Hartley: Fourteen Months

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad time at the OK Corral

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)

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

We feed the pigeons where I come from

Pleased to have escaped the bowl cut my classmates uniformly suffered

The sound of two hands clapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I wanted to stomp a toddler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m hoping there’s a book.

Such uplifting posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cold unknown

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indian and a revelation

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!