Friday 11 January 2013

You think YOU had it tough...?


Well that’s just marvellous.  The motherhood at its finest, I must say.  Actually not just the motherhood, but what I guess is usually referred to as “the sisterhood”, you know, women supporting each other, looking out for each other, empathising and generally being “good eggs” as far as each other are concerned.  As someone who believes in the saying “if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all” (to a fault, probably) I have been pretty staggered over the past few days at just how thoughtless people can be in what they say.  Maybe there is an argument – no doubt imported from the US of A where everyone is encouraged to be frank with each other – that it is better to speak your mind, anything else is bad for ones’ self and dishonest vis a vis the person you are speaking to.  But surely this does not mean dispensing with any kind of filter, the little voice that says “hang on, maybe now isn’t the time/ this isn’t the way to say it/ I’d better just shut the fuck up”?

Picture the scene earlier this week:  gorgeous afternoon at the local park (always a bit tricky as I have a child that goes one way – at speed, on a scooter – and a dog that goes the other, made more tricky by my blooming bump and consequent  breathlessness/ inability to move anywhere faster than at walking pace) and a nice chat to another mum of 2 about dogs, age gaps between kids etc, who then starts telling me how awful she found it going from one child to two.  Now I truly am all for women being honest about the trials of motherhood instead of presenting a glossy Stepford sheen of perfection, but surely it is thoughtless at best to launch into a tirade about how hard the transition from 1 to 2 children is when speaking with a woman you know to be (very) pregnant with their second child? 

Ironically what I find to be happening at the moment is not so much a competition to be the most immaculate parent with angelic children who all slept through from 6 weeks and are a guaranteed delight at every mealtime, but a competition to be having the hardest time of it.  To every “oh we had a bit of a rough Christmas, Rosie was really ill poor thing”, you’ll get “oooo I know what you mean.  Both of mine were in A&E, then I got ill but still had to cater single-handedly for our entire extended family of 16 with nothing but a packet of crisps and half a cocktail sausage to feed them on.”  We seem to have lost the ability to recog nise when we stop being supportive of each other and start on one-upmanship.  And frankly when you are already struggling and feeling a bit low, the one thing guaranteed to make you feel like throwing in the towel is being made to feel that actually you have it easy and have nothing to complain about – at least you got 3 hours sleep last night, mine were up ALL night and ALL day...you get the idea. 

It reminds me of that Boots advert that was on TV last year – the two mums meet on the street comparing snotty noses and Christmas lists of Things To Do.  All very amusing – yes, we nodded sagely with a wry grin on our faces as we recognised the female ability to soldier on and Get Things Done – but part of me thought “Which one came away from that feeling smug that she actually had it worse?”.

 I don’t know whether it is a habit we have slipped into as a misguided way of trying to engender a feeling of solidarity, but maybe sometimes all people need as a sympathetic ear and a big piece of cake.  Unless of course that cake was made while you had your arm in a sling, having made Sunday lunch for 8 while the children both had tonsillitis and your husband was working all weekend...

PS as if by magic, and perfectly illustrating my rant above, on checking my Facebook account a friend had responded to my general “grrrr” about the day by telling me how much harder hers had been.   I can only imagine I was meant to compare myself unfavourably with this Superwoman and count my blessings....
 

Friday 4 January 2013

Hope Over Experience


So, 2013.  I thought I’d be so pleased to see the back of 2012 which was, without doubt, the hardest year I have ever had in my life so far.  NYE itself was hard, though: by bidding farewell to the year that mum died, it felt like I was saying goodbye to her a little bit more.  With the anniversary of her death around the corner, I know that the difficult first milestones aren’t over and, again, while I can’t wait to get through them I know that each one will mark a step further away from mum.  We are expecting our second baby this year and I know this too will lead to so many conflicting emotions: it will be hard to bear at times but I’m determined that this will mark a new positive start, a better time for our family after several years of uphill battles.

I have to send my thanks to Kate (kateonthinice) for her comment on my last post which I am sorry to say I didn’t reply to properly.  It meant a great deal to me to have someone tell me to give myself a break, to step back and see what I am dealing with at the moment and give myself permission not to try and take on yet more pressure and “things to do”.  I think the fact that it meant so much led to me not knowing how to respond: that is something I need to work on.  I’ve never been very good at accepting help from people, or trusting that when people say lovely or supportive things that they actually mean them.  It probably comes from several instances of being sucked in by fair weather friends, and if nothing else mum’s illness showed me very clearly those who felt our friendship was important enough to overcome the British discomfort with talking about difficult subjects, and those who disappeared like the proverbial rats up a drain as soon as the going got a bit tough.

New Year’s resolutions seem a bit trite against this background.  So much has changed fundamentally that setting resolutions would feel like scratching the surface.  I have made a few, which I hope will lead me back to myself, though, and seeing as they should be enjoyable “tasks” there are no excuses!  But I guess if I don’t stick to them perhaps they aren’t pastimes I enjoy as much as I think I do...which is all part of the learning process.  So, every week I want to have completed one of each of the following:

1.       a new blog post (I know, I know – my poor track record doesn’t exactly instil confidence but there’s nothing like the triumph of hope over experience);

2.       a short story exercise;

3.       a watercolour portrait/ life drawing; and

4.       baking – ideally something new but anything is good.
Not so much as resolution as an ongoing challenge, is trying to acknowledge and accept that there are things in life (people, situations) that will not change, and that all I can do is to change my attitude to those things.  Did I say challenge?  Make that a lifetime’s work! But one well worth embarking upon.  Wish me luck!

Thursday 8 November 2012

PS

...and as proof of my New Start I baked for the first time in ages yesterday.  Parkin - nom.  It's currently getting all sticky in its tin but I shall report back on how successful (or otherwise) it turns to be in a few days...

Onwards and Upwards - who's with me?

The Autumn alwys makes me feel excited - it must be memories of the new school year with new shoes, new pens, new books which gets me far more keyed up than New Year ever does.  It was this time last year (or thereabouts) that I decided to give blogging a go, and crashed and burned pretty spectacularly after only a few posts.  In mitigation, the death of my mum and the subsequent lingering demise of my career threw me off course somewhat, but a recent post by kateonthinice (http://kateonthinice.wordpress.com) has prompted me to get my shit together and start doing instead of merely thinking of doing.
Kate's post is about the losing of one's sense of self, which resonates hugely with me at the moment.  With no paid job (and a bit of a crisis in terms of whether my career of the last 10 years is till the one for me - and if not, what the hell is?), one child and another on the way I feel like I am constantly fighting the desire for a life less ordinary with absolutely no idea of how to even take the first step towards making it happen.  Oh the ideas keep flowing - everything from teaching children's yoga to selling homemade cakes, retraining in NLP, teacher training, setting up a radio station - but the sheer directionless of them is overwhelming and consequently I do little (or nothing) about any of them. 
With 6 months to go until life is put on hold (again) for No.2, I feel like the clock is really ticking - or perhaps it's the New Term feeling that's nagging me to take positive steps towards something - anything!  Whatever it is posting this blog will, I hope, mark a bit of a turning point.  Out of the fog and towards the clear blue skies...

Thursday 19 January 2012

Bugger.

Well, my resolution to post at least weekly fell by the wayside pretty quickly, but it's not every week that your mother dies.  It's funny, I really didn't think I'd want to write about this on the blog, but it feels quite liberating to put it down in print, although now that I have it's difficult to know what else to write.  Maybe being able to tell the ether all about mum, and how much I'll miss her is something that will come later.  For now it's like being in a very surreal dream punctuated with crippling physical pain when reality bites, and hysterical laughter when my daughter - the most wonderful thing in my life EVER - punches the air shouting "rock 'n' roll" before giving me a choking cuddle and snotty kiss on the lips.  Right at the time when I thought I'd be plunged back into the black fog of the depression that has tracked my footsteps for about 20 years, I feel so blessed and thankful, and strangely peaceful.  Like I've grown up and have to take responsibility for myself.  I just wish she was still here, so much. 

Wednesday 4 January 2012

White Lies and Whoppers

So I thought maybe the best place to start was to explain how the title of my blog came about and to invite others to share their own tales of parental dishonesty!

One of my family's running jokes (which are, by definition, crashingly boring to anyone outside the four of us) is that any soup is called "ordinary soup", for the benefit of my brother who as a child pretty much refused to eat anything else.  As you have probably guessed, "ordinary soup" happened to be whatever soup my mother set down in front of him, but if it was "ordinary soup" it was eaten. Anything else was dismissed out of hand...and onto the floor.

Other little gems which I took as gospel, as only a child can, were that if I had a bath every day my fingernails would grow to be long and beautiful, and that the hugely overweight girl around the corner became so from eating cheese in precisely the same manner as I had taken to doing when I came in from school.

My daughter is too young at the moment to be subjected to any such blatent fibbing on my part, and I'm sure there are others out there whose mum's and dad's "truths" trounce my own mother's efforts, so please do share.  I may pick up some tips...

Monday 2 January 2012

Here goes!!

Isn't it always the way: you spend forever procrastinating about doing something and then when you actually kick the family out of the house, avoid the wine bottle and get around to doing it, it is SO EASY!  I'm sure there will be a host of little niggles and technophobically motivated errors along the way, and so if there is anyone actually following this anytime, then my apologies in advance.

Right, I'm off to try and make this page look a little less like a hastily set-up blogspot template....

Ta ta for now xx