Parenting Without Parents.

One of the things I was most excited about in terms of having children, was telling my parents. Sharing it with them. Being able to provide them with this new chapter of life and seeing all the joy it would bring them.

We obviously couldn’t have known that we would lose them both in the space of one Summer Holiday. Although dad remains here physically, we lost ‘him’ at the same time as mum, equal parts devastating and also strangely – ultimately - romantic. One of the nurses said to me ‘it’s like a real life version of The Notebook’…. Which, ironically, is my favourite film.

I try not to spend much time pondering on ‘what ifs’ or ‘how it could have beens’. It is a vacuous path. Unfruitful. One always laden with sadness.

But sometimes.. when the day has been particularly exhausting.. overwhelming. When times are a little bit tougher or I’m feeling a little bit weaker, I allow myself to open my little bag of ‘what-could-have-beens’. Only sometimes. Only when it’s quiet and no one else is around; or everyone else is asleep. Sometimes I secretly open the bag and devour those little thought fantasies about how it could have been. The times we could have shared, the phone calls I could have made, the small victories I could have shared with them – first drawings, first words, first day of school. The places we could have met, their faces seeing the children, the things they would have done with them. The pride they would have felt.

I imagine it in the greatest detail. What they might have worn, the words they would have said, the expressions on their faces. I dare to let myself feel the great sadness and exhaustion of life without them and their love and the bright colour they could have brought to our lives. Selfishly, I imagine the difference their presence and help would make. The extra hands, the supportive words, the place to go, the hands to hold, the answers to questions. It’s equal parts tremendous and painful. It brings the greatest smile to my face and then the greatest pain to my body.

I try not to feel negative emotions when I see others with their children and also their parents. I try to be the bigger person and carry on. But there are days when it is hard. The hardest. When I feel like there’s not a lot I wouldn’t give for just one of those experiences. One walk to school with Florence and my mum. One coffee and cake with them in John Lewis. One day being able to watch them with my children. Even just one more hug for me.

I can’t decide if it’s harder that dad is still physically here or not. It’s often like extra torture that I can see him and talk to him and take the children to see him, but he is unable to do anything in return. Sometimes he will burst into tears spontaneously and I’m almost certain it’s because he knows they are there and he can’t be who he wants to be to them.  It’s hard not to feel angry at the universe for that extra punch in the gut every time.

Sometimes I see someone who is wearing the same jeans my dad would have worn, or walks in a similar way; or is carrying a newspaper how he did and it’s like a silent tidal wave hits me out of nowhere. It quite literally takes my breath away. Sometimes I can swallow it back down and carry on and sometimes it paralyses me for some moments. Physically and emotionally.

I’m sad and angry that my verbal descriptions and photos and memories will never do them justice for my children. I will never be able to make them understand the greatness of these people in the way I want to. It’s probably for the best; I don’t want them to feel the loss. But it’s hard. It’s hard to silently see them miss out.

I will always provide my children with more love than they know what to do with. But I will always know that despite this, they are missing out on the love they would have received from my mum and dad.  

Anyway, I let myself have all this for a short time. And then I pack it all back up in my secret bag. Tuck it back down.

Then I get up… wipe someone’s bottom (not Chris’s), pick some squashed pancake off the floor, say no to another snack approximately 47 times.. and carry on as I was.

Somebody Wants Me To Die.

379 nights.

379 nights.

379 nights of never getting to that stage of special sleep where the good stuff happens.

379 nights of ALMOST getting to that special stage of sleep before being wrenched back to awake-ness like a piece of Voldemorts soul being summoned back to hell by a dessimated Horcrux.

379 mornings of looking like I am suffering from a special kind of death plague.

379 mornings of feeling like my eyelids are made from heavy duty sandpaper.

379 mornings of wondering if today is the day I will die of tiredness.

1 night of a baby that slept the whole night. The same night that I woke up every 2 hours wondering why The Baby had not woken up and paved the familiar pathway to the nursery to do The Official Breathing Check. Then a follow-up wee.

379 nights before THE night. The night when I would finally get an uninterrupted, whole night of sleep. The night when we, The Man and I, would leave behind our precious bundle of insomniac joy and travel to London to eat food slowly, watch a musical concert not composed by Toddlers TV and then… the big one… sleep in a hotel room without a baby or baby monitor present. Sleep for a WHOLE NIGHT. Not get out of the bed at all. Until morning. Or the bloody afternoon if I wanted.

No words or phrases present in the English (or any) language can convey the desperation I felt for this nights sleep. This night was the sole reason I had not turned to illegal hard drugs in the past month to ensure my capacity to function as a human being could continue.

I daren’t believe it would actually happen. Something would inevitably go wrong. The Baby would get sick…. I would get sick…. The Man would get sick… The Baby Watchers would pull out… or get sick…. London would close…. The Car would die… I just daren’t believe.

None of the above happened.

What DID happen was this:

• ·      Ate food slowly.
• ·      Watched a musical concert not composed by Toddlers TV.
• ·      Went back to hotel room.
• ·      Did preparatory sleep wee.
• ·      Got in bed.
• ·      Watched TV for 10 minutes.
• ·      Turned TV off after 10 minutes because of overwhelming sleep excitement.
• ·      Snuggled down ready. READY FOR THE SLEEP OF ALL SLEEPS.
• ·      Noticed loudness of external noise.
• ·      Ignored loudness of external noise. London is noisy.
• ·      Started to drift…..
• ·      …… Undrifted due to loudness of external noise.
• ·      Started to drift……..
• ·      **HORRIFIC LOUD METAL SMASHING NOISE**
• ·      Mumbled conversational interlude with Man about potential source.
• ·      Started to drift……
• ·      …. Undrifted due to heavy machinery type noise.
• ·      **HORRIFIC LOUD METAL SMASHING NOISE**
• ·      Angry growl and accompanying turn-over.
• ·      Started to drift…..
• ·      ….. Oooooo lovely drifting….
• ·      **HORRIFIC LOUD METAL SMASHING NOISE**
• ·      Jump out of my skin.
• ·      ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT’
• ‘I don’t know, but it’s fucking annoying’
• ‘Is the balcony door open? It sounds open.’
• ‘No, but I think it’s single glazed so it’s quite noisy’

SIGH

• ·      Started to drift……
• ·      **HORRIFIC LOUD METAL SMASHING NOISE**
• ·      Man is out of bed.
• ·      Man is standing at balcony door.
• ·      ‘It’s a building site. They are actually still working on a building site.’

Let me break this down for you.

Right outside our window (and down a bit, as we were on the 10^th floor), was a building site.

Upon this building site, were approximately 8 builders in luminous jackets.

1 of said builders was driving a digger.

This is what he was doing with the digger:

1.  Drive digger to pile of large metal sheets.

2. Pick up one of the metal sheets with the metal digger section of the digger. (Accompanied by metal screeching noise)

  3. Turn digger and drive approximately 200 metres to a hole in the ground.

4. Drop giant heavy metal sheet from a significant height onto the concrete ground to cover up hole.

5. Repeat.

And when I say repeat…. If I were to make it slightly clearer, I would say that the above 5 steps continued to happen until 2.30am.

TWO THIRTY AM.

That wasn’t the kind of noise you could just IGNORE or PUT TO THE BACK OF YOUR MIND. This was the kind of noise that made me feel like I was attempting sleep in the building site itself. In the digger. This was the kind of noise that made me feel like I was employed by that building company myself and I too was donned in a luminous jacket at 2.30am covering up a giant fucking hole using giant metal sheets.

The anger didn’t come at first.

The Man and I we stood. For a substantial amount of time. At the balcony door. The Man in his special sleeping pants. Me in my special sleeping pants and vest top. Staring. In complete silence.

Because you see… there really weren’t any words. Of course. Of COURSE these men were outside the window or OUR apartment, on THIS night and of COURSE they had to cover this hole until 2.30am. Everyone knows you can’t cover holes during the day. That would just be wrong. Has to be done at 2am.

I stared at the luminous jacket men with a kind of hatred that scared me. Then I cried. Actual tears. As I realized that I would not feel refreshed in the morning, as I had been dreaming about for the past 379 days. I was once again awake in the middle of the night, unable to do anything about it (I wasn’t sure that offering the builders milk from my breast would have the desired effect) and was once again going to have to spend the next day searching for caffeine and trying not to fall asleep on the toilet whilst doing a wee.

It was at this point something became very clear to me… I felt like I had had an epiphany:

Somebody wants me to die.

It was absolutely unquestionable. And thus I proclaimed this to The Man through my tears. And he…. Well practiced in my over-dramatics… merely nodded his head in accompanying despair and sighed. Perhaps you are thinking that this is over dramatic. If you have or have had a non-sleeping baby, you will not be thinking this at all.  You will know. If you have not had a non-sleeping baby… get back to me when you haven’t slept properly for 379 nights.

So we finally got to sleep at 3am.

And on the bright side, we did get to sleep until 8.40am… so I felt less like I had a deathly plague and more like I was just suffering from a slight dust allergy.

Oh well. Maybe in another 379 days we will get another chance. You know…. If we’re still alive.

3 Short Stories. One Giant Booger.

Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect

Sometimes I genuinely think I’ve cracked it, this looking after a baby lark. We’re napping, we’re eating food, we’re doing activities, we’re smiling, we’re only waking up once a night, we’re able to butter toast with one hand, we’ve actually consumed a hot cup of tea within the last 4 days.

You’ve got to be careful though. You can’t go around flaunting this mindset. You can’t tell anyone. You can’t casually mention it to your partner. You can’t even let the thought pass across your mind. Because IF YOU DO…. The Lord of the Babies will know. He will sense even the smallest trace of smugness and he will immediately re-program your baby to Fuck-Up-Mode. This is a Baby Mode designed to take you down a few pegs. To remind you that you are not in control... There is no order here… no pattern… no regularity. (3 of my favourite things… by the way)

The thing is... I’m not expecting a robot baby that conforms to very specific times, no. I would just like SOME sort of consistency. Because currently it would seem that The Baby works in a similar way to the random number generator one would find on a scientific calculator.

Although SOMETIMES I don’t think it’s random at all. I think it’s actually a very particular pattern. I like to call it the ‘Behave-So-That-All-Planned-Activities-Are-Fucked-Up’ pattern. This kind of pattern takes time, dedication and effort from The Baby. It starts days… weeks even.. in advance. The Baby PRETENDS she’s actually in some kind of pattern or… dare I say it… routine. Almost to the point of being able to rely on it. Then you get cocky. You make a commitment based upon this new ‘routine’. For example… maybe you sign up to a term of baby group at a specific time, or make a series of plans based on these times during the following week. . Then… similar to the way it absolutely pisses it down the one day you’ve planned a BBQ in the Summer… The Baby brings out the big guns:

• ·      Baby initiates some form of highly disruptive developmental phase e.g. teething.
• ·      Baby shifts naps to a start time that coincides with every single plan you have made.
• ·      If nap is postponed in an attempt to continue with such plans, Baby behaves like a deranged extra from Planet Of The Apes.
• ·      Things that previously promoted sleepiness now promote hyperactivity and overstimulation.

Emergency Response: Retreat to living room. Eat cake. Give Baby the Calpol Delivery Tube to chew.

Good job she’s bloody cute.

 

Calpol Delivery Tube

Wanted: Construction Specialist.

A HUMAN BEING COMES OUT OF YOUR VAGINA.

Just actually really mull that over for a minute. Think it through. You are a human. And then another human… that wasn’t there before… comes out of you.

This is a shock.

Then you have to look after that human – a unique, unpredictable, complex machine, with no instructions.

For the first few days, you have quite close contact with midwives, so you can ask questions to your hearts content and know that if you have a question, you don’t have to wait long for a potential answer. But then that slowly withdraws. Until eventually…. You mostly only have you. Shit.

Trust your instinct, they say. Listen to your gut. I listen. It just so happens that I also listen to Margaret from Baby Group. And Moira from the Other Baby Group. And the random parent in the doctors waiting room. And sometimes their voices are louder than my gut. So off I go to Baby Group, feeling confident about the skill repertoire of The Baby relating to her age. And then I hear Margaret talking about how her baby of the same age can stack things. And that Margaret read that it’s about this age that they should be able to stack things. But it’s cool… I’m cool about it…. The Man has taught me about these situations.. he says I don’t need to worry about what other babies are doing and that I worry too much. And it’s fine… I’m absolutely cool about it. So what if Mini Margaret is a fucking construction specialist at the age of 9 months. MY baby can saturate a dribble bib in under 12 minutes. And I store my Mini Margaret Stacking Fact in my bottle of Inner Worry that should never come out.

This lasts about until approximately 30 seconds after The Man has walked through the door.

Then the conversation goes like this:

Me: How was your day?

Man: Yeah it was alright thanks.

Me: The Baby can’t stack anything.

Man: What?

Me: Stacking!! She should be able to stack things and she has never done that. Do you think there is something wrong?

Man: What?

Me: STACKING!!!!! She should be able to stack objects and she hasn’t even VAGUELY ever tried to stack anything!

Man: Oh love…

I try to show The Baby the procedure of stacking, but she looks at me like I’m crazy and then goes back to chewing on the Calpol Delivery Tube.

The thing is, I KNOW that she will learn to stack things eventually, at her own pace, because every baby is different… blah blah blah. And I know that it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with her… like Stacking Deficiency Syndrome or Stackaemia. But it’s HARD to fight your way through the Parent Inferno… constantly inundated with advice, opinion, fact, fiction, stories, anecdotes… and to not apply it to your own child in any way.

Sometimes I wonder how The Man is so cool about everything.

2 days pass.

I walk in on The Man secretly trying to teach The Baby to stack.

So it turns out I’m not alone after all.... Ha.

When I Went To The Giant Next.

Today The Baby has a bogey stuck to her head. Literally stuck. At some point.. despite being unable to complete any tasks requiring fine motor skills, The Baby has smeared a bogey across her forehead, then fallen asleep on it, allowing it plentiful time to crust over, solidify and it would seem, grow and implant roots to attach itself surgically to her head.

I cannot get it off. I have scraped, soaked, rubbed. That little booger is there for good.

Anyway. Went on a trip to the New Giant Next.

It was incredible.

Not in a good way.

I’ve never been a Next fan really. Don’t get it. Particularly don’t get queuing at 5am on Boxing Day. Have these people not heard of staying in bed, eating leftover Christmas Dinner and chocolate for breakfast and watching The Snowman? Each to their own I suppose. But for baby items, it’s quite useful. And we needed baby socks. And baby shoes. Too many people have now commented on my child’s bare feet in the cooling temperatures. Strangers included. Even I am questioning the Health & Safety part of my mothering qualifications. Don’t even have one of those buggy footmuffs. The concept of paying £95 for one makes me want to rock backwards and forwards gently in a corner.

Plus I literally cannot face the death defying torture lift in the city centre Next (seriously… PUT THE BABY STUFF ON THE GROUND FLOOR), so I didn’t really have a choice but to go to this ridiculously huge complex that incorporates a Costa. To be fair… it’s quite a challenge to find an establishment that doesn’t incorporate a Costa these days. (Now there’s a good activity for the next day with nothing to do)

It is huge. As in.. had-to-change-the-road-layout-surrounding-it huge. Personally, I would have preferred to see a building of such size used as a Peanut Butter-Related-Food Outlet. But hey… what do I know.

Let’s break this down.

• ·      It was raining. Hard.
• ·      Upon arrival realized I had forgotten to put buggy in boot.
• ·      Luckily had sling.
• ·      Dropped sling in puddle.
• ·      Had to affix sling to my white top, which stained it.
• ·      Placed baby in sling.
• ·      Baby vomited orange Organix carrot stick sick down the top.
• ·      Still standing in the car park. Still raining.
• ·      Despite ridiculously enormous size of store, did not have the size shoe I needed in all except one type of shoe.
• ·      Swore a lot about how ‘f***king ridiculous’ that was.
• ·      Stood in queue for a very long time with only 2 people serving. Literally everyone in front of me had a very complex issue that required at least two members of staff to sort out. Swore some more.
• ·      Finally reached payment station. Asked if I got everything I wanted. Laughed.
• ·      Considered going to Costa, but realized that I would have to reveal my patchwork stain top to members of the public and this would not be acceptable.
• ·      Ran back to car (still raining)
• ·      Loaded Baby into car seat.
• ·      Got in drivers seat.
• ·      Realised I didn’t have my wallet. Shit.
• ·      Unload Baby.
• ·      Don’t bother with sling and run with Baby freestyle across car park.
• ·      Stand in queue with still only 2 people serving.
• ·      Approach payment station. 2 members of staff required to deal with my query.
• ·      Don’t have my purse.
• ·      ShitShitShit.
• ·      Retreat back to car.
• ·      Load Baby into car seat.
• ·      Realise I put it in the bag with the shoes I didn’t like or want.
• ·      Depart ridiculously oversized car park.

Upon arriving home, I was in the process of evacuating The Baby from the vehicle in the pouring rain with one hand (phone, purse and unwanted shoes in the other) when The Cat sauntered across the road and got in the car. GOT. IN. THE. CAR. The Cat has never got in the car before. Ever. So I’m now standing in the pouring rain, baby getting soaked, with no socks on and The Cat is in the footwell of the back seat of the car.  

I am soaked.

The Baby is soaked.

The Cat is bone dry sitting in the footwell that I can’t reach.

The booger is still there.

Sigh.