Mum guilt is the worst. Getting up yesterday, I felt guilty that E had spent the previous day at daycare and had only 1 day with me before going back for 2 more daycare days… I was so determined to be a fun mum and have a fun day with my little nugget.
Unfortunately the little nugget had other plans. We started by going outside and playing with bubbles - which she then wanted to hold, saying “turn! Turn! Turn!” Trying to convince her that I would hold the base while she held the wand were unsuccessful, after which she dumped the bubble solution out everywhere, and completely melted down about “BUBBLES!” I suggested that we do some painting, and she very enthusiastically cried “Pent! Pent! Pent-ing “ while I got it all set up. A few brush strokes on the paper and a few on her belly and she lost interest, so I got the hose. She enjoyed pouring the water on the paint for a little bit and then started crying for bubbles again.
Sorry love, the bubbles are all gone. Cue extreme meltdown and it was only about 8am. We tried a bath… she cried for bubbles the entire time, and then announced “poo poo” so we very quickly got out and got a nappy on before she followed through! (Success!)
At this point, it was really getting hot outside and no shade on the patio so I suggested we play inside. Nope, she wanted bubbles. And chips (“dippies”) so I got her chips, which she screamed at and flung on the floor, so I got her water bottle, which she flung angrily out of my hands. She didn’t want to play with her play couch, or read a book, or play with anything except for bubbles and a) too hot outside b) there were no bubbles left!!!
By 9:45 I took her to a quiet room to try to calm her hysterical screaming, and she fell asleep… waking by 1015 which was terrible as it meant no later nap at all. She immediately started screaming for bubbles again, and to go “ousside”. I tried all sorts of distractions, shall we go in the car? Finally at 12 we did go in the car and I drove around aimlessly for an entire hour trying to get her to sleep again. She screamed for “tinkle” (twinkle twinkle little star) and screamed louder and more angrily if I put it on, and all in general made me want to either run away forever, or hide in a dark corner and never come back out.
When we got home, I gathered up all of our swimming stuff, while she watched Cocomelon, fed it lunch (it screamed) and we headed out to Redcliffe to the lagoon (tinkle tinkle bubbles BUBBLES!!!) but although it was 30 degrees it was also windy so she only lasted about 20 mins in the pool - but at least that was 20 mins during which she wasn’t screaming at me.
After that, it was after 3, so I figured we may as well stay in Redcliffe for the afternoon, get fish and chips and come back for an early bedtime. E decided she wanted to push the wagon and then started screaming and melting down because I videoed her pushing the wagon.
She then melted down because she didn’t want to ride in the wagon any more and wanted a cuddle (“duddle”) to which I obliged… and then David who had joined us took her to give my back a break… and she screamed and screamed hysterically for Mummy. So I took her back so he could go and get takeaway fish and chips because we couldn’t dine in with THAT noise, and she screamed DADDY DADDY DADDDYYYYYYY because he walked away.
It was that kind of day.
Yet here I am with real live pictures of her seemingly having fun, which make a mockery of how the day actually went…
Honestly by the time she was in bed asleep (half an hour early thankfully) I just flopped on the couch and lay there unmoving for 30 mins, without even the energy to scroll on my phone.
So here I am, it’s Wednesday, I am on call and my brat is at daycare and I am SO VERY THANKFUL for daycare and again tomorrow! It’s so quiet and no one is screaming at me. HURRAH!!!!!!!!
Not everyone’s journey to parenthood is an easy one.
Pics from yesterday’s jaunt to Nudgee Beach
I have just been listening to a podcast I enjoy, after a hiatus while they moved house, and this is a comment that stood out to me. I do sometimes wonder what our family would look like if it WAS an easy journey - or indeed if it continued to be an easy journey rather than an every day uphill battle through babyhood and toddlerhood and all of the messes and tantrums and exhaustion that comes with it.
Where someone got horrifically muddy but had a great time
But here we are, our family of 3 and very very occasionally a family of 4 when my bonus daughter comes to stay with us. Last time she stayed was for E’s birthday in April, and she is coming again to share Christmas with us. This is very much anxiety inducing for me - I don’t know what she enjoys at Christmas, what she is used to doing at Christmas, and I hope that what we offer will be good enough! I also worry about her relationship with E. When she last met E (second time ever), E was very much still a baby, while now she is a toddler with Very Real Opinions and also Very Loud Opinions and I hope that they continue to bond - tough for a previously only child to have to share her dad also - and tough for my only child too!
I didn’t intend this post to be about C’s trip but I guess that’s the way it is going. She is arriving on Christmas Eve and staying with us for 10 days - which Dave has off as his uni closes over the Christmas period. We have bought her a very nice Christmas present - unfortunately it is tech which made us twitch a little given how much tech she already has, but really we don’t get the chance to be involved very much with her life so it would be difficult for us - and for her - to change anything in just 10 days! What is harder, for me, is that her “very nice” tech package is also very small size wise - while Emily’s presents are very bulky. Will she try to compare? Will she be jealous? How do we make both children equal, especially when C will be going home to a second lot of Christmas presents from her other family, which E will not have? Can we make them equal? Is it wrong? So much cause for my brain to go into hyperdrive anxiety mode! Part of me wonders whether we should give E part of her Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve before C arrives! 😂. It’s not like E will know any better as she is still very small.
And that, folks, is where my brain is at.
Not really the statement I started this post with, but maybe I will expand on that some other time!
It’s me again
I got a little lost in my last post and not quite sure where to start again so you’ll have to bear with me and wait for the muse to come back. Plus, I’m tired due to my toddler deciding it needs to wake all night and not nap properly. The worst.
We are currently working on upgrading the chair in the nursery - I had hoped that the old marketplace purchase would survive long enough for us to “get by”, but she shows no sign of being ready to discontinue nursing or being held to sleep, and our chair shows every sign of collapsing into a pile of sawdust on the spot.
Dancing in the post storm floodIn other news, I have finished my block of “rolling stand down” which means I should get my next pay - and I have 2 flying days rostered before the end of the month, so fingers crossed they don’t get cancelled again. It sounds as though we will have more flying in November due to borders beginning to open between states. NSW have announced that they are opening international borders but QLD are staunchly waiting until 90% vaccinated so it will still be a few months before we can travel overseas. Mentally I am already preparing for this!
This is just a short post to say I am still here… maybe my muse is gone because I have cut down my calories. Furiously trying to lose the baby weight 18 months post baby… it is HARD, folks. You have no idea how much I want to eat all of the carbs.
How were you raised, and how has that affected who you are? And, perhaps more importantly, how has it affected how you are raising (or have raised) your kid(s)?
These are questions that I am asking myself. I think that in general my parents were good (great?) parents. I think, as all humans, they had their faults, and in some ways I either act or react due to these faults, as do I from their strengths. I think that the environment in which I was raised also plays a big part in who I am, and how I am raising my daughter - and whether you can accredit that to my parents or not is up to you.
When I think about my parents, when I was a child, the word I think of is “present”. My parents were always present for me. From a very young age I can remember “hanging out” in my dad’s office, using up vast quantities of his hot melt glue stringing “webs” across the room, using almost equally large quantities of solder making towers of molten metal. I can remember excavating little buildings out of polystyrene and running electrical circuits inside to poke bright LED lights out of the windows. Playing “Jill of the Jungle” on an ancient PC.
Most weekends (in my memory) we would either go places or do things “as a family”. In an environment where so much was communal/shared it was important to my parents to ensure we were a well knit family unit. In the summer we used to picnic at the “water hole” where we swam in the deep red-brown water, coloured from running through the peat bogs in the mountains. We found a dead sheep there once, and the sandy shallows were often decorated with fresh (and not so fresh) sheep droppings. One of my brothers tried to drown me there - my memory, probably not his. He held my head under the water until I managed to get him to let go by scratching and biting, coming to the surface panicked and screaming. As an adult, I have a strong fear of being trapped or cornered - I wonder if that experience could have something to do with it? As my brother was many years older than me at the time, I wonder whether my behaviour had caused his action? Of course, I have no memory of any of this, only of the trauma - and unfortunately sometimes the trauma is the only thing that sticks with you, despite all of its happy surroundings.
I can remember going to the shopping centre on a Saturday with Mum. She would often drop me (and sometimes my older sister) at the library and I would spend hours engrossed in our books - my favourites being Biggles’ books and the Chalet School series, so I suppose I could’ve been anywhere from 10-15. After the library, I would walk over to the Square and buy myself a snack (often chocolate or Mighty Munch) and a soda (Club Orange, Lilt or Cidona, three things that Australia sadly lacks). And on the dot of 3:30 I would go to our assigned meeting place outside Bewley’s to meet Mum.
If you asked my sister, or either of my brothers about our childhood, they would have very different memories than me. Their childhoods were busy, and full of people and children, while I can remember being lonely, of not having anyone, and turning to books and the internet in a bid to find some connection. Listening to Simon and Garfunkel to somehow share their loneliness.
“Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me…
I am a rock, I am an island.
…and a rock feels no pain,
And an island never cries.”
It wasn’t always like that. As a young child, there were around 5 children my age in the community. My best friend as a very small child left the community not long after I had started school. I can remember when their family left, they strapped a washing machine onto the trailer, I suppose it was a gift from the community. I can’t remember much other than that. Then we were down to four - two boys about a year older than me, and a girl 2 years older and we were all in the same class. We were technically home schooled, but as it was a community and all of the children were home schooled there, it was more like a very small private school with set teachers, subjects and lesson times. Holidays were rostered and when on holiday, you were assigned to an adult and put to work - weeding, cleaning, or whatever the task of the day was.
I don’t think of that part of school as a negative or a positive memory. It was, and therefore it is. I never particularly enjoyed school, I would have preferred to be in the great outdoors gambolling with my pet lambs or climbing trees and damming the stream. Unfortunately in Western Society at least, school is something We Must Do and therefore We Did It. My parents felt strongly and negatively about the public/state school system, about what it taught both societal and educational, and so they made the decision to raise their children away from all of that. “In the world but not of the world” was a popular Biblical phrase. We were called to be “set apart” and set apart we were. And for my younger years, being set apart wasn’t all that bad.
It was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 14, I would say, that being “set apart” became more apart than it was before. The community began to change more than it ever had previously. People had always come and go - it was never a case of community being forever. Families were free to leave, although it wasn’t encouraged. There was a sense that the people who stayed were doing it right, listening to God and their calling, so there was definitely an us versus them undercurrent. But in my tween/early teen years, almost everyone left. And when I say almost everyone - the community dwindled to just 11 people - and I was the only child left. One after another, my classmates (who I wasn’t very close to anyway) left.
My then closest friend, outside the community, also homeschooled (I presume my parents were aware that I needed a friend) moved with her family to the UK. Of course, my memories are just memories, so the timeline is probably not entirely accurate, but once it was only me I spent a lot of time in my room. I played some games on the internet, chatted in chat rooms to strangers (somehow always safely, but WHAT were my parents thinking???) and read an insane number of books. I studied alone, and took my exams in a tutorial centre in Dublin.
If you had asked me then, I wouldn’t have known that I was lonely. I don’t think I would have asked to go to school - not that it was an option. I don’t think my mind would have computed that anything at all was wrong. And of course, this hasn’t even touched on the religious part of our lives.
Every August there was a Youth Camp for the teenagers, 13 and up. My birthday was in September, and the year I was going to turn 13, all of my peers (the ones who had left, the ones who remained, ones from overseas…) went to Youth Camp, and I was not allowed to go. I sat outside the closed door during meetings, listening to the speakers preach. I watched the kids in their group activities, sports, I watched as they all trooped downstairs to eat in the long tables set up in a separate room from everyone else like me. I think that is my very first oh so vivid memory of being “apart”, being “different” - and this was just because of age! It made such a massive impact on me because I was the only one left out. In future years, kids who “barely missed out” were allowed to take part - but it was too late to change that year for me.
I am not an only child. I am the youngest of four - my brothers are 10 and 8 years older than me, my sister is 5.5 years older than me. When I was 8, my eldest brother left home, and when I was 10, my second brother followed him. My sister was my playmate for a short time as a child, but she soon grew too old for dolls, barbies and the like. My female classmate, 2 years older than me, worked for awhile until she “grew up” too, moving on to boys and makeup, two things that never interested me, before then moving to America.
The boys used to make me do trials in the community grounds to prove that, as a girl, I was tough enough to hang out with them. Although as a girl I was forced to either wear dresses or skirts (trousers were forbidden for females), I still managed to climb trees with the rest. I would walk tightropes of thin branches, climb trees and jump, on a rope swing, to plunge into holly bushes to prove my worth. I would never, ever let anyone think that I could be scared - or a GIRL. Being a boy was so much better. Boys got to wear shorts and trousers. Boys were the heirs, and kept their father’s name. Boys got to work outside the community in real jobs, boys were tough and never had to clean the house or cook community dinners. When I grew up, I was going to have boys, lots and lots of BOYS. I had all their names picked out already.
Did my parents think boys were better? I doubt that was even subconsciously their thought. They surely supported me when I decided I wanted to become a pilot. They had my back when an elder disagreed. My parents always had my back.
So, why the negativity? Why the anxiety, why the PRESSURE? Why the overwhelming feeling, the fear of never being enough?
My teenage years were rough. I never rebelled. I went to school and I passed my exams and I took over the farm at age 15 and raised sheep and goats and I loved it. At age 17 I finished school, and at 18 I started flying. So how was it rough? Why was it rough, and what about my parents?
And I think this post has gotten far to long…
So TBC…
We have just passed the 2 year mark of visiting our loved ones in the UK and Ireland and it hurts. It hurts the most that I haven’t been able to introduce my little girl to her family. Her grandparents, aunts, uncles, her myriads of cousins. Here we are in our little “island”, protected for sure, living an amazing Covid-free life… but so so isolated. At Christmas we are hoping to see my step daughter for just the second time this year - that’s insane! There have been so many interstate border closures, or threatened closures, that David hasn’t been able to head down to Tasmania even for a couple of days, without risking not being able to get back to his family for MONTHS. That is a real danger, and has happened to too many people already, and it’s the SAME country.
It is looking more positive now that things will begin to open up again. Vaccination rates are rising and premiers are beginning to promise the easing of restrictions. But in one breath they say international travel will resume in December, and in the next they extend aviation relief payments to March, so I honestly don’t know. It almost makes me want to move back to Ireland - but I know we can’t do that either, right now. Just one example of why is that C needs her dad, even a couple of times a year is better than nothing, going into the difficult teenage years etc.
So here we are… still waiting. And I know we are SO SO lucky to live in Queensland. We have only experienced a handful of 3 day lockdowns, with 8 days being our longest. Melbourne, for instance, has broken the world record for days locked down - I believe over 260? And here we are, mask wearing our only restriction - and not leaving the state. Fingers crossed that won’t be forever!!!!
