straw-clutching

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Now I may balk at the thought of eating food that my children have gobbed in, but it turns out my boundaries are still reassuringly permeable: the other day, after clearing broken glass out of the kitchen I caught myself absent-mindedly running a bare foot over the floor to check for missed shards. This is the sort of thing that we chucklingly label a 'you know you're a parent when' moment. When it's really more of a 'ha! but just see how much parenthood has ennobled me?' moment.

Permanent link - 0 comments

rien de rien

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Last week I got offered another short stint lecturing back at the French dept. Took a deep breath, and turned it down. Generally, when it comes to work, I'm just the girl who cain't say no, but my recent experience juggling teaching around breastfeeding a baby who insisted on two-hourly feeds has left me somewhat jaded on the whole combining-contracting-work-with-full-time-motherhood endeavour. Until we have regular childcare for the Magnet, I decided, I'm going to keep it simple and stick to looking after the girls.

So this morning, Becca announces to Jack that daddies go to work while mummies stay at home. Kids, eh? Who knows where they get these crazy ideas? And what's a mummy to do who isn't ready to send her tender infant off to daycare just yet, but doesn't want her nearly-four-year-old developing unfortunate ideas about gender roles?

One of the effects of motherhood is that whatever choices you make, you always feel you are somehow letting the side down. What's more, there's always another side, so what I'm slowly learning is that the best and only way to proceed is to figure out what's best for you and your particular family, and screw public opinion. Which, if you think about it, is more or less what true choice is about anyway.

What J and I have both wanted ever since the kids came along is a more equitable childcare arrangement, with both of us, at least while the kids are young, working part-time, in order that one parent is always at home with the kids. That way Maggie doesn't have to go into daycare for a bit longer, no one needs to take time off work when the kids get sick, Jack gets more time with his daughters, and Becca's ideas about what mummies and daddies do hopefully get a kick up the arse. No idea how workable this plan will prove to be, but we aim to find out in 2008. So, anyone want to hire a Cambridge PhD with teaching, writing, editing, publishing and translation experience?

Permanent link - 0 comments

hobbledehoy

Monday, January 28, 2008

Took the girls back to Staglands on Saturday, Maggie's first trip on dry land, although she did come with us last time too, not quite a year ago. More bogglement this time. And fewer attacks by Marmite-crazed peacocks. Although the goats were still a bit familiar. And Brock the long-suffering little Shetland pony is still giving rides around the paddock. This time, rather than hiding shyly behind Jack's leg, Becca marched straight up to his wrangler and accosted him with 'Excuse me, can I have a ride on the horse, please?' before climbing up by herself. As she was led off, she was heard informing the bloke with great assurance that she would be starting school soon.

Nobody tell her we forgot the Teddy Bears Picnic yesterday. I am still racked with guilt: I went riding instead. Bike the Trail happens on 24 Feb and I'm going to give it a crack, so went for a practice run yesterday: Jack dropped me and bike off at Manor Park and I cycled down the Hutt River to meet him and the girls at Petone Beach, 10 or so miles away (my odo's still set to Imperial). Although by the time I got down there it was more like 11: it's testament to my utter lack of navigational skills that I can contrive to get lost following a river from north to south; there were a couple of unplanned detours via a large bramble patch and at one point I had to shoulder the bike across a small creek. Still, J reckons the lacerated legs make me look butch. And it's a fun wee ride, gently undulating, mostly gravel tracks with the odd paved bit, and following both sides of the river. Could have used a few more signposts but that's probably just me.

Photos of Staglands are coming. And of Becca's stage début at last week's A&P show. In fact, I'm toying with the idea of a YouTube account just so I can post evidence of Jack's, er, memorable supporting performance as a horsie. (Peter Shaffer, eat yer heart out...)

Permanent link - 0 comments

all of the above

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Is it me, or is finishing off food your child has spat out, or, arguably worse, in, a vile and disgusting practice indicating a total lack of self-respect and no boundaries? Or does my revulsion simply show that I'm a bad, bad, Bad, Terrible Mother who has inadequately bonded with her children?

If you think about it, this sort of thing is just a particularly fucked-up instantiation of Competetive Parenting. See the depths of abjection to which I am happy to sink in the name of mother-love! Depths from which I would have recoiled during those selfish times before I entered the hallowed state of parenthood! Oh what, you mean you have your own plate of food? Well sure, if you have the time to prepare a meal for yourself...

See this is why J thinks I overanalyse...

Permanent link - 2 comments

perpetual motion

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The Magster's crawling. After a fashion: she hasn't yet the strength to get up on all fours, so it's really more like swimming, but she's coordinating movement of opposite arms and legs to propel herself forward, with only the occasional over-vigorous thrust flipping her onto her back, where she lies looking bemused for a few moments before flipping back and carrying doggedly on. Tempus is certainly, as J would say, fugging, and so is our littlest girl. Although a burst of frustrated sobbing from near your ankles indicates that she's just about bloody well had enough now and would you please just GIVE her the damn toy she's been trying to reach for the past 10 minutes. OK?

All this movement may explain her apparently insatiable appetite for pretty much anything edible. Maggie is good at food. In fact like Bruce the Shark, she's an eating machine, stashing away the sort of quantities that you wouldn't think her little frame capable of accommodating. And efficient too: the other day she neatly removed the flesh from a segment of peach before flinging the skin on the floor, sucked clean of literally every scrap of nourishment. And you should see what she does to steak. God help us when she gets teeth.

Permanent link - 1 comments

sunday morning

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Back in the saddle for the second time this new year; a wheezy wobble up to Woodridge and already returning feeling more buzzy and less queasy than the last time. Still feel like a novice though: while the cliché about not forgetting how is broadly true, some of the finer points, such as how to glance over your shoulder without veering into the next lane, or manage gear changes without the rear mech sounding like a sack of cutlery, need relearning. Speedily. And we're not in East Anglia any more: thanks to Wellington's topography my weekend rides will necessarily all be short sharp shocks rather than long flat countryside meanders ending thirstily in a sunny beer garden. Ah, those were the days...

Permanent link - 0 comments

sign of the times

Saturday, January 12, 2008

For someone who loves books, I'm a slow reader. Here's what I read in 2007: not counting the revision for the lecturing I did in September, on average, it amounts just over a book per fortnight. And my to-read pile for 2008 is already beginning to teeter. Have included the Wilfred Owen biog* even though I've only just finished it, because I started it in 2007. Which shows you how much time I have for reading these days.

*Rodger, thanks for your patience!

Fiction

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (reread)

Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder

Iain Banks, Espedair Street

Iain Banks, The Crow Road

Anton Chekhov, The Fiancée and other stories

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (reread)

Margaret Laurence, A Jest of God (reread)

Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers (reread)

Margaret Laurence, Bird in the House

Graeme Lay, ed., 100 NZ Short Short Stories

Alice Munro, Runaway

Alice Munro, Selected Stories (reread)

Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid

Alice Munro, Moons of Jupiter

Non-fiction

Richard Bradford, First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin

Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen

Chrissie Gallagher-Mundy, Caesarean Recovery

Tim Moore, Frost On My Moustache (reread)

Tim Moore, French Revolutions (reread)

Poetry

Fleur Adcock, Poems 1960-2000

Janet Frame, The Goose Bath Poems

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

Tanis MacDonald, Holding Ground

Sharon Olds, The Father

Sharon Olds, The Wellspring

Permanent link - 1 comments

kicking spiders, or

Thursday, January 10, 2008

TAXI DRIVER IN DRIVING LIKE A TW&T SHOCKER: Late yesterday afternoon, while driving the girls home from town, we got rear-ended by a taxi (Combined, if you're interested) who had decided to spurt out of a side street into a non-existent gap in the stop-start traffic. No one was hurt and the car's only a wee bit dented, but I'm still, this morning, feeling a bit rattled. Mainly because, as I pointed out to the driver in a calm, measured, and non-shrill way, when you have your two small children in the back of the car, being driven into by some twonk* who is too stoopid to judge speed and distance even at crawling pace is a bit alarming.

Of course when Jack got home Becca promptly and gleefully informed him that Mummy had hit a police car. Heaven alone knows what she's telling them at crèche today, but I bet it's gonna be good. In the meantime, anyone know a good panelbeater in the northern suburbs?

*I may not have said twonk.

Permanent link - 2 comments

with bells on

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The other morning Rebecca's bedroom was Scotland. She emerged from Scotland to go to the toilet and then announced, as she stomped purposefully from the bathroom, that she was going back. To Scotland, she added firmly, lest there should be any doubt. We're not sure why, but Jack thinks that the Scottish country dancers* she saw at Te Papa the other day may have made a deeper impression than we realised. And this is why I find it hard to join in with the disparagement our national museum, by right-thinking people who condemn its dumbing down and shinying up of New Zealand's culture. In fact, I love Te Papa, precisely because for our almost-four-year-old, it's the happiest place on Earth, the place she begs to be taken to every Saturday, the place she chooses with barely a pause even over her favourite Park House (the indoor playground in Tawa). Which I'm sure the right-thinkers would say proves their point.

*Enacting, through dance, the story of Pelorus Jack, the dolphin. I guess you had to be there.

Permanent link - 0 comments

rpm

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

– So what was your New Year Resolution?
– Something to do with masturbation. I can't remember whether it was more or less.

My NYR for 2008 is to get back on my bike. The last time I did any proper cycling was the London–Cambridge in 2005, the year after Becca was born, since when a trans-hemispheric shift and second pregnancy have kept bum from saddle. So, Jack having fettled Red Girl, last weekend I took her for a quick wobble over the hill into J'ville and back. Despite having to clunk urgently down onto my granny ring approx 30 seconds after pulling out of the driveway and onto Newlands Road (and into a brisk northerly) I managed to make it around the circuit without having to get off and push. Or throw up. And to my astonishment I wasn't even sore the next day, so made enthusiastic plans for the Hutt River Trail the following weekend. Then I abruptly came down with one of those saw-your-head-off-and-fumigate-it type colds and spent Saturday sulking in bed, which put the mockers on the whole project. But I'll be back. Oh yes. After all I kept, and continue to keep, 2007's resolution: to write something, anything, even a facetious blog post, every day. The only two days I missed were when I was in hospital having Maggie, which I consider a reasonable excuse. Although I did, apparently, scrawl a morphined-out journal entry on the afternoon of her birthday. I can't make out what it says, though.

Permanent link - 1 comments

book book

Friday, January 04, 2008

Have I mentioned Bookmooch? Does what it says on the tin. I've just received Ted Hughes' Selected Poems 1957–1981 from a nice lady in Canada, and am about to send Hotel du Lac off to deepest NSW. Incidentally, if anyone has a copy of Margaret Lawrence's The Stone Angel that I can blag, do get in touch. It's one of my favourite books ever: I got a copy in Galloway & Porter in Cambridge years ago for a quid – a quid! – then made the not-to-be-repeated mistake of lending it to someone who never returned it (people who do this: there will be a dedicated circle of Hell for you when I rule the universe, so buck up your bloody ideas).

Ahem. Speaking of books, thanks to Becca's holiday antics I now have the title for when I finally write my wry but honest, sub-Erma Bombeck mommy memoir: Don't Dip Baby Jesus In The Dog Bowl.

Permanent link - 1 comments

aside

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Diana Zuckerman, president of the US National Research Center for Women and Families, recently said that if marketing could turn the post-pregnancy body "into a socially unacceptable thing, think of how big your audience could be and how many surgeries you could sell them". In short, making women believe that their bodies look disgusting after childbirth is a marketing man's dream. [Source]

Fuck, quite frankly, that. Now I don't want to come over all Velveteen Rabbit on you, but I'm perversely proud of the evidence of baby-bearing on my body: varicose veins, wobbly bits and all. And particularly of my wonky c-section scar, which I consider a battle wound (the Aztecs, apparently, believed that two categories of person achieved glory in the afterlife: men who died in battle and women who died in childbirth, and quite right too, I'd say). And anyway, without youth-preserving surgery doesn't everyone sag and go lumpy in the end? At least if it's due to the 'ravages' of motherhood it's sagged in a good cause. Buy a better bra and get over it.

Permanent link - 1 comments

there and back again

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Happy New Year! We're back from a sundrenched and thoroughly restful Christmas with the distaff side in Auckland. Even the four days of driving there and back were peaceful, pace the odd case of Kiwi driving and one hilarious episode on the Desert Road when, minutes out from a comfort-stop at Waiouru and in bucketing rain, Becca decided she had to go to the toilet right now. But apart from this the girls were little backseat angels, with Becca jollying Maggie along when she got grizzly by shaking toys at her and squeaking (cue throaty chuckles from the rear-facing baby capsule: Maggie has a great laugh) and even the odd case of actual simultaneous unconsciousness, aka the Holy Grail of parenting. And Santa was most kind: I now have Flickr Pro – go and check out the Christmas pictures!

Permanent link - 0 comments