What’s this Mummy?
That’s a stone poppet.
(Poppet? I have become my mother.)
What’s this Mummy?
It’s a stone.
What’s this Mummy?
A stone.
What’s this Mummy?
A stone.
What’s this Mummy?
A stone.
What’s this Mummy?
A stone.
What’s this Mummy?
It’s. A. Stone.
What’s this Mummy?
A stone.
What’s this Mummy?
A stone.
What’s this Mummy?
A stone.
What’s this Mummy?
I love you.
Luff oo Mummy.
Watching Grandstand curled into your chest on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for Final Score and the videprinter before dozing to the results and the pools, listening out for the teams with the nice sounding names. Wrapped in your arms, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and washing powder, feeling safe and comfortable and sleepy and special. A memory so vivid I could walk right back in on it today.
Bedtimes stories about my teddy bears and their nocturnal adventures and waking you up in the middle of the night because ‘Daddy I have pins and needles in my hand’ and ‘Daddy is it breakfast time yet? I want Rice Krispies’.
Smashing lampshades and custard tarts from the bakery and drawing with wax crayons. Floating and falling out of my pram, slipping over on icy pavements and the cinema for the first time and a knickerbocker glory.
Pineapple juice in a wine glass and shoulder rides and firemans lifts and throwing a football miles into the sky.
Nearly 28 years of memories, comfort and love and tears and many, many moustache jokes and really I’m still just a five year old who wants to make you proud.
‘Daddy, why are you still holding my hand, we’re not crossing the road any more?’
‘Sometimes I just like holding your hand’.
Happy Father’s Day Dad.
In my limited experience of motherhood thus far, one thing stands out as pivotal thing, a naively unexpected and a big huge perk. Because from the second that you expel that wrinkled, cross looking newborn from (what was once) your most scared area a shittonne of stuff relentlessly pelts you right in the face forever and ever amen.
Do you want the vitamin K injection or the drops and breast or bottle and weaning and walking and cloth or disposable, babygros or outfits, cry it out or cosleep, talking and teething and milestones and sleeping through the night?
Judgement. Always being a bad parent in someone’s eyes and shitting yourself with fear because what do I do with this little person I have no clue how to hold or look after?
And then there’s the constant, my constant.
He dutifully held my hand and didn’t even wince when I bit down on the tender flesh on his forearm while I contracted. I stood up to go for my first wee après birth and launched a torrent of blood onto the carpet which he had cleaned before I returned, stinging from wee and embarrassment because my broken vagina just bled all over the floor when he was looking.
That ain’t nothing though.
The Husband was always the party guy, the one getting the drinks in and charming the girls and playing football and having a beer with his mates and haha, you with kids?! No way dude!
And then there he was, with a kid.
Oh, he loves her.
She smiled her first milk drunk smiles at him. He was the first to make her giggle and even now, over two years later, she still laughs the hardest for her Daddy.
He’s the level headed chalk to my over compensating (the guilt) parenting cheese; Beans knows where she is with him and she pushes sometimes but mostly she thrives.
He taught her how to do thumbs up and high five and (inadvertently) how to say bugger. She still lets him cradle her in his arms, rock her gently from side to side and whisper Twinkle Twinkle into her ear at bedtime.
He holds her hand and gets her dressed and kisses her tears and changes her nappy and keeps her safe. He makes her laugh at her own farts and won’t give her pudding if she doesn’t finish her dinner.
And I just swoon a little watching them together because I love him and I love her and I love them twice as hard when they’re in each others arms.
For all he does for me and for her and for us, selflessly and without mutterings of complaint he is an amazing Daddy. For being my reassurance that I am a good Mummy and I can do it and for still holding my hand he’s a fucking champion.
We love you oh wondrous enigma who says he has and will never read this blog. This outpouring of sickening sentiment is all for you because you rock at being a Daddy and we love you. So there.
‘I had to give three words to describe you’ I call through the wall as I lean against the kitchen worktop and wait for the kettle to boil.
‘Really?’ Mum calls back.
Distractedly wobbling a teaspoon between my thumb and index finger and watching the bubbles start to swell and rise inside the kettle I continue the through-the-wall conversation because yes I did, and Dad too, and no I don’t remember what three words I said.
She thinks I do remember and either embarrassment or shame (I promise I didn’t say anything bad or sarcastic Mum) is stopping me from spilling the the six words that best surmise my parents.
I remember something about saying supportive and caring and I say so as I carry my tea to the garden table and realise I’ve forgotten the biscuits that I got out because that’s just how my brain works now.
That’s the thing about therapy – although these weekly sessions aren’t technically therapy – I never ever remember much.
Instead moments come back to me in flashback like snippets, not all too far removed from the distant days of painfully hungover Sunday mornings clutching my aching skull, craving a cool pint of water and then hearing a snippet of a song as three minutes of the night before come flying back into my conscious, carried by the familiar music.
Nooooooooo.
For sixty minutes a week I am assessed because procedure calls for the ‘problem’ to be unearthed before deciding the appropriate course of action or if I deserve one at all. Assessments are pretty tough going.
I palpitate my way through a quick fire questions and answers and my head throbs with the effort that it takes to find the right words and weave them together in the right order so that they sound somewhere close to what I actually mean.
In my experience clinical psychologists are the masters of questions; the open question, the leading question, they know their shit question-wise.
Without exception all of them feel excruciating and all are equally hard to answer – from a social etiquette perspective I’m sitting in close proximity to a stranger who is writing down every word as it tumbles from my mouth. And it makes me a bit eeesh when I’m asked, bluntly, whether I want to die – other questions are less uncomfortable but leave me slacked jawed and gormless because how does one describe their childhood beyond ‘yeah, it was fine. Normal y’know…’
Another blinding one is breaking off and stopping
randomly
mid sentence, insinuating through deafening silence and expectant eyeballing that
this is a moment that I should be filling with a valid response.
But there was no question? What?
Spending sixty minutes delving through my twenty seven years on this planet stopping only to include detailed family trees and preschool memories and teenage angst and everything plus more is draining, but it’s more than that.
It’s filling in the tick boxes on the forms and deciding just how bad I feel and do I
a) somewhat want to kill myself or
b) definitely want to kill myself
and having to throw myself backwards in a bid to take shaky steps forwards.
It’s feeling stupid and scared and stupid because there are no reasons, there was no BAM moment when my world imploded when I was five and I wasn’t allowed a kitten and that is why I am like this.
It’s feeling breathless and anxious because I’m trapped in this room and even if I wanted to run the corridors snake around themselves too much and each one is as beige as the last so I would never get out and oh god! I want to get out!
It’s hating all of this and hating reeling off the same words and feeling it all again while not knowing where this is going and if I am even going to get any help once my sixty minutes come to an end in another one hundred and twenty minutes time.
It’s being able to agree enthusiastically that I know that my thought processes are irrational and damaging and at times just really, really silly and as much as I can see that as clear as the water in the glass on the glass table right now, in the moment when it actually happens it’s different and yes I want to change but I don’t know how.
If I knew how then I wouldn’t be here, silently wanting to drown in the water in the glass on the glass table.
How do I want therapy to help me and how do I want my life to be and what does a day look like when I’m better?
I don’t know, I really don’t know.
The days blur a bit around the edges and merge into one long period of restless sleep and being woken up by being used as a trampoline but the sun is shining and the grass is growing so it’s OK.
My efforts don’t stretch quite far enough to do much but in doing very little I am achieving so that’s OK too, at least that’s what I’m trying to convince myself.
My confidence is shot meaning I can’t do anything vaguely creative or involving a concentration span of longer than thirty seconds because any longer and my head starts to throb and the frustration rises but flowers are starting to bloom and cheeks are flushed from hours of running in the garden so it’s OK.
There is room in a sea of nothing for bits of something to poke through, punctuating a little bit stronger because there is no other focus when I try hard enough.
Madcap toddler questions and observations and I love you Mummy at bedtime and a sleepy hand on my arm while we snuggle on the sofa with windswept hair and mud under our fingernails.
Three stories before sleep and a cup of tea in the sunshine and bare feet in the grass and what are you doing Mummy. Panic attacks in the evening and dreams so vivid I lose sense of the real and the not quite real but by the time If You’re Happy And You Know It is on it’s seventh repeat we’re clapping our hands and that’s the only reality that matters.
Ignoring phone calls and psyching myself up for appointments and trying, really trying, to write about things but quickly deleting everything but come on Mummy, lets go as I’m led forcibly to the next game which I play because that’s what I have to do and sometimes it feels like it might be getting easier.
New toys and new discoveries and questions and daylight hours filled with two year old whimsy precede disjointed evenings of anxiety and food I don’t want and can’t taste and restlessness.
We’ll do it all over again tomorrow and it will be OK.
It’s as a nine year old, a ten in nine days nine year old, counts on her fingers – ‘nine plus seven so that’s ten, eleven…’ – I realise that while I still ask similar questions and she peppers her sentences with like and I watch my own baby out of the corner of my eye and we both count on our fingers – ‘fourteen, fifteen…’ – that outwardly I probably resemble an actual grown up.
‘Sixteen! I’ll be sixteen when she is nine like I am now. I’ll, like, really very nearly be able to drive!’
Girlish and excited and, like, so desperate to grow up but still able to indulge in the beauty of ring a roses and toy cars and pretend and life without all the complications and responsibilities.
New friends to play with are even better than Mummy and the child who is usually burrowing her head between my shoulder and chin as she hides was suddenly all I want you to put my shoes on now and play jumping with me now and lets place chase while I try to say your names because this is fun nownowNOW!
I take one foot and the other is taken by the nine, ten in nine days girl. Today I realised that these shoes are probably a little too small and tiny toes wriggle and squirm and limbs are all over because everything else is so distracting and I try to marry foot with shoe as best I can. It’s then that I realise that I am being looked to for advice ‘these shoes are just so, like, tiny! Look how small they are! They’re so hard to put on, how do you…?‘
Don’t be fooled kid. I am twenty seven, twenty eight in forty seven days, and I don’t even know. I just aim shoe at foot and hope for the best.
It always looks like mummys know what they’re doing right? I’m sure it’s a lie. We mostly pretend and shroud ourselves in an air of grown up mystery to make the younger feel like we got this shit when invariably, we don’t.
Don’t we?
I am realising, slowly, that being a grown up is something that I am finding a particular struggle at the moment. There’s a lot about being a grown up that is, like, totally awesome. Genuinely, being woken up by the foghorn yell of ‘morning Mummy! I’m awake now!’ while being dive bombed in the face is brilliant, I’m the most anti morning person in the world and even I can’t not love that.
More awesome is laying contorted on one side of a toddler bed, nose to nose singing a tuneless duet of Twinkle Twinkle as I look down at her and its all beautiful and she looks up at my mouth – which does that weird I know someone is looking at me so I’m going to go all over animated and strange thing – as I form the words so she knows what’s coming next. Those moments, all clouds of mingling breath and closeness and shared giggles and ‘just one more tuggle mummy please thank you’ are just wow.
It’s been a long time coming and my god am I putting my absolute all into savouring every last second, to live in the moment for the moment and ignore everything else.
It’s the other stuff that sends me into a panic spiral, like the washing and the shopping and the cleaning and the cooking and is the door locked and the oven off and the light bulb upstairs just blew and when is that bill due and there are no clean socks again and doctors appointments and it is this week that the boiler is being fixed andandand… All that shit slays me because I am yet to work out how to allocate the headspace for everything.
Initially my days are begun with a big cup of pretend where I pretend to smile and enthuse and enjoy until (hopefully) it kicks in naturally and I can enjoy until I need another dose of pretend and repeat times infinity forever. It takes every last cell of my being to plaster on the pretend but I do it because I have to and I want to and it’s what’s important and maybe the more I pretend the more it is likely to just happen spontaneously one day like a miracle of normal. But all of the other stuff…?
It’s too much. It’s too much to see a full sink in the kitchen or a pile of dirty washing in the bathroom. It’s too much to pour the last drop of milk or to wonder what’s for dinner and how and when and who and what?
I think that’s why I need to escape sometimes.
A crucial part of effective toddler parenting, I’ve found, is having an arsenal of things that make life easier. I don’t like to call them bribes but…There are things that I know have one hundred million percent effectiveness at abruptly ending a tantrum or cause dawdling little legs to pick up the pace.
These secret weapons consist of (but aren’t exclusive to):
Cats.
Lets see if we can find a cat! This is a fail safe when the ten minute walk to the shop has already taken over an hour. With the crazed look in her eye of a child on a mission ‘me strooooooke cat, where are ooooo cat’ (as all the cats stampede to find cover) we make it back home lightening fast.
Chocolate.
Yeah, alright, I’m not saying I’m proud. But it works. As do biscuits. And, if I’m really REALLY desperate, ice-cream.
Climbing frames.
Gone are the days of aching arms pushing a swing for the fifth hour in a row, climbing frames are where it’s at, especially if they have a slide. Secretly I like this and all the more so now I don’t have to hover anxiously with open arms ready to catch a stumble on the steps.
After just a few days refining her technique Beans went from dubious climbing to being able to scale the cargo net in double quick time and that in turn seems to have improved her balance generally. She’s certainly fearless in the face of anything if there is the promise of a slide once she’s overcome the obstacle. Not only that but she learned to jump and to swing off a bar (I still don’t like to watch her doing it mind you).
To the untrained eye she is playing happily and I am being a good Mummy by letting her scale new heights, in reality I can have a little sit down while watching her learn all these new skills and revelling in the joy of the all over workout that’s she’s getting meaning she’ll undoubtedly sleep like a champion all night.
The holy grail are the climbing frames with bridges, little houses for pretend picnics and tunnels to crawl through.
Chase Mummy.
OK, this one involves me making a fool of myself when in public but it works every time. Whether I need her to hurry up or to come upstairs for her bath or into the kitchen to eat tea a firm ‘no’ instantly becomes a ‘yaaaaaaaay’ when I utter chase me? I run like a mum (ie, slowly) while she pounds the ground with her feet screeching ‘going to get yoooooou mummy’.
Tangled.
Or Aladdin. Or The Princess And The Frog. Thank you Disney for ninety minutes of bliss.
On a really, really bad day she has chased me to the climbing frame for a chocolate biscuit picnic in the little house before chasing me home to watch Tangled and fall into a climbing induced sleep while I recharge with a cuppa.
Parenting, it’s all about knowing the cheats.
Ah music, the invoker of memories, the inspirer of moods, food of love, understanding comfort in floods of despair…
Music used to be the prevailing background noise in my life but was all too quickly replaced by a louder internal monologue of self loathing so really (not really), I consider myself lucky to spend the amount of time that I do waiting rooms at the moment.
Waiting rooms always have the best music, the kind of stuff that is so ironic it means you have to laugh or you’ll cry.
This place has a newly installed intercom thingy, one of those microphones that means that the receptionist can hear you from the other side of the safety glass as you declare yourself arrived from an appropriate distance because safety first in these offices potentially dangerous mad people.
“Sorry, the microphone isn’t working” she bellows, gesturing at the speakers on her side.
“…not working” she points and then does that mime thing like she’s cutting her throat.
“Did you say 3 o clock?”
It’s 9:55am. I shout back, from my safe distance that “no, I said 10am” – holding up my fingers to indicate ten but at the same time probably looking like I’m showing that I have no concealed weapons.
I sit down and wait to be called while the receptionist resumes her conversation with the man who has come to check the microphone. Through the thick glass. Shouting.
“I’ll put the music on out there and see if I can hear it in here” she yells, annunciating sharply: ‘mew-zick‘.
She pushes some button somewhere in her office behind her glass and the dulcet tones of Now That’s What I Call The Best Mental Health Unit Album In The World Ever Vol.582048 drifts from hidden speakers.
Whut whut, put your rave hats on patients. Psych yourself up for that dreaded psychiatrist appointment as you sob-laugh your way along to Track One.
I mean, I do love this song. I am yet to meet anyone who doesn’t love this song. Thank you Goo Goo Dolls for helping me through some rocky times but there is a time and a place and really, this is neither.
When everything’s made to be broken…
Chuckle chuckle, sob sob, wringing of sweaty palms.
You bleed just to know your aliiiiiive…
Brilliant.
Somewhat disappointingly I’m called through before I’m able to find out what the next song is. Gutted.
I had a psychiatrist appointment last week, a private one. No suicide soundtrack in that waiting room and a ninety minute delve into my psyche. That’s a party in itself let me tells ya.
This dude was NHS and therefore not costing me the equilivant of a months rent. But free did unfortunately mean not quite scraping the top layer from all of the layers from the top of the iceberg. It meant a different diagnosis and different advice, all of which I am still processing.
I’m not great in these appointments. They make me nervous and reciting everything makes me hurt and above all the pressure bares down hard because I need this, I need this to get to the next step so that I can get better. My brain chooses these times to go on sabbatical, deciding to recline on a towel on a sandy beach and work on its tan leaving me totally in the lurch. Thanks brain.
I struggle to take in much information on the spot and it’s usually hours and days before it sinks in properly, once my brain is back with its tan lines and holiday photos and has finished unpacking.
It’s not the best sign though when thirty minutes in I find myself thinking I’m going to have to do this all on my own, all over again.
It’s not great when a bombshell is dropped that is so destructive that whoomph this is all you will take away from these forty five minutes of purgatory because everything else is just shrapnel now.
For confidentialities sake I’ll call him Dr Fuckwad* (PHD). Dr Fuckwad with my thick file of notes with my maiden name crossed out in biro and my married named scrawled below in felt tip and all of his questions and the stifling suffocating atmosphere of his office with his name on the door.
I have generalised anxiety disorder he deduces, not depression at all. He is pleased that I am not self harming because, says Dr Fuckwad, it would be much harder to help me if I was so I should keep not doing that please.
Dr F confirmed that the six weeks of hell I endured was indeed withdrawal *ahem* I mean discontinuation effects and that I should stay on the medication because it works and sure, I can’t actually feel emotion or hunger or anything, nor can I poo – I mean like at all. I haven’t had a good poo for over two years and that is exhausting let me tell you – and as a result I have piles that honestly deserve their own names (ideas on a postcard please) and possibly even hand embroidered little outfits.
The bombshell is coming. Wait for it.
Really, I promise it’s worth it.
Now, my reluctance to stay on these meds for any period of time boils down to:
1: all of the points above
2: they numb me and therefore how can I learn how to deal with any emotional issues that arrive once I stop them?
2b: how can I get better from something that I can’t feel?
3: they are not a cure
4: they are not a lifestyle choice but a tool
5: the longer I am on them the more brutal the withdrawal *ahem* I mean discontinuation will be
6: because I said so
I know I need them now. I know that for whatever reason I am a very, very ill person without them. So, Dr Fuckwad, I dutifully swallow one every morning of every day while I endure all of this and while I struggle to get well again. I know that I am not well now, that my life is, and has to be, on hold until I am well again because that is what is right and what is fair and good and proper. For everyone. I’m not happy about it but I’ll do it, deal.
But, the quicker I can get my nervous sweaty mitts onto some other treatment of the non chemical kind, the quicker I will recover thus saving myself and my family a lot of pain and the NHS a lot of time and money and for that matter, the benefit system too.
So, Dr Fuckwad, mate, lets do this shit! Lets be positive and proactive. Be my cheerleader, tell me I can do this and I’ll be OK and we’re going to get me the therapies that I need and it will be tough but it will be worth it because I can get back to life and myself and my baby. Yeah? Yeah!
My life has been on hold enough already, the husband can’t work, we would have had more babies – we wanted more babies by now – if I was well so lets just focus on getting me well. Lets do this thing.
“No more babies for at least six years please” says Dr Fuckwad.
(That’s the bombshell right there *thwack*)
Now I’m not one to shun medical advice, to put people (or babies or already made children or husbands) at risk but nor am I one to be dictated to. I mean fuck, six years! Am I going to be like this for six years, at least six years?
No. Nononononono.
Please no.
* I can’t even pretend to take credit for this name, twas my muse; a gorgeous vision, an epic writer, a local freakin’ celebrity and reader of my l-o-n-g and garbled text messages of doom.Cheers dude x
She stands stock still while tides of people wash around her in waves of bright colours and candy floss and rosy cheeks from a day spent underneath hot sunshine. Her hunched shoulders covered by a faded quilted jacket, a glimpse of scalp visible beneath thin grey hair combed elegantly into place.
Her feet point inwards and her eyes point downwards and her smile radiates warmth stronger than the afternoon sunshine as she watches my daughter. My daughter who is running her toddler run, golden curls trailing behind her, ice cream cone clutched possessively in her ice cream covered left hand.
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
She watches, shuffling with tiny steps so that her eyes can follow as she sweeps by and her smile grows and grows, all teeth and dusky pink lipstick and creased eyes and memories of her own babies or of how it felt to be young or…or was maybe nothing at all, nothing more than the moment.
In the dappled shade of the park at that moment and surrounded by hoards of children and parents coming and going and shouting and careering it was mine that she saw something in before she dragged her eyes back to the path and slowly faded away into the crowd.
Is there anything better than being young and outside and free, leaping and jumping and bouncing into the sky while limbs flail wildly in the air and hair blows in the breeze?
Beans doesn’t think so. My goodness, this child loves to bounce. In fact, she wants to bounce all the time and she wants to jump high enough to reach the moon, arms stretched up as far as they will go and little fingers pointed into the sky.
Currently trampolines are the best thing ever for so many reasons; for her it’s the obvious – flinging herself wildly high, and for me, it’s good old fashioned safe (the enclosures are brilliant and so reassuring when jumps become really enthusiastic!) fun that gets us outside now that (at last) the sun has remembered how to shine a bit of springlike warmth onto our pale, winter warn faces.
Although my propensity for leaping has waned somewhat as I have got older (even swings make me feel a bit queasy now and I spent the majority of my childhood back and forth, back and forth while the chains creaked) it is just as much fun to witness the delight of my very own little person having the time of her life with fresh air and exercise included as she perfects her jumps.
But the benefits go far beyond fresh air and acrobatics, the humble trampoline is actually does wonders for kids and adults alike (if you have a stronger constitution than me that is).
It’s clear just from watching a two year old throw themselves up and down for a good hour that they’re getting a great workout – which is usually followed by a great nights sleep, hurrah! But, importantly for little bodies the low impact nature of bouncy fun means an optimum muscle workout while joints are protected by the shock absorbing trampoline pad.
Jumping is also brilliant for improving balance, spacial awareness and anticipating what will happen next, all really important skills for rapidly growing children improving their gross motor skills daily.
There are role play opportunities too which is a great way to nurture and encourage budding (if occasionally crazy) imaginations. We bounce to the moon and then back down to earth. The trampoline takes on all kinds of forms as different games and challenges are created.
Plus, they never get old do they? Bouncing is fun and valuable exercise for children of all ages so it’s certainly one toy that doesn’t have a mere six months of use before being discarded as babyish.
Turn taking skills, cause and effect, balance, strong bones and muscles, endorphin boosting, a damn good workout and a good nights sleep plus touching the moon, I kind of want to disregard my protesting motion sickness and take up trampolining myself!