Hartley: Sixteen Months

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

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

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

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

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.