last crumbs of summer

Dear Matilda

You have been eating solids for a few weeks now - you are nearly six months old and already you have found your likes and dislikes. Just like me you love sweet potatoes and just like me you are not so sure about mashed potatoes.

You start wiggling your feet and thrashing about in your chair when we open the freezer doors and see what's left of the homemade purees I make for you. I even puree minced beef for you. It smells. Bad.

Your first ever food was parsnip, followed by sweet potato, and then potatoes. You love apple, and you love apricot. You also love to chew on teething rusks, even though you have no teeth to speak of. Frankly, you love eating, like your parents. You are not even that messy. You just open your little mouth like a bird and we have to shovel it in, if we're not fast enough you start crying.

I weaned you and sometimes you still bat away at my top, looking up at me sadly. At least that's what I think. I don't really think you're upset about the lack of boob in your life. Considering the last time I breastfed you you impatiently chomped down like a calf and nearly dragged my boob off to never never land.

I worry about your length.

I will not allow you to be a supermodel when you're older, you might as well stop growing. You are beautiful, inquisitive, and you have a top notch sense of humour. You really love slapping your naked belly.


Love, mummy

Weekend

Was sick with Mastitis...continued to work on my crazy rug idea...did some gardening and found the spud tower is growing some spuds...harvested eggplants...observed the Redback web carefully and set some mouse traps...made a cushion...did a bit of redecorating...started on a quilt, being carefully watched by Matilda.

Hope your week is full of sunshine!

Changing Faces

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

- Virginia Woolf-

I've been thinking about this quote a lot. Not only in regards to postnatal depression, and living live under a bell jar. Also in relation to what it's like being a mum at home. 

Many wise mothers have warned me that it's horrible to be "trapped" at home with a child.

I used to think, trapped, come on, all I have to do is stick the baby in the Ergo carrier or the pram and we can escape, together. But I understand now that it's a different kind of trapped.

I think motherhood enriches your life in more ways than you could ever imagine. But for all the riches to fit in, you have to make room. And the something that has to give is space. Mental space, physical space, your own space, head space. I miss my space. I do. Even when I have it, when I'm swimming, for example, and I know the baby is safe at home, and I'm swimming lap after lap, my head still isn't free like it used to be. It's always, somehow, with my baby.

At home, the baby's things have slowly crawled into every possible corner. More and more things are being moved into the garage. Our toes are blue from their encounters with the baby gym and the bouncers. I am fine with that. It's lovely and it's necessary. But I can't remember that crafting in my own space has ever felt this important to me before Matilda arrived.

Crafting gives me head space, feet space, mental space.

I have just recently finished clearing out a little corner for my desk and my shelves and my silly doilies, and just looking at it makes me feel a teensy bit calmer. 

It's there waiting for me.

Dear Matilda

you are not four months old and you are rapidly growing. So are your fingernails and toenails. 

Last week I once again faced the awkward and terrifying challenge of cutting your tiny, see-through, fragile fingernails. You were playing with my hair with one hand, and I was gripping the other, clipping one finger at a time, they are as thin as matchsticks, or so it seems to me. I was oh so careful not to do any damage to your buttery, delicate skin. Then I clipped your thumbnail, and there was blood.

A tiny bit. And you started crying.

I rang your dad at work and informed him that he needed to come home in a taxi immediately, because you were bleeding, probably needed stitches, and we had to go to hospital, and I wanted you to have a tetanus shot, who cares if the nail clippers weren't rusty. 

He arrived 20 minutes later, sweating and panicked. He found me on our couch, holding you tightly against my chest. I was sobbing. You were laughing and giggling.  Your dad was very pleased to find out that your blood loss amounted to a 2 dollar coin sized patch on a tissue.He also did a good job of pretending that he didn't mind being married to a crazy person.

He returned to work soon after he reassured me that the injury most likely did not require an emergency room visit. He said it reminded him of the time I rang the ambulance because you had heat rash.  

Sheepishly, your loving mother.

When Matilda was being cooked in my belly I decided she would lead a plastic-free life. 

I purchased wooden toys, lovely cotton rattles and lovingly handmade playthings.

Her favourite toys are mainly those we got given, and those my mum bought at Ikea.

All made in China.

Of course.

Reading

Of course after collecting the best of the best of children's literature for my daughter the first book she falls in love with is: Ikea, by Ikea. 

Growing

Eggplant

Eggplant Flowering

Seeds

Chives

Chives Flowering

What's in a Name

'It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius. 

Well, there is nothing wrong with all this. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, "bring us a basin! we're going to be sick!"

“Matilda said, "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable.” 

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” 

Roald Dahl

Thank You Note

Thank you for responding with lots of interesting comments on my birth post. It appears that almost no one has a smooth ride. And that's ok, right? Just means the way we talk about birth needs to change and we need to acknowledge that it's a complex, often difficult process, involving all sorts of emotions from fear to elation. As far as I'm concerned, if I am ever doing it again, I will not pressure myself at all and just be honest about it if newly pregnant friends ask my opinion. And not everyone needs to have bad experience. I think mine would have been much better if I hadn't approached it as if I was preparing for a yoga retreat. Seriously.
For the moment I'm concentrating on the here and now.
Next time, I'll tell you all about my postnatal depression and how I spent 4 weeks in the psych mother baby unit. I am just bags of fun and joy, let me throw it around like confetti!
But look how far we've come!

No Birth Story

This is not a birth story. I don't want to write what happened at the birth of my baby. I would rather forget.

People, I feel betrayed. I spent nine months reading nothing but birth stories. I couldn't wait to write down how I "birthed" my "babe". I read so many books on yoga birth poses, hypnobirthing and "breathing out the baby", and watched documentaries about arse-kicking feminist who give birth in the bathtub in the name female empowerment, and I could not wait to join them. I was obsessed with the many blogs detailing the lives of beautiful ladies birthing on yogaballs whilst muttering affirmations.
I wanted to be like them, and feel at one with the world, finally. This birthing experience was going to kick some arse.

Then I went to hospital, I somehow, I don't know how, gave birth to a 4,65 kilo baby, and I felt violated. Birth, people, was not my moment to experience self-realisation by means of connecting to mother earth in a powerful way. It was not empowering to feel the labour pains. I refuse to call them "waves". They were earth-shatteringly crippling pains that I was sure I'd not be able to handle for longer than 2 seconds. And I am no a wuss. I am built like a solid Germanic horse, and I could not believe my body was letting me down. I had gas, pain relief, and finally, thank you lord, the epidural. In my mind, I'd already failed. The yoga ball remained unused in the corner.

Then it was my moment to shine. Push! Push! I thought I'd experience the magic moment that I'd later remember - like a well of strength I'd be able to draw from for the rest of my life. Instead I thought I was going to die of fear. It is not empowering to be cut open like a christmas turkey and have a quarter pounder ripped out of you. And I don't think I'd say anything different if I'd given birth at home in a bathtub, to a normal-sized child.

And it was over, and she was out. Finally I was going to feel that giant rush of love when that wee wet bundle of joy would be chucked on my abdomen. Matilda was born, her heartrate had dropped and she was thrown in the emergency incubator and doctors were shoving oxygen on her face. I did not feel a rush of love. I felt my heart open wide when I saw her, briefly. I literally felt my heart open, and I heard myself screaming for the baby, I thought she was dead, and in that moment my newly open heart was torn into a million pieces.

Then the baby was fine, but I was bleeding, and medicated, and so, so sick. I felt like a tractor had been parked on me. I couldn't even hold the baby. I did not want to. I did not feel a rush of love. I did not feel empowered. I felt like a failure. And a bad mother. The world had suddenly become a terrifying place.
I felt I had let myself down, and the baby. And I kept looking at her, and urging myself to feel that joy that I'd read so much about, but for me it remained unreachable.

How sad for me that I spent nine months not following my own instincts, and believing that I needed to have not a birth, but a BIRTH EXPERIENCE. It needed to be calm, spiritual, amazing, and my favourite word of all time (not): NATURAL. A natural birth please, for me! I wanted to show it to the naysayers who'd tell me with that evil glint in their eyes that I'd scream for an epidural the second the contractions hit. Which I did (that doesn't make the naysayers any nicer though).
Well screw all that.

I wish that prior to giving birth, someone had told me that it's ok to be terrified, scared, upset. That birth isn't a concept that sits somewhere between yoga and discovering god.

Lucky for me, my friend Erin saved my life when I told her, in tears, that I did not feel a rush of love for my baby at all. I did not feel a huge "bond". I simply felt that the earth had stopped moving. All I could feel was extreme terror that something might happen to her, or me.

Then Erin said: "you didn't meet the baby at birth, and you didn't need to bond with her. You met her when she was in your belly, you bonded with her then, and you already knew her when she came out. You didn't need to fall in love with her. You were already in love with her".

And it was true. And we are ok, now.

PS: This is what a baby looks like just after birth. Not that pretty. Take note, movie makers.