The Cerebral Mum

Before I write this post I would like to state for the record that I think motherhood is easy or, at least, the first year is anyway. So far it has been just as I expected and all those women who annoyed me while I was pregnant with tales of how I wouldn’t find time to bake muffins or sleep for the next 20 years (among other ridiculous claims) and who, when I disagreed with them, shook their heads and sighed at me as though I was delusional have been proven wrong.

I state this because although motherhood is work, the negatives get focussed on to such an extant that new mothers are virtually encouraged to be overwhelmed by the whole experience before they’re even out of the gate.

But those thoughts are worth an entire post in themselves.

Although being a mum is easy (the love you feel really does wash everything else away) there is one thing going on right now that is getting to me. And any and all advice is welcome.

Caspar has started to hit and scratch me. A lot.

This behaviour isn’t unexpected but I wasn’t expecting it quite so early and I haven’t got a handle on how to deal with it when he is only (almost) one. It’s not like I can explain what he’s done wrong and send him on a time out: He’s far too little to understand “consequences”.

The only tool I have in my arsenal is to firmly say, No!, with my serious face on which works very well when he’s touching things that he’s not allowed to touch but isn’t so effective when he’s having the 1 year old’s equivalent of a tantrum. Trying to work out what is causing the behaviour seems to be the most important thing and I do have some answers.

Teething makes him stroppy but can’t be blamed entirely. It all boils down to boredom and frustration, which is understandable as his mind races far in advance of what his limbs and hands can do but it still makes me feel a bit shite for not having taken him out anywhere at all this week. At his age there is a limit to the things I can do to amuse him at home.

Apart from making a concerted effort to find new games to play to reduce his boredom and frustration (and reminding myself not to take it personally), is there any way to handle the scratching and hitting now that will help when his assertiveness really kicks in?

(I would also like to state for the record that I remain firmly convinced of Caspar’s perfection and see this behaviour as just another sign of his brilliance and strength of character.)

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30 poems in 30 days. A simple enough task. It is now Day 22 and I have written only 10 poems for the project. I have never been very good at finishing things. I am a great procrastinator. Take for example my novel and this painful confession:

I began it in 1994.

Even allowing for 3 computer disasters (which left me computerless for roughly 5 of those 13 years), a lost manuscript (recovered after 7 torturous months) and a ritual burning of about 200 pages (somewhere around the turn of the century), it is a fairly unimpressive effort. At the moment I could not even tell you what state it is in. I hadn’t finished word processing the copious notebooks and scrap paper I filled with my insane scrawls during the penultimate computer crash before the last one occurred.

And then I got pregnant.

I worked my butt off during my pregnancy to save as much money as I could before entering the realm of single motherhood and have not touched my novel since. And I won’t. Work will not begin again until Cas and I have moved back into the city and I am no longer in the in-between. My rough estimate is that about 60% of it is written but it will require some major structural editing as I have been writing it disjointedly for years.

When it does get published, we’ll just avoid mentioning the year 1994 to the critics. Marcel Proust I am not.

But back to that original thought I haven’t yet finished. I am 12 poems behind with only 8 days left. Even excusing myself for the days I was hanging over the toilet bowl as though I were in my first trimester, that too is a fairly unimpressive effort. I’m not being hard on myself. It’s just a fact.

So do I try and catch up? Do I give up? Do I let it go and finish each assignment at my leisure?

I would like to finish the 30 poems in the allotted time; because I chose to participate; because it is hard; because leaving everything to the last minute, until it seems everything is about to implode, is no longer a habit that works for me.

I am a mother.

I used to thrive under pressure; write papers which earned High Distinctions on the night before they were due, work 17 hour shifts on two hours sleep and then go back for more, frantically fill page after page until I was dizzy from the pace of it and I could no longer see. It’s not that I don’t have the stamina any more: I never had it. It’s because I don’t have the drug.

Adrenaline.

I was an adrenaline junkie. Life just pushed so hard that there was never a chance to be tired, and if it didn’t push me hard enough, I made it. I ran on my second wind for years and I loved it. Motherhood has its own hormonal highs but it is nothing like that rush of blood to the head. Motherhood is not strenuous. It is neither a sprint or a marathon. Motherhood is a slow shift.

I was about to launch into a long paragraph about how working in hospitality is like being a rock star but that would be another digression. Let’s just say that it is driving, physical work and it has it’s own momentum. It generates energy and you feed off it. You get caned all night then you clean up and hang out, drinking and smoking and seeing who can tell the most scurrilous stories about the guests.

But the slow shifts - the ones where you’ve polished every bottle, restocked every fridge and wiped every surface twice - those shifts are the killers. Your body isn’t pumping sugars to your brain and you have time to think. Usually, I would think about all the other things I could be doing if I wasn’t trapped in that bar or restaurant, standing at attention like a palace guard. I would be annoyed by the lack of customers, and then annoyed when a customer interrupted whatever boondoggly task I’d found to do.

Babies aren’t very demanding. Their needs are simple, they sleep a lot, their movements are limited and they are easily amused. But in that first year we have to stand at attention constantly and all the things that used to get done in large blocks of time have to get done in pieces. We cannot let the house go to wrack and ruin while we play at whatever is more interesting and then tidy it in a frenzy all in one day. We can’t immerse ourselves in a book and read it cover to cover. Babies’ needs are too constant and not constant enough. There is too little to do but you aren’t free to go and do something else.

This manic insomniac who burnt the candle at both ends until she crashed and and then lit the next one with glee needs to find new ways to get things done. There is not enough pressure but there is no valve to release what is there if it builds up. You can’t put babies on hold. You can’t call in sick. You can’t take a mental health day. You can’t just say, Stuff it - I’m going to the beach.

So I will try and get my poems done but in all likelihood some won’t make it within the 30 days. I’m trying to realign the way my energy works with the requirements of my new life (which I love!) but it is a trial and error process and I don’t have the answers yet.

I do know, however, that it hasn’t done me in!

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One of the things that I’ve learned about being a mother is how incomprehensible time is. While I was pregnant, the possibilities of Cas’ whole life were running through my mind. I never thought about having a baby, I thought about having a person, and suddenly things like life insurance and a will and a college fund became things I had to consider. Now.

I was very aware of him throughout what was a wonderful pregnancy, a pregnancy during which I felt more comfortable in my skin than I ever had in my whole life, during which I felt more beautiful than I had in my whole life (except for that last week once I had stopped work, and the week after that when it didn’t look like he had much motivation to enter the world), during which I felt so connected to every breath, every heartbeat and every mood of the child growing inside me. But in spite of my awareness it was still a surprise to meet him. I was surprised by the separateness.

I don’t mean that I felt disconnected, or felt less of a bond, but I didn’t realise how immediately he would be a person, that he didn’t need to grow into one. He came into this world an individual, limited by his inability to hold his head up, or speak, or feed himself, but an individual nonetheless. He came into the world distinctly himself, no longer a part of me, and I found myself waiting eagerly for him to grasp that first toy, to see that first smile, to hear that first babble, I found myself waiting for his individuality to be translated into the movements and the language I could understand, wanting to learn more about him, to learn more about us. I felt privileged not see him become, but to see him be.

With motherhood time becomes both too fast and too slow. This is a cliche, I guess, but it was something I could conceptualise yet did not know. With every new skill, new expression, new sound, I wanted the next, and the next and the next, but as all these things started piling up, I realised how quickly time passes. It is odd to be so impatient when the world is spinning too quickly. It is odd to want time to stop at the same as I want all my tomorrows.

I long for my baby and my boy and my man in equal measure.

And the possessive pronoun in that sentence makes no sense to me. He is so far from being mine, this individual whom I clothe and feed and bathe and lay down to sleep. Motherhood is both temporal and eternal. We get to watch our children unfolding day by day, yet, in those transcendent moments, we can see them complete.

I am a caretaker. Even as he clings to my legs for balance, I am a caretaker. Today when, for the first time, he walked the length of the room without a hand to hold or furniture to lean on and he came to me, all those future moments when he will be walking in the opposite direction were present.

I can’t wait to see him to walk out into the world, into his own life, but I am grateful that for we humans this takes so much longer than it does for a foal to first stand on its tentative, sticky, newborn legs. I am grateful that we get to hold onto the present and the future for so long, even though I know when that day comes, I will wish it had been longer.

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If Caspar swings any more he will throw up so we are sitting in the middle of the playgound and Caspar is inspecting the bark. There is another mother here who makes no eye contact with me. She looks old to be the mother of the two girls playing, one nearing 5, the other 3. Her face is worn and her hair is dull. Her voice is strident. And constant.

She watches her girls with obvious love but constantly instructs them.

“Concentrate.” she says, but not in a way that means, “Be careful“.

“Now play on the see-saw.”

“I don’t care if you don’t want to.”

The girls are not having fun. From a distance it might appear so but up close the smiles are frozen and do not light their eyes. The older girl’s “Woo-hoo…” is an imitation of enjoyment and she harps at the magpies and her little sister, an echo of her mother.

It is unpleasant.

The girls’ father arrives. He and the woman say, “Hello,” with their bodies turned slightly away from each other. They sit down at the picnic table while girls continue to play. The father has one arm across his body, his chin on his hand. His other hand is drumming on the table. There are long silences between words.

The father gets up to go and fill a water bottle at the fountain and I see the mother lift her sunglasses and rub her eyes with her head lowered. I wonder if that grim face is her only restraint for tears.

I do not know, but I put Caspar in his stroller and we head home. I do not want to see this family leave in what I think would be opposite directions. I do not want to see this mother walk away alone.

And I am grateful that I am a single mum; not a separated mum, not a divorced mum but a single single mum. I am grateful that I do not have to say goodbye to my son over and over again, that I have never had to lose something and wait for time to ease the clenching of my jaw. I am grateful that none of my choices as a mother can be taken away from me, that I do not have to find it in me to make compromises which feel like sacrifices at a time when the whole world seems to be falling apart.

I’m grateful that I do not have to miss that thing I never had.

_{(cross-posted at www.blogher.com)}

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Me, that is. Not Caspar.

I’m one of those annoying mothers whose child sleeps through, eats anything I give him, cries only to let me know his nap is over, and fills his nappy at the same time each morning.

That’s not to say there haven’t been a few hiccups along the way. The week after his first two vaccinations were awful. The week after surgery was horrible. And he has a tendency to shit twice on any day that I’m not the one who changes that first nappy. He must know it’s my job.

I have slowly worked his bedtime back from 11pm to 7pm. My alarm goes off at 7am and I wake to the sound of ABC Classic FM (Caspar’s choice), not to a baby crying. Mostly I’m lazy and I take Cas back to bed with me so I can steal another dozy half hour or so while he annoys his toy giraffe and the curtains.

I’d like to give myself some credit for his 12 hour sleeps but I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve it: Routine and I are incompatible. I just happened to get the beginner’s model baby. Take tonight for example.

He had his dinner and I stripped him off to let him play in the nude. (It’s nice to play in the nude. I miss it.) I had intended to give him a bath but decided I couldn’t be bothered so we just hung out. Like I said, I’m lazy, and, boy, is Big Sis’ bathroom draughty!

At 6:44pm Caspar went to his bookshelf and pulled out all his books. This is not uncommon but he usually turns each one around trying to get to the pages before giving up and trying again with another. Tonight he was actually looking for something. And there it was, being handed to me: Time For Bed by Mem Fox.

(This is nearly always the last book we read together before I tuck him in for the night. The other likely suspects are Penny Dale’s Ten In The Bed and Mike Brownlow’s Little Robots.)

It was at this juncture that I looked at the clock and saw 6:44pm. Why else would I have any idea of the time? He’d factored in 16 minutes to have a snuggle, drink his bottle and hear his bedtime stories before lights out. He’s got it down. Me on the other hand…

As a first time Mum you hear a lot about how hard it is having a baby and living off 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night. I’m not saying that being Mum isn’t exhausting because sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s draining. And I know that it’s different for everyone but I wonder how many other Mum’s are like me and living off 3 or 4 hours sleep because they choose to have a full day of their own once bub has gone down. Did I really luck out and get the beginner’s model, or was I being hazed?

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It was 9:30pm and I was starting a post about our days at the park. I had pictures. I went over to the pram to grab my camera from the nappy bag hanging off the handles.

It wasn’t there.

And I’d been busy. There were so many photos I hadn’t yet had time to upload on that aptly-named memory card; photos from Mum’s visit, from Caspar’s surgery. Photos from today. Photos which marked an amazing change in Caspar as a little human being. Which I was going to write about.

I remembered putting the camera down beside the red slide when Caspar walked over to me. I remembered going to play on the see-saw, and going to have one last turn on the swings before Big Sis called to see if I would take her to the supermarket. So home we went.

Once my brain had taken that split second to process those movements, I was frozen. I had a sleeping baby in my bedroom but I had to go to the park. I’m lucky. I could. Big Sis, whose house I am living in, was only a step away, watching the football and waiting for pizza with her boyfriend in the house behind us on this dual occupancy lot. They came over to stay with Cas while I sped out onto the road and took a right. Parking half over the curb, I left the lights on and barefoot, wearing only a singlet, I ran outside into the winter, over the grass and over the bark to the red slide.

It wasn’t there.

I drove home still frozen. Big Sis and B came out to meet me and I burst into tears. Not just tears but those deep, sorrowful, heartbroken tears; the kind only a woman can cry, the kind you cry when you know your loss is irrevocable.

I walked into the house. I couldn’t speak. Big Sis, in her dressing gown, came toward me to envelop me in her Big Sis arms but she stepped away from me abruptly when she saw, plain as day, my camera sitting on top of Caspar’s bookshelf.

This is a really funny story. It should be funny. A blind panic from a mother whose brain is still not functioning at full capacity. A mind is a terrible thing to lose. That’s my punchline, right? But I’m not ready to laugh yet.

These digital remnants I get to keep are a drop in the ocean for a mother who, so many times a day, sees something new in her son, sees him grow, sees him change, sees him approach the world from different angles, sees him constantly becoming that little human being she already knew he was before she gave birth to him.

But they’re what I get to keep. They’re what I can look at now, while he’s sleeping, so I don’t go and pick him up and disturb his rest just so I can hold him. They’re what I will be able to look at when he’s grown and gone and I can no longer glance up from the dishes or my computer or the chopping board and be overcome by the transcendent perfection of this person I created and yet can take no credit for.

So thank you, Big Sis, for not laughing. Or, at least, for not laughing at me.

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I’ve been doing a lot of reading today, filling my head with brilliant ideas on what to write about. A simple and shocking post from Dad Gone Mad has blown all of that out of the water. So instead of producing an erudite, layman’s commentary on pop-psychology and neuroscience or a lighthearted story about the pain of putting my books into storage for a few months, I am sitting at my desk in state somewhere between frozen and shaking, with my jaw clenched and August & Everything After playing on repeat in iTunes.

And I need to write about Death.

Today, DGM had to tell his son that his six-year-old friend had died. For me, his post brought to the forefront how much my attitude toward that inevitable part of life has changed since becoming a parent. The capital letter I used above is indicative of the shift.

BC (Before Caspar), Death never shook me. I had no tears when Opa, a very important figure in my life, died, and at Oma’s funeral I wanted to see her body before the cremation not to say goodbye but out of intellectual curiosity. That may seem bizarre and callous to some people in spite of the fact that I love her and miss her to this day. But there is a reason this blog isn’t called The Emo Mum.

When life is a wonderful, amazing, abstract experiment, it is easy to look, like Henry Miller, upon decay as being “just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth”, whether that decay is premature or not. It is easy to know that “to deny one is to deny the other”.

But children are not abstract. And…

Death is not for children. _DGM

So now Death is something I need distance from. It is no longer earthy. It no longer human. It is an awful presence incompatible with the effortless, all-encompassing care that exists within me as a parent.

Children are written in the future tense. So I have to try, like DGM and the Counting Crows, to tell myself the things I try to tell myself to make myself forget, and while i continue to know that life and death are inextricably bound together, I can no longer feel at ease with it.

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