dangerous. He once lifted you into the air and shouted ROUGHHOUSING! before setting you back down on the bed, where you paused from a seated position and then fell backwards with a kind of ‘timbre!’ fluidity. Wham! Which you still do to this day - just straight back, wherever you happen to be, which is usually the bed. I say ‘usually’ because now you sometimes remember ROUGHHOUSING! and I can see it in your little face, that ROUGHHOUSING! look you get, moments before you hurl yourself backwards onto the hardwood floor. And then you scream.

You did a bunch of ROUHHOUSING! on the bed yesterday, and then you demanded we take a look at The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, which is your favourite book in the entire world. You didn’t want to read the book – you just wanted to skip straight to the part where I say BIG FAT CATERPILLAR while squeezing your little tummy like you are the big fat caterpillar, except now you will just flip open to any old page and then tickle your own belly with your little fingers. Thank goodness I can often read your mind, because otherwise the joke might have gone amiss, and then you would realise with horror that we do not always share the same thoughts.

Well, you are a tiny bit aware of this fact, as is evidenced by the little storms you sometimes create when you don’t get your way, usually because we simply can’t understand what you’re after. You don’t just flap your arms in frustration anymore – you follow through with crying and a flurry of insistent words that must mean something to you, though we don’t have an English/Angry Little Chick dictionary and so can only listen patiently until you’re satisfied we’ve heard you out. These words you make up are not exclusive to tantrums and you can often be heard repeating sounds in complex patterns I find myself saying out loud to your father, who says them back to me, and oh you can imagine the passionate embraces that result after you go to bed, with a lead up like MAma, MAma…ma…ma…ma….MAma, MAma, &ct.

Usually, though, I can follow your little train of thought as it pertains to sounds that seem like words, or words that are only sounds. I used to think that ‘NAna!’ was your very first word, because you would say it over and over again until I gave you a bit of banana to eat, and then every time you wanted banana, you would find me wherever I happened to be and repeat ‘NAna!’ and ‘NaNAna!’ until I set you up in your high chair with some naNAna. But then one day you asked for ‘NAna!’ and it became clear that it wasn’t banana you were after but a packet of pureed broccoli, pear and peas (I know, but it’s what you like). So now you just shout NANA! NANAAANA! whenever you’re hungry, and we’re back to guessing at what it is you might like to eat.

Likewise, you don’t only refer to your friend Leila (pronounced ‘Lila’) as LEILA! LEILA! Any little person you quite like you’ve assigned the name LEILA! to, and I’ve given up explaining that no, that baby is not Leila, because I know you know full well that it’s just easier to adapt existing words to a variety of contexts than to try and learn hundreds of new words. I am hoping that you learn at least one or two other words from the English dictionary so that I also know when you want to go out for a bit of air, or have some milk, which at the moment you indicate by snaking your little arm into my top and pinching my nipple as hard as you can while hyperventilating and laughing your stuttering anaconda laugh.

I’m not even safe on the sofa anymore, as you can clamber up there by holding onto the buttons of the futon roll I sleep on now, your face buried as you wiggle your back legs to gain purchase, and suddenly there you are, on my lap, your hand groping around in my bra for your milk. Luckily you are very good at the dismount now, and can exit the sofa without injuring your face or head.

You have the best comedic timing of any baby I’ve ever met, and you’d have to see yourself to know what I’m talking about. I should really have something ready to record you at these times, because these little moments of yours are worth keeping, and showing to the judges on X-Factor when you invariably try out for the show with your stand-up routine. I promise I will not let your father help you write your jokes.

You are one hundred percent pure joy, and I am having the best time with you, even in spite of the fact that you are also one hundred percent bonkers. I promise you that I will try not to panic every time you shout incoherently at me when I leave a room if you promise to try not to panic so much when I go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, or your lunch. Deal?

Happy lucky thirteen, Juicyconda.

Love, love, love, love,

MAma

Holidaymaker's initiation into adulthood

2010-02-01T14:37:00.003Z

In Edinburgh, from the hotel, you can hear the thin, distant sound of traffic, the calls of school children on break and, sometimes, the cry of a seagull. I can picture the high stone walls of the town and the ferocious turquoise of the sea, so dark it is almost like the wicked opalescence of a summer sky at night, minutes before a storm.

Here, I can just as easily picture my old neighbourhoods back home, where I thought I was living independently because I no longer shared a roof with my family. It's only been over the last few days, mainly in quiet moments while the baby sleeps, and as Bruce and I are secluded on our own islands of thought, that I've been able to appreciate that we are really doing this on our own. And then I think that maybe I have finally become a mother - one adult in the story of our family, essential and working invisibly behind the scenes for once.

Except I realise too now that parenthood is not earned. It's not even something you can learn. It's just the responsibility of making one decision after another, with the small, daily picture in mind, while you try and guess at the bigger picture during short, infrequent moments of repose. It's something you do, an instinctual action, and whether anyone sees you with any continuity, the unquestioning way that a child perceives an adult, is really up to them.

Hartley: Twelve Months

2010-01-27T23:10:00.018Z

Hello my little love,

Look, I’ll be honest with you – I’ve been trying to write you an adequate letter to commemorate your very first year on earth, and that is a lot of pressure to put on oneself, even semantically, I hope you’ll agree.

It’s been over two weeks since your first birthday, and I have even given up on the idea of a belated birthday apology, peppered here and there with post-12-month anecdotes to make up for lost time.

I began what I thought would be your 12 month letter last week, and opened with the story of your first birthday, but like an accordion, the story tumbled open to reveal the many pleats that had been tightly folded inside what, at first glance, appeared to be an uncomplicated tale of unity.

I’ve made mental and real notes of your accomplishments, which are accumulating at such an alarming rate that I sometimes have to open a notepad and quickly jot down “imitates blowing a kiss by gagging himself with his fingers and extracting them with a staccato MA,” before training my eyes on you again, just in case I miss something else, or you fall headfirst off the sofa, which you did once, and which scared the life out of me.

There is nothing coherent about your development either. I could write out a list as long as my arm filled with all the wonderful things you’ve done over the past few weeks (if I resorted to using that shorthand which only scientologists and courtroom secretaries have any need for) . . . and then it would be time for bed.

I could probably try to work it out in some type of free-form poem if I had a bottle of wine and an entire night (and some talent in this area) but these luxuries are not available to me for the time being.

I wish I knew where to start, Boo. A beginning would be something. Anything to fill in the vague impression of your small, serious face with its dark eyes and cherubic features; your long, lean chicken body when you’re laid out flat on the bed after your bath, frowning slightly and silently suffering our slathering of lotions and balms, our pampering and soft-bagging of you before bed.

Apart from the fact that you have a hundred new words in your vocabulary now – all of them ‘deedee!’; all of them referring to entirely different things, but not excluding your daddy – and that you can stand on your own without holding onto anything so long as you don’t realise you’ve let go, I think the biggest way you’ve changed this past month has been your sleep.

Lately you’ve been allowing us to put you in your cot at night before you’ve passed out on milk, and you are quite happy to lie there babbling quietly to yourself until you feel sleepy enough to nod off on your own without needing a single thing more from us. When we quietly tip-toe in to check on you now, we find you sleeping soundly on your back, your head nestled between the two curved arms of the breast pillow we’ve placed there to make it feel more secure (though tonight you were using the pillow as it was meant to be used for the very first time, which brought tears to the surface of my mind), your body position the perfect indication of contentment.

We went one step further last week and decided that I would sleep out on the sofa from now on. We did this for my own peace of mind, as it wasn’t terribly relaxing to know that at any moment you could let out a shrill cry (usually as I’m finally drifting off) and I would have to stand straight up and take you out of the cot to soothe you.

What we didn’t know was that you would also sleep much better without me around, and now you only wake up once in the night for a quick feed before your inner drill sergeant blows his whistle at the stroke of 5:40 a.m. and wakes us all up for good. This means that as a family, we are finally getting a solid block of five and sometimes six hours for the first time since you were born. This is a great accomplishment, my love.

There are so many things I want to tell you about this time in our lives, but I am too busy living it with you to work out how it all fits into our narrative, which we are creating even now, even as you sleep and I sit here breathing and thinking.

I promise you I will show you all the photographs, videos, notes and butchered letters one day, Hartley. You only need to see my enthusiasm as I try in my stilted way to explain to you how much we loved you, how much we still love you – now (which will be then) and then (which is now) – to know that this is true.

I love you with everything in me, and the new bits of me you’ve created by just being here.

Happy first year, tiny Boo. You’re not so tiny anymore.

Frances Straker

2010-01-04T08:43:00.002Z

We love you, nan. You'll be greatly missed.

Nine

2009-12-31T00:13:00.007Z

When I first found out about you, you were the size of a poppy seed.

That is what I will always remember. You were my tiny poppy seed, growing.

You were.

Safely you'll abide

2009-12-29T23:57:00.004Z

Hello introspection; it’s been awhile. It may be a while longer, as I can barely distinguish gumballs from lip balm these days, let alone bisect the double helix of thought and action.

After Bruce went to bed, I found myself uncommonly relaxed and coherent, so when the neurotic avis of ‘what next?’ finally emerged on a branch to swoop down and begin its tired circling of my brain, I knew that what I wanted to do was to sit down and write something for Friday Films. What can I say? Old habits die hard.

Nowadays, most of us run to tell the Internet straight away when something we deem significant takes place, and although I won’t disparage anyone of this creed (glass houses), I do feel that full disclosure is the last thing on my mind when the careless sleeve of universal chaos brushes the delicate orbit of my tiny world and sets it spinning much too quickly.

No really: what am I trying to say here? This may be my current terrified self trying to channel its blundering, reckless voice of years past in order to make one last go of pigeonholing experience so that I can pretend for a few minutes that I’m in control of anything. I think it’s the feeling of control I miss most in this chapter.

Things that are different for me now include: fear, unconditional love, conditional love, acceptance and even perspective. The first three make it very difficult for me to want to open up about any of it, whereas the last two render the attempt itself unnecessary.

Which leaves me precisely where I started off in this post: I don’t really have anything to say here, at least not in the manner to which I’m accustomed. I’m perfectly okay with that. But I do miss this activity an awful lot when I remember to.

Hartley: Eleven Months

2009-12-11T22:12:00.012Z

Each time I approach this letter, I see a vaster space ahead of me, as though I must flesh you out from the beginning, and I find that I am set further back than I was one month ago. You are not the sum of last month’s parts plus a few extras – you are like the chrysalis in your favourite story book, except you are in the constant process of evolving into something even more beautiful than the time before.

You are in your eleventh month now, and I can’t believe that it’s been almost an entire year since you began. I still remember our first few days together in hospital – you were so quiet, and the midwives would pause in their rotations to comment on how unusually pretty you were for a boy, or how you seemed already wise. I used to think these were just the things that people said to new mothers, but to this day we are approached by all sorts of strangers (a cultural anomaly in this country) who tell me what an unequivocally lovely, good-natured and happy baby you seem.

At the risk of seeming biased, you are still the only baby I know who shows an obvious aptitude for relating to other human beings, and across a wide scope at that. This is something you couldn’t possibly have learned from me, as I instinctively, if imperceptibly, withdraw from most social situations, deeming myself too awkward to navigate even the simplest exchange. You, on the other hand, will look straight into someone’s face and smile beatifically while reciting all the (non-)words in your roster in an attempt to make contact.

You adore babies of all sizes, and will reach for their faces or knees with your chubby arm outstretched, though these other children never share your enthusiasm, and often turn on their heel to bid you a rude farewell. This doesn’t faze you, though. In a room full of toddlers, you race around on your hands and knees, running full tilt at one child and then another in an attempt to join in, even if you don’t always understand the purpose of the assembly. This fills me with love and admiration, but also fear, as the last thing I want is for you to reach out to someone only to experience the sting of rejection. This is where I have to be careful to keep my own issues separate from what I teach you about the world.

You have mastered the art of imitation now, and will do things on command if you feel like it, such as ‘fish’ (where you pop your mouth silently open and closed like a fish gasping for air, except sometimes you put a sound behind it and it becomes ‘ba ba ba ba’) or ‘clap clap clap’ (which you did of your own accord one day, without any prompting from anyone). You will also twist your lips in imitation of me (a trick Daddy can’t even do) and burble your bottom lip with your finger, which I encourage you to do often, as it’s such a sweet and silly thing. You hit all the different buttons on our record player to keep things fresh, and when you find a new song, you do a bendy-knee dance and grin at me over your shoulder to make sure I am watching you.

Your little gum line on the top, which I used to tickle you just to get a glimpse of, is now broken by the shiny white buds of teeth – four new ones in all. At first I thought it was just the one, but three others were only a day behind, and now when you smile I’m not sure what it is I see - a baby hippo sometimes, and sometimes just these teeth, which are yours, and which I’m still getting used to. You sometimes grind these together, but it’s not a worry for now. You did something else that used to worry me – knock your own head against the wall or the floor, or any other hard surface – until I realised you were just experimenting with sensation. You’ve mostly abandoned this habit, I’m happy to say.

But these teeth! You often bite my nipples now, dragging them across your teeth and laughing at my reactions, however discouraging I think they might be. At these times I have to stop feeding you, and if it’s night time, I’ll ask Daddy to help me get you off to sleep some other way. I intend to feed you until you are at least a year old, and secretly I was hoping to feed you beyond this deadline, but you will have to stop this painful habit or Daddy may not grant us our extension (your Daddy believes that with weaning will come magical nights of unbroken sleep, bless).

You’ve mostly overcome your fear of strangers, though occasionally you’ll decide that a friendly face seems sinister after all, and then no amount of soothing and raisins will abate your red-faced wailing. The most benign image can morph into a sudden threat, and the baby channel embodies a veritable minefield of such triggers. You used to love those smiley faced shapes that jump from a high shelf and do a silly song and dance, but now every time you see them, you scream and flag me down for help. I don’t ever belittle your fears, and cuddle you for as long as you like, though I will try to help you conquer the ones that are unavoidable (like when you see me wash dishes; I know, it scares me too).

Aside from these small setbacks, you are still fearless in your exploration of the world, and can now clamber up onto the sofa if you see something worth your reach, holding onto anything and everything in your bid to remain upright and mobile. You follow a schedule of your own devising when you play with your things, and have even discovered a shortcut in making your pop-up toys pop-up (rather than fiddling with buttons and switches you simply bash it against the floor until the trap doors fling open at once). We live in a tight space for a family of three, but you know precisely how much weight you can put on any given piece of furniture, whether it slips or rolls, and how much force it takes to pull over a plastic container of giant blocks. You do these things well because I’ve given you the time and space to learn, which is difficult for a natural hoverer like me.

This is why I never take credit for the way you’ve turned out. Your joyful disposition, your affability towards others and your unquenchable thirst for new experiences are just a part of who you are, and who you’ve always been. We’ve all been extraordinarily lucky in that you were born to a set of parents who recognised this potential in you and wanted nothing more than to help you unlock it, simply by loving you and waiting patiently for you to one day discover these traits yourself. You are a marvelous baby, and I feel so lucky, so disbelievingly grateful, that you are mine.

There is so much more to tell, and a big change is on the horizon – one that will alter all our lives forever. But it’s still a ways off, and I want this letter, and every letter that follows, to celebrate you, and you alone. I love you with all my heart, Chicken. That will never, ever change.

Happy eleventh month, baby.

Night, not mine

2009-12-07T22:01:00.006Z

Pressed pyjama top with wide cuffs; a heavy, cut glass tumbler half filled with water (cool, not cold) and a reliable tablet to swallow.

Cotton sheets, freshly laundered beneath a duvet with presence, an excess of length.

Quiet lamp light, off.

Respectable street lamp aura;

soft city goodnight.

Sleep.

Thank you and goodnight

2009-11-30T22:12:00.008Z

So, last post of November! Part of me thinks a retrospective would be the way to go, but I’m not sure I have the stamina to turn the threads of thirty (30!) posts into a coherent...uh...post hanky.

I will say that posting every day for a month has brought about certain benefits which, apart from giving me the opportunity to flex my writing muscles, I hadn’t considered. For the first time in a long time, I can see a kind of rough continuity in what, up until recently, has seemed like an endless path choked with vines, which I’d been slavishly hacking my way through without any reflection whatsoever.

Since moving to England, and since having my first child, I haven’t had the time or the energy to stop and really look at the shape my life has taken over the past three years. I approached this task knowing full well that I would finish NaBloPoMo, however dubious I felt about the quality of the ensuing content. Now I know that the content wasn't really the point – at least not for me.

More than anything, it’s been refreshing to take a bit of time each day to process all the little trials and tribulations of being a new mother living in London. Knowing that I could come home and unload everything onto my blog also gave me the courage to push myself in ways I might not have otherwise, even if it meant subjecting Hartley to psychotic toddlers, or forcing myself to sit in a sauna with a depressing Austrian film director.

Erm, and a moral? Okay.

This month of posting has taught me that the most important thing of all is to write – not well, not even passably, but to keep putting it into words, whatever it is we see fit to immortalise for ourselves. Because at the end, even if we don’t have an answer that will help us to unlock the mystery of our lives, we will at least have a residue of what it was like to be here.

Okay, thanks for tuning in.

The penultimate post of November, oooh

2009-11-29T23:04:00.004Z

Photograph by Julieta Sans

A few years ago, I was at the National Portrait Gallery to see an exhibition of photographs that were nominated for the Photographic Portrait Prize. I can’t remember the image that actually won, but one photograph that still sticks out in my mind was of two lean, twenty-something brunettes in American Apparel-type clothing, entwined in a hammock, asleep. I think it was titled “New Parents Resting,” which basically says it all.

At the time, I had no inkling that I would soon be a mother, but the image did give me some pretty inaccurate ideas about what it was like to be a new parent. For instance: the napping. That pretty much never happens. Those kids were probably surrounded by both sets of parents, siblings and thirty of their closest friends (one of whom, it seems, had a pretty good eye and a half-decent camera) in order to steal a much needed half hour. Even if four devoted grandparents were in the midst of a rock paper scissors war to determine who got to hold that little bundle of joy next, at some point in the visit, the baby would have needed its mother, loudly.

That comes much sooner and much more often than you’d think.

So yeah, images. I guess the thing about images is that they tend to mean more than they actually convey. Although you can tell a lot about a person from their dress, carriage, environment, etc., you do not know if that person only bought an outfit for the camera, if they spend the bulk of their time trying not to touch their significant other unless someone is around to witness the lie, or even if they emerged from their cardboard box for a day to visit a long-lost great Aunt at her holiday home in Spain.

You can’t trick people for very long with words, however lively and well-crafted, but you can certainly trick people with an image. An image speaks louder than words because it only has one thing to say, and usually it’s none too subtle about the point it’s trying to make.

Ugh, I don’t know if this is right, but it seems right at the moment. I’m certainly not young enough or well-enough-connected in this city to have on-hand caregivers who want nothing more than to occupy Hartley while someone takes flattering portraits of me while I sleep in gym shorts and thigh-high athletic socks. Would that I were.

Luckily Bruce and I have, after ten months, managed to work out a systematic routine that allows us all to eat and live in relative comfort and hygiene. Hartley is still waking up several times a night, and that probably won’t change until he’s no longer breastfed. We were going to leave him with my sister-in-law last night, as a kind of experiment that would allow us to have eight or nine solid hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I’m glad we sussed that it was a bad idea, as this morning, about an hour after I fed Hartley to sleep for the fifth time, he woke up screaming. It was a scream that turned into the most despairing, hitching sobs I’ve ever heard him make. He would not latch on to comfort himself and he cried with such hopelessness that I was frightened he was in some sort of pain. After a while he did calm down and I realised he must have had a nightmare. I don’t think he’s ever had one before. Usually his cries indicate frustration at being awake, and an insistence that I help him get back to sleep.

Anyway, we’re all fine, but I’m exhausted and need to try falling asleep a bit earlier tonight. Usually I put it off because - subconsciously - I realise that the moment I do, Hartley will wake up crying and demanding that I put him to sleep again. It’s fairly irrational, because the longer I put this off, the less sleep I get. But sometimes you’ve just got to play Bejeweled.

I don't want to sleep alone

2009-11-28T20:30:00.008Z

Nan sings us a song on her 96th birthday, right after she swears in Gaelic.

Bad time at the OK Corral

2009-11-27T23:19:00.005Z

Our son, in a jolly jumper thingie we bought at a consignment store to keep him occupied while we lazed about my parents' unairconditioned condo during two summer weeks in Vancouver.

Time warp (click to enlarge)

2009-11-26T21:57:00.009Z

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

2009-11-25T23:39:00.003Z

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

2009-11-24T23:22:00.005Z

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

2009-11-23T21:58:00.007Z

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

2009-11-22T22:59:00.001Z

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.

Indian and a revelation

2009-11-21T23:36:00.002Z

We decided to take Hartley to Harrods today, to buy him a gift for Christmas. That was stupid.

There were protesters outside with gory signs of animal cruelty, I guess because Harrods sells fur. I wish they’d managed to dissuade at least seventy percent of the oblivious, pushy masses who held us suspended amidst their throng. It made it very difficult for us to linger too long over the Paddington Bears and real-haired rocking horses.

In the end, we decided his gift – all gifts – would be best purchased in the family friendliest shop on earth – the Internet.

That left us with part of an afternoon in town to kill before slinking back to the outskirts, our aspiring middle-class tails between our weary legs. And that is when we struck upon the most ingenious plan of all: Bruce went to see a film at the Odeon in Covent Garden and I took Hartley to my favourite Indian restaurant in the Universe - Mela.

They were very kind to us in Mela, bringing Hartley free mango lassies and tickling him with a Phillips head screw driver (I don’t know) and pinching his cheeks. Hartley left in his wake a trail of naan, pilau rice and his own baby snacks, but the staff remained unfazed, and continued to approach us throughout the meal to make sure he was still smiling away, which he was.

At the end of the meal I tried to pay, but my server said, “Next time,” and gave me a knowing smile and nod. “Pardon?” I said, playing dumb, just to make sure. “It’s on us,” he said and nodded again, this time with no room for argument. It was probably due to the fact that I found a tiny silver slug, which had come loose from one of their cooking pans, in my dish.

I saw it glinting amidst piles of saucy chicken before it became an issue and thought I should draw their attention to it. They probably bought their pans from the same kitchen supply shop, and I didn’t want someone less understanding to find a bolt in their food when all the pans decide to simultaneously self-destruct.

No biggie, and I ate everything just to show them that I wasn’t going to let a little piece of metal get between me and my dinner. I’m sure this is why they didn’t make me pay, but part of me thinks it might have more to do with the fact that Hartley brings the party wherever we go, with that infectious smile and a sleeveful of tricks.

On the bus on the way home, Hartley was having a feed and probably slipped off the breast or something because he totally lost his shit. We cooed and tutted over him and knew that he was just probably very tired. He’d had a long day, and it was already past his bedtime.

It struck me though, that the reason we no longer panic about his occasionally extreme moods isn’t so much because we have more experience, but because we know him now. He’s no longer this tiny, foreign being who can’t be consoled or figured out. We’ll always know – I hope we’ll always know – how to read our boo, because he’s ours.

We’re all three of us in the midst, at all times, of creating this tiny person named Hartley, and I really do think we're exceeding our expectations.

Miss, I think

2009-11-20T22:46:00.003Z

This makes up part of an ad campaign for the NHS, which outlines various reasons why you should call or visit your hospital. The ideograms are a bit hit and miss.

Feeling a bit linky, am I?

2009-11-19T23:36:00.007Z

Part of me wonders if some of my recent anonymous, IP-addressless readers are tuning in to see if I’ve failed yet at NaBloPoMo, but then I think: how sad.

Probably it’s just the secret police (look, it was only a chocolate bar; I was fourteen!), so I won’t worry too much.

In any case, I will not fail, because I told my brain at the beginning of the month that I must do this thing, and my brain was all Must we? Fine, but there’s something you need to do for me too. Can you please STOP THAT INCESSANT SINGING OF THEME SONGS TO CHILDREN’S TV PROGRAMMES? And I was all Yeah, sorry. I’m working on that.

So last evening I went to Ignite London, which you can read about elsewhere (back there, for instance), and though I’ll admit I was unduly excited to attend, I was not disappointed. One of the slide show presenters did a slam poem about how he got food poisoning from this one doner kebab, and I have never before heard anyone rhyme ‘attack’ with ‘stomach’ before, which is odd, come to think of it. Why not? Regardless, I am so glad he did, even though I was in the midst of eating a plate of chips.

My friend Amy was one of the event planners, and wrote me a little RESERVED sign for my seat, which I lorded over the 170 attendees before spending the next two hours messing about on my iPhone. Well it was a really visual experience, and there was a lot to Tweet about.

Besides, some of the talks were related to technology, social media and distraction, as well as iPhone photography (I best liked the line about how ‘photography is clip art for the digital age’ or something to that effect, as this is exactly the kind of thing I’d been wanting to write for The Januarist but didn’t have the guts to do [some of my closest friends are iPhone-tographers].) so really, I was only doing what was expected of me.

Don't it just?

But yes - the event was brilliant, and the free drinks not too shabby. I really hope they put on another one soon, because I need to see at least two or three more before deciding whether or not I stand a chance up there. I thought I might do a talk on The Numberjacks, which is a programme Hartley really enjoys, and is a source of much contemplation for me as well.

True Story

2009-11-18T22:27:00.003Z

Why don't we save ourselves while we have the chance?

2009-11-17T22:54:00.008Z

We just finished watching The Age of Stupid, which does what few provocative documentaries about climate change have managed (I’m thinking of Al Gore and the slow boiling frog, which is about all I can recall from that film): broadcast from an imagined future earth, the culmination of our (impending) self-lead demise is made plain through a convincing splice of actual archival footage that brings the evidence together in a continuity never before afforded us. The film's tagline cuts right to the chase: "Why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance?"

Michael Moore has a talent for assessing some of our biggest denials about a controversial issue and then methodically severing our most beloved strongholds on fatal ignorance in short order. Although he is often criticized for taking liberties with the truth in order to better serve his own agenda, this doesn’t make that agenda false, any more than unfulfilled promises make a member of the elected a poor politician (maybe not the best example).

This film, amazingly, is not another Michael Moore initiative as I'd first believed, but one that was written and directed by British born Franny Armstrong. So before the (anti-?)conspiracy theorists get all bent out of shape, they should probably know that there is more than one good storyteller who is fighting for humankind's wellbeing.

I don’t necessarily believe that things are as black and white as Armstrong portrays them, though I have a strong feeling that unless we cut emissions to practically nothing, and quickly, we are pretty well doomed to whatever fate a planet suffers when it runs out of the stuff that makes its inhabitants live (we can see microcosms of this occurring the world over right now – no need to wait for some ambiguous Armageddon).

So tonight I am powering off this computer, the television, and the fan we leave on in the bedroom that drowns out Bruce’s snoring and simultaneously keeps Hartley from waking to every little sound and me from dreaming that I am asleep in a crypt (it is that dark, silent and airless in our bedroom without the fan). I am going to brave the wrath of our neighbours when we invariably get our recycling all backwards (I geddit, no plastic fruit punnets or cereal boxes) and I am going to look into ways of sustainable living that we can achieve now (cutting travel, turning off lights) and ones we will need to work towards in the future (compost toilets, solar panels).

Bruce thinks I’m on another tangent that’s due to fizzle out by morning, but I am deadly serious. The idea of Hartley suffering some future, sickly world that I didn’t lift a finger to try and save, or that his children might not even live to see any world whatsoever, makes my heart shrink into a tiny, wrinkled pea of grief.

I haven’t had a chance to look at the website yet, but apparently www.notstupid.org has some practical tips for turning things around, should enough of us feel moved to rise to the challenge. You can wait for someone else to take initiative and do it for you, but unfortunately there are probably more of you out there than you think.

A crack up at the egg aisle

2009-11-16T22:09:00.006Z

Some might come across a senseless scene of yolky devastation such as this, shake their heads and think, “Tsk, such a shame.”

Not me though. I think: How touching is that?

That a group of regular eggs, so much like the ones you had for breakfast – these eggs that could have ended up in a happy omelet with some cheese and ham, or flown across an autumn picnic in the trembling mouth of a spoon during the Egg and Spoon race – these fairly healthy looking eggs gave their lives for something larger than themselves. They gave their lives so that we may know that it’s Christmas time.

Obvious Christmas tree formation

Or perhaps they were staging a protest against the ugly holiday spangles that hung like Goth extensions in the windows at Sainsbury’s. It’s still a bit early for tinsel, in my opinion.

I mean, it’s hard to say. Who knows what lies in the hearts of eggs? Besides unfertilized chicken fetuses?

Still wouldst thou sing

2009-11-15T21:26:00.004Z

I used to be pretty precious about film credits, as in my bum would not leave my seat until the very last name reverse-abseiled over the top of the screen. Nowadays nothing can keep me in the theatre beyond the plot, not even amusing outtakes or charming vignettes of our beloved characters.

Last night I went to see Bright Star at the cinema up the road, and apart from it being a very quiet, somber sort of narrative with few opportunities to unwrap your Oreos or fiddle with your strawberry pencils (not a euphemism, but go ahead and enjoy that), it is the credits that constitute the true test of a film lover’s endurance. After the final scene, the roll call began its dutiful climb skywards and the theatre was just bustling to life when, suddenly, the voice of the actor playing Keats started to read out “Ode to a Nightingale.”

The weary rustle of coat gathering rippled to a halt.

Nobody was going to be the sort who would walk out on a poetry reading just to save themselves an extra five minutes, and so we sat respectfully, silently, as the ghost of Keats read out line after haunting line. The poem lasted the length of the credits, which is a long time for a stuffy theatre full of strangers to sit in mutual reverence of a disembodied voice.

I’m not overly familiar with the poem, but by the time Whishaw read out “Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades” most of us felt pretty confident that we’d be queuing for the toilet stalls within moments. The reading did end fairly soon after this, but not for another stanza or so. As the screen blipped into darkness, nobody dared move from their seat – it wasn’t a spell, so much as a reluctance to break the spell, should one be in the midst of occurring for somebody else.

And then I grabbed my stuff and made for the door. It totally wigged me out.

Into the eye

2009-11-14T18:08:00.002Z

It’s one hour before Hartley goes to bed and then this domestic inmate is going out for an evening, on a date, with herself. Earlier, while Bruce and Hartley were in the West End reading comics, I did a quick blitz of the flat, opening the window for a bit of air. It’s mighty gusty out there but it looks worse than it is. As the boys returned home, I left to grab my first gingerbread latte of the season, and to purchase some reasonably priced junk food for the cinema later. The citizens of Muswell Hill were in a tizz, stockpiling fresh produce like the end of the world was nigh and nobody seemed to have a handle on what they were doing, including the frazzled baristas who made my latte.

On my way home, I shed the gloves and woolen beret (my only extravagance from our trip to Paris, bought in a shop at the train station like a true tourist) as it was windy but not at all cold. Throw a bit of rain or snow into the equation and you’d have something to worry about definitely, but there’s something exciting about venturing out into dramatic weather that’s all bark and no bite. That said, I do plan to steer clear of any dodgy looking fixtures, as on my way to the shops I noticed an entire doorway lying flat across the path amidst portions of the brick wall to which it was once attached. That doorway always did look a little sorry for itself, though, and maybe this is just the kick in the pants that agent or landlord needs to fix it properly for those poor tenants.

Initially I was going to grab some dinner and a drink at the pub around the corner (the restaurant there boasts some of the best Thai Food in North London) and maybe read a bit of my new book, but the film I’m seeing starts earlier than I thought, so it looks like I’ll be having steak or maybe coq au vin at the establishment directly opposite the cinema. You could do worse on a stormy night in London, I guess.

True milk

2009-11-13T23:22:00.002Z

I’ve had enough online experience to know that in the grand scheme of things, nobody is going to bother reading a post on a Friday. It doesn’t matter if it’s morning, afternoon or evening – people are too busy planning their brief weekly escapes to pay much notice to trifles, especially those of the online persuasion (hopefully, for their sake). But NaBloPoMo waits for no weekend.

We’ve been back a day, and already I feel much better about things here. I guess you don’t have to have a wildly fabulous time on holiday in order to approach your real life with renewed strength. I am definitely much more appreciative of how calmly efficient everyone is here, respectful of boundaries and even appearances. Sometimes looks do matter, and I know I’ve never seen a terrible collage of piss, shit and vomit on a street corner outside Kings Cross, never mind a major disembarking point like Gare Du Nord.

In the spirit of civility, I did not meet the mummy group in the pub this afternoon, and instead spent the day reestablishing order within the flat. Hartley was keen to get started so I let him unpack our suitcase, right after I let him eat the top off an empty raisin packet, because I can’t watch him every second of the day. I usually let a few seconds slip by, and it only takes one to eat something you shouldn’t.

Speaking of, I can hear young sir calling out for his midnight snack as I type this, so I’d better finish up.

You may want to give this one a miss

2009-11-12T21:42:00.005Z

Maybe it is because I’m tired and have never had a life threatening illness, but I’m going to go ahead and make the comparison between cancer and babies. Yes I am, because I don’t have the wherewithal to come up with a better, more sensitive analogy, and also because I sort of think I’m right in this instance.

We took this trip to Paris thinking that it would be a nice change of scenery for Hartley (which it was) and thus a relaxing time for us (which it was not). And see, I always forget the golden rule of parenting: wherever you go, there they are – screaming to be taken out of their push chairs in rush hour traffic on a rammed bus, or punching you in the tit in the middle of the night, just for fun. Like cancer, right?

Okay, how about this: having a baby means you never get to rest. Let me stress this: HAVE A BABY AND YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN HAVE A MOMENT’S PEACE, NOT UNTIL HE IS EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD, AND EVEN THEN YOU WILL WONDER IF HE IS LIGHTING INCENSE BECAUSE OF SPIRITUALITY OR SOME OTHER REASON.

So you may think that a trip to another country would be just the thing, but you would be wrong. Mightily, stark-raving-madly WRONG. Because having a baby basically takes a stressful situation and ramps it up to DEFCON 1, such as when we decided it might be fun to walk to the Eiffel Tower from where we were staying, which is nowhere near the Eiffel Tower. And on our way back, in our fifth hour, as we hobbled a fair distance further because we couldn’t find the right bus stop, a long, plaintive sound suddenly emanated from Hartley that was the infant equivalent of Oh you’ve GOT to be shitting me, and that is when he had a complete meltdown - one that could not be overturned by raisins or sips from my water bottle - and so we had to carry him for another ten city blocks until our feet turned blue and fell off and we died.

And anyway, even if you’re not into suicidal levels of pedestrian sight-seeing, holidays are not really holidays if you’ve brought along a baby. Babies boil down all experience to the same few elements: feeding, playing, napping, nappy change, bedtime. You could be on a spaceship to Mars, but if that kid has done a number two, you are not going to be counting Saturn’s rings from the observation room at that moment but, rather, hoping like hell that you remembered to pack the powder-scented nappy sacks.

I can only imagine that cancer has the same effect on holiday – if it’s really terribly serious, and you are suffering day and night, it doesn’t make a lick of difference if you’ve got the penthouse suite on Paradise Island, you are still living in your own personal bubble of cancer hell. Though obviously having a baby is nothing like having cancer, and might even be the opposite. Both have their stresses, though, and that is why. That is why I am going to shut up my typing fingers and stop this ridiculous post. We’re back in England, and I’ve never felt more at home.

Hartley: Ten Months

2009-11-11T20:29:00.004Z

http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/bruceandjackie/4095639061/sizes/m/

Hartley Bear

Right this minute you are sitting up on the bed, fingering and biting your jumper instead of sleeping. I think you must know that you are toeing the line because at least you're not trying to leap off the bed, and actually, you are falling asleep in an upright position, so I guess your batteries have a small amount of juice in them yet.

Which is more than I can say for this phone, which is the only thing I have with me for posting online. We're in Paris on a much needed holiday from England, and somehow we took for granted that they'd have everything we needed for you already at the flat. I mean, it's Paris. It's just a French-speaking London, right? Except no. This apartment, this entire city, couldn't be any less accommodating to babies if tried, and sometimes it seems to give that a go too. If we have to carry you down the several steps leading to the metro and we leave plenty of room for someone else to get past us, that someone else will find a way to get stuck behind us so that they can tutt and sigh and make rude remarks about us under their breath. But they live in the country of good cheese so you have to be lenient.

This hasn't been the easiest month of your life, I have to say. It seems like your cold heads off to the cold library every week where it renews that same book about a runny nose and high temperature, which this last time around you had for four days. FOUR DAYS. That's like six months in baby years! And we took you to the emergency clinic for your tracheotemy or vasectamy or whatever would make that permanent bogey on your top lip disappear long enough for you to eat and breathe properly in your sleep. It seemed you woke with every stiffled breath, which meant bad sleeps for mummy, and also daddy while we've been sharing a bed here.

The only way we could convince you to drink your horrible banana-tasting antibiotics (which I think were given to us to make us go away, though we've started you on them now and have to finish the course) was to pour it into a shot glass and pretend like it was liquid gold. Then, even this stopped working, and currently you're taking it in the lid of a cola bottle. If you insist on a thimble by tomorrow, I'll thank my lucky stars there's only four more days of this.

I don't have much time, as we plan to watch a French film we bought earlier, as well as scarf down a wheel of Brie with the rest of those madeleines, so let me just say that in spite of how hard being sick was for you, you have been lovely and brave, and are growing in ways that take my breath away. You participate in our jokes now, and have begun to imitate small gestures, such as the one we call 'fish' and the one where you tickle your bottom lip and make a burbling sound. Your mamama and dadadas have become more pointed, and it's becoming increasingly evident that you are your own person now - one who likes to stand on the back bumper of your walker or shout at us when we do the hoovering or sit up on your own gumming baguette in a restaurant.

We love you madly, mon cherie. Don't ever change.

Not every fountain is a wishing well

2009-11-10T19:16:00.003Z

We went to the Louvre and it was . . . closed.

We walked to the Eiffel Tower and it was . . . far.

Hartley will only take his antibiotics in a shot glass. No comment.

I am trying to add an image to this post, though I'm not sure if I'll succeed. It was taken at the Muse de Louvre during those blissful minutes before we discovered our mistake.

It's been a long day, and I just want to drink a glass of wine and think about nothing, so you'll have to imagine a grand day with us in it.

Present and accounted for

2009-11-09T21:28:00.006Z

In spite of engine failure and a sick infant, the three of us made it to Paris, and as I write this on a notepad with a failing felt-tip pen in the near dark of the television, Bruce is trying to tire out Hartley, who for the last two hours has been proclaiming his enthusiasm for the new surroundings, and for the recent absence of a crippling fever which has plagued him for more than three days. It doesn't help that we're an hour ahead here, but it's approaching ten o'clock at night and he's still sitting up in bed like a cheeky sentinal, blowing raspberries and shouting at me from across the room (it's an open-concept apartment superficially divided by a skeletal wood shelving unit.)

I'm drinking Cotes de Bourg (or perhaps that's just the region - whatever, the stuff is red and dry and lovely) and eating emmental croustilles (they really like their emmental in this country), pre-writing this post so as not to waste a precious drop of my iPhone's dwindling power, as we don't yet have a converter. But we are having a marvelous time. Or at least I think we are. It is the British way to leave on holiday and then spend the entire time pointing out how much better England is and wanting the holiday to be over so that one can return home.

Earlier, Bruce applauded my stellar bilingualism at a cafe in the train station shortly after we disembarked, and seemed really impressed, until I reminded him that the croque Monsieur and pain au chocolat are already in French.

Anyway, I'm still here. Proving I can kick it old skool. I mean, pen and paper - what's that all about, hey? Wish you were here, etc.

C'est la vie en rose

2009-11-08T20:52:00.005Z

Hartley’s fever broke at around two this morning and Bruce and I did a sleepy high-five in the dark before settling back into a fitful sleep. At about four, Hartley woke again, this time in tears. His little head began another slow burn, and by eight o’clock, his fever was back in full force. We called the NHS help line, and the person on the other end of the phone said some vague things about Swine Flu before referring us to an emergency clinic in Crouch End.

We bundled up our little boo and rushed him down there, only to find that the doctor seemed relatively unconcerned, even after he misunderstood that his fever had only come on in the last few days and not weeks as he’d imagined. We’ve had a trip to Paris planned for ages, and as it’s coming up tomorrow, we were certain we’d have to cancel. But the doctor wrote us up a prescription for antibiotics just in case we needed a Plan B, and told us to have a nice time.

So the rest of the day has passed in a flurry of activity - not only in preparing to leave for Paris, but in getting my application together for my leave to remain, as my visa runs out soon and we have to pop it in the mail the day after we get back. In addition to proof of having passed my Life in the UK test* and upward of eight hundred pounds, we also need to provide several documents demonstrating that we’ve been cohabitating for the last two years. One would think a marriage certificate would suffice, but one would be sorely misguided in that thinking.

If you’re well acquainted with the pair of us in real life, you will know what our organisational skills are like. They are like someone carefully filed every single letter, bill, receipt or notification in a well-ordered cabinet, in a well-ordered study, and then lobbed a Moltov cockatil into the midst of all that order. And then rubbed their hands together and said, Okay, now where did I put that Council Tax bill from 2006? I tell you, trying to gather the supporting documentation whilst force-feeding our screaming, choking infant his thrice-daily antibiotics has been fun. Great fun.

But although we are closer to fleeing the country in distress than setting out on a great adventure at this point, I have high hopes that tomorrow Hartley’s fever will have disappeared, and that we’ll be able to pull off this packing/leaving the house stint within the first few hours of waking. Or at least I’m folding dresses, t-shirts and baby blankets like that’s what I think. Going through the motions of belief is half the battle.

If anyone reading has ever done Paris on a budget and with an infant, your ideas on some baby-friendly sights and activities would be greatly appreciated. We haven’t exactly had time to do our research.

A tout a l’heur!

*I think I could probably wring a whole new post out of that experience, and will probably try at some point this month.

Prisencolinensinainciusol and Paracetamol

2009-11-07T15:37:00.003Z

I’m leaving in less than an hour to meet my friend Jennifer, for an evening of comedy in a beautiful venue called Union Chapel in Islington. It really is a chapel, and it’s leant itself to a number of fringe activities, such as waiting for Daniel Johnston to lose the plot after Adem played a really tiny keyboard and, I hear, a screening of the original Friday the 13th movie with free whisky (Personally, I can’t think of which is worse, but maybe one makes the other bearable).

Bruce is out supporting his football team in Tottenham but his mother will be over in a little while to take care of Hartley during the overlap. Our poor wee boo has been doped up on Calpol for the past twenty-four hours, and although it hasn’t done anything to assuage his fever, it does make him feel well enough to trawl for exposed wires to chew on (they are well hidden, but not well enough – it’s okay, I’m keeping an eye out). He’s a bit fragile, so his minor entanglements with the legs of chairs are upsetting him more than they usually do. I wish he would rest, but you can’t really reason with a medicated infant with get up and go.

Anyway, I anticipate coming home to a circus of flu, snot and tears, which means I’d better whip up a post for today before I leave.

This is it, folks!

This, and a video I posted on my Facebook last week. Even if you’ve already seen it, it’s worth watching another twenty times, in my humble opinion. If we all learn the dance moves from our respective homes, maybe one day we can get together and, you know, recreate it.

Bubbles: like mother like son

2009-11-06T19:48:00.007Z

I have slug trails of baby snot on my top, dark circles under my eyes and I’ve lost the will to watch America’s Next Top Model, which frightens me the most.

It’s been one of those weeks, and Hartley’s cold-turned-cough-turned-fever was brought to us by the makers of insomnia and too many nights out with my good friend Beer and his loopy gal Red Wine.

I nearly killed myself by drinking a full bottle of wine over the course of three hours at a cocktail bar last Friday, and ‘never again’ turned into ‘maybe just four’ when I had the good fortune to spend a fabulous night out with the lovely Making Strange this past evening. We ate our weight in ribs caked in Frank’s Red and I doused the fire with two Coronas, a Peroni and a San Miguel.

Sadly, liberal amounts of fizzy pink alcohol circulated at a baby’s first birthday party this afternoon, with most of the mothers justifying a second and third glass by way of the ‘it’s only 4%’ clause. Live and learn, and live and learn again.

Needless to say, I’m in no state to brood over a proper post this evening, so instead I give you a video of my son enjoying bubbles more than anyone with a temperature above 37 degrees has any right to. Please enjoy!

In the morning

2009-11-05T16:30:00.003Z

In the morning, I make myself three slices of toast and a cup of coffee. I make Hartley one slice of toast with a very thin spread of margarine, cut into small pieces.

I sit at the computer having my breakfast, and I pass Hartley a little piece of toast, repeating the mantra A slice of toast is a good breakfast for a boo. This is something Bruce said once, to make me feel better about the fact that Hartley will only eat toast or fromage frais in the morning. I say the mantra aloud as I hand him each bit of toast, and he looks up at me from his Bumbo and smiles, making clutchy clutchy motions with his hand.

Sometimes he takes the toast and turns back to watch television, which is on to distract him from the fact that his only task right now is to eat his toast. Toast isn’t much of a challenge for a ten-month-old. Having a conversation with him doesn’t work, because eventually it dawns on him that he’s eating toast and then he gets upset.

Sometimes he makes the clutchy clutchy hand motion but then slaps the toast out of my fingers. If I feel he’s going to do this, I lightly hold his wrist and sometimes he will let me place the toast in his palm. If he’s serious about wanting to slap the toast away, he won’t let me hold his wrist, and will flap his entire arm at my fingers until the toast piece falls to the floor. Then I know that breakfast is over.

When his favourite programme came on this morning, he did what he does every time the programme comes on: he swivels his head to locate me in the room and then gives me a cheeky grin as if to say, Look, it’s our favourite programme! Then he turns to watch the intro, which is the best part of any show in his opinion.

We only let him watch baby telly, and only when we’re trying to eat breakfast or accomplish a task he’s not allowed to take part in, like a shower or cooking. The kitchen is very small, and he always wants to play with the rubbish bin.

Mornings with the baby are some of the loveliest mornings I’ve known.

Must...write...post...

2009-11-04T23:20:00.004Z

Hoof, why did I sign up for this again? Okay, something else. Tonight it’s the Proust Questionnaire.

1.What is your idea of perfect happiness?
No pain, no yearning, and to exist without the weight or burden of self.

2.What is your greatest fear?
Dying, and the eternity of nothingness that follows.

3.What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Weakness.

4.What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Smugness. Or immodesty. I don’t know, some combination of the two. Smudesty.

5.Which living person do you most admire?
My son.

6.What is your greatest extravagance?
The time I spend online.

7.What is your current state of mind?
It’s standing on the edge of a high diving board that is suspended above an empty pool.

8.What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Beauty, obviously. Nobody has to work at beauty, so why do we reward those who have it? Ptooee.

9.On what occasion do you lie?
When I want to spare someone’s feelings. I think that’s important to do. There’s nothing virtuous about crushing someone.

10.What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My eyes. They look hound-doggish when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror.

11.Which living person do you most despise?
I’d rather not say.

12.What is the quality you most like in a man?
Wit.

13.What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Kindness.

14.Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I quite like [insert likeable thing here].

15.What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Bruce. Or Hartley. Brucely. Hartluce.

16.When and where were you happiest?
I don’t remember.

17.Which talent would you most like to have?
Musicality, or paintingness.

18.If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would feel less awkward about talking to people.

19.What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Changing my life from what it used to be.

20.If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
I’d want to come back as myself. I can’t imagine being anyone or anything else. That would be frightening.

21.Where would you most like to live?
France, or some non-existent place in Italy.

22.What is your most treasured possession?
A small box of memorabilia from childhood.

23.What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being in a very bad situation you know you're not going to change. That’s different from the lowest depth of grief, obviously.

24.What is your favorite occupation?
I haven’t found it yet, but I imagine it would be writing. It’s the only thing I actually put effort into without feeling like I’ve lost something.

25.What is your most marked characteristic?
I wish I knew.

26.What do you most value in your friends?
Mutual respect, and the sense that I can speak to them in confidence and vice versa.

27.Who are your favorite writers?
This changes with the books I’m reading because I admire a lot of writers. Right now it’s Wells Tower. I used to really like Murakami, but then I realised everyone else in the world does too, which makes me question his value. I know that’s silly, but the best writers make you feel as though they are writing only for you.

28.Who is your hero of fiction?
Fictional hero? Or writer of fiction? If it’s the former, then I’m not sure. I don’t think writers are heroic. It’s easy to sit alone in a room and make things up. It’s much more courageous to try and see things the way they really are, and feel helpless in the face of that.

29.Which historical figure do you most identify with?
I’m ignorant of most historical figures. I’ve been told that I resemble a Joan of Arc figure, and I remember feeling like a persecuted crusader when I was in a mental institute, so maybe her.

30.Who are your heroes in real life?
The professors at the university where I did my film degree. They are some of the most dedicated and interesting people I’ve ever met.

31.What are your favorite names?
I admire simple names, like Sam, but I’m always choosing silly names like Jupiter. If I have another son, I think I’d like to name him Casper.

32.What is it that you most dislike?
The feeling of impermanence, or that life could end at any moment so you can never really relax.

33.What is your greatest regret?
That I fell out of touch with a wonderful friend who died in an accident a few years later. I wish I’d told her how much she meant to me, but I was young.

34.How would you like to die?
I’ve thought about this, and I still don’t know. I think it would be horrific to die before you have the chance to say goodbye to your people and to yourself. But I think it would be horrific to contemplate eternity as imminent also. I think I would like to know that it was going to happen and then drift away surrounded by people I felt good being around.

35.What is your motto?
I don’t have a motto. Mottos are for people who think in absolutes. Maybe that’s my motto.

What is more interesting than child abuse? Herein lies the answer, maybe.

2009-11-03T20:55:00.004Z

Ha ha. It only occurred to me today that I can’t even rest on my laurels of yesterday’s post, as I’m meant to be doing this every day. When did I last have enough time or gumption to write a post about myself every single day? Somewhere in the vicinity of 2004, I suspect. My navel seams to have closed up over the past few years, and I find myself - or even the way my brain works – less and less interesting as time goes on. I don’t even look at daily events as potential story fodder anymore, as I find most things can be adequately summarised in a 140 character tweet, or my Facebook status.

I thought I was going to have to elaborate on how my good feeling about this little play group I attend nearby went rapidly downhill after I watched the leader snatch a toy piano away from a baby not much older than Hartley while she was trying to make an announcement, even though she’d just finished handing out instruments to the children in preparation for our sing-along, and then didn’t even give it back to him once the music had begun (though some kindhearted mother pointed out to her that the reason he was screaming through snot and tears was probably due to this fact). The good feelings dissipated further after I watched her absentmindedly push what I am hoping was her own child into a pretend sleeping position for "Hop Little Bunnies," which resulted in said child hitting her head on the hard vinyl floor.

But then something much more interesting took place after class, on our walk home. It was Morag who noticed that someone had left their laptop case leaning against a tree. I’d registered the laptop but immediately dismissed it as unimportant, I guess because I envisioned someone emerging from one of the nearby houses to collect it. But then I remembered that we live in London, and you can’t drop a wallet with any hope of ever seeing it again if you don’t notice straight away. We deliberated about what to do, and had to concede that its owner wasn’t coming back and so began searching it for contact details.

I found a plastic folder of personal effects, which I felt uncomfortable about going through because at that point I thought there was still a chance the owner would return and find me snooping through their official documents. The documents contained an address, but it wasn’t a UK address. I opened a note that had been handwritten in blue ink on a piece of graph paper, which was tucked away in a pocket. The letter was folded in three, its face addressed to “Mum and Dad” in a childlike script. Inside was an apologetic, self-deprecating missive with a tone of finality so pointed it became immediately apparent that it was a suicide note.

“Um, this is a suicide note!” I said to Morag, who was in the midst of outlining a plan of attack. Her eyes widened as I handed her the piece of paper, and she scanned the letter quickly before noting, with some relief, that it was dated from two years ago. We finally decided to take the laptop to the police station, because whether or not there was any significance in it being left behind, we couldn’t just let some random kid come along and pinch it. We scrawled a quick note to this effect on the blank inside of a prescription packet and tacked it to the tree where we’d found the laptop, reasoning that if they returned to that spot, they’d probably see the note.

The police station isn’t far from where I live, though it’s small and keeps to erratic hours, so it was closed by the time we got there. We stood outside in the dark debating on whether or not one of us should take it home and bring it back in the morning. There really didn’t seem to be any other option, so I hooked the laptop case around the handle of Hartley’s pushchair and we headed off back in the direction of home, and the shops.

Along the way, we ran into two female police officers, who agreed to take the laptop from us with our details. They asked us what was in the bag and we itemised everything whilst they went through it all. Morag mentioned the suicide note, which seemed to baffle them, though they glossed over this bit of information in their report. The officer I spoke to said they would contact me if the bag was retrieved by its owner. Bruce says this is because the owner might want to give me a small reward. I think that’s an odd thing to volunteer, but we’ll see I guess.

Mostly I wonder about the note, and about the person who wrote it. Our search revealed that the owner of the laptop is in his or her seventies, which would put the writer of the note in his or her thirties, at best. If a child writes a suicide note to their parents and that child is very young, there is a chance the note is a cry for help. If the child is more of an adult, on the other hand, there is a very good chance that such a note indicates intent.

It’s difficult to know for certain, and so the question I’m left with is this: would a parent keep their child’s suicide note from two years ago if the note writer hadn't succeeded? Would they keep the note if the note writer had succeeded? I don’t want to put myself in the shoes of whoever lost that laptop, even if it means clearing up a mystery. And who am I to reduce the tragedy - large or small - of a complete stranger to a mere curiosity?

It is rather curious, though.

Much ado about blogging, and pasta

2009-11-02T20:54:00.006Z

Let me sully this post by first speaking about my writing here, and elsewhere. I think reflexivity is pretty pertinent to a month-long yard sale of musty, randomly priced ideas I’ve had to drag out from storage because I have nothing of real value to say. Everything I write is off-the-cuff, from conception to execution, and I only sit down to write when I feel confident that my mojo (or in this case blomo) is in good working order.

This is why I have a partially written piece that gives me the evils every time I maximize its worthless bulk to see if I can perform some kind of emergency surgery to get it at least looking like something I could post on a collaborative site made up of fearless, prolific bloggers. But that’s the irony of my situation: the words I conjure are either living or dead, and the dead ones are usually too far gone for the defibrillators.

So you may be in for a fairly ghastly house of spooks, gimps and amputees this month, and I can’t even pretend it’s a lead-up to Halloween. What I can do is try to keep this as close to its original intent as possible: an online log of day-to-day events as they occur, at least for the month of November. I might even be able to convince you that I do more here than shovel gruel into the mouth of a nine-month-old boy and then scoop out the results hours later. Slightly more, then.

Today, for instance, I tried to do what I do every day, which is to make a sort of minor celebration of life using whatever positive feelings and tangible materials I have at my disposal and fashioning them into some kind of ticker-tape, bunting-choked fanfare that will propel me out the door and into the world, where we all live and pretend that nobody else lives as well or as colourfully as we do. That last part is something I don’t do anymore, actually. I’ve let too many minor characters act out their stories on my stage over the years, and wouldn’t know how to play the leading lady to a flea at this point.

Regardless, I know that I have to raise a wee one, and wee ones naturally feel they are at the centre of everything, with passersby cheering them on from open windows and city sidewalks. This is why they smile so damn much, and why they have no qualms about screaming at you in public if you’ve deprived them of a teething biscuit for longer than five minutes on a bus journey to the nearest play group. This is a delusion you want to nurture, because it takes a buttload of confidence to make your way in this world without letting some bullish, snub-nosed kid grind your feelings beneath his heel because you wouldn’t let him push you off a swing.

We do not push people off swings, we two, no. We stand idly by and grin madly at the fun those kids are having until someone’s father notices us and sheepishly pries his sprog from the chain-linked ropes so that we can have a turn ourselves. It’s chilly, and his breath is hitching with laughter as I push him gently away from me and he comes drifting back into my hands, and I remember that although this doesn’t come naturally to me, the stuff of memory is born from playground antics with your mother or your sister or whoever is in charge of your experiences, and I want him to have as many happy memories of his childhood as I can reasonably provide.

I remember how some baby book or website or newsletter told me that it was my job to make sure that Hartley transitioned from helpless infant to confident baby - to “turn him on to life,” they said. And I wondered how I could do this after allowing him to lie naked under a florescent lamp for three days, screaming for hours on end, because he had a touch of jaundice and that’s what the hospital wanted. He went from being the only baby on the ward who never cried or complained, to an inconsolable, blubbering mess who hated everything to do with being alive. I really felt like that was my fault.

But I needn’t have worried, as this kid is turned on full bright. I don’t think a day goes by that he doesn’t screech with delight over his evening bath, or his lunch, or some silly expression on my face.

So anyway, we had a bit of a swing, and then I took him down the slide a few times, and we headed back home, where he played happily alone in the living room while I made dinner for myself. Whenever Bruce is out for the evening, I try to take the opportunity to eat something he would never in a million years concede to trying. That’s anything that includes vegetable pieces, by the way. Earlier today I’d picked up fresh ingredients for a vegetarian bolognaise (I use Quorn mince, because it makes an awful lot, and because I’m the only one eating it so I have to consider its longevity in the fridge), and I chopped and seasoned and threw it all together in a pot to simmer for an hour.

My pasta sauce is pretty much like my writing – I mainly rely on common sense to roll it out, and if I throw in a little more cooking wine and a little less oregano than last time, it usually still turns out okay.

I had to let Hartley play with a plate of cold noodles, since he’d already had his dinner and wasn’t in any mood to let me eat mine without his participation. Then I gave him a lovely warm bath and a good feed before putting him down, and now he’s sleeping soundly in the next room, which is how I managed to find the time to bash this out. Usually, I lie with him until he’s fully asleep and then transfer him to the cot before tiptoeing out again. While he drifts, I surf the internet on my iPhone, which is mainly how I get around online these days. I steal a moment here and there when I’m out with the baby, or while he’s napping, or sitting in his Bumbo eating toast.

As the cold weather sets in, I become more interested in stories about recipes and cooking, and Erqsome never lets me down on this front. She remains the biggest culinary/crafting genius I’ve ever met, and she can turn a pretty mean phrase as well, which consequently leaves me feeling hungry and full, all at the same time. I know I don’t usually praise other bloggers here (most of them are pretty good at bigging themselves up on their own blogs), but you’d be surprised by what this girl can do with cabbage. She’s my inspiration in most things, and I still refuse to molest that lovely hank of wool she gave me for my birthday this past year. At least until I can work out what I’m doing.

NaBloBlahBlah

2009-11-01T19:04:00.008Z

I signed up to write a blog post every day for the whole of November, I guess because I don't have enough on my plate.

Actually, I have about a million things to do, most of which need doing in the next ten minutes. But the online writing thing has fallen to the wayside since motherhood, and this makes me sad in moments when I can actually get a handle on how I'm feeling and why, so I thought: why not? I'll leave National Beat Yourself Up for Not Knowing the First Thing About Writing a Novel Month for those with more ambition and less infant in their lives.

So here's my first post. You can find quality posts such as this one right here, every day for the next thirty days. Or is it thirty-one?

Hartley: Nine Months

2009-10-11T17:36:00.014+01:00

Chicken,

Today you turned nine months old, which means you’ve officially spent as long on the outside as you have on the inside. I’m not sure if there’s any significance in that as such, but it’s sort of interesting, no?

I think the last time I wrote you, I said something silly about the fact that babies stop smiling at strangers once they realise the world is Satan’s playground and everyone in it self-serving demons who are only interested in their own survival and would use your head as their personal stepping stone if it meant they could leave their stamp on this whirling, meaningless mass of tarted-up dirt. Those might not have been my exact words, but the sentiment remains.

Your mummy has been going through a bit of a rough patch this past while, as our little family unit was playing tradsies with a variety of illnesses that violated one or more of us nearly every single day for three solid weeks. We were very lucky in the sense that none of these illnesses affected you too badly, and for the most part you were your boisterous, happy self. In another sense, we were unlucky for this same reason, if only because it wasn’t easy to convince you to stand in your walker in front of the telly while we took turns rotating from the bed to the sofa to the toilet until it was time to feed you and put you to bed.

Somewhere in the midst of this, a doctor told mummy she wasn’t allowed to be skinny anymore, because she hadn’t earned the right to wear size 6 jeans (which, in this country, is actually a size 8). No, mummy cheated the system by acquiring a thyroid disorder that turned her closet into a veritable storeroom of unwearable tents and, more significantly, messed around with her mood, which has been up and down and all around, but mainly buried down beneath a heavy duvet, which is where mummy wishes she was most of the time.

Anyway, that’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m working on feeling better, and meanwhile am painting over the big brown scribble I made all over poor, defenseless planet earth and its inhabitants. I’ll let you know how that goes.

And it turns out that your growing wariness of outsiders is a good thing. It makes perfect sense, now I think of it. How else would you know not to go crawling into the lap of a psychotic dictator or a diseased leper or your grandmother after she has said something rude about the way I walk, with my arms held stiffly down by my sides which, I should point out, is the strained and cautious walk of a person who has spent the bulk of her life beneath a cloud of cruel scrutiny, ruthlessly delivered by the woman who raised her? You wouldn’t, and so this is part of what you must teach yourself.

It’s been a little strange, though, to watch you go from open and beaming to guarded and vaguely fearful almost overnight. But both my baby newsletter and the health visitor say that you’ve worked out who the important adults in your life are, and although you might deign to smile at a table of pretty girls if you’re feeling secure in my company, for the most part you will wail like you’ve been stuck with a pin if someone looks at you wrong or, god forbid, tries to pick you up. This makes the baby gym class we signed up to on Wednesdays a little uncomfortable for both of us, but I’m sure you’ll get used to the lovely woman who encourages you to walk on the balancing beam soon enough.

Apart from the onset of shyness around strangers, you are steadily gaining confidence in yourself and in the world around you, conquering whatever obstacles you come up against and gumming happily on the rest. The other day we were deep in conversation when suddenly your father looked over and said “Hey, he’s standing up.” And so you were! You’d been trying to pull yourself up by holding onto the back of your walker since the last time we’d helped you to do that, and lo and behold, it turns out you no longer need a cheering section to get to your feet. I’ve also watched you pull yourself up by holding onto the seat of the sofa, but only because you spotted my iPhone and saw that it needed chewing.

I am no longer under the illusion that I’ve given birth to the only developmentally-challenged infant on earth who is destined to never grow to be any bigger than a bread loaf and will always impart his needs through screaming, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t surprise and delight me on a daily basis. You have to remember that until you came along, your mummy had only ever lived with cats. It takes approximately two weeks before a kitten outgrows that cute tiny kitty phase, after which it spends the next fifteen years knocking your picture frames off the mantelpiece in a misguided effort to get you to feed it. Babies, on the other hand, go from being inconsolable lumps of scream to actual humans with their own mobile phones, and the shift from one stage to the next is palpable.

The other day I was encouraging you to drink from a cup, and after you struggled to allow some water into your mouth before I pulled the glass away, you smacked your lips. Only that: you smacked your lips, except for me, it was the equivalent of a ten-year-old cat clearing its throat and then asking you to please pass the fish snacks, it was just that astounding. I have to keep reminding myself that you are not a one-dimensional animal or even a very clever one-dimensional animal – you’re a tiny person, and with every passing day you are shedding the mystery of mute infancy and becoming ever more sentient. It’s thrilling, and also a little sad, because I want to freeze you like this forever. You’re my little boo, but one day you’ll slam a door in my face because I won’t let you buy a Vespa with your postgraduate savings.

Even though you are still waking up many times in the night because you can’t get back to sleep unless you are pressed against me, your hand curled loosely around the collar of my shirt, your lips pursed and sucking the air, and even though I am exhausted and sometimes desperate for a bit of time alone, I know that I have to try and stay with you in these baby years, because I’m told it’s over far too quickly. I can’t imagine you being anything other than who you are right now – this beautiful, smiling chicken who pumps his little arms excitedly and nearly hyperventilates at the prospect of milk; who screeches with delight as someone chases him down the hall on his belly; who grins and lifts his arms with the anticipation of being picked up.

You were in Camden earlier, suffering your father’s five-comic-a-day habit so that I could get some writing done, and though you weren't gone for more than a few hours, I was already missing the way your eyes burn a hole into the back of my skull if I turn away from you for more than a few moments, and the sound you make when you want my attention, like a little Einstein discovering the theory of relativity over and over again: Ahhhhh!

I guess one day we will only have photos and videos and memories of this time, which we’ll share quietly with one another while you conquer the world in the privacy of your own bedroom. But right at this moment you are kneeling by your walker, cooing and pushing the buttons on your activity tray while daddy prepares a lovely Thanksgiving dinner for your Canadian mummy, and I’m going to file away this letter and come and join you now.

I love you, chicken.

Hartley: Seven and Eight Months

2009-09-13T21:39:00.010+01:00

Hello Little You!

Well. It’s been quite some time since I’ve written to you here, and as usual, I’m at a loss as to where to even begin.

Some people might think me crazy for saying I have no time to write anymore, when I’m clearly active on one of the biggest time wasters to hit the internet thus far – Twitter. But one-hundred-and-forty characters is pretty much all the time you’re willing to give me, at least once I’ve done the essentials like bathed, eaten breakfast, had my coffee and maybe read a page or two of a book. I suppose if you tallied up all those one-liners, you’d have a decent block of time wherein one could feasibly write letters of adoration to her firstborn son, but that’s not how life works, at least not for us.

After I last wrote to you, the three of us flew to Canada to visit family, and it was there that you turned seven months old. I think we were all more than a little surprised by how well you adapted to the situation. A long-haul flight across the Atlantic with a seven-month-old baby is a harrowing idea for those of us with children (and those of us who fly with those of us with children), and I wasn’t sure how I was going to help you settle into nine hours of lap time, being that you’re not a lap baby by any stretch of the imagination, and being also that mummy is a very nervous flyer.

No matter how many statistics I hear, or glasses of wine I imbibe in-flight, nothing can convince me that flying is a perfectly safe way to travel. And mothers don’t follow you around with their tops undone, asking if you’re okay and making sure you don’t pull the stereo speakers off the table and onto your head because they have nothing better to do – no, we are programmed, PROGRAMMED to keep our babies out of danger. And so if any part of me, however irrational, believes that by getting on a plane I am somehow putting myself at risk, try and imagine how much bigger that fear becomes when I add you to the mix.

Regardless, we got on the plane, mummy forced herself to chill out, and we steeled ourselves for countless hours of you crying and us pacing the narrow aisles. But you know what? You were fine. No, you were better than fine: you were a brilliant little flyer. From the moment we got into the air, you transformed into a baby I’d never met before. Although you were confined to my lap for 95% of that flight, and even though you missed an entire night of sleep, you didn’t complain once. I spent most of those nine hours shrugging at strangers and saying “He’s not usually like this,” because I wanted them to know how very lucky we all were that you’d left your former shouty self at home.

Even when we disembarked and we buckled you into your car seat and subjected you to the most annoying drive of your life, because your grandparents can’t drive anywhere without getting lost or having an argument but usually both, you still managed a smile. When we got to the condo, I let your cousin Danielle take you upstairs in her arms, because I was practically blind with exhaustion and you seemed fine. And you were fine: all the way upstairs in the lift, all the way down the hall leading to the condo, and all the way into the living room, where Danielle finally lay you gently against a cushion on your grandparents’ sofa, you were fine. And then you completely lost your shit, because you had no idea where you were, hadn’t slept in over fifteen hours and had no clue who any of these people were. Pretty understandable, really.

But then your aunty Gabe offered to help me bathe you, and so you had your first bath outside the little plastic bath we’d been using at home. I dressed you in clean pajamas and your cousin fed you your peaches and banana in the plushest high chair we’d ever seen, while Aunty Gabe unpacked, folded and hung all our clothes for us. Then I did something that daddy still wishes to this very day I hadn’t done: I taught them the song I sing to you when I put you in your boo bag, and so the three of us surrounded you on that giant, marshmallowy bed and sang the boo bag song to you until your father left the room in shame.

I thought there was no way you’d concede to sleeping in a strange room, in a strange cot, which was a travel cot and so nothing like your cot back home, but after a few minutes of crying you settled into a deep sleep, which is something you did every night thereafter.

I don’t want to spend too much time on Canada because so much has happened since, but I will say that we flew back to the place your mummy was born, and it was a trip that made her very happy (she saw one of her dearest friends marry) and a bit sad too (it had been nearly three years since she’d returned, and home had lost its shine, which is something I’ll explain to you one day). At one point on the flight back to Vancouver, you let out a scream that continued to rise in pitch until everyone in the adjoining rows was staring at us. I thought that might have spelled the end of your flight tolerance, but it turned out you were only politely informing us that your foot had become trapped between the arm rest and the seat. Sorry!

In spite of the fact that we suffered two weeks of terrible jet lag, and you wouldn’t sleep in your cot - wouldn’t sleep at all - once we arrived home, I am so happy that we made that trip. It gave daddy and me a chance to catch our breath, but more importantly, the new environment, all those different experiences, and the loving, varied attention you received from family and friends brought you out of yourself, gave you confidence and turned you into the happiest baby you’ve ever been. A few days ago, you turned eight months old, and the three of us celebrated by taking you to an exhibition at The Serpentine before denying you chocolate ice cream at Harrods, though we gave you tastes of vanilla (we’re not that cruel).

The other morning, after very little sleep, I opened my eyes and caught sight of a small, strange face looking back at me. I must have brought you back into bed at some point, because there you were beside me in the push up position, breathing into my face and grinning at me like someone with very good news. It took me a few moments to recognise your sweet face, because I still remember when you were too little to meet me at face level of your own accord, and part of me hasn’t caught up to this other baby who can sit upright without support, handle and chew a variety of finger foods with his bottom two teeth, and laugh at all my jokes because he knows exactly what I mean. You are becoming less like a baby and more like a little boy every day. I remember when I thought that this would make me sad, that I would lose the tiny infant I first fell in love with, but I now realise that I am steadily gaining more and more of you, and that there’s nothing to be sad about at all.

I’m glad that you’re still so good at smiling, and I honestly believe that you could build bridges with those big silly grins of yours. The other day I took you into the dentist’s office, where I barely registered a sulky looking youth with long greasy hair and dark circles under eyes obscured by furrowed, pierced eyebrows. You, on the other hand, gave this boy your whole attention, disarming him with one of your charming grins and eliciting an unguarded smile from him as well. It wasn’t until I noticed this interaction that I realised that I’d made an unfair judgment about someone I didn’t know based on how he looked, which is something that you would never, ever do. I know it’s because you’re a baby, and babies haven’t been shaped by societal stereotyping, but it gives me a glimmer of hope nonetheless, because you continually remind me that nearly every single person on earth has the same good things inside them.

Sometimes when we’re out for a walk together, I look into the faces of people who seem bitter, depressed, lonely and generally unhappy, and I worry that some of them might have started out exactly like you: enthusiastic about what life has to offer, happy to experience this magic among so many others, and secure in the notion that people are inherently good, loving individuals who mean you no harm. I worry that one day you will grow too wise, see things - the world and its billions of inhabitants, some thriving and some always in the grip of terrible things - the way they really are, and that these two elements combined will break your heart. I can’t think of another way to explain so many unhappy faces in such a beautiful, thriving city, Hartley.

And although nothing I say and do could forever shield you from the sadness of being, I hope that you will always find ways to smile at strangers, that you’ll show compassion for people who aren’t as fortunate as you, and that you’ll strive to find the magic in living, even if life gets hard, because it’s there. I promise you, it’s there. You’re living proof of that.

I love you very much, darling.

Away

2009-08-31T21:50:00.010+01:00

What makes me think I could do this again? I don't know. Something.

I'm quite behind on the one little online luxury I allow myself, mainly because I feel I'm not being completely selfish with that time, and possibly because I'm arrogant enough to believe that I could be making an investment in his future emotional inheritance.

But actually, it will be a number of years before he'll know how to read these sentimental outpourings of mine and, indeed, a good few more before he'll even want to. I've got at least two decades to complete this series, and that's if we still communicate online, with words, written with our tentacles. Fingers! I mean.

For those of you still with me, though, I can offer you the Cole's Notes version of the last eight weeks:

We took Hartley to Canada for three weeks, so that he could meet the rest of his family and finally pay a visit to his second home. In that time, he turned seven months, but not before growing two teeth and learning to crawl - a skill he uses mostly for good, though sometimes for trying to launch himself off the sheer quiltface of the bed, like a happy wee lemming pursued by the notion that something more exciting exists just three feet lower.

In less than two weeks he'll turn eight months old.

I love him more every day.

Some wise T-shirt once said: "Every Life Should Have a Secret Plan" or something to that effect (I don't actually own the t-shirt). We don't have any top secret plans to sit on yet, but I think we're working on it.