Single parenthood. Tales from the front-line...

On the Move

2010-07-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

I am defecting.

I am changing my name...

And I am going to the other side.

Actually the horse has already bolted. I've moved to Wordpress.

If you would like to come with me - and I very much hope you do - then feel free to click HERE.

See you there.

Face Book - The Devils Work?

2010-07-19T03:44:00.000-07:00

Being relatively new to the internet, (better late to the party than never I suppose) the whole virtual world is still fairly mind-blowing to me. I keep waiting for the novelty to wear off, but no. I suppose you might say that I was easily pleased but actually you'd be wrong. I'm excited because the internet is truly a thing of wonder. It's like having an entire and previously undiscovered universe of possibilities opened up to you. I love that all that information is right there at the click of a mouse, ready to be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. It is in a lot of ways the most significant equalizer of our time. Just look at blogging - anyone can publish - you don't need to be an established author or have an agent - you just need to be able to read and write. As an aside the internet is also a mild OCD sufferers dream. So many new things to check obsessively - E-mail accounts, Facebook, Statcounter... I could go on.

Now I have to say though that the jury is out for me on facebook. I can see all the positives and I enjoy them as much as the next person, but I'm just not sure. One morning for example when checking my e-mails, I found one informing me that a man named N had requested my facebook friendship. I racked my brains trying to think of all the N's I had ever known, none of whom matched the photo in front of me. Nope, I thought in the end. I have never seen this person before in my entire life. Just to make sure I clicked on his other profile photos and then - aha - recognition. He was someone with whom I had had a short and fairly insignificant relationship, years ago at university. It had all been rather forgettable as I now recall, except for one thing: he had lost his virginity to me. He'd neglected to tell me untill after the event, but honestly? I'd guessed.

Now, is it me or is it slightly odd that someone would just make contact like that out of the blue? I have on various trawls through facebook looking for friends, come across a couple of old lovers myself. And yes I suppose out of curiosity and fond memories and such like, it would be nice to know how they were getting on. But I certainly haven't contacted them. Why? Well because time has moved on. They could have a partner or spouse who might be less than thrilled about an old girlfriend getting in touch out of the blue, and also because the medium is so ripe for people to get the wrong idea. The problem with on-line communication of all sorts is that there is no way to judge someones tone of voice or body language, and so it's much harder to determine what their agenda or meaning might be. And so I have done what I believe to be the wisest thing and chosen to let bygones be bygones.

The next problem with facebook is requests for friendship from people who you don't even know. Why? Why would I wish for someone with whom I had never even had a basic conversation to be able to view my personal details and photographs? Why on earth would they be interested in the day to day inanities that I put up on my wall anyway? I just don't get it.

The last, and for me most pertinent problem, is the privacy settings. Now I have mine up so that only my friends can view my wall and my photographs, but I have only done this recently since I discovered that the default setting has it so that anyone is able to view anyone elses wall, whether they are friends with them or not. I wish to god I had never found that out. It has meant that I have been unable to resist a sneaky peak at my ex boyfriends wall even though it was me who originally broke our facebook connection thinking that it would be healthier and easier to move on if I didn't see his comings and goings on my home page every day! Anyway there he was looking extremely happy with his new partner. His new, much younger than me (although much closer to his age to be fair,) extremely attractive, just graduated with a maths degree, partner. Ouch. A dagger to the heart. Just when I thought I was on the mend.

Freedom of information, I have decided, can have its drawbacks after all. There are some things that you just don't want to know.

As for Facebook? It's the damn devils work I tell you.

Technical Glitches and Secret Crushes

2010-07-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

This last week my computer, or rather my internet connection, has been down. I say down, a tiny thread of snail paced connection has in fact stayed up and running but everything has been taking sooooo long to load - indeed if it will load at all - that attempting to do the simplest thing on line has turned into more of an exercise in hair tearing frustration than anything else.

I say frustration, actually what I mean is white hot raging fury. It's always the little things that get to me. I'm pretty patient with the children, I manage to co-exist perfectly peacefully alongside all manner of idiots with whom I am expected to share the planet, and although injustice and inequality can sometimes make me angry, it is for the most part in a sad, slow head shaking sort of a way. For some reason (I know not which) it is the lost sellotape, the lids that won't screw open, the radios that won't tune in, and the damn computers that decide it is a good time to stage a go-slow that make me really hopping mad. I think it's called transference, or projection, or something. Anyway, in the end I had to just walk away. It wasn't worth it. I knew during a protracted phone call to the Orange broadband support team when I began to have lurid fantasies about taking a large mallet to the monitor, that it would be better that way.

So in the past week or so, instead of blogging I have been doing other things. I have blitzed the house; it hasn't been this clean since December 2009 - the approximate fateful date on which I first plugged myself into the virtual ether. The children have clearly been set slightly off balance by their newly ordered surroundings and as a result have felt compelled to render things familiar once more by doing their very best to mess it all up again in the quickest time possible. I found a great trail of printer paper all over the house this morning, the Youngest had been making "stepping stones" apparently. Of course - silly me. It's not as if we could use the bloody stuff for anything else after all.

I have also been spending more time with other people. A few days ago I went out to dinner with a small group of friends that I don't see nearly often enough. You know that warm relaxed feeling you get when in the company of people whom you know like and accept you totally? Who know that you can sometimes mess things up royally, but who don't care and don't judge because they love you anyway, warts and all? I can state with absolute conviction that an evening of belly laughs with friends like that really does a woman good. I am current living proof.

This week has also seen me managing to read a book, sort out my front garden, survive one childs birthday and anothers last day at primary school (they have now all broken up for the summer holidays) and last but not least spend a curious and slightly worrying amount of time amusing myself thinking about who it might be fun to go out on a date with. In the end it was a toss up between Captain Jack Sparrow, Jim Morrison and Charlie Brooker. After some serious consideration I plumped for Charlie. Obvious reasons such as him being a) real, and b) not dead, aside - he is for me the ideal combination of cynical, angry and scathing, yet witty, clever and likeable, not to mention a master of the one slightly raised ironic eyebrow expression - so hard to pull off without looking smarmy, wouldn't you agree?

I have decided (I've worked it all out you see) that Charlie and I would meet at some soul suckingly awful corporate 'do' somewhere and bond instantly over how appalling it all was and how much we hated the sort of people who liked these things. We'd sit there being cynical together - Charlie of course also being devilishly handsome and impossibly funny - and then we'd sneak off on our own having realised that really we could think of a million different and better things to do. We'd go on the London Eye and eat really lovely food on a verandah overlooking the river. Then at night we'd break into the natural history museum and marvel at having it all to ourselves. It would be eerie and silent in the dim light and we'd have to try not to touch anything in case we set all the alarms off. Later we'd go and watch some fireworks fizzing around the moon from the top of a huge climbing frame, and then we'd find a really seedy pub somewhere and shoot pool untill the early hours. I would win. You can tell a lot about a man by how he responds to being beaten at pool by a woman. Charlie of course would be suitably impressed and gracious yet doggedly competitive, whilst still remaining - at all times - unfailingly and impossibly funny. No pressure there then.

Now. This isn't going to be a post about how I've had a taste of my real life back and as a result am going to lay off the blogging for a while. Blogging is a part of my real life (oh the joy when my broadband, for no blasted reason whatsoever, suddenly started working again) and besides I'm far too narcissistic to want to stop. In fact this post actually began life as a 'why I haven't been posting post' (I know, I know, yawn yawn) but then took on a life of its own and morphed unbidden into a post detailing my secret fantasy of breaking into the natural history museum in the dead of night with Charlie Brooker.

Deeply Freudian I'm sure. My mother will be so proud.

It's good to be back.

Playground Politics

2010-07-09T01:52:00.000-07:00

The village school my children attend lies just a few minutes walk up the road from our house and is responsible for the education of about fifty children. There are two classrooms; one for the reception class and pupils in years one and two, and the other for the pupils in years three, four, five and six. At the moment I have Eldest Son in one class, Middle Son in the other and The Youngest attending one day a week, although that will all change come September when Eldest Son goes off to secondary school and The Youngest moves up to full time reception. The team of staff is made up in its entirety of a head-teacher, two classroom teachers, one classroom assistant, one cook, and a taxi driver whose main job it is to ferry some of the children to and from school, but who also doubles up as a dinner lady. She's a 'twofer' as my mother would say - twofer the price of one.

The school is very much the hub of the local community and always has a large part to play in the organisation of village activities such as the annual fete, the fun run, and the summer grass-cuts of the village church grounds in which all the parents get together to strim, rake, and then finally wheelbarrow great heaps of grass up steeply angled wooden boards and on to flat bed trucks while the children all run around shrieking and chucking the grass at each other. The P.T.A. is extremely well attended with the majority of mothers going regularly to meetings; indeed if you do not choose to get involved with the P.T.A. and by the same token do not then contribute towards the planning and running of community activities, it tends to be rather frowned upon. The more active mothers huff and sigh and whisper amongst themselves that if so and so can't be bothered to help the school raise a bit of bloody money then why should so and so's children be entitled to free school trips along with their children. What can I say... there's not much to do around here.

Now. There is a small but powerful clique at the centre of the school that has the classroom assistant at its head, her best friend the cook as her trusty sidekick, one of the fathers who is on the board of governors and who has fairly recently split with his partner (he now rents the house directly opposite her) as the third in command, and a few of the other parents as their loyal sniveling minions. They are all on extremely friendly terms with the teaching staff, including the head; in fact the father who is on the board of governors is actually having a relationship with one of the teachers whose class includes his youngest daughter. It's supposed to be a secret but it's a fairly open one really - subtle gestures of intimacy can often be seen passing between them when they think no-one's looking - and so in a nutshell I think it would probably be fair to say that the whole group is rather...um ....cosy.

Funny isn't it how one small group of people can have such a big effect on the wider community around them. One of the ripples cast in the village pond by this particular groups social brick is that of a real change in the dynamics between the children at the school. The offspring of the cliques chosen few all socialise together regularly with their parents and so have very much picked up on the overblown sense of power and influence that their parents have. They shun the children whose parents are shunned by their parents and as a result, something of a two-tier social system has begun to emerge in the village. The strange thing is that all the other parents are only too aware of what is going on. The classroom assistant (who it is quietly felt has far too much clout when it comes to the running of the school) is not well liked despite her position at the top of the tree. She is seen to be something of a bully and a gossip, the sort of person who paints themselves with a superficial coating of sugary friendliness but who is actually rather mean spirited and judgemental, very much focused on their own agenda and concerned mainly with the retention of power at all costs - a bit like David Cameron.

I used to be very much involved with the P.T.A. when Mr S was still living with us and The Youngest had not yet been born. I did the lucky dip every year at the school fete and we would always go as a family to the grass cuts. But these days not so much. The Youngest is too small to be left to roam and play unsupervised at community events while I am busy, and I do not have a partner or any extended family living nearby to help supervise her. Besides I find the group dynamics these days deeply unpleasant - any comments or suggestions made in meetings by anyone outside of the inner circle tend only to be dismissed out of hand anyway - so I've backed off from it all a bit with a view to perhaps becoming more involved again once my daughter is a little older.

Now I know full well that the clique despise me (they barely acknowledge my existence most of the time, often to the point of downright rudeness) firstly for what they probably see as my lack of contribution to the school but also because I just don't fit in with them - never have and never will. They are uber parents and uber villagers, and I'm a bit messy and a bit disorganised and a bit, well.... slummy. I'm not overly concerned by their chilly shoulders, I don't think much of them either and there are plenty of people around that I do like. My main social circle is outside of the village anyway and I find that I much prefer it that way - that it prevents village life from becoming too claustrophobic - however I do know that their superior attitude and air of exclusivity, not to mention their disproportionate degree of influence as to how the school is run, does upset some of the other mums very much and so I was wondering...

Does this happen at every school? Is it inevitable that there will always be some sort of a hierarchy amongst parents? Or is it simply that the community here is small and a little incestuous? I would love to hear about other peoples experiences of school gate politics - what say you?

So What Now?

2010-07-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

I didn't get the job.

My boss phoned me on my mobile while I was in the middle of Tescos with the youngest choosing a packed lunch box for her first ever school trip.

"I'm sorry Gappy. No-one wanted you to get the job more than me, but you just didn't give us the answers we were looking for."

A bit like a court case in which previous convictions for the same crime cannot be taken into account lest it prejudice the minds of the jury, my colleagues on the interview panel were not allowed to take into account the skills they know I have, and the good work they know I do. The interview questions were all scored - a point being awarded for various specific key words and phrases used by the interviewee - and I didn't score high enough on some of the questions; not because I don't know the answers, but because I just didn't say them right or go into enough detail.

So someone else will be starting my job after my temporary contract for it ends in two months time, and I will.... well, I'm not entirely sure what I will do. My boss was keen to point out that there was another job coming up soon and that they wanted to make sure to give me feedback from this interview so that I would be able to sail the next one if I wanted to apply for it, but I'm not sure if I do. The job will be in the information centre for one, and I much prefer refuge work. Also it will be five days a week which I just can't see myself being able to manage in the school holidays. On top of all that the working environments created by the two different teams are like night and day - the refuge team being a strong supportive group who take care of each other at work and the community/information centre being something of a snake pit in which nobody trusts each other and everybody goes about subtly undermining everybody else. I don't, in all honesty, really want to work there.

I also feel embarrassed if truth be told. I really appreciate their support in offering to try to make sure I get this next job, it's nice that my boss has specifically said that she knows I'm good and she wants me working for them, but really it's not their responsibility to try to make sure that I am gainfully employed. I feel as if they feel they owe me something because I have volunteered and covered paid posts at short notice for a long time now - but they don't really - it was my choice to do those things. One particularly helpful colleague from the community team said before my interview that she was hoping and praying I got the job because if I didn't it would just be "really awkward for you and everyone else." I refrained from laughing bitterly and saying "Yeah thanks for that," but it's true really. It is all a bit awkward.

Tomorrow night is the slightly belated leaving do of the colleague whose job it was that I had applied for. I want to go - she was a fantastic, dedicated support worker and colleague who taught me a lot - but I know that me having not got the permanent post is going to be a massive elephant in the room. I'm torn really - I don't want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but I also think that if I don't go it will look as though I have simply spat my dummy out, which isn't the case at all. My feeling is that I should probably go and try to hold my head high. I tried my best, I didn't get it, I'm terribly disappointed, but I'll live. It's her night anyway and we should all be concentrating on being there for her.

What do you think? Any and all advice much appreciated.

Eau de Dead Fox

2010-07-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

I once spent an entire month smelling of dead fox.

There is a lot of wildlife around these parts. You see it if you drive out in the early morning while the mist is still hanging in wisps just above the ground and the air is dewy and cold. A whole other wild world exists outside of the harsh hurried day - foxes, rabbits, and badgers can all sometimes be observed going about their business in the fields and hedges that run alongside the long and windy road that leads out of my village and into the next town. Most often though, the badgers are dead. It's not uncommon to see more than one lying on the grassy verge in a heavy heap before the council workers come later in the morning to remove them. I suspect that the local farmers bait them and then dump the corpses by the side of the road in order to pass them off as road kill. They never appear injured, just curled up, dirty, deathly still, and always much much larger than you would imagine.

Of course lots of wildlife does tend to mean lots of road-kill too. The pheasants that come out during the day seem to be particularly susceptible to death by automobile. This is because they are extremely stupid and neurotic creatures with a gigantic death wish. I once had one walk straight in front of my car seemingly from nowhere, leaving me no time at all in which to stop, swerve, or even slow down. I remember feeling a dull thud and then seeing it roll in a perfect lightning ball of feathers to the side of the road. When I got home Mr S had asked me why I hadn't stopped and slung it in the boot to be brought home and plucked, drawn and eaten. "Well excuse me Mr Hugh Fearnley fucking Whittingstall if I don't much fancy stopping to investigate the 'of this world' status of a half dead and traumatised pheasant" I had said, annoyed. "Besides, the babies buggy is in the boot."

I live in a rural farming community and people here don't much like foxes. Entire evenings are spent by some down the pub comparing and contrasting the various methods for keeping them away from the chicken pens at night. There are "Fight prejudice, fight the hunting ban" posters and car stickers everywhere, and I have even seen a dead fox draped menacingly over a local road sign, its head dangling like some sort of medieval talismanic warning.

Consequently I did not pay too much attention when - a few years back - I saw a small fox lying dead on the road to town, it's body smashed and broken on the sticky tarmac. It was a hot hot day, I had my window wide open and I was driving to the mother and baby group where I volunteered as a breastfeeding peer supporter. My youngest was still a baby herself, cooing and dribbling and sucking on her tiny fist in her car seat next to me. Suddenly I felt a drop of something wet hit the top of my jaw just below my right ear. I looked up and saw that my rear view mirror also had a tiny splatter of pinkish red at its bottom corner. It was strange I suppose, but I didn't think much more of it untill gradually I began to become aware of an unfamiliar but distinctive smell that seemed to increase in intensity whenever I moved my head. Odd. And then - of course - I remembered the fox, lying directly in the line of my right sides wheels, blood and entrails spilling out like stuffing from its open belly.

The aroma of dead fox is hard to shake. I know because I tried. I washed and scrubbed and bathed and sprayed, but still the unmistakable smell lingered on, seeming eventually to envelope my entire being. Week after week I retraced the journey back to my mother and baby group and I can state with absolute conviction that there is nothing more guaranteed to make a new mother clutch her small baby tighter to her bosom and start to edge away into a corner than a breastfeeding supporter wailing "Sniff me, sniff me! Do I still smell of fox guts to you?" at the group facillitator.

Eventually of course the smell faded and went, but I can still now conjure up that salty musky tang if I concentrate hard enough - it will be indelibly stamped on my olfactory memory forever more. It reminds me of a time in summer in which my last baby was small. Of being so delighted to finally have a daughter. Of spending time with a group of women who are still my friends now, all of us with our new babies, going for picnics, for walks in the park, and for tea and cake at the local cafe. It is not an uncommon question to be asked what is, for you, an evocative smell and my answer of dead fox is not really a socially acceptable one I know.

But it is the truth nevertheless.

Gappy goes to London (Cybermummy 2010)

2010-07-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

The evening before Cybermummy I took a train for the first time in years to London Paddington. I approached the ticket office at my journeys starting point like an eager puppy, my huge bag swinging heavily against my legs as I heaved it off my shoulder. "I want to go to London" I said breathlessly to the man selling tickets from behind the glass partition. He was wearing what can only be described as an expression of monumental boredom, although I did also - I'm sure - see a slight look of alarm pass quickly over his face as he considered this shining eyed, slightly over excited woman in front of him. As he handed me my ticket however, accompanied by a gentle explanation as to how it also allowed me to travel on the tube, his features quickly settled back into their obviously familiar arrangement of weary indifference. He had, it seemed, come to the reassuring decision that I was merely a harmless imbecile as opposed to an unhinged, dirty great bag carrying, maximum security escapee.

I got to Paddington, took the tube to Waterloo - hot air blasting up in my face from the tunnels like a hairdryer - and from there made my way on foot down to the South Bank. The atmosphere was like a carnival. The evening sun was still shining, the enormous ferris wheel that is the London Eye loomed excitingly up ahead and there were happy, relaxed looking people outside all the cafes and pubs celebrating the end of the working week. I walked across the road towards the little food market where an old friend of mine has a stall selling fairly traded olive oil and spices. All the smells mingled into one delicious warm spicy bready aroma as I tried to count how many different languages I could hear being spoken. Somewhere in the distance a small brass band was playing some New Orleans style jazz music and it all just seemed to me in that moment to be as perfect a city scene as one could ever hope for. I hung about the market for a while then helped my friend to pack up her stall. As the sun began to dim we made our way slowly back to the to the small flat that she shares with her Palestinian husband and baby son.

The next morning I was awake before the baby. Butterflies flitting in my stomach, I showered, dressed and made a cup of tea. My friend got up bleary eyed to see me off and I hugged her tightly goodbye before heading out in the morning sun to the tube station and hopping on the eastward bound Piccadilly line to Earls Court. A short walk from there to the Ibis Hotel and that was it. No going back, no running for the hills. Cybermummy had officially begun.

It was all very much in stark contrast to the slightly bohemian, international feel of the South Bank the night before. Every credit to the women who had obviously worked incredibly hard to bring it all together - it was without doubt extremely well organised. It looked smart and professional, everything happened when it was supposed to, the food was good and the time-table was clear. The freebies were plentiful and the PR's and company representatives were out in force. It was..... slick.

I however am not slick and if I'm honest the blatant commercialism bothered me. I don't have a view on what anyone else chooses to do on their own blog - it is their space and their business and we are all free to take from blogging what we will - but I personally don't like having people try to sell me shit, and I'm not interested in being used to sell shit for other people either. There are obviously many cynical company big-wigs out there who feel that mummy bloggers are a prime market for milking - there was even a babies bottle in our swag bags - and for me that side of things just left a slightly off taste in the mouth.

I have also never been required to 'network' before. Turns out I'm shit at it. I met some lovely lovely people but they were mostly people with whom I had made a virtual connection anyway and so already felt some affinity with. My poor blue 'business' cards were left sadly redundant as I discovered that I couldn't quite bring myself to press them onto people I had had no contact whatsoever with other than a two minute schmooze over a cupcake. I think in Twitter speak that that could possibly be referred to as a #putyourselfouttherefail. Ah well. I was clearly never destined to be an internet rock star anyway.

No. The highlight of the day by far in my opinion was listening to blog posts being read out by the authors themselves. There is something incredibly moving about hearing a blogger read their own post in their own way, using their own emphasis, their own meaningful pauses, and their own real emotion. Even posts that I had read before in their published form and so recognised straight away came strangely alive for me when I heard them spoken out loud by the women who had written them. It gave a real glimpse into the wealth of talent that is out there in the blogosphere and it was at this part in the proceedings more than any other that I felt a genuine kinship with my fellow women bloggers. Real womens lives and real womens experiences were laid bare with such beauty and raw honesty and I was struck by the strength of my response. We have so much more in common than we often think.

What else? Well.. I also discovered that I am a veritable platinum mine of information when it comes to the all important subject of the lyrics of pop songs released from the nineteen eighties onwards. My fellow pub quizzers were gasping in what I imagined was, ahem... sheer admiration at my recognition of the poetic talents of the likes of JLS, Luther Vandross and Kylie. Um... I also won a prize. Oh, and there is now a picture of my (clothed) arse on Tara Cains blog for anyone who's interested.

Bang go the last vestiges of my anonymity ;-)

Winter Winds

2010-07-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

I realise this may be a bit of a lazy post seeing as the words I am about to write are not my own. I wish they were though - this is the most beautiful song I have heard in an age. The whole album is wonderful actually so if you're looking for something new to listen to, may I suggest Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons. You can click HERE to hear their song Winter Winds, the lyrics of which I have taken the liberty of writing out for you below to read:

As the winter winds litter London with lonely hearts
The warmth in your eyes swept me into your arms
Was it love or fear of the cold that led us through the night?
For every kiss your beauty trumped my doubt

And my head told my heart
Let love grow
But my heart told my head
This time no, this time no

We'll be washed and buried one day my girl
And the time we were given will be left for the world
The flesh that lived and loved will be eaten by plague
So let the memories be good for those who stay

And my head told my heart
Let love grow
But my heart told my head
This time no, this time no

The shame that sent me off from the god that I once loved
Was the same that sent me into your arms
And pestilence has won when you are lost and I am gone
And no hope, no hope will overcome

But if your strife strikes at your sleep
Remember spring swaps snow for leaves
You'll be happy and wholesome again
When the city clears and sun ascends

And my head told my heart
Let love grow
But my heart told my head
This time no, this time no

Jobs For The Girls

2010-06-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

Or a quick employment update.

I have recently started paid work again for Women's Aid. One of our family support workers left to work for another Women's Aid group (one that is still a collective as opposed to a hierarchy) so I have been drafted in to cover her hours for three months over the summer. It is actually supposed to be a twenty five hour a week job - I can only do eighteen hours because of my childcare responsibilities and yet they still employed me, so I guess that means they either really rate my work or that they were just plain desperate. Who knows.

Anyway, a more permanent version of the same post has been advertised. I say permanent, it's actually only a one year fixed term in order to allow for an easy fall guy when it comes to the fairly inevitable 're-structuring' that is likely to happen in the nearish future to the refuge team. We've already seen it happen with the community team. But still, I have applied for it. A job for a year is a job for a year. At least if I get it I'll be doing the job I love, gaining valuable experience, and buying myself more time to find something else which hopefully will be permanent.

I e-mailed my application form to my boss yesterday. And today my colleague whom I work extremely closely with for two days a week went to sift through the applications in order to help select for interview. I have to say, it feels a bit weird. I'm essentially applying for my own job, and my colleague is the one who is not only judging my application form but who will be (if I am selected for interview) amongst others on the interviewing panel.

Now I am not guaranteed to get this job, even though I am providing the temporary cover. A lot of experienced people may have applied for it, and the way I'm feeling at the moment it is perfectly possible that I will simply clam up at the interview and forget everything I ever knew about how to effectively support women and children in refuge. I have been told in the past that I interview well, but I'm ridiculously nervous about this whole process. I imagine it's pretty tough for my colleague aswell. We have a good working relationship, but she has to remain completely impartial - not easy I guess. I have so far resisted holding onto her ankles and snivelling, but I'm unsure as to how much longer I can last - I really want this job. It will mean aswell as everything else that I can put the book-keeping on hold and no longer have to deal with Naked Boss - something of a bonus, I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, this is just a short post (for me.) I've had an intense day at work and I'm on call tonight so I should get to bed early in case I'm woken in the wee hours. Please keep your collective fingers crossed for me. I'll keep you posted as to how it all goes.

A Woman of a Certain Age. Or See You at Cybermummy?

2010-06-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

I was born in the late hot summer of 1975. I have the scars to prove it. Cold metal forceps dug deep into baby soft flesh, tugging, pulling, splitting the skin. My poor mother. She was only nineteen.

Very soon I will be Thirty Five. And what I want to know is, how the hell did that happen? My eldest son will soon be twelve - is due to start secondary school in September - and still I don't feel so very much different from the young girl trying desperately to give off an air of sophisticated worldly wisdom in the hopes of fooling the circling predators on her own first day of secondary school.

I can remember once when I was about sixteen, standing in the open doorway of my best friends living room. I was leaning lazily with my head against the door frame, chewing in a carefully cultivated 'whatever' sort of manner on cola flavoured Hubba Bubba. Her mother (who can only have been about thirty two herself - younger than I am now) was watching a Tina Turner video. We were contemptuous, my friend and I. After a short discussion we came to the conclusion that Tina Turner was failing abysmally in her duty to "grow old gracefully." I couldn't for the life of me work out why my friends mother was so annoyed.

I keep waiting for the day to arrive when I feel like a proper grown up. Perhaps it will be the morning of my thirty fifth birthday. Perhaps that will be the day when I wake up and suddenly, doing the correct and responsible thing will have become second nature and I won't have to think about it anymore. I won't have to think to myself, "Hmmm, what would a responsible adult do in this situation? O.k. I'll try that then" because I will have stopped feeling like a beginner trapped in an experienced adults body. And just perhaps, on that fine morning, it will all start to feel a little less fraudulent. A little less of a confidence trick. Perhaps eh.

In the meantime though, it seems that there are a whole host of other things to do with the aging process that I should have been worrying about, only wasn't. A few recent happenings have conspired to make me begin to suspect that this is the case. The first was a conversation that I had with my friend and neighbour, a woman in her late twenties with three young children. She worked as a hairdresser before she had her kids and the other day she said to me ( while simultaneously flicking her long straightened hair over her shoulder) something along the lines of:
"Of course I'll just have to make the most of having my hair like this while I can still get away with it."
Me, in typically intelligent fashion: "What?"
Her: "Well you know... once you get to a certain age......

The second was my six year old son rolling his eyes at me in the car today and saying: "Not Lady Gaaaaagaaaaaa again mum. Can't we listen to some David Bowie?" Now I am not generally a lover of pop music but I do love Lady Gaga unashamedly. She's actually a very talented woman I think, a proper musician, and also she's a bit strange. What's not to like? But today, looking at my sons expression which seemed clearly to state that he considered it best just to humour me, it suddenly struck me that perhaps it really isn't appropriate for a nearly thirty five year old woman to be driving along with her stereo on a bit too loud singing Pokerface at the top of her voice. Perhaps my fellow villagers think me unseemly. Oh dear.

The third thing is all this talk of what to wear to Cybermummy. What to wear? I was going in the hope that somebody might be able to teach me how to work my bloody computer. And in anticipation of meeting some interesting, like minded women too of course. I hadn't given that much thought as to what I was going to wear. But here's the thing - amongst all this talk of what to wear, the main concern seems to be that one doesn't end up looking too "muttony", which I'm presuming is a derivative of the expression 'mutton dressed as lamb.' Now my every day get up tends to be a t-shirt and jeans tucked into a pair of slightly battered biker boots. It's comfortable, I like it, and it's probably what I would have worn to Cybermummy, only now of course I'm starting to worry whether it might not be a bit "muttony." It's definitely a bit scruffy. Perhaps I will find that I'm able to 'network' so much more successfully if I wear something.... well I don't know. Something else.

Of course I'm tempted just to say what a load of old bollocks. Mutton dressed as lamb is an appalling expression (is there an equivalent saying for men? Thought not.) But if I said that I wouldn't be being entirely honest, because the fact is I do care about how I come across to other people. So in the absence of a meet and greet photo post which I have noticed others putting up on their non-anonymous blogs in time for Cybermummy, I will simply say, on the day just look out for a woman who's completely inappropriately dressed and trying desperately to act her age. That'll be me.

;-) See you there.

The Bad Mummy Moments Carnival Goes Live!

2010-06-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

So here we are! I am quite excited to be finally presenting the Bad Mummy Moments Carnival in all its (gory) glory. A huge thank you to everyone who has participated and submitted a post - it's been so enjoyable reading them all and I have also managed to discover some really fantastic new blogs in the process. Sooo without further ado, I reckon we'll start.

First up we have How to be a consistent single parent or not by Slummy Single Mummy. I loved this post. It was really funny but it also touched on stuff that I think a lot of parents sometimes worry about. After all is it really possible for anybody to ever be 100% consistent?

Next is Notes From Home with Coping with four children under six. I have to say that although parts of this post made me laugh out loud (fake poo is always going to be a winner for me) I actually felt like lying down in a darkened room after reading it. This is one brave woman.

Then we've got Travels With my Nine Year Old and her post, Age Appropriate Reading. MummyT tells her 'cringy conversation with your child' story with style and aplomb.

Next up we have Bloggertropolis and his post Dropping the Baby. I think almost every parent can tell a similar story to this one. I've certainly experienced one or two of those heart in the mouth moments with my children and can remember feeling sick for the rest of the day. Horrible.

Notes From Lapland is next with her hilarious post I am a Stick. I could completely relate to this one too. In fact I would go so far as to say that I am the master of having entire conversations with my children while nine tenths of my brain is actually focused on something else entirely.

Next is New Mummy with her post which is actually called Bad Mummy Moment. It is a good example of how we can let a genuinely innocent mistake make us feel unnecessarily guilty, even when we know logically that it isn't our fault.

Then we have The Babbling Mummy and her post (which also made me laugh out loud) Mummy I'm Thirsty. If you fancy a giggle and you have a strong stomach, then this is the post for you.

I remembered this post by It's a Small World After All from when it was first published. I loved it then and I love it now. I just think her children sound so ace. Click here for On Mice Ice-rinks and Sweeping Chimneys. You will find all sorts of ideas for games to keep your little ones amused!

Now Mommy Has a Headache is my kind of woman. Read her post Ahoy There Matey! on how to throw a kids birthday party without having a nervous breakdown (hopefully.) Also, I know strictly speaking that this poem hasn't anything to do with the theme of my carnival - MHAH didn't ask to submit it either - but I read this poem on her blog and it is so bloody brilliant that I'm just going to have to include a link to it here. Do yourselves a favour and read THIS. I'm going to give it to my daughter to read when she comes of age.

Next up is Tiddlyompompom with her post: Tiddlyompompom thinks it's time to change her ways. Read this post for some refreshing role reversal.

Frugal Family next with her post about swapping her child with someone elses in the supermarket (Ha! says a smug Gappy - at least I've never done that. Ahem... I think...) Read What's the Most Embarrassing Thing You Have Done as a Parent here.

Then we have TattieWeasle and Mummy are you a Saint (or why I will never be canonised) All I can say is Hahahahahahahaha! If all else fails, threaten them with dog poo.

The next post is a more serious one - This Parenting Lark isn't too Easy from Mummy From the Heart. It certainly isn't. I found this post so touching. What a hard time we give ourselves for not being perfect.

Next up is Babyrambles with her post If Supernanny Spent the Day in my House. If Supernanny spent the day in my house she'd be needing her smelling salts and a stiff gin before we'd even got so far as to set the table for lunch.

A Muse Inner Me next. Her post, Creme de la Creme aka Bad Mummy Moments comes complete with photographic evidence of what can happen when you leave a toddler alone with a full pot of sudocreme (clue: it's very funny as long as it's not happening to you.)

Then we have Alex Late Enough with her post My Day in Bullets and it's Not Over Yet. A crappy day condensed into bullet point form. Genius. Next time I have a crappy day, I'm going to try that.

Bare Naked Mummy next with a post that had me nodding vigorously in agreement: I'm Not an Alpha-Mummy and I Don't Care. Amen to that sister.

The next post is from Pants With Names. It's actually from her Brits In Bosnia archives and is entitled A Mistress of Spin. The post skillfully shows how what sort of mother you are perceived to be can be "all in the presentation." Tsk. These so called uber mummys - all style over substance you know.

Typecast is next with her post Buzzing. This post was a valuable insight for me into what it might be like for a child to experience ADHD, which is something I know very little about.

Our penultimate post is from Rosie Scribble with her piece entitled A Bad Mummy Moment or Two. What is it about children and bookshops eh?

Last but definitely not least we have Musings of a Mother with her fantastic post How Many Council Workers Does it Take to Dig Out a Stupid Mummy? What can I say except read this post. It will make you laugh and laugh (and shake your head a bit) and then laugh some more. I do declare MOAM the winner of the Bad Mummy Moments Carnival with this legendary post. She is to wear a virtual tiara for the rest of the month and shall be receiving a special prize in the next week or two.

Anyway thanks again to everyone who has participated in the Bad Mummy Moments Carnival. I have laughed and I have cried, and now I think that I'd better go and tackle my laundry mountain so that my children might actually have some clean clothes to wear tomorrow. xxx

Some People Shouldn't be Allowed to Have Children...

2010-06-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

The other day while I was lolling idly on my sofa reading the supplement magazine that comes with my weekend paper, I came across something that genuinely frightened and appalled me. Now I am, if I'm honest, the sort of person that often tuts at articles in the newspaper - it is a rare day indeed that I find myself short of things to tut at - but it is not often I find an article that makes me balk in quite the way this one did.

The article - written by Jenny Kleeman - was about an American woman named Barbara Harris who runs a charity in the US called Project Prevention. Now Barbara Harris is of the belief that some people shouldn't be allowed to have children and has therefore made it her lifes mission to try to prevent them from doing so. So convinced is she of the rightness of her mission and the efficacy of her methods that she is now intent on exporting Project Prevention to the U.K. In fact she has recently spent time here, trawling our most deprived areas, dropping leaflets, talking to local people and making the most of various media opportunities with a view to spreading the word, managing to bag herself a wealthy British donor in the process.

What Harris does essentially is buy peoples fertility. She pays people to get sterilised. Almost all of the people whom she offers money to in return for their ability to have children are women. Women with drug and alcohol problems. Her website claims that her goal is to "reduce the number of substance exposed births to zero." Harris herself has been directly quoted as saying that she and her charity are "preventing child abuse."

It's an easy throw away comment to make isn't it? 'Some people shouldn't be allowed to have children.' I've heard it said many a time. I've seen it written in the comments sections of other peoples blogs in response to some awful story or another. Hell, I've probably even said it myself without really thinking. But now here we have a woman who has taken that common knee-jerk reaction and is doing her best to put it into practice (or at least to put her own ideas about what it might mean into practice) and the horrifying implications of what the impact might be on real peoples real lives begin to become clear.

Personally I choose to avoid the obvious comparisons with the Nazi eugenics programme that have been made by other critics of Project Prevention. I find them a little bit crass to be honest and I worry that others may find them offensive. I also think that Harris' complete and utter lack of even basic ethics are plain for any thinking person to see and so I will not focus long on those either. Instead what I would like to look at are her beliefs and aims themselves.

Harris believes that if you are an addict then you have no right to become a parent. There seems to be no space in her world view for ideas of redemption and recovery. Becoming a mother is an extremely meaningful occurrence in a womans life and can be the catalyst for all sorts of positive changes in her habits and behaviour. This can be true for any woman (I'm sure we can all think of changes that we might have made in our lifestyles for the sake of our children) but comes all the more sharply into focus when you consider that former addicts will often cite their children as being the main motivating factor in their decision to kick their habits.

Harris believes that she is preventing child abuse, but the deliberate infliction of harm upon children cuts across class and social barriers. Why then is she only concentrating her efforts on the most deprived and run-down areas of Britain and the U.S? Homing in on some of the poorest, most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of our society and coercing them into becoming sterile does nothing to reduce the appalling rates of physical and sexual abuse of our societies children. If a woman gives birth to a baby who is suffering from neo-natal abstinence syndrome, (or who in plain English is going through the symptoms of withdrawal) the harm inflicted on that child is not the result of deliberate violence or malice on the part of the mother, but rather her inability to manage her addiction during pregnancy. It is a terrible thing by anybodies standards, but not the same as deliberate child abuse.

Harris believes that she has the right to decide who is worthy of the gift of parenthood and who is not. She has amassed serious funding and is garnering a degree of credibility amongst some professionals involved in child protection, aswell as a lot of serious opposition. Where will the line be drawn? How about women who are addicted to anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drugs that are legally prescribed by their doctors? How about women who smoke? Or who live below the poverty line and so are unable to provide their children with everything they need? How about women who have mental health problems, or a significant chance of passing on a debilitating and hereditary disease or disability? What about women who have a history of being abused themselves as lots of addicts do? Where will it end?

For those of you who think that Harris may have a point and that she is being unfairly lambasted by a gutless media (and a rather mediocre blogger) I would ask you to consider her next plan for Project Prevention. She intends to go to Haiti and pay women food stamps for their fertility. I quote: "Women in Haiti are having children they can't even feed, so why are they getting pregnant?" She thinks African women who are HIV positive shouldn't be allowed to have children either.

Like I said.... where will it end?

But Hang On... YOU Crashed Into ME!

2010-06-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

It's lovely, my local town. You take a ten minute drive away from my house, up out of a valley and down a long and winding road with stunning views out over green hills and fields, and you're there. It's colourful and interesting with just the right amount of charming and eccentric thrown in. Full of independent shops and local produce, it has a real close-knit community feel to it. The post-office workers ask after your children and the woman who works in the second hand bookshop keeps books back for you that she thinks you'll be interested in.

Down the bottom of town is a row of really lovely (but overpriced) shops - mostly independent and family owned. There is a gorgeous cook-ware shop selling everything from heavy cast iron Le Creuset pans to rows and rows of tiny pots of food colouring pastes in every shade of every colour imaginable. There is a drapers with samples from floor to ceiling of beautiful silks and fabrics (you can hear the sewing machines gently whirring upstairs) and an interiors shop full of locally thrown pottery and hand made furniture. There is also an extravagantly upmarket clothes shop to which people have been known to travel from London when there is a sale on.

Now much as I hate to generalise, there is a certain type of woman can often be seen parking her extremely posh and unnecessarily large vehicle in one of the free parking spaces that lie facing onto both sides of the one way street on which these shops are situated. With her designer sunglasses perched elegantly atop her head and great clouds of perfume wafting in her wake, her entire demeanour screams, "I am expensive!!! My husband works away!!! I win dammit!!!"

Yesterday I had an ill child at home and some essential errands to run, so my next door neighbour kindly let my son snuggle up in his pyjamas on her sofa while I quickly made the trip into town. Driving slowly up the aforementioned one way street, I could see only one empty parking space that had been made impossible to get into due to a woman in a BMW X6 straddling one of the white lines that marked it, essentially taking up two parking spaces. I was anxious to get back to my boy and so in a bit of a hurry, stopped my car, got out, and politely asked the woman in the BMW to please move over slightly so I could pop my car in next to her. I got back into my car intending to reverse it out of the way in order to allow her to re-park, but by this time other cars had driven up behind me, so I was unable to move back untill they had all passed. Obviously annoyed by my effrontery at having asked her to move in the first place, the woman in the BMW then reversed huffily out of the parking bays without looking and, despite my frantic beeping, drove straight into the drivers side of my tiny Clio. Shocked, I drove forwards, stopped further up the hill and got out. The woman and her two passengers had also got out of their vehicle and looked about to walk off in the other direction. I walked quickly towards them. One of them turned to me with a false, spiteful eyed smile and said:

"I see you found somewhere else to park then."
Me: "Um... you've just backed into my car. My driver door's all dented."
Driver: "Well I didn't feel anything"
Me: "But come and look at my car!"
Driver: (walking up the road with her expensive friends to survey the damage, and then asking incredulously) "And that's just happened has it?"
Me: "Yes! I'm not lying for goodness sake. You just backed into me. You know you did. Didn't you hear me beeping?"
Driver: (raising her voice) "Yes, so I stopped. Anyway, you knew I was going to reverse. You didn't move out of the way! Pretty bloody stupid thing to do if you ask me!"
Me: "There were people behind me. I couldn't move out of the way. You would have known that had you been looking, which is what I presumed you would do. Most people tend to before reversing I find."
Drivers friend: (with same false spiteful smile as before) "Well I certainly didn't feel anything either, and for a dent that big I think we probably would have don't you?"

To be honest I was starting to feel a bit out of my depth. Already shaky from having had an (albeit minor) bump, I was now faced with three hostile women who were not only flatly denying what was obviously true, but who were also now openly sneering at both me (I had barely had time to brush my hair that morning) and my slightly grubby, bashed up car (complete with screwed up fruit gum wrappers all over the dash.) In the end the driver reluctantly gave me her details and they walked off, their heels clicking down the pavement, the drivers friend suddenly turning around to administer a parting shot:

"So do you want the details of two witnesses who didn't feel anything happen then?"

It was one of those situations where you think of about a million ways in which you could have handled it better - only about half an hour later. But in that moment as I stood there in the street watching them disappear in a trail of over-dressed nastiness into the clothes boutique, all I could think was:

"But hang on. You crashed into me..."

Roll up, roll up! It's The Bad Mummy Moments Carnival!

2010-06-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know what you're all thinking. What's with the picture? Not exactly seasonal is it Gappy? But please bear with me, for all will soon be revealed....

You see I have (after some fairly perfunctory how-to research) decided to host a carnival. I thought that perhaps it would be a good way to help us bloggers come together and discover some new authors, and that also the theme, "Bad Mummy Moments" (don't snigger, it took me bloody ages to come up with that) might provide us all with some laughs and reassurance along the way. I suppose that strictly speaking I should have called it "Bad Parenting Moments" but that didn't have quite the same alliterative ring to it, so "Bad Mummy Moments" it is, although of course anyone who would like to join in is more than welcome.

Soooo if you would care to write (or already have) a post detailing your finest slackest hour, simply leave a link to it in the comments section or e-mail it to me ~~so that I can feel so much better about myself~~ No! I mean so that we can all support each other and take comfort in the shared knowledge that there is no such thing as a perfect mother - and that as long as we are genuinely doing our very best - then that is good enough. Your post can be humorous, thoughtful, poetic, or whatever you feel. The carnival will go live on Thursday 24th June and the author of my favourite post will receive a special prize...

And so back to the picture. That picture actually accompanied one of the first posts that I ever wrote. I have decided to re-publish it here as my own contribution to the Bad Mummy Moments carnival as I distinctly remember worrying at the time that the drawing of satanist snowmen might just be considered reasonable justification by my sons teacher for a discreet wee call to social services... I give you:

Sinister Seasons Greetings

Tis the season to be jolly... And with that in mind presumably, my sons were asked by their teachers a while ago to design christmas cards, which could then be printed out and bought by parents wishing to send personalised seasons greetings to family and friends. I gave the school what seemed an inconceivable amount of money, in advance, for four packs of five.

Today Eldest Son comes out of school grinning proudly and gives me a stack of cards with what appears to be some sort of evil snowman on them. On closer inspection, one can see the snowman is carrying a forked staff, and is sporting sharp red horns. He is surrounded by ice blue snowflakes, and if you look really closely you can see a vague smudge of red around the mouth, as if he had failed to scrub up properly after feasting on bloodied corpses. The 'Merry Christmas' written on his body looks like an oddly obscure threat. 'We could send one to Grandma' chirrups Eldest Son happily.

Now Eldest Sons favourite song is Monty Pythons 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'. His favourite and most oft repeated lyric (regularly sung with gusto whilst zapping aliens on the computer) is: 'Always look on the bright side of death. Just before you draw your terminal breath'...

Ever wonder if perhaps you're doing something wrong?

CBeebies is for Girls. Salami is for Boys.

2010-06-11T02:48:00.000-07:00

We are going through a funny phase in our house at the moment, or at least the youngest is. She has become inexplicably convinced that everything in her world can be categorised and sorted into two distinct camps - the boy camp and the girl camp. Everything is either for boys or for girls and woe betide anyone who is caught doing or touching anything that she considers to be outside the boundaries of their gender based confines. Extracts from recent conversations include:

"CBeebies is for girls. It's not for boys. Not for boys with short hair anyway" (WTF?)

(Pointing at a strange man in the street who is daring to wear white trainers with a small dark pink motif) "Look mummy, that man is wearing giiiirrrls trainers!"

(Looking suspiciously at some new foodstuff) "That looks bisgusting. I think that must be for boys" (I am ashamed to say that that one made me laugh. A lot.)

The thing is, it's all getting a bit random. It started off predictably enough with the obvious gender stereotypes being applied to colours and toys and the like, but these days anything - food, inanimate objects, words even - can be assigned masculine or feminine status by my three year old daughter. She is the worlds self-appointed leading authority on what is supposedly for boys and what is for giiiirrls.

Where is it all coming from? Before I had children I was convinced that gender was, for the most part, socially constructed. As a mother I am now less convinced by that argument, but not much less. I still think that boys and girls simply learn very early on what is expected of them in terms of demeanour and behaviour and that no matter how much we as parents try to guard against gender stereotyping, our children are still receiving messages about what it means to be either masculine or feminine from many different sources. It is a very human trait to seek approval by behaving in ways that you know are expected of you. Some of the earliest lessons we learn are in how to tow the line. But still... CBeebies is just for girls???

So I have started gently challenging my daughter when she makes these sweeping declarations. I ask her why she thinks girls shouldn't like the blue Power Ranger and why salami is only for boys, but her reaction is simply to look at me as if to say, 'Good lord I really have got my work cut out with you haven't I...'

Do you believe that gender differences are to a more or lesser extent innate? Do you go out of your way to avoid gender stereotyping at home? Is there a limit to how much we as parents can do? And how the hell has my daughter got it into her head that salami is boy food?!

An Award and a Mini Interview

2010-06-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

I have been sent this award by the lovely and inspiring Technobabe. I rather love the picture, but that is not really the point. The point is that Technobabe gave it to me. I'm chuffed because she is - in my opinion - a very fine blogger. Although I have never met her (she lives somewhere in middle America) we have over the last few months developed the sort of unique connection that comes from reading and commenting regularly on someone elses blog and having them do the same on yours. Funny, isn't it, how you can never have met someone and yet feel you in some way know them.... Anyway, the first post of hers that I ever read was this one. I was blown away by it and I think it's fairly safe to say that I was hooked from that point on. Go and check it out. It will make you laugh and cry simultaneously, which is a rare thing.

Along with the award also came a set of questions - a mini interview if you like. Here they are complete with my answers for anyone who's interested:

Q.1: If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing it that way? If you are not anonymous do you wish you had started out anonymously so you could be anonymous now?

A: My blog is anonymous(ish.) I was completely anonymous when I started - and still the vast majority of my friends and family do not know that I write a blog. A few people know that I write one but do not know where to find it, which leaves just two people in my life who have read it - one with my permission - one without. I much prefer anonymity. I've heard other bloggers say that it's best to write as if everyone you know was reading, but if I did that I'd never write a thing!

Q.2: Describe one incident that shows your stubborn side.

A: I don't really think that I am particularly stubborn (although I am now imagining my mother shouting, "Ooh Gappy, may you be forgiven!" at her computer screen.) I was fairly recalcitrant as a child by all accounts, but I think that I have mellowed and become far more given to compromise as I've got older. I don't know - I suppose you'd have to ask the people who actually have to deal with me on a regular basis!

Q.3: What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?

A: Bloody hell. I'm going to have to take this question literally I think, because any other way just makes my brain hurt. Um... o.k. Well... I see a youngish looking woman with long wavy reddish hair, fair skin and grey eyes. She's slim and about 5foot 4inches tall, and is often sporting a slightly dishevelled, tired look. I call it the 'Vaguely Harassed Mum of Three.'

Q.4: What is your favourite summer cold drink?

A: Anything fizzy. I like to mix fruit juice with sparkling mineral water, or sometimes I buy Schloer which is kind of a poor womans Aqua Libra. I love Aqua Libra but can never seem to find it anymore. Does that make me sound a bit Waitrose?

Q.5: When you take time for yourself, what do you do?

A: I blog. Blogging is my 'me' thing. I also like to read novels although I have done far less of that since I discovered blogging, which for some reason makes me feel slightly guilty. About four times a year I go to a place called Hay-on-Wye for the day. It is the second hand bookshop capital of the world and you could safely say that it was my special place - my Mecca if you like. I wrote a post about it complete with photos a while back. You can find it here.

Q.6: Is there something you still want to accomplish in your life? What is it?

A: This one's easy. My goal at the moment is financial independence. Independence from the state and independence from any future potential partner. I want to have a job that earns enough that I can support myself and my family reasonably comfortably and that ideally allows us to move to a house that is big enough for our needs (at the moment, my daughter and I have to share a bedroom.)

Q.7: When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the class shy person, or always ditching school? Describe who you were if you were not one of these.

A: I think it would probably be fair to say that I was an underachiever. I was academically very able, but ultimately did not put the work in. By the time I was fourteen or so, I was a chronic and persistent truant. I'll never forget the feeling of elation that went with the realisation that nobody could actually make me go to school. I used to leave the house in the morning wearing my school uniform, but with my normal clothes in my school bag instead of my books. I'd walk to my friends house, get changed, and we'd spend the day smoking packets of ten Silk Cut under the underpass near her house. Happy days.

Q.8: If you close your eyes and want to visualise a very poignant moment in your life, what do you see?

A: I see green hills all around. I am standing beneath an Ash tree with my feet feeling as though they had taken root in the ground. Enormous contractions are sweeping through my body. I am giving birth to my second son.

Q.9: Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people or events?

A: Being anonymous certainly makes it easier for me to share more of my true self in my blog, although I tend to write a mixture of different kinds of posts. I have found that what I write about chops and changes a lot. When I first started blogging, my posts were mostly a mixture of what I hoped were humorous anecdotes about my life and my children, and more serious pieces about being a mother. But I have also found through blogging that I enjoy writing social commentary and I think that a lot of my posts now have that element, often with a feminist slant. I suppose that lately though, my blog has tended towards the more confessional. The really personal posts can be harder to write I find, but they are certainly very cathartic to get out there. I would never want the personal stuff to become the sole focus though - I like to mix it up a bit.

Q.10: If you had the choice to sit and read or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?

A: That would depend totally on my mood. I have one friend in particular who I tend to spend at least an hour on the phone to - although I do tend to multi-task whilst on the phone, even sometimes idly surfing the net whilst talking (naughty I know.) But then again I do love to curl up with a good book too. Could this question be interpreted as one that was really asking whether someone was an extrovert or an introvert? I'm an extrovert with introverted tendencies I think. Although I could be an introvert with extrovert tendencies.... Sigh. Self obsessed? Moi?

Next I have to pass on the award to five other bloggers. So here goes...

Jana from An Attitude Adjustment
Ellie from One Crafty Mother
Jo from Slummy Single Mummy
Liz from But Then I Had Kids

And my mate Victoria aka MODERN DILEMMA

Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to answer these ten questions about yourselves:

Q.1. Inspired by Technobabes last question: Would you describe yourself as an introvert or an extrovert?
Q.2. What is your opinion on reality television?
Q.3. Do you have any phobias?
Q.4. What first attracted you to blogging?
Q.5. Can you name a famous person that you despise and say why?
Q.6. What is your most treasured possession?
Q.7. If you could have any skill in the world, what would it be?
Q.8. What is your favourite novel?
Q.9. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Q.10. Which is your favourite season and why?

Happy blogging. x

Mine's a Lime and Soda

2010-06-03T14:05:00.000-07:00

This post was originally written for Crying Out Now, which is a site that provides a space for women to talk about their struggles with addiction and recovery. I have thought long and hard about publishing it on my own space too, but decided in the end that I would. Comments, as always, are welcome although I will say that gushing affirmations can make me feel uncomfortable. I really don't want to be told I'm brave and amazing for finally making the commitment to recovery that I should have made years ago. On the other hand - for those who are tempted to judge - I would like to say that it could just as easily have been you writing this post and me sitting in judgement.

Up untill quite recently, it never properly occurred to me that I was an alcoholic. I still balk at the term now - not out of any sense of denial, I know full well that I cannot drink moderately or safely - but simply because to say it seems so dramatic. It makes me think of the people I see on the benches in town on my way to work sometimes, drinking Special Brew at 9.00 in the morning. I sometimes find myself fantasising idly about joining them, about throwing all of my many balls straight up in the air and not even bothering to try to catch them again. I am drawn to it like one is to the edge of a cliff or the bank of a deep river. It's terrifying, yet strangely magnetic.

They say that alcoholism is progressive, and I don't doubt it, but I can not remember a time when I drank normally. I can not pin point where I might have 'crossed the line' because I have always drunk to excess. Even as a young teenager I would always be the one passing out in unsuitable places while my friends agonised over what to do with me. From that point on my alcoholism has gone through phases. There have been periods when I have been either drunk or hungover almost all the time. I have experienced black-outs, drunk spirits in the morning, and woken up shaking with the cold sweats. I also spent about six years trying desperately to moderate with varying degrees of torturous success. It was always going to be doomed to failure eventually. True moderate drinkers just are - they don't have to try with all their mental might. These days I make the only reasonable choice left to me, which is to be sober. See? Mine's a lime and soda.

Except when it's a gin and tonic.

You see, this was supposed to be a post all about my sobriety. About how sobriety was a righteous choice that I had made. About how I was done with self sabotage and self pity. It was going to be a post that said fuck the back story, because whether to drink or not is a simple choice to be made forever in the here and now - that talked about how I was never again going to repeat another pathetic story from my childhood because I alone was responsible for my actions - not some demon from my distant past. It was going to be a post about how my sobriety was rooted in the fertile soil of my own power, and about how - for me - there could be no higher power than that.

Except that last night I drank again. A group of us went out for a friends birthday and I could not resist the peer pressure to have a drink. I could not bring myself to spill when my friends asked me why I was not having a cocktail. I attempted a feeble, 'Oh you know, I'm not really drinking at the moment...' only to have it waved away by friends who wanted to see me have a great time. Friends who I have managed to hide so much of myself from. Friends who wanted to go to a club to get drunk and dance and flirt, and who wanted me to join in. So I broke a promise to myself and I did.

And nobody died. We drank cocktails and danced and flirted. It was fun. The only person in the whole world who knew what I was risking was me. But today I feel frightened and shocked. I feel turned inside out because I thought I had being sober pretty much sewn up. I had been completely tee-total for six months. I thought I was learning to trust myself dammit. 'You takes your responsibility, you makes your choices' had become my personal motto, and I still wholeheartedly believe that. I did make a choice last night, but it was the choice to drink. The choice to jeopardise my good life, and by the same token, my childrens good lives. Today it is unthinkable.

So now what? The fact that the night passed without incident is precisely what makes this relapse so very dangerous. How easy it is now for the devil on my shoulder to whisper seductively: "See? What's the problem? You're fine to have a few drinks every now and then. Real alcoholics drink untill they pass out every time they pick up. You can control it now." I can't. I don't want to go into lurid details about my own personal rock bottoms but I know that I can't control my drinking - that I've never been able to control it. I know that I will always be an alcoholic and that the only way I can win is to not feed my body and brain with the substance to which they are addicted.

So this is what I'm going to do: I'm going to get up, dust myself off and keep going in the same sober direction. I'm going to formulate a comprehensive plan as to how I'm going to deal with the next situation in which there is social pressure to drink (if anyone's got any tips I would be most grateful) and I'm going to takes my responsibility and makes my (better) choices. In the end what else is there?

Mine's a lime and soda.

If anyone has been affected by the issues discussed in this post then there are some fantastic blogs out there that deal (amongst other things) with the thorny subject of addiction and recovery. It is by no means a comprehensive list - I'm discovering new stuff all the time - but these are invaluable and really worth reading:

Stephanie over at Baby on Bored
Ellie over at One Crafty Mother
Robin over at Life on its Own Terms
And of course, Black Hockey Jesus

Do You Ever Miss Your Old Life?

2010-06-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

Do you? Ever miss your old life?

It is half term break and my children, as is usual, have spent the first half of it with their fathers. They left Sunday night and so Monday morning - feeling ever so slightly drunk with freedom - I took off down a hot dusty motorway in my little car, turned the radio up loud, and drove for what seemed like forever to see some old friends in another part of the country.

After a couple of hours I turned off the motorway and drove through a major city, coming out the other side into a gradually more genteel and rural setting. I ploughed on through small towns and villages untill I finally came to the small right hand turn off the main road that leads onto some tree lined country lanes, which themselves eventually dwindle after a few twists and turns into little more than a dusty track full of pot holes, the thick mud that for most of the year splatters the bottom of your car, baked pale dry and hard by the early summer sun.

I parked in a shady spot under some trees and got out of my car, opening my boot and heaving my rucksack onto my back. The first familiar sound to greet me was the barking of dogs who came seemingly from all directions to investigate this strange person on their patch. The second was the sound of humans somewhere shouting at the dogs, "Dogs! Be quiet!" I smiled inwardly - for this was a scene that I had heard play out a thousand times in a thousand different places. I looked around at the vehicles and caravans - everything seemed to be in much the same spot as last time - so no-one new had moved on then. Walking up towards my old friends home, a huge converted horse box painted a dark red, I could see that she was sitting outside at a table in the sun making some shutters for the windows of her trailer. She looked up and grinned. It was so lovely to see her, happy and nesting, finally healthily pregnant with her second child after suffering the heartbreak that is recurrent miscarriage for so long.

I spent a lovely couple of days not doing very much really. We had a barbecue and I saw some other friends who were parked up on the same site - one has midwifery exams coming up and so is hard at work on various placements, another is studying for an imminent book-keeping exam. My pregnant friend is actually an author and cartoonist who is - understandably enough - finding it hard to concentrate on anything except her longed for baby. Everyone seemed to be busy with various projects and looking forward to the summer.

I am home now and it is of course wonderful to have my kids back again, but in the same way as always happens when I get back from visiting old friends on traveller sites, I feel a bit of a pang for my old way of life. I miss the sense of community, I miss the camaraderie, I miss the freedom. I miss having close male friends that I don't just socialise with because they are somebodies husband or partner. I miss the festivals in the summer, and the hunkering down next to the wood-burner in the winter. Not that I would go back now - it wouldn't be fair on the children - they are settled in our house and settled at school and we are all now used to hot running water and central heating. Besides there are many many things I don't miss about living on site. It could be hard sometimes, especially in the colder, wetter months. Conflict was always a nightmare to deal with because everyone was living in each others pockets, and then there's the cold hard fact of having to live under the almost constant threat or possibility of eviction. I know that it's easy for me to get all romantic about it when I'm only visiting for two days at the beginning of summer. I know that really I've changed a lot and I've moved on... but... I don't know, just but.

Do you ever miss anything about your old life?

Pornification

2010-05-28T09:10:00.001-07:00

First things first: If there are kids of reading age around, you might want to read this post later. It contains some parts that are not appropriate for children.

I wanted to write a post about the pornification of our popular culture.

But it's not an easy post to write. I have thought about what I want to say and how difficult it is to say it without appearing puritanical or judgemental, and so with that in mind I'm going to begin with a disclaimer: I love good sex as much as the next person. I think that what truly consenting adults choose to do with each other in private is entirely up to them. I am very much pro the sexual empowerment of women and I do not for one minute buy into the notions of shame that surround female sexuality and impede its liberation. Clear? Good. Then I shall begin my post proper...

Years ago I read a book called The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. The essence of its argument was that the more liberated women became in their day to day lives, the greater the pressure became on them to live up to an unachievable beauty ideal. Wolf argued that ever more unrealistic beauty standards caused women to become ever more insecure about themselves thus keeping them firmly in their (inferior) place. How can we move confidently towards true equality, she argued, if we are collapsing under the weight of our own insecurities?

I am really interested in Wolfs idea that as we achieve more freedom in some areas of our lives, we become yet more oppressed in others, and that this serves to redress the balance and maintain the status quo. I believe that there is clear evidence for this in the increasing sexualisation of women and girls and the insidious pornification of our culture.

My how things have changed. When I was a girl growing up in the eighties, we had the odd topless model lurking about on page 3 of the newspaper and people tutting disapprovingly over Madonna singing Like a Virgin on Top of the Pops (god I thought she was amazing.) Now soft-core pornography is everywhere - it's completely mainstream - and totally in your face. I went to the Co-op today to buy some milk. On the newspaper stand just at childs eye level was a picture of a woman on the front cover of a tabloid. She was naked apart from a thong, and posed on all fours. The photograph was taken from behind with her vulva clearly outlined through the thin fabric of the strip of material that covered it. She was contorting uncomfortably, her head twisted over her shoulder in order to pout at the camera. I drove home with the radio on and a song by Taio Cruz came on. In it a female singer called Kesha sang explicitly about taking 'dirty' pictures of herself and sending them to him. It was half past two in the afternoon. My three year old daughter was with me. When did society suddenly deem these things to be appropriate for children?

I'm not a prude. I just think that the encroachment of pornography into our everyday lives sends out messages to young women and girls (and to young men and boys too) that are incredibly damaging. Images and portrayals of women objectified and offered up for mindless consumption, abuse and distort everyones sexuality. We can try to teach our daughters that they have a right to be treated with respect, that they can enter into sexual relationships on their own terms, that they can say no to things which make them feel uncomfortable or turn them off, and that they have the right to claim their own pleasure; but how successful can we be in instilling those values, that self worth, when Every. Single. Day. they are bombarded with music videos and adverts and song lyrics and magazine covers that send out a clear message that they are not worthy of respect - that they are little more than decorative sex toys to be gawped at and played with and used - and that if they want to be considered desirable they'd better just shut up and play along.

Although designed for their pleasure and the reinforcement of their superior status I think that ultimately the ubiquitous peddling of female bodies for titillation and entertainment does men and boys a huge disservice too. As avid consumers of internet pornography and so called 'lads mags' such as Zoo and Nuts, young men just starting out on their own sexual journeys are coming to the table with completely warped expectations. The advice columns of these magazines are full of young men horrified to discover that their girlfriends actually have pubic hair for example. How do they go about insisting that their girlfriend remove it they ask, after all aren't they entitled to a hairless partner? I should imagine that it also comes as a shock for some to discover that a lot of women don't actually want anal sex or to have their faces ejaculated over - that what they are looking for is a real connection and real intimacy and an orgasm or two for themselves thank you very much. Our cultures increasing pornification degrades and devalues sex for both genders. Sex that is devoid of intimacy or love ultimately becomes very unsatisfying for everyone.

Walk down any British high street on a Saturday afternoon and you will see young women everywhere sporting a certain look. It's one we all recognise: Long harshly dyed pale blond hair, heavily fake tanned limbs, pushed up breasts and make-up applied to the lips in such a way as to make them appear swollen and enlarged. Whether they are aware of it or not (and I suspect the majority are not) it is a porn aesthetic that has become steadily mainstream due to so much exposure. In much the same way that bikini waxes designed to remove all or most of the pubic hair became widespread as a result of pornography (actresses in the adult industry remove all pubic hair so as not to impede the view of penetration) so has mimicking the look of a soft porn glamour model now become an everyday fashion choice. I do not blame anyone for attempting to conform to what society makes clear is expected of them but it makes me so sad to see young women obviously spending vast amounts of their money, energy, and time on an effort to make themselves more closely resemble a real life blow-up barbie doll. It just seems such a waste of their resources.

What makes me really angry though is when the growing sexualisation of women and girls is presented as being somehow empowering. Who needs equal pay or anything to be done about the rape conviction rate when we have 'girl power' eh? We live in a post-feminist society apparently. Our bodies are nothing to be ashamed of so why not flaunt them in a Girls Gone Wild video? Pole dancing is fun and a celebration of the female form. "Girls rule, boys drool" cry my eldest sons female classmates as they wiggle around suggestively at the school disco copying the dance moves they have seen performed by supposedly empowered women in endless music videos. Twenty first century women are sexy and unashamed, liberated and in control.

It is a seductive argument. We all enjoy feeling attractive and confident, and being the focus of male attention and desire certainly can give one a superficial sense of personal power. But it is a trick. In the end it is just the same old bullshit wrapped up in different packaging. There is nothing for women to celebrate in the pornification of our culture because ultimately all it does is reinforce the notion that a womans intrinsic worth lies in her ability to attract and please men. Real empowerment and self-esteem come from valuing our skills and achievements. From believing ourselves to be good and capable people who have a positive impact on the lives of others. There is no strength to be found in the commodification of our bodies.

Our cultures pornification is damaging to the self-esteem of women and girls. It is a major step backwards in terms of our journey towards equality. And it doesn't lead to better sex for anybody.

True Blood.

2010-05-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

Those of you that follow me on Twitter will probably already know that I am a huge fan of the American television series True Blood. Written by Alan Ball (who also wrote the amazing Oscar winning film, American Beauty) True Blood is set in the small, conservative Southern town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. Vampires are living amongst human society, surviving on synthetic blood and attempting to integrate and achieve equal rights despite the huge prejudice against them. The story line revolves around the relationship between the two main characters: Sookie Stackhouse - a human waitress with a powerful ability to read minds, and Bill Compton - a five hundred year old vampire.

It is a dark fantasy, richly imagined and blackly comic, sexy and bloody and over the top, and in my opinion one of the very few things actually worth watching on television. Not only is it grippingly entertaining, but it is also far more sophisticated than it may at first appear. The opening credit sequence is nothing short of stunning and could actually work as a short film on its own. Created by Digital Kitchen it uses stereotyped imagery of the rural Deep South, juxtaposing themes of sex, religion, and violence to set the scene and create a deep sense of unease. We see a rickety Lucky Liquor store on a dirt road segueing into glowing crosses that could almost be burning. A white preacher heals a black woman as the rest of the congregation sway and clap. A bar room brawl made murky under red lighting occurs in slow motion. The snippets of film and jerking, sometimes flashing images all culminate in a river baptism, a woman flailing and splashing in the dark as two men dunk her in.

What struck me the most about season one in particular were the observations that it appeared to me to make about female sexuality - in particular the way in which societal judgements and norms are set in place to rigidly control it. It is made clear from the beginning that Sookie Stackhouse is a good, traditional Southern young woman - in fact it is made explicitly clear almost from the start that she is still a virgin. In Bon Temps women who associate with vampires are generally viewed with disaproval and contempt. They are labelled 'fangbangers', and so when a woman who was known to sometimes frequent the vampire bar Fangtasia is discovered dead in her apartment, and a further woman (one of Sookies fellow waitresses) is also found murdered in her home with vampire bite marks on her body, the whisperings around the town are that they had somehow asked for it - that they had 'had it coming.' Of course then the irony is that whiter than white Sookie Stackhouse falls in love with a vampire herself - bestowing unto him her precious virginity - and so sullying her reputation. What is interesting is that the whole town appear to take it upon themselves to be horrified, as if her virtue somehow belongs to all of them and it is up to them as a community to safe-guard it. Meanwhile her brother Jason (who was a sexual partner to both the dead women) behaves like a child in a sweet shop - having sex with every willing woman he can find - and everyone simply smirks and shakes their heads. Boys will be boys after all. Of course it is not long before the body count rises and the murderer is on the hunt for Sookie. The good girl gone bad must pay the ultimate price it would seem.

One of the reasons I like True Blood so much is that it pokes fun at this sexual double standard. It exposes as ridiculous the notion that women can be judged good or bad, deserving or undeserving of violence, based purely on how they choose to conduct their sexual lives. With a cast full of telepaths, shape-shifters, vampires and rednecks True Blood manages to say an awful lot about the nature of inequality and prejudice whilst at the same time spinning a yarn so riveting, I defy anyone not to become hooked.

Roll on season three. I can't wait.

Do You Believe in Fate?

2010-05-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

Fate.

Do you believe in it?

Or is the whole concept merely an irrational symptom of a very human desire to make sense of the crazy world around us?

With society in general becoming ever more secular, has the notion of fate - of our lives having some pre-destined path - taken up the slack and helped to fill a spiritual void?

I have to say that I balk at the concept of our paths having been already mapped out for us before we even begin the journey. I will not be denied my own agency. I cannot accept that I'm not in control of my own life and that I am simply at the mercy of fates hand; a little cork bobbing helplessly around on the surface of the sea, buffeted this way and that by lifes winds and currents. I believe that I live in choice. That I can make good choices or bad ones, but that either way they are mine. I own them. They are my responsibility. I know that through my own efforts I can change and improve if need be. I know that I am the driving force behind my own destiny.

It is not possible to control every aspect of our lives however. Accidental circumstance can render one person at great disadvantage to another - where in the world you happen to have been born for example - how wealthy your parents are, or even what sort of upbringing you had. Unforeseen catastrophe can strike at any time and we can become the unwitting victims of a purely random tragedy such as a natural disaster, or a violent crime. Are we to believe then that these things are the products of fate, that they are somehow meant to be? When viewed through that lens, doesn't the whole concept of fate and its even more suspect cousin - the idea that we subconsciously choose our own paths - then become a tad offensive? I would not like to try to explain to a mother who had been caught in the crossfire of a civil war and forced to flee with her children to a refugee camp many miles away from her home, that her personal tragedy and my relative comfort and luxury were all part of a grand scheme that was somehow written in the stars.

No. I am happy to accept that my life is made up of some entirely coincidental and random happenstance on the one hand - and my own conscious design on the other. I will not hand over to fate the credit for all that is good in my life and neither will I abdicate responsibility for that which is bad. For the things that I can't control, well... I have been working on my best c'est la vie style shrug for ages. It's still a wee bit unconvincing if I'm honest, but it's coming along.

Single Parenthood... Tales From the Front Line, welcomes all points of view. If you disagree with me, don't be shy. I'm interested in what everybody has to say.

Occasionally I am too sad to write...

2010-05-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I am too sad to write.

I haven't got the energy to think of anything intelligent to say and I haven't the heart to be funny. There is only the day to be done as best I can. I force myself to tie up the niggly little loose ends that have been bothering me. I pay bills and parking tickets and I buy new blades for the lawn mower. I even mow the lawn. I sort out the re-cycling. I wash my hair and do the weekly food shop. I buy the boys new football stickers for their albums and myself some favourite chocolate.

I keep on pushing on because there is no other choice. I am flying this plane - and I'm flying it on my own. And yes, it certainly is liberating, but I don't think I ever truly understood the word responsibility untill I got here. Because there is no-one else to take the wheel no matter how tired or crazy or sad I get. Losing ones nerve is not an option when one is flying solo.

The issue of self disclosure has been on my mind recently. As time goes on my blog becomes a little less anonymous. I let my mother read it, somebody else who has been a part of my life looks for it, finds it, and reads it uninvited. I even go out for an evening with some other bloggers. Words on my computer screen become flesh and blood - I see real women with real lives - and in turn I feel a little more exposed. What to reveal and what to keep hidden when one is now only partially obscured by the screen in front of them?

Writing is the one for me you see. In this small space I can take my sadness or fear or guilt and I can put them somewhere safe. I can do something with them. Something that is healthy and constructive and which does not pickle my liver or alienate my friends.

I set fire to a bridge today. I didn't want to and it made me really sad. So sad that I thought I couldn't write or fly in anything like the right direction. But it turns out that actually I can do both of those things after all because one helps to enable the other. Writing fosters self-reliance.

Apparently the weather's going to be nice this weekend. I think I will take the children out for a treat.

The Cats...

2010-05-18T03:38:00.000-07:00

Unusually for a modern day household, the Gappy residence is a pet free zone. There are no animals at all - not one. Not even a single forgetful little goldfish. The reasons for this are threefold:

1) I don't actually like animals very much. I quite like dogs but that's about it. I don't like anything with a beak. I don't like anything too large (so that's horses and cattle out of the question) and anything even remotely resembling a rodent is a complete and utter no no. The very thought is enough to make me shudder.

2) I have an aversion to faeces. It doesn't matter how often and how convincingly my children look up at me with big soulful eyes and insist that they would look after it if only we could just please please pleeeease get a pet, I know that it would be me who ended up having to deal with said pets shit. Ugh. I have enough responsibilities in my life thank you very much. Cleaning up animal shit is not going to become one of them.

3) Anything plant-like that I have ever owned has been stone dead within three months of coming into contact with me. Seriously, I've so far managed to kill a grand total of four Spider plants and I hear that they're supposed to be practically immortal. I'm secretly worried that if we did get a cute little puppy or some such creature, that it would take one look at me - keel over - and that my children would be left traumatised for ever more. "It was such an adorable little puppy" I imagine them sobbing to their therapists... "And she killed it with her mind..."

I comfort myself with the knowledge that between them, my neighbours appear to have an entire colony of cats, and so my poor deprived children are able to vicariously enjoy all the more palatable aspects of pet ownership through their friends. Cats are everywhere on our street. Everywhere. Sunning themselves on the garden wall, sauntering nonchalantly up the road, tripping you up when you're attempting to lug ten tons of shopping in from the car. They're everywhere I tell you.

They all seem to come out en masse around dusk. One can sense a change in the mood, their collective feline presence becoming sinister, purposeful. They congregate - these glassy eyed feral creatures - slinking and yowling, in my back garden, looking for all the world like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock film. 'Why?' I hear you ask.... Because my back garden has been officially designated the communal cat latrine of course. Why go for a boring poo on your own when you could meet up with all your mates and make an evening of it. Oh yes, if you're a cat and you need to go, Gappys garden is the place to be. Pass it on.

They have even started doing it in broad daylight. I often look up from the sink whilst doing the dishes only to see that an individual cat has sneaked into my garden and is now hovering suspiciously over a patch of grass. I will bang on the window and give it my fiercest look, only to have it stare back in an unconcerned yet vaguely put out manner, as if to say: "Please. Do you mind? Only some of us are trying to have a poo here...." But what really takes the biscuit is that some of the braver ones will then hop up, post poo, onto my window sill, arching their backs and rubbing their ears against the glass, looking at me and meowing contentedly. "Ah that's better, they seem to say. You know I do rather like your garden.." Call me paranoid, but I know when I'm being mocked.

One day I will lose the plot, get dressed up in over sized army fatigues, smear my face with black and green face paint and gather together my sons super-soakers. I will fill them all up and sit and wait silently on my back door step for the sun to go down, and then when I see the cats begin to slink in over the fence I shall laugh maniacally while I drench everything that moves.

Bwahahahaha, take that Tiddles! Litter tray isn't looking quite so dull now is it?

Ahem.

Mugabes Ark

2010-05-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend while sitting at my mothers kitchen table with a cup of tea and the newspaper, an article in the International section caught my eye. It told of how the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe plans to send a "modern day ark" of wild animals taken from a Zimbabwean national park to North Korea as a gift to that countries 'Supreme Leader' Kim Jong-il.

The story seemed one of those everyday coincidences in that I am at present reading David Maines, The Flood - a fictional retelling of the biblical story of Noah. It is a fascinating book in which Noah is depicted as a slightly mad old goat whose 'visions' must be humoured by his loyal and subservient family. When he receives word from Yahweh that there is to be a flood, he sends one of his daughters in law (a tough, cynical character) on a mission to collect some of the more exotic animals that are to be kept aboard the ark. The imagery of her return journey is startlingly beautiful. You are asked to imagine many rafts attached in a line to a boat, snaking out behind it like a 'desert caravan' on a glittering sea, bamboo cages atop the rafts filled with huge cats, gazelles, and monkeys, sailing their way slowly back to Noahs shore under a bright blistering sun.

I imagine that the reality will be a catastrophe. Conservationists are already expressing concerns that two baby elephants will likely not survive what will in fact be an airlift to North Korea, and that there may also be plans to include a pair of endangered rhinos in the mix. The whole idea sounds completely fantastical and frankly, the product of an ill mind. An unimaginably grandiose gift from one megalomaniac to another. I suspect the biblical allusions are not lost on Mugabe - himself a roman catholic - and that they in fact fit in rather nicely with his distorted view of his own omnipotence.

It is all too easy though to dismiss Mugabe as being simply mad and bad. In much the same way as some sought to dismiss the killers of James Bulger as being simply evil - therefore neatly avoiding any obligation to examine the ways in which society as a whole might bear some responsibility for turning out children who were capable of committing such a dreadful crime - so does the world denounce Mugabe in such glib terms as seem to forget that he is in many ways a product of his countries history.

I am no apologist for Robert Mugabe. He has brought a country that was once considered to be the 'bread basket of Africa' to its knees, using violence and intimidation against his own people in order to maintain his grip on power. His policies have created an economic meltdown, with sky high inflation rendering the Zimbabwean dollar completely worthless. But no man comes to rule in a vacuum - context is key if we are to understand how this disaster has come about. Let's not forget that when he first came to power in 1980 he was a democratically elected leader who enjoyed huge popular support. Indeed he was considered by many to be a hero, a man who had both spent time as a political prisoner and been forced into exile as a result of his efforts to liberate his country from white minority rule.

Whatever our abhorrence at the scenes on television of white farmers being violently evicted from their homes and land by Mugabes 'war veterans', it is nevertheless true that Zimbabwes tiny white population did not come by their wealth legitimately. Initially colonized by the British, Rhodesia (as it was then called) quickly found all of its best land appropriated by the white settlers who used all means of oppression at their disposal to create and legislate a system in which they could rule over the black majority. It was a brutal racist system that continued unabated untill 1980, and so the understandable bitterness and resentment felt by the majority of Zimbabweans of course then created the perfect climate for the rise to power of someone like Mugabe who (with a degree of tacit support from some other African leaders) has been able to dismiss all criticism of his land reform policies by other countries as being simply neocolonialist meddling - never mind that all the most profitable farmland has in fact been divvied up amongst his cronies rather than redistributed fairly to the people as promised.

Todays people cannot be held responsible for the actions of their ancestors. But they can be held responsible for continuing to perpetuate a system that is unfair and immoral. Mugabe is happy to still use the emotive language of the anti imperialist freedom fighter that he once was in order to justify his clinging to power by violent means while his terrorised population starve. It is inexcusable. But I also think that it is a mistake for Western countries to dismiss as now past and irrelevant, the horrific legacy of colonialism and the huge part that it still has to play in this and other humanitarian disasters in Africa.

The Delicate Art of Blogging Etiquette

2010-05-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

When I first set up my blog and published my first post, I only really thought about the possibility of people reading it in quite specific, personal terms. As in: am I sure I can live with the fall-out if for some reason Naked Boss discovers it and recognises himself, which of course is never going to happen because no-one who knows me knows I'm writing it and I never use anybodies real name so stop being so paranoid and just write the flipping thing will you.... It didn't occur to me in any sort of concrete way that real people who didn't know me might end up reading it on a regular basis. Of course I realise now how naive that was, but in my defence at the time I had only just got connected to the internet and I didn't have any understanding at all of how the blogosphere worked. In fact I posted for a good month or so just happily oblivious in my own little bloggy bubble, assuming that I was just writing for myself and that because nobody had left a comment, nobody was reading it. I had not yet become acquainted with anything like Stat-counter or Twitter and my blog just felt like my own little private domain. My secret. A clandestine and solitary pursuit, that no-one else was in on.

My first comments came via Noble Savage. She discovered my blog - in particular a post that I had written about the sugar coating of motherhood - liked what she saw and not only left a comment herself, but also put out a link to the post on Twitter, which then had the effect of attracting many more comments and also my first readers. I was terribly excited. Blogging had now been instantly transformed into something else entirely - a mode of communication - rather than simply of self-expression.

I sent NS an e-mail to thank her. I seem to remember gushing all over the place - which no doubt embarrassed her somewhat - before explaining that I was new and wasn't really sure what I was doing and did she have any tips? She sent back a very kind reply explaining (amongst other things) that it was generally considered good form to go and check out the blogs of those people that had left a comment on yours and perhaps also to leave a comment yourself if you felt so inclined.

Almost five months later - although no less of a technical dunderhead - I do have a slightly better idea of how things work. But I still find the whole area around blogging etiquette a complete mine-field. I have, in the main, stuck to NS's advice in the sense that I will always have a look at someones blog if they have bothered to comment on mine. I feel it is only courteous and besides it's a good way to discover interesting new things to read. I am already finding however that when one is time poor it can be a difficult policy to keep up with. For bloggers who receive many comments per post I can imagine that it becomes almost impossible. I find myself worrying at times that I may have unintentionally snubbed someone, only to then feel frustrated because blogging for me is supposed to be about writing. It's supposed to be fun and cathartic, not an exercise in social climbing.

The blogosphere is in some ways a social space though, and it's here that it can become tricky to navigate. Because ultimately - and here's the rub - I am not prepared to read and comment on blogs that I'm not interested in or that I don't think are good, just to be polite. It's a waste of time. There, I've said it.

Now... I know that my feelings and opinions are not objective facts. I only get to say what is good and what is not from my own point of view. Different strokes for different folks and all that. I think Catherine Cooksons books are crap for example, but she was an extremely successful author whose works sold more than 100 million copies. And everybody in the whole world seems to love the film The Shawshank Redemption, but I think it's mawkish and trite. There we are - I'm happy to accept that it's just me. By the same token I'm more than happy to accept that not everybody is going to think my blog is good. I can be quite opinionated, perhaps I can take myself a little seriously at times, and my posts tend to be far too long - all things that I know can put readers off. I certainly don't expect anyone to read and comment on my blog simply because I read and comment on theirs. In fact I'm mortified by the idea that someone might comment on my space simply to be polite - I'd much rather they didn't to be honest.

One of my favourite bloggers of all is Black Hockey Jesus (or BHJ.) He's a talented, funny, brutally honest and clever man who is also capable of writing that is so delicate, subtle and beautiful, it can take your breath away. I was re-reading this post of his last night (which by the way is neither delicate, subtle nor beautiful) and the comments that followed it, and really thinking about the questions it posed - one of which was this, which actually began life as a question on formspring:

“Would you concede that you ‘used’ certain bloggers you don’t respect and never did in order to get more attention early on?”

Now I'm proud to say that I haven't ever done that. I have courted some bloggers unashamedly, leaving them lots of comments and hoping that they would notice, read my blog, and like my stuff too. BUT the crucial difference is that I have only done this with bloggers that I genuinely really admire. I have left them lots of comments because their writing has inspired me to do so. I have wanted to make a connection with them because I have found them interesting and truly liked what they have to say and the way they say it.

Ultimately I think that being authentic is more important than being scrupulously polite. There is nothing appealing in falsity. I like to think that I'm courteous and friendly, but I'm not going to comment unless I mean it. On the other side of the coin you can know that if I do sometimes comment on your posts then that is because I have felt honestly inspired to do so and because I truly rate your writing.

I am interested to know what other bloggers feel about this. Do you ever feel under pressure when it comes to reading and commenting?

Domestic Abuse and the System.

2010-05-10T09:56:00.001-07:00

Those of you that have been reading my blog for a while now will probably know that I work for Womens Aid. Mostly just once a week as a volunteer, but sometimes as a part time paid worker aswell, usually to cover someones sabbatical or sick leave. It's not something you'll often find me blogging about - even anonymously - as the work I do is highly confidential, but today sheer frustration has spurred me into writing a general post about domestic abuse, its effects, and specifically how both of these things tie in with the reform of the benefits system.

Women come into refuge because they need a safe place to stay. They come from all different walks of life, often with very few belongings, and stay for varying lengths of time. Some women stay untill they are suitably rehoused, and some women choose after a short (or long) period to go back to their homes and partners. That is their choice and they receive no judgement from us. We simply let them know that our doors are always open if they ever need to come back. It actually takes a woman seven attempts on average to leave an abusive relationship before finally making the break for good, which is hardly surprising when you consider that she must often leave behind friends, family, her home, her possessions and pets, in order to move somewhere where she will not be found and harassed by her ex-partner. Many women do continue to endure harassment and abuse even after they have left their relationship. Two women every week are murdered in Britain by their partners or ex-partners, and the first three months after she has left (aswell as during pregnancy when she is three times more likely to be assaulted) are widely recognised as being the most dangerous and vulnerable time for a woman.

It is a popular misconception that domestic abuse simply means physical violence. It is in fact an umbrella term for many different sorts of behaviours that abusive people will sometimes use to control and bully their partners, including:

Financial abuse: eg Controlling all the money and denying the partner access to funds. Racking up debts in the partners name. Making the partner solely responsible financially while spending irresponsibly themselves.

Isolation: eg Stopping or reducing contact with family and friends. Deliberately moving the partner somewhere where they don't know anybody. Preventing them from having a job or attending college. Stopping or making it difficult for the partner to go out.

Emotional and psychological abuse: eg Constantly putting the partner down. Calling them names. Making them feel stupid and incompetent. Monitoring phone calls and checking up on them. Threatening suicide if the partner leaves. Telling them that nobody else would ever want them.

Women do not necessarily have to be experiencing physical violence to be suffering from domestic abuse. Many perpetrators are able to achieve the domination and control that they desire over their partners by using some or all of the tactics listed above, although it is by no means an exhaustive list. Of course these tactics can also sometimes be a precursor to physical violence, especially if the perpetrator begins to feel that they are no longer having the desired effect on their own.

The effects of domestic abuse can be devastating. The effects of emotional abuse can be particularly pernicious. Loss of self-worth and confidence in ones abilities, destroyed self-esteem and a real difficulty in making ones own decisions being just the tip of the ice-berg. Women who have also been physically and/or sexually abused by their partners can often be left deeply traumatised. Post traumatic stress disorder as a result of having lived in an almost constant state of fear over a period of time - often years - is common, as are panic attacks, flashbacks, extreme anxiety and depression, and addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol (women often turning to these substances in a desperate attempt to somehow cope with what is going on at home.)

As a result of the effects of domestic abuse some women are already on sickness benefit when they first come into refuge, or sometimes (I am not - let me be clear - suggesting that this is always the case) they need to apply for it when they arrive. It's not actually called sickness or incapacity benefit anymore - it's called Employment Support Allowance or ESA, but is still much the same thing in terms of being a benefit that is paid to anyone who is considered to be unfit for work due to ill-health. There has been a huge government led drive recently to lower the numbers of people receiving ESA, with doctors being discouraged from giving their patients sick-notes and instead being told to write reports about what their patients can rather than can't do. Now please don't get me wrong; I am all for empowering people to improve their lives by getting back into the workforce if they are able, and I'd be the first to agree that long term unemployment can sometimes have its own negative effects on mental health. But the problem with this new approach is that it does not discriminate. Vulnerable people who are perfectly entitled to receive ESA are having their benefits suddenly stopped or their claims turned down, left right and centre. The only option for them is to appeal the decision - a lengthy process that involves filling in endless complicated paperwork, and submitting to an examination and interview conducted by a doctor who is specifically employed by the department for work and pensions. The irony of course is that it is all so stressful, it often has the effect of setting people who suffer with anxiety or mental health issues further back, making it even more unlikely that they will be able to return to work in the near future.

In recent months I have seen women whose appeals have also been turned down despite them having produced letters of support from their G.P's confirming that they are at present entirely unfit for work, and despite them having produced letters of support from us and even sometimes social services and police liaison officers, explaining what they have gone through and that they are now living in a refuge and are technically homeless. Despite all this they have still been forced to go over it all again with a strange and sometimes hostile doctor who has then gone on to pronounce them fit for work.

It is a scandal. One which makes me furious, and which can only get worse under a conservative government. All we can do is watch and wait.

If you would like any information or support regarding domestic abuse, please click on the links below:

http://womensaid.org.uk
http://refuge.org.uk
http://www.southallblacksisters.org.uk
http://www.enddomesticabuse.org

I have referred only to male perpetrators and female survivors in this piece because domestic abuse is recognised as a gender specific crime in which the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male and the overwhelming majority of survivors, female. However women do sometimes abuse - both in the context of heterosexual relationships and in the context of same-sex relationships, and I think that it is important that that be acknowledged.

I'll Think About it Tomorrow, I've Had Enough of Today

2010-05-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

I am so tired today.

We all had to get up earlier than usual because the boys had a school trip and the bus was leaving at 8.30 am. So the day started with us all bleary eyed but having to hurry in order to ensure that packed lunches were made and that the right uniform, footwear and weather appropriate outerwear were found and matched to the correct bodies before 8.15. Then five minutes before we were due to leave the house, the youngest decided to have a (thankfully rare) tantrum and refuse to put on her jumper, raincoat or shoes. I know the accepted thinking is that it's best to ignore tantrums - it is sound advice too in my opinion - but what do you do when you can't ignore it because whatever it is your child is kicking and screaming about actually has to happen now? I tried to jolly her along, I tried cajoling, pleading, I even tried bribery, and in the end I shouted at her. She is three. There is nothing quite like shouting at a three year old to make you feel extra specially good about yourself you know?

I then spent the majority of my mornings free time manically cleaning the house because I was expecting a friend for lunch who then didn't turn up, or bother to phone to say that she wasn't coming.

Then at 12.00 I picked the youngest up from nursery, came home and spent the first bit of the afternoon trying to persuade her to eat her lunch (she refused point blank) and then the rest of it attempting to simultaneously entertain her, which involved singing her favourite song 'Rudolph the red nosed reindeer' about three million times in a row - and yes I do know it's bloody May - and attempting to keep myself abreast of what was going on in terms of the hung parliament we now find ourselves landed with. Personally I am anxious about the prospect of a conservative government in these tough times we are facing. Tax cuts for the rich to accompany massive cuts in public spending? Surely they can't be serious.

We then went to pick up the boys from school. The bus that was bringing them back from their trip arrived and all the children disembarked sporting bright blue painted faces and rather realistic looking toy spears. They seemed as though they had had a fine old time although of course within half an hour of arriving home, the blue face paint had migrated all over the sofa, and my eldest and middle sons were making serious attempts to decapitate one another with their new novelty weaponry.

Eldest son had also managed to persuade me to let his friend come round for a sleepover so I have had four children to feed and water this evening, which would be neither here nor there I suppose were it not for my own childrens endless, endless requests for drinks and snacks and updated information about exactly when dinner will be ready. Between them they form quite a sophisticated tag team - taking it in turns to find that perfect moment in which I have just sat down in order to call out, 'Muuuuuum can I have a drink?' Or, 'Muuuuuum, tell so and so to stop annoying me.' Or my particular favourite which is, 'Oh Muuuuuum, not (whatever it is I'm cooking) for dinner.'

It is nearly 10.00 and my eldest and his friend are still up. My kitchen - which was perfectly clean this morning - looks like a smart bomb has been dropped on it. Dirty plates, cooking vessels, and cutlery all vie for space on my spill-ridden kitchen counters. I know the children will want pancakes for breakfast tomorrow and so really I should clean the kitchen tonight in order to be able to cook in the morning.

But I'm too tired. I've had enough. I'm done for today.

So sod it. I'll think about it tomorrow.

Do You Remember When....

2010-05-05T01:56:00.000-07:00

In the long summer of 1996 - the summer in which they both turned 21 - two young women travelled all over the length and breadth of the U.K. with nothing but two back-packs, a guitar and a couple of sleeping bags. They hitch-hiked from place to place, going to almost every major festival that they could manage to sneak into unticketed. Scrambling over and under fences beneath the cover of darkness, those sleeping in nearby tents might have heard them giggling as one would try vainly again and again using a wild under arm swing to throw the back-packs over the fence for the one on the other side to catch. They bathed in the reddish tinged quagmire of Glastonbury, only to wash themselves gratefully clean under the solar powered showers of the Green Gathering, and between different festivals they visited various friends flung far and wide by their own travels and adventures. Lounging on pebbly Brighton beaches, walking for miles under cloudless Cornish skies, and dancing all night to repetitive beats in a wet and lushly verdant Welsh wood, they told each other that the one and only rule that would exist that summer was that they would never stay anywhere for more than three days. They were free as birds, focused on their own flight, propelled happily along by the summers breeze - getting stuck anywhere was never going to be an option.

Many hours - even sometimes days - were spent hitching up and down the countries motorways and major roads to get to this place or that. They had a map; they would plan their route and set off, usually in the morning. The travelling itself was always as much a part of the experience as the getting there, they rarely had to wait long for a lift, and when they did - usually because the motorway had long been left behind and they were drawing close along B roads to their destination - K (who was the eldest of the two by a couple of months) would get out her guitar and sing. The other - M - would sing along and act the fool, and forget half the time to even stick out her thumb when a vehicle went past. They were blessed with that invincibility of youth, which for them translated into a perfect confidence that the right lift would always come along at just the right time. And so with that they were perfectly happy to be just where they were, singing and laughing and sitting on their back-packs, sharing some bits of food by the side of the road.

One late afternoon they had been waiting a rare couple of hours on a grassy verge next to a small rural road somewhere in the South West of England. It was bright, leafy and warm and they were stretched out lazily on the grass enjoying the sunshine. M spotted a white transit van shimmering in the distance and the heat, and so grinning, jumped up and stuck her thumb out as it drove towards them. It gradually slowed and began to pull over, the driver - a small man with glasses and grey hair - winding down the passenger window as he came to a stop.
"I can drop you off 20 miles further down"
M could only just make out what he was saying. His voice had a strange buzzing quality (nasal was how she would later describe it) which made her think briefly of fly paper. She turned questioningly to K who shrugged and began to throw their back-packs into the back. They climbed into the front passenger seat, M first next to the driver and then K on her other side by the window. It did not take M long to realise that any attempt to exchange pleasantries was going to be futile and so after a while she fell quiet and looked instead out of the window at the canopy of trees that formed a green shadowy arch over the road. K was turned slightly away from her on her side, her breathing deep and even. M presumed she had fallen asleep.

They had been driving in silence for about fifteen minutes, when the driver suddenly said apropos of nothing, and with a pronunciation that was as clear as a bell:
"If I give you ten pounds will you watch me play with myself?"
"I'm sorry?"
Perhaps she had not heard correctly. M shook her head slightly. But once again, his voice as sharply clear as glass, the driver repeated his request. M thought quickly. She felt no real fear - after all there were two of them and the man seemed more pathetic than predatory - but still decided none the less that the situation probably called for a degree of assertiveness. She looked at him straight in the face and said calmly but sternly:
"No. Now I think you had better pull over. We're getting out now."
Which might have been fine were it not for the fact that there was nowhere for the driver to pull over. There was no choice but to plough on, with him visibly squirming in his seat and casting around desperately for a place to stop. M sat tall and stared stonily straight ahead. Gradually though she became aware that beside her, K was shaking. It seemed almost as though she were vibrating. Alarmed, M turned to look at her and the reason became immediately apparent.

K was slumped in her seat with her hand clamped over her mouth, her whole body convulsing with silent, suppressed laughter. Unable to get a grip on herself, her mirth proved highly contagious. M at once let out an involuntary snort which only served to tip K finally and fully over the edge. She let escape a strangled howl and that was that. Both girls were completely and utterly helpless with the sort of hysterical, unrestrained laughter that always has a tiny percentage of your brain wondering 'when was the last time I laughed like this?' Still the poor driver could not stop, and M and K clutched at eachother - the tears rolling down their cheeks - any attempt to stifle their hilarity simply resulting in fresh further fits of delirious giggling.

When they finally came to a lay-by, K opened the passenger door of the van and the two girls literally fell out of it, tumbling over each other onto the grass verge and laughing so hard that it was all they could do to collect their belongings out of the back. As soon as M had slammed the door shut the white transit van sped off like a demon, leaving them once again at the side of the road; fresh peals of their laughter ringing out into the air as the late afternoon began to slide into evening.

This is a post about how shared experiences can help create and nurture strong bonds. M is me you see. And K and I are still friends. She travelled the world before settling in Australia to train as a midwife. Right now she is cycling some 1860km with some other women before coming back to Britain for the summer. I gave birth to my first son just two years after that little escapade. I only ever see K once every few years now, but she is still a very special person in my life and I know that the feeling's mutual. The memory of that day can still reduce us to helpless tears of laughter. I can't wait to see her soon.

Bigotgate (I'm sorry, did somebody mention the 'B' word?)

2010-05-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to post anything about the election.

Mainly because my own apathy makes me feel slightly guilty. I know how hard the suffragettes fought to ensure my entitlement to vote. I can see the argument for not having any right to complain about government policy if you can't even be bothered to engage in the political process. I also know that my genuinely held and heartfelt opinion of politicians in general (that they're all a bunch of unrepresentative tossers) is neither adding anything to the conversation, nor a particularly intelligent thing to say. I read Deeply Flawed but Trying, Used to be Somebody, and the Enemies of Reason, and I feel slightly embarrassed about being so, well.... slack.

Which is why I had decided to butt out.

But now of course we have 'Bigotgate' and it seems that I can hold back no longer.

As I'm sure most of us are aware by now, the other day whilst out canvassing on the streets of Rochdale our Prime Minister Gordon Brown met 66 year old retired council worker Gillian Duffy who quizzed him on various aspects of labour policy - including immigration. In fact her exact words were:

"You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're..... but all these eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?"

Well now... let me think. Where could immigrants from eastern Europe possibly be coming from? Ahem, but seriously, I'm sure we're most of us familiar with what happened next too. Gordon Brown got into his car and - forgetting that his mic was still switched on - described Ms Duffy as a "bigoted woman." The ensuing scandal has dominated the electoral news coverage ever since. Brown has been forced to apologise to Duffy in person, and any slim hopes that Labour had of being re-elected appear cruelly dashed.

What I am interested in is not whether Ms Duffy is or is not a bigot - everyone is entitled to their view after all - but what the medias response has been to the whole embarrassing exchange. Duffy it seems is being held up as a paragon of moral virtue, a woman who was not afraid to speak the truth, a lone brave voice in the wilderness who has been unfairly demonised for daring to utter the 'I' word. But wait.... last time I looked at the news it was in fact the Prime Minister who was being demonised for daring to call a woman he thought was bigoted - a bigot. I have only ever seen Duffy being portrayed as some sort of courageous heroine - a true woman of the people. I fully expect to see 'Gillian Duffy for PM' t-shirts on sale before the week is out.

One of the most compelling arguments against so called political correctness is that it stifles debate - that it tells people how to think and how to speak and so leaves no room for dissenting opinions. This backlash has been eagerly co-opted by all sorts of groups and institutions, from the tabloid media to the BNP who have used it to try to paint themselves as a disenfranchised minority, daring to say the unsayable on behalf of a muzzled British public. Look again at the first line of Duffys quote: "You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're...." Racist, is what I presume she would have said if she hadn't trailed off. It's a popular point of view - that one can't initiate any sort of discussion about immigration without being labelled a racist - but one which is so patently untrue that I am always reminded of the Orwellian concept of doublethink every time I hear it. Discussions about immigration are everywhere! It was discussed openly on the live televised debates between the political leaders - indeed I remember quite clearly them all falling over themselves to show how they would be the 'toughest' on immigration - with Cameron promising to introduce caps and Brown vowing to implement an Australian inspired points based system. There was also a Panorama programme entitled Is Britain Full? aired on prime time BBC recently. Every single day there are newspaper headlines and articles devoted to discussing immigration, and almost without exception they are negative. Ms Duffy certainly had no qualms about bringing the subject up in a very public setting - did she appear genuinely worried that she would be lambasted as a bigot? No she did not.

Of course wanting to have a debate about immigration does not make you a bigot. When you consider what is published in some newspapers as 'facts' about immigration, and the fears that some political parties attempt to whip up in the hope that it will land them some more votes, it is hardly surprising that people feel concerned. Honest and open discussion is always to be encouraged, especially around sensitive topics such as this.

So for my own contribution to this debate I would like to make the point that the hostilities towards and arguments against immigration have not changed over centuries. From the French protestant Huguenots driven to Britain as a result of religious persecution in the eighteenth century, to the Russian Jews who came to Britain in the nineteenth century in order to escape the vicious pogroms taking place in their home land and who went on to create a thriving textile industry, to the West Indian migrants arriving on board The Empire Windrush in 1948, to the Eastern European economic migrants of today, the arguments against their being allowed to settle here have always been the same - that it is too much of a burden on our country and that there is not enough room, that it places too much strain on housing and swallows up jobs that should be going to the 'indigenous' population, and that it will dilute our cultural identity. Here then is my attempt to provide some counter to these arguments:

There's this which I blatantly stole from The Angry Mobs article, Let's have a talk about immigration:

A Home Office research study found that, in 1999/2000, first generation migrants in the UK contributed £31.2 billion in taxes and consumed £28.8 billion in benefits and public services – a net fiscal contribution of £2.5 billion³.

This from the UN Refugee Agency:

The overall number of asylum seekers in industrialized nations was stable in 2009, according to the UNHCR provisional statistical report that measures asylum levels and trends in industrialized nations.

"The notion that there is a flood of asylum seekers into richer countries is a myth," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres. "Despite what some populists claim, our data shows that the numbers have remained stable."

This from the Equality and Human Rights Commission:

The vast majority of people who live in social housing in Britain were born in the UK according to a research study published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission today. The study found that less than two per cent of all social housing residents are people who have moved to Britain in the last five years and that nine out of ten people who live in social housing were born in the UK.

And this from Immigration Matters:

Record numbers of people are leaving Britain at the same time as immigration is slowing down, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics.

In the first half of 2007, only 17,360 Bulgarians and Romanians arrived in the UK, far below many expectations of up to 300,000 in the first year.

Experts believe that without immigration to the UK the population could go into decline, shrinking the working age population and compounding the problem of how to support an ageing society.

I'm not trying to pretend that multi-culturalism poses no problems whatsoever. Elements of different cultures can sometimes clash, assimilation will always mean different things to different people. But the benefits of immigration have always far superceded any negatives. Everybody has the right to try to improve their lot. Let's not allow our opinions to become hijacked by a right-wing media and the politicians who must pander to it in order to have any chance of achieving power.

One last link: I read this really interesting take on Bigotgate and the conspicuous absence of women in the run up to the election at Wife in the North - I recommend you head on over and have a look.

In Search of the Blogging Light

2010-04-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

When I was pregnant with The Youngest, I decided that the one morning a week that my partner had off work and was prepared to spend looking after Middle Son, I would spend attending an ante-natal yoga class. I remember being particularly tired during that last pregnancy - having two children already to care for aswell as two part-time cleaning jobs that I had to squeeze into any available nursery hours all took its inevitable toll on my energy levels - and so I figured that the relaxing benefits of yoga would do both me and my unborn child good. I had a friend who was at a similar stage of pregnancy to me and so we made an arrangement to meet up every Tuesday morning and dutifully roll up at our local 'healing centre' to be put through some gentle yogic paces.

The woman who taught us and who also owned and ran the healing centre had - I remember - all these gilt framed pictures up everywhere of another woman whom she described as being her 'guru' - a woman with long grey hair and a serene expression, who held her palms together as if in prayer and who always appeared in every picture to be wearing exactly the same long multi-coloured caftan. The teacher herself always wore sandals with these strange little bells on them that would knock together every time she made so much as the slightest movement, producing tiny little tinkly noises that seemed to echo on and on. She also insisted on being called a completely made up (and rather exotic and bohemian sounding) amalgamation of her first and last names, despite the fact that she already had a perfectly serviceable ordinary first name and that far from actually hailing from anywhere exotic she in fact came from a large grey commuter town just off the M1. Needless to say it was fairly clear to me from the start that ours was not a match made in heaven.

I stuck with the yoga though as I enjoyed the actual physical exercises and the 'me time' that it afforded, but as my pregnancy progressed my tolerance decreased, and I became more and more irritated with she of the pretentious name and the tinkling sandals. I remember one particular morning coming home from a class, stomping into the kitchen and slamming my keys down on the table, all of which had the immediate effect of causing my partner to fall about in fits of helpless laughter. He just about managed to blurt out, 'Gappy, it's yoga. It's not supposed to make you angry' before once again dissolving into a puddle of mirth - at which point I launched into a frustrated rant about how when I had mentioned how little sleep I was getting because the baby seemed to want to practice its somersaults as soon as I laid down - she had actually asked me what sort of visualisations I might want to focus on in order to enable my baby to relax. 'Has it not occurred to this woman that I might simply have an active baby and that my lack of sleep may not in fact be the result of some f***ing fault on my astral plane,' I raged - by which point my partner was laughing at me so hysterically that he nearly fell off his chair.

I only went again a few times after that. It was official. Pregnancy yoga was bad for my blood pressure. However, what might have remained a distant memory has now come to the fore again for me because I have been reminded in recent days of how at the end of the yoga class we would always do a short session of meditation in which we were encouraged to try to clear our minds and think of nothing. 'Well'... I can remember thinking at the time... 'This is ridiculous. It's impossible to think of nothing. Who thinks of nothing? I can't think of nothing, there is far too much in my head to even contemplate thinking of nothing.

Little did I know that almost four years later I would begin writing a blog and that all of a sudden the concept of being able to clear ones mind and think of nothing would not only make perfect sense, but that thinking of nothing would in fact become a common occurrence. Indeed that whenever I sat down to try to write a blog post, my mind would immediately and inexplicably go completely blank and that I would find myself suddenly incapable of thinking of anything at all. Oh how I long to go back to my old yoga teacher and tell her that I've cracked it - that I have achieved enlightenment and ascended to that higher plane - and all as a result of having been inspired by that well respected guru: Blogspot.com.

This has been my version of the post that everyone writes eventually... The 'Help, I can't think of anything to write' post. And so with it I am asking: Where does your inspiration come from? When and where do you come up with your best ideas? And what the bloody hell do you do when you really can't think of anything to write about?

Seven Things You Didn't Know About Me.

2010-04-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

I have been tagged by the lovely A Small Hand in Mine to receive the Kreativ Blogger award. Very pretty it is too - just the sort of thing a girl wants in her sidebar. The idea seems to be that you list seven things about yourself that you have not previously divulged on your blog, and that you then of course pass it on. So here goes....

1. I have a tattoo on my head. You can't see it because I have long hair and to be honest I forget it's there most of the time - that is until I go to a new hairdressers and see them do a complete double take. The reaction is always something along the lines of, 'Oh my god, you're the last person that I would have expected to have a tattoo on their head!' I'm never quite sure how to take that.

2. I'm quite handy. I can put up a mean shelf, and in fact I built a whole book case at the top of our stairs myself. I have a really impressive tool box full of my late grandfathers ancient old tools and I love a bit of flat pack.

3. I'm a typical Virgo which always strikes me as being rather ironic seeing as I don't believe that when you happen to have been born has any bearing whatsoever on your personality. But even I can't deny my own perfectionism and liking for things to be in order. My books are grouped into sections and the fiction section is in alphabetical order for christs sakes. Friends over the years have found this anally retentive aspect to my nature completely hilarious - even my own mother takes the piss - which is rich coming from her because she's exactly the same!

4. I like driving really fast. In another life I would have been a formula one driver. Lewis Hamilton would have been eating my dust.

5. I have absolutely no sense of direction and have even been known to get lost in peoples houses. Perhaps it's a spatial awareness thing because I once did one of those IQ tests - you know the ones with the little puzzles you have to solve - and my eventual score suggested that I was of subnormal intelligence.

6. I have recently been reunited with my best friend from when I was a teenager, through facebook of all things. Even though it is now many years later, we still share a real connection. We have met up a few times now and I'm absolutely thrilled to have her back in my life.

7. I'm scared of horses. They're far too big.

So with that it is now time for me to tag seven other bloggers whom I would like to get to know better. Would you like a Kreativ Blogger award?

Paula from Battling On
Very Bored in Catalunya
Stephen from Bloggertropolis
Heather from Notes From Lapland
Julia at What Will Julia do Next?
Sandrine at Paris-Ankara Express
Newdaynewlesson

A Question of Privacy (T, this one's for you)

2010-04-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

I never imagined that this would happen so soon. That just four months into my blogging journey I would find myself having to re-evaluate and explore further my ideas concerning the slightly oxymoronic concept of privacy on the internet. Blogging and boundaries - now there's a tricksy topic. A real slippery fish of a subject. This could take a while... I mean where do you even start?

Perhaps with... I know you've been reading this, T.

You see a couple of days ago I was looking through my stats when I discovered that a new reader had visited my blog and had spent quite a while looking at it - clicking through all my archives and categories and even going so far as to check out my 'contact me' page.

Checking the e-mail address to see if it's the one you recognise?

On closer inspection I saw that this reader had found my blog through Technorati. My initial reaction was one of pleasure in that perhaps submitting my blog had in fact been worth it after all, and so absent mindedly I clicked on the referring link, expecting to see my technorati profile (which uses the name Gappy) come up. Instead, what appeared in front of me was a 'claimed blogs profile' which I had never even seen before, and which used my real name. For the sake of this post, lets just say my initials are M.H. The profile I was looking at had in large letters at the top, 'M...... H......'s Claimed Blogs, and then a small link and picture of my layout at the bottom. After a few minutes of confusion it suddenly struck me that whoever had found this profile must surely have been searching for it under my real name. Oooookaaay I thought - there's plenty of M.H's in the world - perhaps it's just a coincidence. But it didn't feel right and so I went back to my stats for a closer look. They showed that the reader also happened to come from the same city as someone I know. Still I thought.. it's a big place... it could still just be a coincidence. But when I looked yet more closely and saw what posts the reader appeared to have skimmed through, and what they had suddenly stopped on and really spent time reading, I knew that my suspicion was almost certainly correct.

I notice that you clicked on my 'personal stuff' category and that you lingered there for quite a while. Just the page where there happens to be a post that I wrote about love and relationships. So did you find what you were looking for T? I'm assuming you did.

I have just had the loveliest weekend spent enjoying the company of friends. But how to handle this situation has been playing on my mind. I told my friend about it and she just looked a bit blank. 'But... it's on the internet' was her eventual reaction, which I interpreted as meaning, 'don't put your stuff in a public space if you don't want people to read it'. The thing is I do want people to read it. I just don't want people I know to know it's me - which is why I blog anonymously.

Do you remember asking me where you could find my blog when I told you during that phone conversation that I had one? I know I know, I should never have mentioned it at all, but when I made it clear to you that I didn't want anyone I knew to read it, I absolutely trusted that you wouldn't go looking for it. You said you wouldn't.

My blog is no longer completely anonymous. I am - let's be frank - a pretty rubbish anonymous blogger. I'm not technically savvy enough to be able to do it properly. My anonymity was dependent on a certain amount of trust, which has now been broken. Am I hugely morally outraged by this? Well nooo.... not really. I'm human and I can understand how it feels to be curious. I can understand how it feels to be tempted too. The line shouldn't have been crossed, but there are worse crimes I suppose. I do feel a bit strange about it though, as if my space has been invaded and someone has read my diary, despite the fact that I know a blog is fundamentally different (and perhaps even the opposite) to a private journal.

So what I'm saying to you T (and I hope this is clear) is don't come here again. It's not for you. I didn't write any of this so that you could read it. You know, if you want to know how I am or what I'm up to, you could always ring. Now get lost and go and do something else.

First Day At School

2010-04-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

Today was The Youngests first day at school. She is only three. Where I live kids start full-time school the term before they're four. She will not be going full-time untill September, but in the meantime will go one day a week in order to get slowly accustomed to school life before she begins reception class properly after the summer holidays.

I got up even earlier than usual to make doubly sure that we had plenty of time to get ready, figuring that if she was feeling at all nervous about going to school for the first time, the last thing she would need was a rushed and chaotic morning. We went through the usual routine of breakfast, teeth brushing, face washing and getting dressed. Then I brushed her hair in front of the big mirror in my bedroom and arranged it into two plaits. I smiled at her reflection and asked how it felt to be a big school-girl. She hugged her toy cat and said, 'Meow.'

Her brothers shot like bullets out of the car and into the playground as soon as we got to the school. Their bags slapping against their legs, they disappeared quickly round the corner to the school entrance. I lifted The Youngest out of her car seat and set her down on the pavement just near the school gates. I went to take her hand but suddenly she was off! Like a coiled spring, her little legs motoring as fast as they possibly could, her plaits flapping in the wind, determinedly hot on the tail of her older brothers. She ran as fast as she could into her classroom and didn't give me so much as a backwards glance. I hovered neurotically a while at the classroom door asking her teacher to please remind her to go to the loo, and please would she phone me if there were any problems at all, but The Youngest had already made herself perfectly comfortable at a table with some other children and was doing a spot of colouring.

Ah... mixed feelings. She's my last child, and while a big part of me is relishing the prospect of having more time to do my own thing and pursue my own ambitions, another part of me felt heavy hearted today. My beautiful little girl is growing up and becoming more and more independent, and while I know this is something to be celebrated, I must admit to a small lump forming in my throat as I walked back out through the windy playground towards my car this morning.

On Being a Single Mother Today

2010-04-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

It struck me the other day that despite the title of my blog, I don't really write very much about being a single parent at all. This is partly because my blog has morphed slightly into something other than what I originally thought it would be, and partly because again - in spite of the title - being a single mother specifically isn't actually a huge part of my identity.

Yesterday however I was commenting on a post over at Fertile Feminism about how mothering is not generally considered to be real work, and it inspired me to finally write a post about my experience of being a single mother in todays political climate, and how I feel it is different to that of being a married or partnered mother.

What I find is that there tend to be two polarised stereotypes of the single mother. The first - and by far the most popular - is that of a feckless young woman who deliberately "gets herself pregnant" in order to ensure that she is prioritized for a council house, and who then brings her children up to be ASBO ridden hooligans - feeding them entirely on chicken nuggets and coca cola - all courtesy of an over-stretched tax payer. The second is that we are noble martyrs in the face of bleak adversity and cruel stigma and that we are - and I think I might possibly be quoting the actress Emma Thompson here - "The brave heroines of our society."

I can't say that either one of those stereotypes sits particularly comfortably with me (although if I really had to pick one I know which one I'd plump for - thanks Emma.) Of course I can only ever speak from my own personal experience, but I don't actually find being a single mother hugely different to being a partnered one in practical terms. It's the social aspect that brings the changes, I have found.

I became a single mother through choice really. It wasn't that I particularly relished the prospect of bringing up three children on my own, but rather that the alternative - which was to stay in a relationship that had become unbearable - was much much worse. I have to say that I have been more than pleasantly surprised in a lot of ways. I really don't find the practical side of mothering any harder now than I did when I was living with a man who worked full time. I was doing the vast majority of the childcare and housework anyway. My partner would often come home and cook the dinner and wash the dishes, but he so bitterly resented having to do what he viewed as womens work, that rather than his contribution being helpful, it would just make me feel incredibly anxious, knowing as I did that the next time we had a row it would be used as ammunition against me. A few extra bits of cooking and washing up seem a very small price to pay for the relaxation and peace of mind that I am now able to enjoy in my own home to be honest.

We were a traditional family in the sense that although we were not married, my partner went out to work and I stayed at home to care for the children. I still stay at home to care for my children most of the time. I do odd bits of book-keeping work and I have done temporary paid work at Womens Aid covering peoples sabbaticals and sick leave, but for the most part I am still a stay at home mother whose day to day work has not really changed much at all in the last decade or so. What has changed though, crucially is that I am no longer living with a man who buys my food and pays my bills and so I am now often reliant on state benefits to pay for those things instead. That is all. I have gone from being David Camerons wet dream of a traditional 'wife' to being the scourge of his broken Britain. And the only thing that has changed is that I no longer have the financial support of a male partner.

I find this contradiction almost impossible to reconcile. The same people who blame the so called breakdown of society on women choosing to work outside the home rather than dedicate their entire lives to bringing up their children, also seek to label stay at home single mothers who need to claim state assistance to help with the cost of bringing up their children as being worthless scroungers - terrible burdens on society - whose children will grow up to be the criminals of tomorrow. Only one thing is clear, and that is that mothers - whatever choices they make - can never win.

The government are at the moment slowly working towards scrapping income support altogether (the age that your youngest child has to be in order for you to qualify is getting lower and lower) with the idea of eventually replacing it entirely with job seekers allowance, which is not nearly as much money and so will serve to force single women with dependent children out into the work-place. It will be interesting to see where the government suggests we all go to find part-time jobs that will pay enough to support our families, and that will also fit around school hours. I want to work. I want to give my children something to aspire to and I want them to see me working hard to support them. I've got skills and some experience that I can utilise but I can't find reasonably paid part time work that takes into account my caring responsibilities. I can't find it because it's not really out there. The only outcome of these radical reforms that are being implemented by stealth will be to simply plunge yet more women and their children into poverty - and this from a government who rode to power on the promise of cutting child poverty in half by 2010.

Never doubt that the success of the traditional nuclear family has often been built on the backs of womens misery. Over the centuries, women have been forced to stay with husbands who were violent and abusive, persistently unfaithful, or who treated them like servants simply because they had no choice. Women survived and guaranteed their childrens survival by sticking with a man who, whatever else, was prepared to financially support them. These days women no longer have to endure relationships that make them miserable and destroy their self-esteem. If we want to leave we can, indeed the majority of divorces are now initiated by women. If we are lucky we can earn enough money to be able to financially support ourselves and our families on our own - if not, we have a benefits system to fall back on while we find our feet. But instead of this being seen as progress and as evidence of how our society has become more free and humane, politicians everywhere are wringing their hands, wailing about a broken Britain, and seeking to gradually remove the safety net of the benefits system for mothers who do not have a male partner to financially support them and who, due to their caring responsibilities and circumstances are unable to pay their own way.

I am neither a feckless scrounger, nor a brave heroine. I'm just an ordinary woman trying to raise a reasonably happy family. Without access to single parent benefits I would have had no choice but to remain in a desperately unhappy relationship. Any woman can find herself suddenly in the position of needing the safety net of income support. All this talk of getting lone parents back to work might sound positive on the face of it, but it actually cloaks a hidden and dangerous agenda, which is an attack on all of our freedom.

The Grumpy Seven

2010-04-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

I have recently been tagged with a little gem of a meme by Very Bored in Catalunya. See it turns out this week that not only is she bored in Catalunya, she's grumpy too. She's fed up, she's pissed off and she's running out of patience. She's Crabby in Catalunya. But, on the positive side, out of the ashes of said crabbyness has risen this most awesome phoenix of an entirely new meme: 'How's your blood pressure? 7 things this week that have made me grumpy' So I say thank you lady, for this is my kind of meme. In fact I could just run and run with it - so without further ado - I'll begin shall I?

1. Bin Weevils.

The entire population of 8 - 12 year olds that inhabit our village seem to share an unhealthy obsession with Binweevils (this of course has nothing whatsoever in common with my entirely constructive obsession with Twitter.) Eldest Son - I kid you not - has even gone so far as to organise a Bin Weevils phone tree so that he and his classmates can synchronise their Bin Weeviling. As far as I can tell, how it seems to work is that he phones one friend and hisses urgently, 'Bin Weevils - 5 o'clock o.k?' down the receiver like some sort of double agent from the cold war era, at which point said friend hangs up and then phones the next friend in order to issue the same stage whispered instruction to them - and so on and so on - untill the whole of year bloody 6 arrive on line en masse in order to do whatever the hell it is Bin Weevils do. What do Bin Weevils do? It had better be good.

2. Computer Games in General (or more specifically, talking about them.)

Because actually it's not just Bin Weevils that can sometimes make me grumpy. It's not even just computer games in and of themselves. It's the fact that my sons want to talk to me about them all the time. They are constantly attempting to engage me in conversation about things like Bin Weevils and Club Penguin - things of which I know nothing, and of which I frankly couldn't give a flying toss either. The thing is they're sneaky about it too. Conversations will start off as one thing and then morph into a computer game conversation without me even realising. For example:

Eldest Son: Mum can I talk to you about something?
Me: (In the middle of the washing up) Sure, what's up?
Eldest Son: Well... have you ever been in a situation where you're friends with a certain group of people, but you think maybe you don't really trust them and you'd be better off with a different group of friends?
Me: (Taking off washing up gloves and sitting down next to him in order to give him my full attention) Is something worrying you love?
Eldest Son: Well what it is you see, is that I was really good friends with this one group, but then just because I wanted to play for a bit with a different group, they shot me.
Me: They shot you? Hang on a minute.... is this about that flipping computer game?
Eldest Son: (Grinning) Um, might be....

3. Being spoken to entirely in Doctor Who quotes

Middle son is obsessed with Doctor Who. (You may recall a previous post I wrote about a suspiciously phallic looking tardis that he drew and then stuck on the fridge.) He also possesses a memory akin to a small elephant. Entire scripts from countless episodes are lodged firmly in that freaky little head of his, only to come tumbling out of his mouth at every possible opportunity. Middle son no longer says hello to people. His standard greeting has become, 'Alonzeeeeeee!' I have no idea what that even means. It could be Dalek for 'bestiality is best' for all I know. He now also has a Doctor Who quote which he saves especially for whenever he is asked to do anything he doesn't want to do, or for when I attempt to cajole him into eating anything that far too closely resembles a plant for his liking. The conversation typically goes something like this:

Me: Please would you go upstairs and sort out your toybox so that we can give things you don't play with anymore to the charity shop?/Please will you just try your runner beans?
Middle son: Funny is like this! (manic grinning face.) Not funny is like this.. (exageratedly sad face.) Right now I'm not like this! (manic grinning face) I'm like this.. (exageratedly sad face) because YOU ARE TRAITORS! YES YOU ARE!

What are you supposed to say to that?

4. Chris Moyles.

'Nuff said.

5. Jeremy Clarkson.

Ditto.

Oooh I was so close to moving on to number six without comment then... I almost managed it. But not quite. Because I can't even think about his stupid, dad rock loving, global warming denying, crap joke about how murdering prostitutes is funny telling face, without wanting to spit. Better out than in though eh. Ahem... Moving swiftly on...

6. People trying to have a conversation with me while I'm on the loo

Through the bathroom door. It's bad enough that the children do it, but I've got a friend that does it aswell. For christs sake, is nothing sacred?

And lastly, rather than a seventh grump, I thought I might instead provide a fool-proof antidote to all of the things that can conspire to put us in a bad temper. May I suggest that you listen to 'The Heartbeat Song' by the Futureheads and jump around. It works for me.

So now to invite some others to share their miffs of the week. You're up girls... Enjoy.

Modern Dilemma
Vegemitevix
Becky at Single Mummy
Last of the Mojitos
Notes From Lapland

A Guest Post from Spilt Milk: "It's Still My Room"

2010-04-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

Today I am really pleased to be publishing another guest post written in response to the piece I wrote entitled: 'Mummy Blogging. Just how important is it?' This time I am honoured to be sharing my space with Elizabeth from Spilt Milk, who is such a gifted writer and story teller that I would urge anybody who doesn't already do so to subscribe to her blog. In fact go and read this post - written about the Australian bush fires. It absolutely blew me away when I read it.

Anyway, here's what she has to say about mummy blogging and the importance of womens on-line writing...

"It's still my room"

I don't think I'm a 'mummy blogger'. No one's ever called me that. As far as I'm aware, I'm not under 'mummy/mommy blogger' on any lists. And perhaps this is because the blogs that I comment on and put on my own blogroll are not the kind of mummy blogs that readers of the New York Times article were encouraged to imagine. They are not the kind of blogs which are solely concerned with Timmy's weekend basketball game, cooking batches of Grandma's cookies, and the baby hitting milestones on time (or not).

But so what? Not everybody blogs for the same reasons - or rather, the reasons that people blog (expression, community, communication, sharing and yes, sometimes business) mean different things to everyone. Some people use blogs as a communication tool, to share photos and stories with family and friends. Sure, sometimes those stories might seem inane to readers to whom they are not addressed. But that's not because the writers are mothers - frankly, I'd find a man's blog about restoring a boat or cooking his way through '101 Ways With Mince' pretty boring and inane too. The difference is, a man's project - not pertaining to children - is considered to be of some intrinsic value. If it doesn't have broad appeal, then it merely becomes eccentric. But a woman's project - particularly a project which is informed by her low-status role as a mother? Well, that's a different, more easily dismissed story.

Thus, because my blog isn't exclusively about parenting and because it's not the daily journal kind, it's not had the 'mummy blog' label whacked on it. (Or perhaps it's just not been noticed by the label-whackers.) Even so, it probably could be labelled that. I write about motherhood and about being a daughter. I write about feminism through the prism of parenthood. The title, Spilt Milk, came about because I thought it would be a blog all about breastfeeding and birth, about the physical business of being a woman and the emotional work of mothering. Through no fault of its own it morphed into more - and less - than that, but such is the nature of online writing.

You could call me a 'mummy blogger', if you liked. Part of me used to react with almost violent negativity to the term and I have no doubt this is because of internalised misogyny: we all know it, the stereotype of the brainless mother and her gushing. And this is why, I think, the New York Times article pushed so many buttons right around the blogosphere. We knew what it was we were being painted as because it is a painting we know well. Some of us see it in the mirror but most of us spend our days hoping that it isn't us, hoping that others can see through the tracksuit-with-baby-sick to the intelligence and uniqueness underneath. Or conversely, some of us spend our days working for money or otherwise projecting a professional image onto the world, and long to be also seen as a nurturer. Pigeon-holes are squashy places and I don't know anyone who likes to be in them, especially if they are the kind relegated near the bottom by society.

I'm not sure if reclaiming 'mummy/mommy blogger' in order to subvert the misogyny that has made this term infantilising and dismissive is the best route, but I'd be supportive of anyone who tried it. For me, I think a complete move away from any such labelling is more important. Women have long fought for a room of our own in which to create, express and craft meaning. A blog is that room in an online form. Almost anyone with enough privilege to access the internet can make her own room and perhaps this is a frightening prospect to those who are invested in keeping women silent about their daily struggles and also in keeping them out of the marketplace.

But they can't quiet us. Call us what they may, we're here, we're talking, we're networking, we're spreading ideas and some of us are even making money out of it. Even at the same time as having children! And I believe - because I have to - that it's only going to get louder. The Hotel Internet has a LOT of rooms.

The Sweet Sweet Smell of a Very Private Victory

2010-04-14T00:47:00.000-07:00

This post has been written as a contribution to Josies writing workshop and was inspired by prompt 4 which was: 'Clear out a cupboard you've not visited in years.'

When I was a little girl growing up in the early 1980's I had a best friend and a worst enemy. Her name was Melissa. Melissa and I lived in the same square terraced block of council houses that stood off to the left at the top of our road. In the middle of the square was a small patch of grass and next to that was a slightly bigger patch of asphalt with a hopscotch painted onto it and a line of concrete blocks on which you could jump from one to the other. Our whole town was designed like that. Rows upon rows of these great long roads with square blocks of terraces branching off them at intervals like little goldfish bowls. Almost everyone I knew lived in one.

My favourite possessions in the whole wide world were my Strawberry Shortcake dolls. To this day I can still remember every single word to the song on the advert by heart. They were small plastic dolls with bizarrely coloured hair that each came with their own little plastic pet and their own individual 'fragrance.' My mother says they stank the whole upstairs of the house out and that every morning after I'd gone to school she would have to open all the windows to let some air in. But at seven years old they were my pride and joy. I could identify each and every one and match it to it's correct pet simply by using touch and smell alone.

Melissa and I played together almost every day and yet I don't remember ever going to her house very much. Her parents - who I can still just vaguely picture - were distant undemonstrative people who always spoke to her sharply in Swedish whenever I was there, even though I knew that they spoke English most of the time at home. Her mother was a tall, severe looking woman who Melissa swore blind had blue lips under her lipstick, and looking back now I can recall an awkward feeling of never knowing quite where to put myself accompanying the odd occasions that I did go inside her unfailingly pristine house to play. The vast majority of my memories instead involve us playing together in the little square onto which our houses faced - endless games of hopscotch and skipping and twirling around and around on the grass looking at the sky, trying to make ourselves dizzy.

Out of the two of us Melissa was the most dominant and confident. She had an authoritative air coupled with a vicious streak that would rise up suddenly out of nowhere like a guard dog woken from its slumber. Her nastiness could reduce me to tears in a matter of seconds. Looking back now I suppose that perhaps ultimately ours was a friendship of convenience rather than of genuine affection - proximity more than anything drawing us back together time and again. But we did have one essential thing in common: Melissa was as in love with her collection of strawberry shortcake dolls as I was with mine. In fact these dolls became in the end largely symbolic of - and certainly the main focus for - our entire friendship. We were constantly and shamelessly embroiled in a bitter competition over who had the most, the best, and the newest. Indeed the only time I ever really felt as though I had any power - temporarily at least - in our relationship was when I was the proud possessor of a brand new doll that I knew Melissa coveted. Dangled like carrots and wielded like sticks, we used those poor dolls to control, manipulate, and punish each other mercilessly, the worst punishment of all being a shouted threat of, 'That's it! I'm NEVER going to let you smell my strawberry shortcake dolls EVER again!'

I remember one argument in particular beginning with an announcement from Melissa that from now on she was only ever going to call me Knobbly Knees and that I was to call her Sylvia. She had recently had a birthday which had enlarged her collection of strawberry shortcake dolls considerably and she was therefore only too aware that I was not in a good bargaining position. I protested feebly - if she got to be called Sylvia I said, then it was only fair that I got to be called Camilla - but no she insisted; it was to be Knobbly Knees or nothing. I promptly burst into tears and began to walk off, shoulders heaving, towards my front door. Melissa stood her ground, her hands on her hips in a gesture of mocking defiance. 'Fine, go in then. Tell your mum then. I don't care' she hissed, before delivering the knock-out blow... 'Anyway, I'm NEVER going to let you smell my strawberry shortcake dolls EVER again!' I can remember afterwards lying face down on my bed sobbing pitifully into my pillow and feeling utterly overwhelmed by a dark sense of injustice and impotent rage. I wished so hard that I could be brave. I hated myself for crying and running to my mother. Too small to understand that I alone was responsible for my own behaviour and responses, I blamed her for making me run home crying. It was all her fault.

The next day she was being taken out somewhere by her father. I remember pressing my nose against the cold pane of our living room window, my breath misting up the glass - and watching her leave the house with him, immaculate as always in her best dress though looking oddly miserable for a child who was to be taken on a treat. I saw them walk out of the gap in the square that led to the road and then disappear from view.

My heart was pounding so violently that I felt it might leap out of my throat as I rang Melissas doorbell and heard the sounds inside of her mother coming to answer it. She opened the door and stood there unsmiling. I have absolutely no recollection of what I said to gain access to Melissas room - perhaps I said that I had left something in there, or that she had borrowed something that I needed back - but my next memory is of standing in her bedroom feeling as though I desperately needed to pee. I can remember her room was freakishly tidy with an air of having just recently been hoovered - this in stark contrast to my own which always bore the air of having just recently been ransacked - and that it gave me the creeps. The only things on the floor were her collection of strawberry shortcake dolls arranged in a perfect circle with their pets in front of them. I immediately spied her newest ones, the sight seeming to shake me out of the fear that held me immobilized and causing another emotion entirely to take over. Like a little girl possessed I seized the first doll and buried my nose in its purple hair, sniffing, almost gulping in the synthetic smell of cherries as though my life depended on it. I hurriedly did the same with the next one and the next and the next. Then I put them back very carefully as I had found them, making sure to arrange them just so. I walked as calmly as I could down the stairs, called out a goodbye to Melissas mother, and then ran out of the house and back the few metres to my own front door as fast as I could, a strange feeling of elation beginning to spread from my grin down and out through my entire body.

A Guest Post from Noble Savage: Blogger. No 'Mummy' Necessary

2010-04-12T03:58:00.000-07:00

Today I am excited to be publishing a guest post from one of my favourite bloggers, Noble Savage. Hers was one of the first blogs that I started reading regularly and it was through her blogroll that I discovered many other blogs that I now consider to be essential reading. She also writes over at Fertile Feminism, working to address issues that affect all of us as women and parents. Is it too much to describe her as one of my blogging heroes? No doubt she'll cringe - but fuck it - I'm going to say it anyway.

Recently I published a post entitled, 'Mummy Blogging. Just how important is it?' and invited readers to give their response. This then is Noble Savages...

Blogger. No 'mummy' necessary

I have to admit something right off the bat; I didn't find the New York Times article in question all that controversial. Yes, it had a few snide remarks slipped in (some subtle, some pretty blatant) but that's to be expected considering the publication in which it was printed. Snobbery and elitism are handed out with the bagels and Pulitzers at that office, I can assure you. So I tend to take any criticism they heft towards other, smaller writers with a big, fat grain of salt. The title and accompanying graphic were pretty ridiculous with its suggestion that mothers who blog are neglecting their children to do so, but the article did raise some interesting points, namely about turning blogging from a social pastime to a brand or business.

On my own blog, I've expressed concerns and reservations about the direction that 'mummy blogging' is going, with all the sponsorship and ads and giveaways, but that's my own personal aversion to capitalism and corporate globalisation, not a dig at mummy blogging itself. What is mummy blogging anyway, Gappy asks us? Well, it's just as she says: mothers who blog. It's that plain and that simple.

Yet, it's not.

Because, like motherhood itself, it's complicated territory. Some of us write nearly exclusively about our children and the job of parenting them and that's okay -- after all, parenting is a really tough gig and a completely valid experience to want to document and get feedback on. Why do people write about sex, or relationships? Why are there entire sites dedicated to cooking, running, fashion, the works of Nietzsche, bungee jumping, folk music, cancer and who will win the next parliamentary election? Because they are interesting to the people interested in or experiencing those things. Because one (wo)man's trash is another's treasure. Because we're all individuals who go through stages in our lives when we need to reach out and connect with others going through, thinking about and writing about the same sorts of things.

But there does come a point when some of us, including me, start to resent the label that has been affixed to us because it feels limiting. When we accept a label we risk narrowing our audience, the topics we feel able to write about and, sometimes, our experience or enjoyment of the whole process. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and every person will feel differently about it, but I think the vast majority of those who reject it are not doing so because we shun blogging mothers, or feel superior to those who are at the forefront of the movement and/or have happily accepted the label; we do it because we don't want to be pigeonholed any more so than a sports journalist would want to be known only for his cricket coverage and never what he writes on football, rugby, cycling and athletics.

Another apt comparison, from which I can draw on my own personal experiences, is that of the expatriate in a foreign land. Some 'expats', particularly those who are relatively new to living abroad, embrace the label with vigour. In order to find one's tribe, one must usually adopt a label of some sort in order to identify others in the same situation or interested in the same things. So at first the label is worn with pride and used to locate a community upon which one can rely and turn to for comfort and camaraderie in what is, at times, a frightening, lonely, challenging, life-altering experience. This is completely natural and normal. However, after a time, many grow tired of being known as 'the expat', the Other, the one who doesn't quite fit in. At some point, after a period of time which varies from person to person, most expats just want to settle into their adopted country and stop thinking about 'back home' so much. Hell, Noble Savage started as an expat and current events site! A few months later I became pregnant and BOOM! my blog went from expats and pundits to parents and everything in between.

Suddenly, I felt that I could write about a wider variety of topics and with a more diverse spread of readers. Even though I'd worn the expat label gladly and had made great friends and connections that way, I realised it had been holding me back. Not because blogging about that experience wasn't worthwhile, but because it constrained me within the parameters of what 'those kinds of blogs' are like. And it limited my writing, certainly. You only have to look at how infrequently I posted when my blog first began, in early 2005, to see that if it didn't have to do with my preconceived idea of what my site was about or what my readers wanted, I didn't really write about it. Once I lost the label I gained a new perspective, one that I felt freed me creatively. Obviously not everyone feels or will feel that way but it goes a long way in explaining why I've personally resisted the 'mummy blogger' tag.

I'm not ashamed to be a mummy blogger in that I am a woman who blogs about mothering and I am proud of that. I am not delusional, pampered or neglectful, as the New York Times article suggests, and I'm not a bore or irrelevant either. I write about what I want, how I want -- be that giving birth, breastfeeding and dealing with tantrums, or gender politics, grief and religion. I reject the label not because I don't like what it describes but because I don't want it to be stuck on a box in which I'm forced to climb.

Day Trip To Hay-on-Wye

2010-04-11T07:20:00.001-07:00

Today me and Eldest Son took a long journey through the Brecon Beacons to one of my favourite places in the entire world. The sun was shining, the spring flowers and lambs were all out in abundance, and it was just me and him together in the car looking quietly forward to the day ahead.

Hay-on-Wye is a small town on the Welsh/English border with over thirty second hand book shops. Even the old cinema is now a sprawling book shop with rows upon rows upon rows of shelves lined with books on every subject you can possibly imagine. You could quite easily become lost forever in there, completely unaware of time slipping by as you browsed through the vast fiction section, breathing in the musty smell of old paper. I absolutely love it.

I took some photos while we were there - although I'm making no claims for their quality - the photographic aspect of blogging was never going to be my strong point, let's be frank. But I wanted to see if I could convey something of the magic of the place to you. I don't know if anyone remembers the Faraway Tree series of books by Enid Blyton? For those that don't, they featured a tree that always had a magical land at the top. Every now and then strong winds would come and blow away the land that was there so that another one could come and take its place. There was the Land of Toys, the Land of Sweets, the Land of Spells and many others. Well to me, Hay-on-Wye will always be the Land of Books.

This picture is of the upstairs of one of the biggest book shops. They must have done it up fairly recently - I'd never seen the tree before - but the new chairs are really comfortable and provide a welcome place to sit and peruse your potential purchases.

Today there were a couple of cats slinking and purring their way around one of the book shops, presumably in the hopes of getting a stroke or two. One of them jumped onto Eldest Sons lap whilst he was sat in the childrens section reading one of his new books. The funny thing is that in Hay the sight of a cat or two in a book shop doesn't strike you as being in the least bit odd. You could sit in one of the armchairs reading and stroking a cat and it would be the most natural thing in the world - no-one that had been there more than once would bat an eyelid.

I know these pictures aren't very clear - the sun had gone in by then and I was standing in the middle of the road in imminent danger of being run over, but the one on the left is of the sign for the shop pictured on the right called Murder and Mayhem, or the 'Who Dunnit' shop as we call it. It specializes in detective fiction, true crime and horror.

The sign for Eldest Sons favourite shop. They have everything from old battered copies of Harry Potter to pristine first editions of things like Rupert the Bear.

Always the last stop on the way home, the fudge shop not only has every flavour of fudge you can think of piled in slabs and displayed temptingly on the counter, but it has shelves almost up to the ceiling of glass jars full of the sorts of sweets that remind you of your childhood, and which you can still buy by the weight.

Full disclosure: I promise I do not work for the tourist board - nor was I given any free books (mores the pity) for writing this post. Hay-on-Wye is just genuinely one of the most wonderful places I know.

An Apology.

2010-04-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

I have had it pointed out to me that I have made a large error in my previous post: Mummy Blogging. Just how important is it? The post was largely a critique of an article published in the New York Times, and entitled: Honey, Don't Bother Mommy. I'm Too Busy Building My Brand. I had credited the author as being 3 times Pullitzer nominated photo-journalist Monica Lopossay, when in fact the article was written by American journalist, Jennifer Mendelsohn.

I would like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere apologies to Ms Lopossay - I will edit the original post so that it credits the real author immediately.

If any readers would care to look at the comments to my original post, you will see one written by Kevin Dayhoff who is a colleague of Ms Lopossays and points to the fact that Lopossay is in fact a woman who has worked hard to promote societal change through her photography.

Mummy Blogging. Just How Important is it?

2010-04-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

I realise that I may be coming to this conversation a little late - such is my habit I'm afraid - but after reading what I felt to be a rather objectionable on-line article that had been featured in the New York Times and is entitled: 'Honey, Don't Bother Mommy. I'm Too Busy Building My Brand' I felt moved to write a response.

The piece was written by American journalist Jennifer Mendelsohn, and from the very beginning is shot through with exactly the same patronizing tone that so distinguishes the title. Mendelsohn portrays Mummy blogging as a self indulgent and silly hobby, enjoyed by mostly middle class mothers with far too much time on their hands. An air of mockery can also be detected consistently throughout the article - Mendelsohn quotes the titles and tag lines of womens blogs with a superior and sardonic air - as though she can't quite help but cock a speculative and disbelieving eye at how anyone could possibly concern themselves with reading and writing such trivia.

Unfortunately this point of view is not an uncommon one. I have often heard it implied (by other bloggers too, interestingly) that mummy bloggers specifically are a sad, socially challenged bunch who use blogging and social media as a substitute for real friendships and interaction, and who have nothing better to do with their free time than to spend it documenting their little darlings adventures on the toilet for all and sundry to read. Mendelsohn herself describes the mummy blogosphere as functioning as a kind of "modern day kaffeeklatsch" and in doing so reinforces this attitude that mothers who blog have nothing of value to contribute to any serious discussion. As offended as I am by the tone of her comments, I nevertheless can acknowledge a grain of truth in what she says. The mummy blogosphere can indeed sometimes resemble something of a virtual coffee morning, but mostly in the sense that it provides often isolated mothers with the support, advice and company of their peers. Being the sole or main carer for children is not always conducive to an active social life, or necessarily to an active working one, and so what many resourceful women are finding is that blogging can provide new ways of connecting with other mothers, of discussing the issues that affect them, and of engaging with a world from which they can sometimes feel excluded.

What I take real exception to is the derisory tone Mendelsohn chooses to adopt when discussing the possibility that some mummy bloggers might take their writing seriously. I presume (and it is a fairly large assumption, but bear with me) that as a well educated, successful woman in a male dominated field she would have at least a passing familiarity with the principles of feminism. I wonder then why she feels it acceptable to dismiss what is in effect an entire genre of female writers in one fell swoop, and why she is happy to imply that women who dare to take a bit of time out for themselves in order to write are neglecting their children.

The attitude that mothers have nothing of value to contribute to any discussion that doesn't involve either nappies or baby food is - unfortunately - not an uncommon one either. Even the feminist movement itself has sometimes marginalised or ignored mothers and the issues that can affect them, which has always struck me as being hugely counter-productive. After all the majority of women become mothers at some point, how can we claim to advocate for womankind whilst simultaneously pretending that the majority don't exist? The occupation of motherhood is often denigrated and given low status by both men and women because it is unpaid and is therefore classed as having no economic value. Stay at home mothers especially suffer at the hands of a male dominated and profit driven society that often seeks to class them as being brainless amoebas with nothing to contribute and nothing to say. Never mind that we have given up our independence in order to bring up the next generation. Mendelsohns article plays neatly into all of these odious stereotypes. 'How dare these women entertain such ideas above their station' seems to be the message. 'What thinking person would possibly want to read about their lives?' To quote the inimitable Germaine Greer: "Motherhood is now regarded as a sort of personal indulgence." If that is the case, where then might that leave writing about it?

Of course as any blog reader will tell you there is in fact an infinite amount of variation in womens on line writing. Although if you are a woman and you mention your children on your blog - however tangentially - be prepared for your blog to be instantly labelled a 'Mummy Blog' whether or not that is how you would choose to define yourself. There has been a lot of talk in our corner of the internet recently about the term 'mummy blogger' and how well it defines what we do. Are we 'just' mummy bloggers or are we more than that? Does the term itself invite others to take us less seriously? Or are we proud of that label? Would distancing ourselves from it simply play into the hands of those who would seek to denigrate mothers and their writing? Or does it not really matter either way because we only blog for fun anyway?

In truth I have not read many blogs that focus exclusively on relaying the day to day bringing up of small children, although I certainly do not think blogs that do are less relevant than any other. The beauty of having a blog is that it is your own space to write about what you want. What I have found to be mostly the case though is that the vast majority of mummy blogs are actually concerned with all sorts of subjects aswell as parenting. Popular culture, politics, history, mental health, feminism, crafts, creative writing - it's all there. Not only that but it is being documented by some extremely talented writers. Writers who without the medium of blogging might not have found a space to use as their creative and intellectual outlet. Just imagine what a treasure trove it will all make for the future social historians of the next millenium.

Mummy blogging is important, simply because through it we are telling the truth about ordinary womens lives. It is the story of our time and place from a myriad of different perspectives. It is relevant and it is worthy - and not only that - it is being kept safe for future generations.

So with this post I am asking: What does mummy blogging and your writing mean to you? Leave a comment, or if you are interested in doing a guest post with a view to answering the question in more detail, feel free to e-mail me (contact details are linked to at the top.)

A Poem

2010-04-06T12:07:00.000-07:00

Simple and beautiful... but also powerful. It is by a woman called Grace Nichols, and is called 'Because she has come.' I don't know if this is the whole poem or just an extract:

Because she has borne five children
And her belly is criss-crossed
With little tongues of fire...

Give her honour
Give her honour, you fools,
Give her honour

Go Team Katie...

2010-04-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

Before you say anything, no I can't believe I'm posting this either. But I don't care what anyone says about Katie Price - I like her. She's a survivor and a battler and you just can't keep the woman down. She's got balls which is more than can be said for that snivelling ex husband of hers.

I can't bear him and his public pity party. His 'poor me all I care about is being a good daddy' act (whilst he simultaneously implies constantly through the worlds media that the mother of his children is unfit and a slut to boot) makes me want to chuck. He has done everything he can to publicly shame his ex-wife and destroy her reputation whilst still managing to cling on to the moral high ground by playing the victim, and I personally fail to understand how he can square his professed commitment to putting the needs of his children first with his active collusion in the medias bashing of their mother.

Price on the other hand has always deliberately courted the media - she is a canny woman who understands well the symbiotic relationship enjoyed by the press and so called celebrities - and who tries to exploit that relationship to her advantage. But she has never pretended otherwise. There is nothing coy or disingenuous about Price, she knows full well that the press attention is her bread and butter and she makes no apologies for that. Peter Andre however is supposedly a musician. A musician who used the pain of his recent divorce to promote his latest album.

I personally think that it is specifically Prices refusal to hide and act as though she is ashamed that makes her so unpopular. If she was photographed mascara streaked and blubbing and issued a press release stating that she was suffering from 'exhaustion' and was booking herself in for a stint at the Priory, she would probably find herself soaring in the popularity stakes. The media does love a broken woman after all. But instead she has kept her nose in the air and remarried a man whom she is routinely accused of using and exploiting, despite the fact that he clearly needs her in order to establish his own 'celebrity career' far more than she needs anything from him.

Price is no doubt aware that she's made some mistakes and poor choices in her life (haven't we all), but instead of curling up into a ball and disappearing into a bottomless pit of self-loathing she holds her head up high and keeps walking - and in doing so gives a metaphorical two fingered salute to a salivating misogynist media and its rubber necking consumers - and that is precisely the reason I like her.

GO PRICEY, I say.

Go on, tell me I'm talking bollocks. You know you wanna....

Yippee, Yahoo, and Cockadoodledoo

2010-03-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

Just in case the clue was in fact not in the title, this is just a short post to say how incredibly excited and indeed honoured I am to have been nominated for not just one, but two MAD blogger awards - Best New Blog and Best Writer. Seriously, I really am genuinely thrilled so thank you very very much to whoever nominated me (~~the cheque's in the post.~~)

I am not even going to attempt to feign nonchalance at having received such a lovely compliment. I suppose if I tried very hard I might be able to trot out some worthy post about blogging not being a competition and about how these sorts of awards tend to get mired down in nepotism and sour grapes, but (whilst these things may be true) I'm not gunna because I'm far too busy dancing a little celebratory jig around my office.

Soooo... if anyone feels like chucking another vote or two my way that would be... ahem... you know... wonderful. The prizes are ever so good you know and I could do with a laptop. Imagine - being able to blog from the comfort of my own bed. Oh the joy.

Anyway before I get too carried away I'm going. I'll take my big fat head with me, but before I do, I'd just really like to say - seriously - thanks again.

xxxxxxxxx

The Big Question

2010-03-30T14:05:00.001-07:00

This post is a contribution to Josies writing workshop, although it is not strictly speaking a piece of creative writing, it was still very much inspired by prompt 3 which was itself inspired by Christine at Thinly Spreads beautiful post: What Comes Next?

Occasionally when I find myself unable to sleep and it is a clear night, I open my curtains and lie on my bed looking out at the sky. Its vastness is soothing, the moon always seems to stare back knowingly, and sometimes if I'm lucky I will catch a shooting star flaming across the inky backdrop as if intent on a last hurrah before its light finally goes out for good. It is a good time for thinking and for half-dreaming.

The Butterfly Effect is a metaphor that seeks to sum up the principles of Chaos theory - it is a metaphor that asks a question: Does the flap of a butterflies wings in Brazil start a ripple effect that could result in a tornado in Texas? Although the science behind it is beyond me really I have always loved this idea and the image it creates. Recently whilst lying half awake on a late and starry night I found myself gazing out at the sky and dreamily wondering if perhaps the death of one human being could set off a similar ripple effect - eventually causing a small but significant shift in the entire universe - with planets and stars all being forced to change course and realign as a result? Whilst I do not believe that this could be literally true, it is nevertheless an idea that I find beautiful, and that weaves seamlessly into my genuine belief that birth and death are simply a part of the cyclical nature of life along with the tides and the seasons.

Neanderthals were one of the earliest species of hominid to inhabit the earth. They lived 250,000 years ago and survived on their own wit and resources through an ice age, but perhaps most interestingly of all they are said to have been the first hominids to have buried their dead. Not only that but some evidence has also been found to suggest that alongside the bodies of their dead they sometimes buried trinkets and animal bones. The assumption made by many archaeologists is that this indicates a belief in some sort of an afterlife, and that this is turn is evidence of their humanity. Which then of course begs the question: is there an intrinsic human need to want to trust in our own relative immortality? If the most primitive humans who must only have been bent on survival in the harshest of conditions sought the comfort of belief in a life beyond the grave, what might this say about human nature in general?

None of this would ever have crossed my mind for long if it weren't for the fact that inevitably - like every other mother sooner or later - I was confronted with The Question.

'Mum, what happens when you die?'

Nothing. You just die. For some reason I balked at saying this to my child. It seemed almost cruel, so abrupt, so harsh and yet it is what I have always believed and it has never frightened me. I have no problem with the idea of an end point, of closure. Indeed the promise of eternal life - that triumphant carrot dangled so enthusiastically in front of non-believers by the majority of the worlds religions - has never held any lure for me. My money has always been on Darwin. But when my curious and sensitive eldest son first asked me The Question, an inner voice suddenly said, 'You can't just say 'nothing'. It won't do, not on its own. You will cut him off dead when what he needs is to explore the possibilities for himself.' So I have tried my best to enable him to do that, which has not always been easy to square with my own strongly held atheism. I have also tried to answer his many questions as honestly as I can, which has not always been easy to square with my desire not to steer his train of thought too sharply in any direction. He knows that I do not believe in a heaven. He knows that I do not believe in ghosts. He knows that I do believe that unquestioning and devoted faith in something which has been proven to be highly improbable can be dangerous, and that far from being a virtue I believe it can breed intolerance and inhibit moral behaviour. He also knows that he is absolutely free to make up his own mind.

My mothers father - my 'Diddydad' - was dying in a small cottage hospital just at the time I was due to give birth to my second child. My mother sat with him through the last days of his life and one night when she could not sleep in the armchair beside his bed, the nurse on the night shift took pity on her, made her a cup of tea and some toast, and sat down with her for a while to chat. My mum talked of how I was expected to go into labour at any time and how sad she was that she could not be there for me. Apparently the nurse had said briskly but kindly, 'Well I'm a firm believer in one in one out dear'. My mother still remembers this particular nurse fondly and repeats this story often, and somehow - although I know her words of comfort were essentially nonsense in light of the current global population explosion - it always brings me back full circle to where this post began.

A full circle back to the butterfly and its flapping wings. Back to my night gazing and nocturnal imagining that with every death the stars and planets might sigh, change course and roll over to make room for the new life that is to follow.

So... Where To Now?

2010-03-29T05:54:00.000-07:00

I have been treading the same path for a very long time. There have been some twists and turns, but always the same path going in the same general direction. Suddenly though (for although I have been expecting it, it still comes as a surprise), up in the distance I spy a junction - a cross roads. I hesitate. I feel anticipation, dread and excitement in equal measure. I have no choice but to keep moving forwards. Soon there will be no choice but to set off in a wholly new direction.

The Youngest starts school in September. It will be the first time in almost 12 years that I have not had a little one at home.

My temporary paid post at Womens Aid has come to an end. The world of accountancy seems eerily quiet at the moment and Naked Boss has not contacted me regarding any book-keeping work for weeks. I think perhaps he has decided that he only wants female employees who are prepared to overlook the fact that he is a predatory pest. Well o.k. I can live with that.

I have made a new claim for Income Support and Housing Benefit for now, and am thinking hard about how I am going to support myself and my children when I no longer need to be at home to care for The Youngest, and the majority of my day becomes free. I have all the skills necessary to work in domestic abuse service provision but the funding for Womens Aid in my area is being slashed to ribbons, and there are more likely to be redundancies than new vacancies in the near future, (I will avoid ranting about what a disgrace this is - but suffice to say - vulnerable women and children will suffer as a result.) I have another option which is to spend a year at college gaining an official book-keeping qualification that will enable me to become self-employed and work from home, which would be ideal, but lets just say that the world of accountancy doesn't exactly set me on fire.

A new beginning is what this feels like. A new stage of my life about to be embarked upon. I am aware that this is a well worn path trodden to dust by many mothers, but for me personally it is unknown territory. What I want more than anything is financial independence. To be able to support myself and my family reasonably comfortably by doing something that I find meaningful is my ultimate goal, and I believe, not an unrealistic one.

Of course like many women (and men) who inhabit the blogosphere, the dream would be to earn money from writing, writing anything really - articles for magazines, a blog, even perhaps a book - but I have no idea where to even start along those lines. So for now the focus is on what is genuinely attainable for me, what I can do to get myself earning in the near future, and how I make the transition from 'stay at home most of the time mum' to 'working mum'.

As I approach nearer the crossroads, time seems to accelerate beyond my control. There are no signposts that I can see, simply roads that loom larger and larger and seem to stretch out forever, splintering off in the middle distance into a multitude of different directions. I still have no idea where I'm really going.

Happiness MeMe

2010-03-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

I have been tagged by the marvellous Modern Dilemma. If you haven't checked out her blog yet, then you should, because she's really good and I like her. She eats biscuits called de-stroppers (well, they're almost called that) and that's my kinda woman. Since beginning this post I have also discovered that the very lovely Last of the Mojitos has tagged me with the exact same meme. Who'd have thought? I would urge you to check out her blog aswell as she is also dead good, and I like her lots too. She and I share a dislike of people who sit in the over-taking lane on the motorway. That alone is good enough for me.

Anyway they have challenged me to list ten things that make me happy. TEN. And not just things that make me generally happy either. Ten things that made me happy today. I have spent ages agonising over this, and have come to the only conclusion possible - that I am a miserable fucker. I am however a miserable fucker who is usually up for a challenge, so I'm off to find me a barrel or two to scrape, and I shall be back soon....

Right, here goes. Today I enjoyed:

1. Listening and singing along to loud music in my car. Specifically (hangs head in shame) Lady Gaga and Beyonces one, you know... 'tonight I'm not takin no calls cos I'll be dancin'... Yep, my blog's anonymous for a reason, see?

2. Complaining. When I'm not working for Naked Boss, I work for Womens Aid. You might have thought that being as my colleagues and I work for a feminist organisation, we would transcend all the stereotypical notions of what large groups of women working together might be like. Well you would be wrong. We bitched and whined and gossiped our way through yet another stressful day with the utmost gusto. It was great.

3. Wild red salmon and cucumber sandwiches from M&S. Yum. This makes me sound an awful lot posher than I actually am by the way.

4. Mr S taking all the children, including the one that isn't his, out swimming and then onto a cafe for dinner afterwards. And not bringing them back until bedtime. I realise this may sound callous, but a woman needs a bit of time to herself you know?

5. Publishing interesting and engaging comments from bloggers that I respect as being really very good, on my last post (and of course on other posts too.) Yippee. It's nice when the people whose stuff you like seem to like your stuff too.

6. Knowing that my hair is clean, and that I do not have to wash it either tonight or in the morning. I realise this may seem like I am taking the concept of barrel scraping to a whole new level but I really hate washing my hair, and the knowledge that I don't have to do it for another a day or so is always a cause for celebration.

7. Spring being almost here. I know everyone's said this - but a glimpse of sunshine and daffodils really does improve ones mood.

8. O.k. I really am running out of steam now. What to write, what to write..... (Gappy stares wild eyed around the 'office' in vague hopes of some inspiration...) Ha! I know! Looking at my stats and seeing that I have a reader from Wichita, Kansas. Wichita may just be the most fabulous sound that a mouth can make, plus I love that Glen Campbell song and it starts on a pleasant loop inside my head whenever I see the Wichita reader in my visitor paths. Hmm. Now I am all: perhaps I have far too much time on my hands, but whatever. Reader from Wichita - you make my day.

9. The fact that the Easter holidays are fast approaching - I am looking forward to nearly three weeks break from the old routine and to visiting friends and making merry.

10. O.k. When my kids came back from the swimming pool and the cafe. It was past The Youngests bedtime and she was half asleep in her dads arms, but when she saw me she smiled, reached out for me and said 'Mumeeeeeeee'. Middle Son leapt into my arms and hugged my neck. Even The Eldest - who is far too within sniffing distance of becoming a teenager for such ebullient displays of affection - sidled up to me and happily submitted to a ruffle of the hair and a kiss hello on the forehead. I took The Youngest straight up to bed, put her in her pyjamas and tucked her up with her favourite toy fluffy cat. She lay with her beautiful curls splayed out over the pillow and her 'Catty' in her arms, her eyes involuntarily closing despite her best efforts to keep them open. I looked at the perfect skin on her cheek and kissed it good night. Sleepily, almost imperceptibly then she said, 'Meeow'.

Sometimes my cup really does runneth over after all.

So with this I now tag:

Brits in Bosnia
An Attitude Adjustment
Eternally Distracted
Spilt Milk
Nova

Good For Babies - But is it Good For Mothers? Some Thoughts on Attachment Parenting and Baby Wearing

2010-03-20T03:43:00.000-07:00

Since I first began my blog I have had a vague intention to write a post on baby wearing and attachment parenting. But my views on the subject are so conflicting that although half formed ideas have been floating around in the darkest recesses of my brain for a while, any attempt to gather them together and organise them into a coherent post seemed a near impossible task.

I became pregnant with my first child when I was 22. I was idealistic and impressionable, and when I look back now my heart bleeds a tiny bit for the naive young woman that I was. She was so desperately excited to be having a baby. She had no earthly clue how horrendously hard it would all turn out to be.

During my pregnancy a friend lent me a copy of The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. Liedloff had developed her continuum theory of baby care through her observations of Yequana indian women living in the South American jungle. She claimed that their babies almost never cried due to being carried constantly by their mothers as they went about their work and daily business, and that the whole community enjoyed a level of well-being and contentment unheard of in modern western societies due to having had their need for contact with their mothers consistently fulfilled as infants. Liedloff had come to the conclusion that western styles of baby care which involved separating babies from their mothers by putting them in cots and prams, and leaving them to cry, were responsible for the high levels of mental ill health in our society. I had what I thought was an epiphany reading that book, and vowed then and there that I would never ever put my baby down. Liedloff had mentioned very briefly that some house work, particularly bed making might be hard to do whilst carrying a baby, but had gone on to say that a resourceful mother would find a way. I was going to be a resourceful mother - I was going to find a way.

I am still of the belief that a baby needs as much physical contact with his/her caregivers as they can feasibly manage. I chose to breastfeed my children as and when they seemed interested, as opposed to trying to impose a feeding routine onto them. I also co-slept with my two younger children for the first six months or so, simply because it meant that I was actually able to get some sleep (a breastfeeding baby soon learns how to help herself during the night) and I also believe that if I had co-slept with my first child and therefore not had to endure night after night of broken sleep, I might have been spared the worst excesses of the post-natal illness that destroyed our early relationship. The basic principles of attachment parenting still make sense to me. And yet... so much writing on the subject, particularly the Continuum Concept itself, now makes uncomfortable reading for me.

Firstly, I would say that in my experience baby wearing doesn't 'work' in terms of its promises to create a happy baby that rarely cries. Both of my sons screamed as though they were having their fingernails pulled out with a pair of tweezers, almost continuously (or so it felt at the time) despite being held for the vast majority of their waking hours.

Secondly, I found that far from satisfying my own primal needs as a mother for contact with her new child, I didn't always enjoy it very much. I hated the lack of personal space that came from having a baby attached to me all the time, and found myself longing for someone to come and just take the baby away for a bit. By the time my babies were old enough to be carried in a back pack, it just plain did my back in. I struggled on regardless, still believing it was the 'right' thing to do.

Thirdly, I often found it more or less logistically impossible. I must have tried just about every sling on the (incredibly lucrative) market, but failed to find one that allowed me the freedom of movement I needed to go about my everyday tasks with ease, and which also felt secure enough that I could be confidently hands free. I became only too aware of just how miserably I was managing to fail Liedloffs resourcefulness test. The dirty dishes, dust and laundry kept creeping up ever higher around my ears.

By the time I got to baby number three my approach had, through necessity, morphed into a 'whatever works' type of pragmatism. The Youngest spent much of her time in one of those metal framed cloth chairs, watching her brothers play and the washing machine go round, and observing the general chaos that surrounded her with remarkable equanimity. Wouldn't you just know it, she was the happiest baby out of the three of them. I was so busy managing at home alone with three children that it was physically impossible for me to always pick her up at the first squawk, and the poor thing basically got offered a feed whenever I had a spare ten minutes to sit down in. But she took it all in her stride and I can certainly detect no ill effects so far.

So now as a more experienced mother, I can sometimes feel slightly uncomfortable listening to vehement advocates of attachment parenting and baby wearing. My discomfort comes I think from the idea that there is only one way to nurture a baby effectively, and the resulting pressure that attitude puts on women to do it the 'right' way. In order to be good enough mothers we must breastfeed on demand, preferably until our children self-wean. We must carry our babies in close contact with us at all times no matter how difficult or impractical this may be. We must sleep with our babies untill they leave our bed of their own volition, with no thought for our own personal space or how this may affect our enjoyment of our sexual relationship. But most of all we must always be there, and this has huge implications for women who need or want to work outside their home, or to have an identity apart from being a mother.

So with this post I am asking: Would a wide spread adoption of attachment parenting methods mean a huge step backwards for women in terms of their options and freedom of choice in how to live their lives? Does attachment parenting theory lean too heavily on the notion of endless maternal sacrifice being the true path to womanly fulfillment? Perhaps the reason that the Yequana women and other women all over the world practice baby wearing is because they have little choice in the matter. Has anybody ever actually asked them if they enjoy working all day with their babies tied to their backs? Perhaps given the option some of these women would give their eye teeth for a pram and a nanny and an office job. I don't know. I'm not trying to infer that our way of life is in any way superior, but equally I don't accept that it's necessarily inferior either. It's just different. I do however think that attempting to parent as if one lived in an interdependent and supportive community in the South American jungle - when one actually lives in a post-industrial western society in which most of us barely know our neighbours and have to parent alone for most of the day - can be strewn with difficulties. It certainly was for me. What do you think?

Road Rage and the Lollipop Lady

2010-03-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

Driving I'll admit, does not always bring out the very best in me. Mr S used to joke that Britain had always been considered a relatively safe place until I passed my driving test. My what a card he was. But actually if I'm honest it is not completely unheard of, on the odd rare occasion, for me to be taken over by a rather unattractive and impromptu bout of road-rage. This only ever happens within the private confines of my own car I would hasten to add, but I do once in a while catch myself tapping irritably on the steering wheel and swearing under my breath at other (annoyingly incompetent) road users. In fact my two most favourite driving expressions ever are: 'Hoo yes, that is an inspired place to stop there matey' and 'Come on sunshine, you could get a bloody bus through there' ( I am nothing if not original.) For some reason the inside of my car is the only place in the entire world in which I ever refer to anybody as 'sunshine'. It's as if the moment I get behind the wheel, there is always the possibility that I will become possessed by an entirely new persona - a kind of drivers alter ego if you like - and that this other self just happens to sport a deeply unconvincing mockney accent to boot.

Some time ago I was having a discussion with a friend about road rage. She had recently moved from the capital to live more rurally, and I remember her saying that in the London borough where she had lived there would sometimes be articles in the local paper describing how Lollipop ladies had been verbally or even sometimes physically attacked by irate commuters, angry at being forced to stop so that children could safely cross the road to school. My friend had shaken her head in disbelief and declared: 'You know you're scum when you have a go at a lollipop lady.' I had nodded gravely in agreement. Ha, at least I had the decency to swear at other drivers in such a way that they couldn't actually hear me. What kind of moral degenerate would openly abuse a lollipop lady? Jeez.

A couple of days ago I was driving home from work after a long and draining start to the week, and I saw a lollipop lady up ahead walk out into the road waving her stop sign. I slowed down, and came to a halt just as a young woman with a pram started to cross over the road behind her. Now my cars horn is located slap bang in the centre of the steering wheel (which is a stupid place to put it in my opinion Mr Renault designer just in case you're listening.) Tired as I was, I leaned my forearm without thinking across the steering wheel to rest my chin on while I waited. Suddenly there was this almighty deafening BEEEEP!! The poor woman with the pram nearly leapt three feet into the air, and the lady brandishing the lollipop fixed me with a scowl so fierce that I nearly melted on the spot. My slightly panicked response to this was to wave my hands around in such a manner as I thought clearly communicated 'oh god I'm really sorry, I did not mean to do that, damn horn is in a really stupid place eh.' At which point the lollipop ladies scowl darkened to a look of undiluted fury, and I realised that now not only did she think that I had deliberately leaned on my horn because I was impatient at having to stop for a young mother and her baby to cross the road, but that I was also now waving my arms around aggressively in such a manner as to say: 'Get out of the fucking road and take your stupid stick with you before I run you over....' or something like that.

So I am now waiting with baited breath for a headline to appear in my local paper screaming: 'MYSTERY ARM WAVING WOMAN IN SILVER RENAULT CLIO THREATENS POOR WEE INNOCENT LOLLIPOP LADY' and for all my neighbours reading it to think 'Hmm, mad arm waving woman in a silver renault clio... now then, who could that be? Oh hang on a minute - of course - that'll be Gappy.

Dear So and So... Get it off Your Chest 2

2010-03-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the month again. That time when all my bottled up frustration and suppressed annoyance coagulates and multiplies in my stomach until I can hold it in no more, and it finally, gloriously, spews forth like ectoplasm. Yep, it's time for:

Dear Farm Traffic Leader,

I just want you to know that I am on to you. I have a theory that I have been working on for some time now. It goes something like this: That every lumbering, foul smelling vehicle and its driver are in fact part of an evil masonic conspiracy intent on world domination, and that this malevolent network of tractors and the like is closely involved in monitoring my habits, routines, and movements and then communicating them to each other via Evil Farm Traffic Network radio, in the interests of ensuring that one of your kind is always directly in front of me going at about 3 miles per hour whenever I need to actually get anywhere within the next five hours. Why why why? I'm innocent can't you see? I'm simply an ordinary woman on a mission, who happens to be bloody late again.

Yours with a creeping sense of paranoia, Gappy.

Dear Nessa (she of the Gavin and Stacey fame),

There is, so I'm told, to be a general election soon. Have you considered putting yourself up for the job of Prime Minister? Because any woman who drives an articulated lorry with shooting flames down the side is sure to get my vote.

P.S. I think I may possibly be a little bit in love with you,

Gappy.

Dear Naked Boss,

Just when I think that you may have surpassed even yourself in terms of cretinous creepiness, you just have to go that extra mile and prove me wrong don't you? Your latest conceptual leap involving the logic that only a radical feminist could possibly object to your inappropriate comments and uninvited back rubs, and that I can't be one of those because my daughter owns a pink scooter, has left me feeling baffled to say the least. I mean jesus, I applied moisturiser this morning. Perhaps you now feel it wise that I seriously reconsider whether or not I should be entitled to vote?

You know, I would tell you to shove your job up your arse, but I suspect you'd only take it as a come on.

Gappy.

Dear Joke Book belonging to Middle Son,

Do you think there is any chance at all that you could find your way discreetly into the re-cycling bin? Because there's a limit to how much crap jokery any woman can take you know. If I have to spend one more afternoon being trailed by a six year old asking me repeatedly where astronaut cows go, and then laughing until he gags every time he manages to squeak out the punchline (the moooooon of course) I may just finally lose the will to live.

Q: What do you call a woman who's just about ready to shoot herself? A: Gappy.

Dear So and So Boat,

Why am I always just missing you? Is it that other more organised bloggers have their Dear So and So's ready and waiting in their drafts, so that when you are first spotted on the horizon, they can immediately rush to the shore and anchor their link before Kat has moved on entirely and published a new post? Or sailed a new ship? Do I have any bloody idea where I'm going with this metaphor? No, I don't. But in the meantime, it would seem that I have missed you once again.

Yours, forever destined to trail behind confusedly,

Gappy.

And breathe....

If you would like to have yourself a go at a Dear So and So (sooo much cheaper than therapy) then head on over to Kats 3 Bedroom Bungalow where you can get your widget and post your link.

To My Mother

2010-03-13T01:23:00.000-08:00

My mother gave birth to me when she was just nineteen. She had attended a convent school where she was taught by nuns. Her parents had controlled her life brutally and absolutely, and she had not been allowed to enjoy any of the normal teenage opportunities to explore her own identity. She didn't even know that babies cried at night.

When I was a toddler, she met a man and later married him. He adopted me and we went to live with him in a small council house in an uninspiring commuter town designed to take the over-spill from London. The dining room was covered in busily patterned wallpaper, typical of the nineteen seventies, and I can remember standing with my face right up close to it and staring until it made my eyes go squinty.

When I was at primary school my mother went to stay at a womens peace camp called Greenham common. Sometimes I would stay there with her. She would wear this huge brown heavy woollen kaftan, and I would snuggle up into it and watch the campfire, listening to the women talk and sing. Sometimes we were at Yellow Gate which was the main camp, and sometimes we were at Green Gate which was in a wood and had a tyre swing to play on. I got lost wandering around Green Gate once for what felt like hours - I can remember stumbling through ditches and shouting desperately at the sky - I thought I might never be found again. By the time I was eventually reunited with my mother I was tear streaked and wailing, but she told me not to cry because she had a surprise for me: we were going on an aeroplane. That night we flew to Germany on what I now know was a speaking tour for CND. Many things from that trip now stick in my mind. I can remember us waiting in a queue for a taxi in the dark - it was raining and our luggage was getting wet. The pavements were slick and shiny and dotted with the reflections of all the different coloured lights from the street. We stayed in lots of different peoples houses - in one house there was a boy my age who serenaded me on a little acoustic guitar and pronounced his name 'Michelle' which I thought was hilarious - but most vividly of all I remember my mother standing at a podium, speaking to a vast hall crammed full of people. There was a stand selling sausages and little telly screens up near the back so that the people there could look at them to see and hear properly what she was saying. I could tell that she felt nervous. She was talking about Hiroshima and how dangerous nuclear weapons were, and how we should get rid of them. It seemed to me then that she was the most important person in the world. Of course she was - to me.

My mother had left school without many qualifications, so when I was nine I think, certainly after she had moved completely out of our home and was living with a new partner in a different house and had had my brother, she decided she was going to study to become a solicitor. She had to get her maths G.C.S.E. before she could do her A levels and go on to university, but she hated maths and I remember her once throwing her maths book across the room in frustration. I also remember a ritual burning in the back garden of some of her more loathed study books once she had finally got through one particular set of exams. She studied for years - on a wall in her house there is a photo of us all together and smiling, my eccentric little brother still very small - on the day that she graduated from university. She did go on to become a solicitor. Now, at 53, she is re-training to be a psychotherapist.

What else? There is so much I could say, and yet limited space in which to say it. My mother curses like a sailor. She has a big laugh that is not altogether lady like. She's a talented singer and an excellent cook. She works hard. She enjoys travelling and adventure. She has trekked to Machu Picchu, gone white water rafting in Alaska (she bought my son a poster back from that trip that gave detailed instructions on what to do in the event of a brown bear attack) and most recently went on safari in Tanzania. She has also travelled all around South East Asia, and visited the Killing Fields of Cambodia. I encouraged her to write a diary whilst on her travels which she could then give to family and friends to read and keep for future generations. Her description of the horrors she saw at The Killing Field at Cheoung Ek - of the bones and tatters of clothing still pushing up through the earth as if determined they not be forgotten - reduced me to quiet shaking sobs. My mother is made of inspiring stuff. She is brave and wise and has helped inform and shape my beliefs and principles in a way that no-one else has. We are extremely close, and I fancy I can now see elements of her personality coming through in my spirited young daughter, which makes me feel incredibly proud.

I have never before shown her my blog, but for this post I am making an exception, because I wrote it for her really. It's my tribute to her on the day we celebrate our mothers. I feel as though there is a fine line to be trodden however, the last thing I would want is for this gift to descend into mawkish one-sided sentimentality. Firstly because I know she'd hate it, and secondly because it would not be an honest depiction of our often complicated relationship. My mother is as straight as a die and would always rather the truth be told. There have been times when we have made each other miserable. There have been times when she has let me down badly. I know that in my turn, there have been times when I have let her down too. But the love and respect we have for one another is I believe, bigger and stronger than past disappointments, and I know that come what may, it will always win out.

So happy Mothering Sunday mum. Have a good day. I'm sending you all my love with this post.

Your daughter. x

This post was also in response to the gratitude tag, sent to me by the lovely Fraught Mummy, whose blog Brits in Bosnia is one of the most interesting and informative reads in my blogroll.

In Love

2010-03-10T11:27:00.000-08:00

Who was it that said if they could choose to do anything before they died, it would be to fall in love again? I thought it was Germaine Greer, in fact I hoped it was, but I think now that perhaps it wasn't. Never mind. It's what I would choose too, every time.

To feel that intensity of longing and mutual desire, of anticipation and excitement, has to be one of the most sublime experiences that life has to offer. A lot of people dismiss the heady emotions that tend to mark the early stages of a relationship as being essentially meaningless. Psychologists label them 'attachment flu' as though new love were an illness, and people far more sensible than myself quote that famous passage from Captain Corellis Mandolin and say that it is only after the first rush of infatuation has faded and you find that what you have left are shared values and a common vision for the future that you can truly say you have found love.

But I think that society can often seek to dismiss and minimise what it fears the most. Attraction, chemistry, and the feelings associated with falling and being in love are extremely powerful. Fathers and mothers have been known to leave their homes and abandon their children whilst in the grip of such strong emotions. You can read what is possibly the greatest of all the Shakespearean tragedies, or listen to any contemporary love song. Focus on the sentiments that are being expressed - they are not concerned with shared values and long term commitments. It is the fireworks that inspire great art.

I don't think that I will ever live with a man again. My own personal experience of living in a traditional set-up in which I was financially dependent on my partner was that it was a horrible, horrible trap. I believe that women tend to lose out when it comes to the institution of marriage and partnership and that they often sacrifice far more than their men in the interests of keeping the nuclear family together. I have never felt the injustice of gender inequality more keenly than when immersed in efforts to navigate my way through the choppy waters of my intimate relationships with men. Talk about the personal being the political. My priorities these days are that I am able to support myself and my family, and that I enjoy and can feel proud of my autonomy. My children have good relationships with their fathers whom they see consistently and regularly on a weekly basis - and once they are in bed my time and space is my own which is something I value immeasurably.

I sometimes find myself questioning whether a whole adult life spent in a monogamous relationship with the same person is a particularly natural state for human beings. I have a huge amount of admiration for people who manage to make it work and who remain content in their partnerships, but I think that generally as a species we are not very good at it. Indeed the idea that successful marriages can be founded on enduring romantic love is actually very recent and not at all universal. If I'm honest I don't enjoy being in long term relationships very much. In my experience they tend eventually to be defined by a diminishing interest in the other person, power struggles over who does what, and a lack of sex. At 34 and with a completed family of three children, I have come to the conclusion that those things hold no interest for me. I do not want them. And as long as I have family and good friends around me then I don't give a fig if I never have a husband or live with anyone again. But, show me a future in which I never fall in love again and it looks bleak. It takes on a sad grey tinge and in it I feel strangely wilted.

The last time I fell in love it was completely out of the blue. I was at a wedding, we were introduced, he held out his hand to shake mine, and I actually caught my breath. I suddenly felt shot through with self consciousness and kept looking furtively around, convinced that what I was feeling was somehow written all over my face. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen - he reminded me of a greek statue. He was also much younger than me and wildly unsuitable really, but it was too late. I had already decided that I was just going to ignore all of that.

He lived about a two hour drive away. Soon after we met, my children were going away for the weekend with their fathers. I jumped in my car and sped down the motorway to spend the weekend with him. It was two days of madness. We must have walked for miles around the city he calls home, little landmarks of which will be forever etched on my brain. The tiny pub on the corner with the outside tables and chairs on the little roof balcony that we had all to ourselves and where we watched the cars and the night go by. The narrow boats moored to shiny black iron boulders along the city canal. We sneaked onto one of those boats, laughing, shushing and whispering, and made love hoping the moonlight wouldn't give us away. It took us hours to walk back to his flat that night. We kept stopping to kiss every ten paces and he carried me half the way home because my shoes were hurting my feet. He was the most fun I had had in years. When it was time for me to go home, we both sat in silence in my car for about twenty minutes. Already, tearing ourselves away seemed impossible.

And so began a relationship that lasted about fifteen months. Through choice I only ever saw him when the children were with their fathers so we did not get to spend much time together. He would come over once a week after work, drive for two hours to spend the evening and the night with me, and then get up at half past five in the morning in order to leave in time for work the next day. We got the odd weekend together during the school holidays, and that was all.

It is over now, and although the end has been painful I'm still so glad that we had those times together. For a while we were in love and it was wonderful, and as much as I loathe mawkish cliches, it is still nevertheless true I think, that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

So when I picture my future I do not imagine wedding bells and shared possessions. But I do, I admit, sometimes find myself thinking: please, don't let that have been the last time I ever get to feel like that.

Blogging on Blogging.

2010-03-08T10:28:00.000-08:00

I am about to commit what I hear from certain sections of the blogging community is a cardinal sin.

In the interests of making things crystal clear for those of you that might prefer to run screaming, and just in case the title wasn't a complete give away, this is... wait for it... a blog post about blogging. I know. I'm bad.

A few things prompted me to begin writing this post. Reading and enjoying other posts about blogging, for example this one from Notes From Lapland, and this one from Black Hockey Jesus, but mostly - and this is the crux of my point on which I shall elaborate shortly - reading back through my earliest posts which I believe (but for a few exceptions) to be better than my most recent ones.

Being something of a closet Luddite, I only got connected to the internet in December last year. I set up an e-mail account, found a few old friends on facebook and pottered about on mumsnet for a bit. Then after a week or so, and armed only with my Readers Digest: 'How to do just about anything on a computer' I set up a site using Blogger and published my first ever post. I was thrilled - and that is no exaggeration - by the medium of blogging. Still am. I couldn't believe it, anyone with an internet connection could self-publish whatever they wanted. That to me was revolutionary. It was anarchic and exciting but most importantly I felt, it was a great equalizer. I've always been a sucker for a good free for all.

Lately though I've come to the realisation that many things have been distracting me from the writing, which is after all supposed to be the point. New discoveries such as Twitter, statcounter (I have a sad obsession with the recent visitor map - don't ask) and feedburner, make it hard to concentrate on creating actual content. I find myself checking my e-mail at regular half an hour intervals like a trained lab rat in the hope that there will be a new comment waiting juicily in my inbox to be published. After all who doesn't love getting comments? They are part of what makes blogging the unique medium it is - the ability for the writer to interact with their readers is what can make the posts come alive. The knowledge that someone is not only reading what I have to say, but that they can relate to it enough to want to comment and add to it is fantastic. But getting too caught up in the trappings of blogging along with the self imposed pressure I feel to produce a certain number of posts each week is, I feel, driving down the quality of my writing (not that I think I'm Margaret bloody Atwood, but ya know, I want to be the best I can.)

I have also discovered that I am not in any way immune to blogging insecurity. I find myself wondering why certain posts didn't receive many comments. I compare myself unfavourably to other new bloggers. I worry that I'm not up to scratch.

Today I discovered that someone had blocked me on Twitter. I have absolutely no idea why. I don't think I've ever had any contact with this person, or even commented on their blog - I'd seen them about the blogosphere and was interested in what they had to say - so put in a request to follow them, that is all. The reason I'm (sob) sharing this is because on finding that I had been blocked, I then spent the next fifteen minutes checking through all my tweets to see if I had said anything that could possibly have offended anybody. Fifiteen minutes that could have been spent writing and enjoying my blog. Why do I care that someone with whom I don't even have a passing virtual acquaintance has blocked me from following them? I don't know. I do though.

So I think perhaps I need to go back all of three months to my blogging roots. I need to remember why I started blogging, I need to remember that virtually everyone I have met in the blogosphere has gone out of their way to be friendly and supportive, and most of all I need to get over my existential blogging angst, because frankly it's boring even me now.

I am really interested to know if other bloggers experience blogging insecurity - and if they feel that it can affect the quality of their writing. Have you devised ways of guarding against it? Please feel free to share anything that comes to mind.

Costume Dramas

2010-03-05T12:21:00.000-08:00

For those of you that weren't aware, last Thursday was World Book Day.

To celebrate my sons had to go into school dressed up as characters from their favourite book. Some furious last minute rummaging through the dressing up drawer resulted in Middle Son deciding to don his slightly too small Power Ranger suit (according to him there is such a thing as a Power Ranger book, and anyway comics do count.) He then spent the next half an hour before school racing around in said ill-fitting suit (which happens to be the most lurid and migraine inducing shade of lime green you can possibly imagine) pretending to taser his siblings, and taking flying leaps at the sofa like some hyperactive sherbert lemon. Oh, the joys.

Eldest sons father had lent him his climbing harness, complete with clinking karabiners and prussock loops and helmet, in order for him to dress up as some real life bloke who had written a book about how he had fallen seemingly to his death during a mountain climb in the Himalayas, only to crawl a thousand miles to safety with one arm hanging off or something. Which got me off the hook, so I wasn't complaining.

An author had been invited to come to the school for the afternoon, to talk to the children about creative writing, and to give out a prize for the best costume. Parents were also invited to attend. Last minute refusal to leave the house on the part of The Youngest unless she not only got to dress up in a costume but managed to find every little last bloody accessory that went with it, made us inevitably late; but eventually we got there and sat down to listen to the author who then proceeded to go on and on interminably about the difference between kayaks and canoes for some reason that escaped me (turns out she actually wrote the history books that the school subscribed to and wasn't technically a creative writer at all.) I could that see all of the children were deeply unimpressed. J.K. Rowling she was not.

Bored, my gaze wandered idly around the room. Amongst the deeply unimpressed I spied a nose picking Oliver Twist, a couple of Harry Potters, a rather impressive Willy Wonka, and even a Princess Leah (?) complete with the hair-do of my childhood dreams. When the time finally came for the competition to be judged the author asked if anyone wanted to stand up and say a bit about the character that had inspired their costume. Eldest Son stood up and said that his was inspired by a true story. He then went on to describe in gory detail the near death experience of the climber in his fathers book. I felt rather proud watching him. He had overcome his considerable nerves and mustered the confidence to stand up - and to his credit he came across really well, and as if he had genuine enthusiasm for the book. When he'd finished he sat back down and looked at me. I smiled and gave him a discreet thumbs up.

The prize itself was a huge Easter egg. I could see all the kids eyeing it and waiting breathless and vulture-like to see who would have the pleasure of getting to eat it. After some deliberation the author gave it to Eldest Son on the basis that not only did he have an interesting costume, but that he had been the most well informed about his book. I could see that he was thrilled to win, and I was actually rather thrilled for him too. No doubt my indulgent smile and over enthusiastic hand clapping were most nauseating. It was clear that the hopes of others had been cruelly dashed. King Arthur was now sporting a rather black look as though he were spoiling for a fight, and poor Princess Leah was openly weeping with disappointment.

As parents and children alike filed out into the hall to collect coats and school bags ready to go home, other parents crowded round to congratulate Eldest Son on his well deserved win. Clutching his prize and smiling broadly he cleared his throat as if about to begin some sort of rehearsed acceptance speech. 'Funny really' he announced after a pause. 'I failed to mention that I hadn't actually read the book'.

Ah. This now has the makings of a village scandal. There's not a huge amount to do around here. I can see it now.... 'And so it came to pass that Gappy was shunned by the P.T.A. mums for the rest of her childrens school life...' Or something like that. Ha ha, cheers kid.

Good Enough?

2010-03-03T16:56:00.000-08:00

What makes a good mother?

Or perhaps a better question might be: What do you consider to be good mothering?

It's a rhetorical question, but nevertheless the reason I ask is because every woman I know who has children seems to struggle sometimes with what it means to mother well. In fact I don't know a single one who doesn't now and again fear that she is doing a bad job, that she is somehow failing her children despite her best efforts, and who doesn't occasionally catch herself hoping against hope that her children will grow up to be far more forgiving of her perceived motherly mistakes than she herself is. My first forays into the blogosphere have shown that it is no different for a lot of the virtual mothers I meet. Of course it isn't. Why would it be?

The question posed by this post seems on a superficial level to be a fairly easy one to answer. We can surely all agree on the basics of food, warmth, love e.c.t. But dig below the surface, and the question becomes complicated. It becomes emotive and delicate. Opinions on the smallest of issues can become polarised. We start to judge each other mercilessly.

All of us are very much influenced by what we believe other people may think of us, (and our mothering) however much we would like to pretend or insist otherwise. Human beings are social animals - to want to fit in and be liked is an essential part of our makeup. Seeking the approval and acceptance of others is in part instinctual, after all our ancestors lives depended on the support of the whole group. We are not designed to rear our young isolated and alone. But alone we often are in this modern age, the extended family and close community or tribe that was once always on hand to help and give guidance is there no longer. We have no choice but to try to make the best of it and work with what we've got, finding our own parenting way, often in near darkness. We turn in our thousands to parenting books, but often these give confusing and contradictory advice, and so we stumble along unsure, trying desperately not to repeat the same mistakes we feel our own parents made, while joking nervously with other parents who make up the substitute community of the local toddler group or on-line forum, about how our kids are heading for therapy in twenty years time.

The majority of my identity is rooted in being a mother. I take pride and find meaning in my work, I enjoy my friends and my writing, I have lots of interests, but mothering is mostly what I do. And being that I am determined to provide my children with as much love and stability as I possibly can, the question for me then becomes how to do that to the absolute best of my ability, whilst still retaining a sense of self - not to mention my sanity.

Before I had children I was extremely judgemental when it came to other peoples parenting. I had all sorts of ideas about what sort of mother I was going to be (a lot of the ideas were in hindsight rather vague, but definitely involved being better at it than almost everybody else.) I was going to be endlessly patient for one thing. I was certainly never going to shout silly things like, 'I'll count to three....' oh no. It never once occurred to me that there would be times when I would rather do almost anything than look after my child. Or that I would ever desperately watch the clock, counting the minutes untill bed time. Or that I would ever say no to a small child who wanted to do some painting, simply because I could not face dealing with the mess afterwards.

Oh, how I can look back now and laugh at my younger self and her ridiculous notion that motherhood might for some reason change her entire personality. That it would transform her from a rather idle, truculent young woman who liked a good party and could never get up in the morning, into a serene and patient angel who loved nothing more than 6.oo am starts, and having next to no social life. The reality of parenthood and the subsequent realisation that I could never live up to my own initial standards of perfection, forced a major about turn in my attitude and ideas about mothering, and these have continued to evolve and grow with my childrens different developmental stages and my own changing circumstances.

The difficult truth is that over the years I have found the needs and wants of children to be boundless, and that in a zealous quest to be a 'perfect' mother it is all too easy to run oneself completely into the ground. I have had no choice but to develop ways of protecting myself from being sucked dry. Most of all I have had to struggle to find a way to truly accept that keeping a little bit back for myself is o.k. I find this extremely difficult to do without collapsing into a pit of guilt and self flagellation. As much as I tell myself that I don't buy into these notions of endless maternal sacrifice being the one true path to womanly righteousness, and as much as I do take steps to meet my own needs aswell as theirs, I still feel guilty about it. I feel guilty that I could not provide my children with the consistent stability of a two parent family, even though I know that my relationship with my ex-partner was damaging me psychologically. I feel guilty for occasionally feeding my children frozen pizza for tea when I'm exceptionally tired, even though I know that the vast majority of the time they eat perfectly healthily. I feel guilty that my children do not enjoy the endless after school activities that their friends seem to - ballet, karate, rugby e.c.t - because I cannot afford it, or manage the constant too-ing and fro-ing on my own with no partner to help out or make sure dinner's ready when we get home. Even though I know that my kids are fine. Even though I hate that pushy style of parenting that allows children no free time in which to make their own entertainment!

My point is, that although I know intellectually that my mothering is good enough - more than just good enough, it's still extremely hard for me to put a full stop at the end of that sentence and have done with the self doubt. The secret for all of us I think, lies in a genuine acceptance that less than perfect but perfectly good enough, really is good enough.

In Honour of My Bed

2010-02-27T12:39:00.000-08:00

This post is a tribute to my bed.

Not only because my bed is one of my favourite places to be, but also because for me it has come to symbolise autonomy, freedom, and comfort. It tells a story about my life.

When Mr S finally left the family home, one of the first things I decided to do was re-decorate. I dipped into my savings and bought new sofas. I spent many a happy hour amongst the tester pots at B and Q - and having finally decided on a colour - repainted the living room. I bought great swathes of beautiful luxurious silk and harangued my poor mother into making new curtains for me. I also repainted the bedroom and changed all the furniture in it around.

Unfortunately (for me) Mr S had had a tendency to lose practically half his body weight in sweat every night - to the extent that his side of the bed would often be wringing wet by the time morning came. We slept on a futon (having been under the impression when we bought it that they were terribly good for your back) and as I'm sure you can imagine, after six years, the mattress was in a fairly nasty state. Riding high on my new found wave of freedom, I decided on a whim one day to chuck it out and buy a new one. How hard can it be, thought I. It's only a futon mattress, I'll just roll it up, put it in the back of the car and drive it down to the tip. Easy peasy.

And so began a truly slapstick mission, which involved lugging the mattress off the bed, realising immediately that actually it weighed a bleeding ton, dragging it to the top of the stairs and pushing it down - very nearly sliding head first after it - opening my front door, and proceeding to wrestle it out into my front garden. By which time of course I'd gone too far to turn back. I was damned if I was going to let some stinky mattress get the better of me.

Did I forget to mention that I have the smallest three door car in the world? There were some builders working on the roof of the house opposite who actually stopped what they were doing in order to openly watch me grapple Laurel and Hardy style with this dead weight of a futon mattress, which now appeared to have inexplicably grown to twice its size, somewhere between the bedroom and the front garden.

So mustering all the dignity I could, I opened my car door, pushed the front seat forward, and set about getting the mattress into the car. I must have utilised almost every single body part in this endeavour (much to the amusement of the onlooking builders) pushing and pulling with my entire weight to try and squish the bugger onto the back seat. Eventually it was all in and taking up every inch of available space inside the car as if it had suddenly and miraculously inflated. I managed to just about squeeze into the drivers seat and set off, completely illegally and very slowly (I couldn't see anything out of the rear view and not much out of the sides) down the back roads to the tip. I fancy the builders clapped as I went.

I managed to arrive without incident at the tip and park next to the appropriate skip, only to begin the whole process again in reverse. This time it was the tip workers turn to stare in a vaguely amused manner as I wrestled, yanked and swore, trying to get the godforsaken thing back out of my car. Eventually I prevailed and dragged it over to the skip in order to set about heaving it over the side. The dull triumphant thud as it finally landed in the giant bin was the sweetest sound I had heard in an age.

I got back into my car and drove to the nearest bed selling superstore. I spent a small fortune on a luxury memory foam mattress which was neatly rolled up in vacuum packed plastic so I could take it home straight away. I went to another shop and bought new bedding. New everything, even down to the mattress protector. Beautiful crisp white cotton sateen sheets and duvet covers with a 400 thread count - the best I could afford. Singing along to the radio, I drove home and made my new bed.

It is gorgeous. And it is mine.

Reading this post back, I am struck by how much it appears to reveal about my personality. I am not always the most sensible of people I'm afraid, and I can be rather impulsive at times. I often make mistakes. I am however extremely resourceful, quite determined, and I generally have faith in myself that I will get there in the end, and get there off my own steam.

So with this in mind I am asking: Which one of your posts do you think says the most about you? Feel free to leave a link in the comments - I would really love to read it.

Dear So and So... Get it off Your Chest.

2010-02-26T11:25:00.001-08:00

I have been enjoying the Dear So and So's over at Brits in Bosnia for a while now, and only today realised that they are in fact linked to a tag/writing exercise (not entirely sure what to call it) set over at Kats 3 Bedroom Bungalow, and that anybody can join in, (doh, not terribly observant you see). Oooh goody, I thought when all became clear. Rants are the one thing that I'm never short of, I shall have a go at that. So here it is, my first Dear So and So:

Dear Socks,

Where do you go to my lovelies? And why is it always just one out of every pair that disappears? Do you have a special hiding place where you can be found giggling hysterically every time one of the children shouts downstairs, ten seconds before we're due to leave the house, 'Muuum, none of my socks are the same!'

Come out come out wherever you are, because I'm in danger of going slowly demented.

Here's to pairs and all things that match, Gappy.

Dear Local Policeman,

I would like you to look deep inside your soul and tell me whether you honestly think it's justifiable to slam me with a 60 quid fine and three points on my licence for doing just six miles per hour over the speed limit. It's bad timing see? I have just had to shell out for two new tyres and my M.O.T. is coming up soon too. I am literally up to the eyeballs in crap-car-related-money-eating-stuff, and I could do without it, that's all.

By the way, did you know that domestic abuse accounts for 25% of all reported violent crime in the U.K. because duh, you're a policeman and you bloody well should. Perhaps if you put half as much effort into reducing that nasty little statistic as you do into persecuting people like myself in the interests of getting an easy result, then you might possibly find your yearly stats improving, aswell as your karma. Just a suggestion,

Yours in crap-car-related-poverty, Gappy.

Dear Brain,

Any chance we could perhaps hurry things along a little bit? We've an awful lot of stuff to do, and I'd like to get this posted sometime today.

Cheers, The rest of me.

Dear Snooty County Council Receptionist,

Yes, I know I have received two parking tickets in the space of a month from the same car park. Do you suppose it's really necessary to point this out to me (and the rest of the queue) in quite such a snooty manner? Your eyebrows really are in danger of disappearing into your hairline. Why the indignation? Myself and my colleagues have been asking for yearly passes for said car park untill we're blue in the face, but county council official bod - he say no. I am in fact thinking of taking up permanent residence on this very buildings roof, wearing a stupid costume and carrying a banner pointing out that this same county council official bod authorised the spending of 20 thousand pounds on repainting the towns main road, only to dig it up for repairs three months later. So perhaps you could stop looking at me like you're sucking a wasp and tell your boss to just GIVE ME THE FRIGGING PASS O.K?

Also perhaps you might like to ask that incredibly enthusiastically keen car park warden of yours if he would like a poke in the eye? You may even like one yourself.

Gappy.

Dear Veruca on Middle Sons toe,

Would you mind kindly pissing off now, before I am reduced to buying shares in Bazuka? The whole 'bazuka that veruca' thing was only funny for about two seconds, and frankly filing you down with that little emery board thingy makes me gip.

Yours, in anticipation of being able to go swimming at some point in the future, Gappy.

P.S.

Dear Technorati,

Here is your proof that I am not some evil spamming genius: BAMC4H44DZ85

Yours, forever in the hope of one day finally figuring out what the hell SEO actually means, Gappy.

And breathe..... Just like Fraught Mummy said: Better than therapy. Much cheaper too.

Sunshine Awards

2010-02-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

If you care to have a little look in my sidebar (oh and of course below) you will find a lovely sunshiney award sitting there. Very pleased with it I am too. I feel happy and proud to have received it, plus I absolutely love the picture. It reminds me of things like going on holiday and sitting in the park all day with friends. So I would like to say a big thank you to Fraught mummy from Brits in Bosnia and Working Mama from the Last of the Mojitos for awarding it to me. They are both very lovely and if you haven't read their blogs yet, then you should do yourself a favour and head on over to their sites.

See? What's not to love about that picture? Now I believe it is time to pass on the sunshine to some other bloggers. Unfortunately I don't know who's got what, so if you already have this award, then you'll just have to think of it as extra sunshine in reserve... or something. So come on down and have your speeches ready:

Spilt Milk
An Attitude Adjustment
Sleep is for the Weak
Not Waving but Ironing
Mon Avis Mes Amis
Noble Savage (also the author of Fertile Feminism)
Modern Dilemma

Dick for a Day

2010-02-25T01:14:00.000-08:00

Last night on twitter, I was bemoaning the fact that I had run out of inspiration for anything intelligent to say on my blog. One quick glance at the title of this post should serve to reassure everybody that not much has changed... but bear with me.

In my house bookshelves take up most of the available wall space. My own personal library is my most treasured posession, and I have to admit to being slightly precious about my books - I have 'sections' and the fiction is arranged in alphabetical order - oh dear, it sounds so anal reading that back. Anyway, on my way up to bed last night after having tried unsucessfully to come up with an even vaguely interesting blog post, I passed my 'womens' section and snatched up a book that I've had for as long as I can remember but haven't looked at in ages. It is a collection of essays by respected women authors and academics, edited by Fiona Giles, and entitled 'Dick for a Day.' I immediately thought (as you would) Aha! Of course! Finally, the eureka moment that I had been waiting for.

You see, at the risk of being struck down by the god(ess?) of feminism, I have to admit to experiencing more than a just a tinge of penis envy myself. It has been there for as long as I can remember, ever since I was a little girl who managed to persuade next doors little boy to let her watch him have a pee. 'Not fair' I remember thinking. Why can't I just pee, shake and go? Having a penis seemed so much more convenient. And so began a number of experiments in which I attempted to master the art of peeing standing up. To be fair I did actually enjoy varying degrees of success with this, but eventually gave up, presumably having learnt as most girls do, that it is sometimes just easier to accept things the way they are.

So now I have in front of me my book, in which the likes of Germaine Greer and Patricia Cornwell discuss what they would do if they had a dick for a day; and I am wondering, what would I do?

I fear that my response may not be a particularly imaginative one. The first thing to immediately spring to mind would be my new found ability to piss up a wall (base, moi?) Clearly there is still a small part of me that has failed to move on from my eventual childhood defeat in this endeavour. So I would certainly be indulging in all sorts of novelty pissing. Then of course one would, without a doubt, wish to be receiving a blow job at some point during the day; in fact lots of sex with a confident and beautiful woman would definitely be on my list. I have often wondered just how different an experience sex is for men, both physically and emotionally, and how much of a social construct the different approaches to sex and relationships that men and women supposedly have really are. Can men honestly enjoy sex with a woman without it resulting in any sort of emotional bond whatsoever? Are they really biologically more driven to pursue sex than women? These would be the sorts of questions I would want my dick for the day to try to answer.

So come on women of the blogosphere, what would you do?

I would also really appreciate getting some mens responses to this post, especially to the questions I have posed to my imaginary dick. What say you?

Keepers of the groove.

2010-02-20T14:46:00.000-08:00

All three of my children are massive fans of one of Dizzy Rascals most recent ditties, which I believe to be entitled 'Bonkers'. A great deal of their time is devoted to practising their mimicry of the computerised American voice that fires out 'Bonkers!' just before the slide guitar riff kicks in, and much leaping about ensues whenever the song comes on the radio. I wonder if it ever occurred to Mr Rascal that his song would be such a hit with small children.

Not since The Automatics 'Monster' (you remember... 'What's that coming over the hill is it a monster, is it a monster?') has a song enjoyed such popularity in our house, although the all time favourite probably still has to be 'I predict a riot' by The Kaiser Chiefs. In fact my favourite middle son quote of all time is his response to having being asked, aged three and a half, whether or not he liked music. The reply was: 'I like Baa baa black sheep, and Dict a riot!'

For me, watching my children dance is a real parenting high point. To see them so completely immersed in the present moment and so wonderfully free from any inhibition - their interpretation of the music always wild, unpredictable and energetic, is just fantastic. No awkward foot shuffling or wall flowering for them - these kids leap, twirl, and punch the air. They shout out the lyrics (or what they think might be the lyrics) to their favourite songs, and play crazy air guitar, enthusiastically using all the available space. Graceful it isn't. But it is pretty inspiring. Seeing them so utterly lacking in self consciousness always makes me think: When do we lose that? When did I lose that?

One of my favourite books in the whole world is by a woman named Lynda Barry, and is entitled One! Hundred! Demon s! In it Barry confronts the demons of her childhood and adolescence by telling 20 short stories through the medium of cartoon drawings and an accompanying narrative so bittersweet, I defy anybody not to be made to both laugh and cry. The pictures she paints of her childhood, her family, and where she grew up are so vivid, you feel an almost instant recognition for them and the universal truths that she tells. She captures her childhood feelings of alienation and confusion so beautifully that you are almost right there with her.

The story I like best is about dancing. Barry describes how she grew up in a household where everybody danced, and how as a child she went devotedly to hula dancing lessons taught by a "middle aged white lady who was obsessed with Hawaii, and always wore a plastic orchid in her hair". It never occurs to the young Barry to feel self conscious untill an older girl whom she admires tells her that she dances like "a spaz". From that moment on she is crippled with awkwardness in any situation that involves dancing in front of other people. She has lost "her groove". At the end of the story there is a stunningly touching paragraph in which Barry states that it is babies and small children who are the "keepers of the groove", and that seeing them dance can always serve to remind us that "Any dancing is better than no dancing at all".

And so this morning when the radio began to blast out 'Bonkers' and that familiar slide guitar kicked in, and my youngest started jumping up and down shaking her head around manically and shouting, 'Look, I'm dancing with my hair!' I almost felt a lump in my throat. Because I don't ever want her to lose her groove. Ever.

Guilt Trips. Take two...

2010-02-19T08:24:00.000-08:00

I don't know if this is true for anyone else, but I have a tendency to write slightly obsessively. If I'm working on a post that has real meaning for me, I will often spend hours crafting it, tweaking it, reading it through - wanting it to be exactly right. Finally happy with what I've written, I will then publish it, only to read it again a week or two later and groan. I won't like it anymore, what I had previously thought flowed, will now read awkwardly and stumblingly, and I will be able to see a million ways in which I could have made my point more eloquently.

We (as in myself and my children) have just come to the end of a rather lovely half-term holiday. The first half they spent with their fathers, so I was able to go and stay with friends in another city, sans kids. I had whole uninterrupted conversations with people and everything. For the second half we all went together to stay with another friend (with whom I had years of catching up to do) and her family. A thoroughly enjoyable break from the usual routine was had by all I think. I am feeling quite refreshed. The kids are tired but happy.

It has meant though, that I've had very little time to devote to my blog, and that I've done next to no writing recently. So rather than not post for ages, what I've decided to do is dig around in my archives, pull out one of the rare posts that I still actually like, and re-publish it. It was published before I had any readers anyway, and it fits in well with some of the other issues I've been writing about of late. So without further ado, or almost any tweaking, I give you: Guilt Trips. Not literally of course.... that's just the name of the post.

Mothers feel guilty. An awful lot of the time. It's a fact of life.

I have a friend who feels guilty if the vegetables she feeds her children have been bought from the supermarket, and not lovingly hand plucked from her own organic garden. I'm not joking. Being around her makes me feel guilty for not feeling guilty enough.

Fear of being labelled a 'Bad Mother' is enough to drive the most confident of us into a pit of self-doubt. It is the worst thing we can be called. Why? Because we love our children and want to be seen to be doing our best for them? Well yes of course. But also because deep down, despite all the progress that's been made in terms of womens rights and equality, there still exists a belief that this is what women are for. That motherhood is our only true purpose. So if we can't cope/don't like it much/fail to persuade our little darlings to eat ten different types of green vegetable a day; then we have failed utterly in our duty as human beings. And that's a bloody big guilt trip...

The trouble is, we can't win. It begins before a woman has even had her pregnancy confirmed. A few too many tequila slammers before you got your positive test result? Perhaps you forgot to take your folic acid? Then shame on you, you Bad Mother you. And it goes on through every stage of pregnancy. Still enjoying regular exercise? Puts the baby at risk that. Sitting around all day? You'll get swollen ankles; and besides, nobody wants a mother with a fat arse you know.

And after the baby's born... well. Lord help you if you need to go to work to earn a crust. Or because, god forbid, your work is actually really important to you. Because if you choose to bottle feed and put your baby into child care facilities, you may just as well proclaim your membership to a sadistic satan worshipping cult and have done with it. But then on the other hand... you've got these stay at home mothers. Boring, sponging, brainless amoebas with nothing better to do than give their children serious dependency issues.

You're a Bad Mother if you don't breastfeed. You're a Bad Mother if you breastfeed too long (a lack of consensus on how long might be too long making doubly sure that breastfeeding mothers don't escape their share of guilt). And if you breastfeed openly in public you're a shameless hussy, putting everyone off their lunch. When I was breastfeeding, I had the idea of writing a weekly magazine column, which was to be imaginatively entitled: 'Places I Have Breastfed'. My list was long:

1. In a tipi.
2. In the Liverpool Museum.
3. In the queue at the dole office.
4. In a Working Mens Club. I swear this is true. I'd love to be able to say I was being deliberately provocative, but actually there was an acoustic band playing and there were loads of women there.
5. In the back seat of a moving car, contorting painfully in order to feed the baby who was safely strapped in his car seat. Highly illegal, and probably not to be recommended, but I (or should I say the baby) was desperate.

There's plenty more where that came from, but you get the gist. I am a completely shameless hussy. And a terrible mother. But I feel endlessly guilty about it, so that's o.k. then.

Shiny Happy Things

2010-02-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

I received my first tag the other day. Can you remember how it feels to receive your first tag, all you veteran bloggers out there? It's very exciting.

The tag was sent to me by Working Mama from the Last of the Mojitos (I've said it before but I'm saying it again - quite possibly the best name for a blog ever). It is the Shiny Happy Things tag. The idea is that you think of something that never fails to put a smile on your face, then write a blog post about it.

After a couple of days spent scratching my head (bloody headlice - only joking) I have come up with a list of a few things, and I thought that rather than choosing just one of them, which was proving too difficult, I would write about all of them. In a list like stylee. So here goes:

1. A Cup of Tea.

Ah yes, that fine British panacea, the cup of tea. It soothes, it aids the flow of conversation, it signifies five minutes of precious peace. I like mine with milk and two sugars. Which could possibly be why all my teeth are falling out.

2. Dolly Parton.

I love a bit of Dolly. It's not the music so much (although she does have a fine voice), it's her specifically. She is funny, self deprecating, and as sharp as a razor. She's also a socialist, for anyone who's interested. The exact moment I fell in love with Ms Parton was when I was watching a televised live performance, in which one soppy male audience member shouted, 'I love you Dolly!' The woman didn't miss a beat. She shouted back, 'I thought I told you to stay in the back of the truck!' Now whenever I am faced with a tricky moral dilemma or an important life decision, I ask myself, what would Dolly do?

3. Total Wipeout

For months, this programme was the highlight of my families week. Presented by Richard Hamilton of Top Gear fame, what it is essentially is an inflatable assault course on water, which various contestants have to try to complete in the best time possible. Only the assaults(?) are really good. There is one which is basically huge inflatable balls on the end of bendy sticks, that stick up in a row out of the water, and gradually reduce in height. The idea is that the contestant jumps from a platform onto the first one, and then tries to bounce on to the next one, and so on and so on. Watching people dressed in spandex and red life jackets rebound helplessly off huge inflatable balls is extremely funny. My children and I are generally rolling around on the floor, completely hysterical by the end, which I fear says something about me that I'd probably rather not dwell on.

So those were my three things. I now need to lie down in a darkened room in order to recover from being suddenly faced with just how high-brow I really am.

I believe that tag etiquette now dictates that I choose five people whose blogs I like, to pass this tag on to. So come on down:

Not waving but ironing
Slightly south of sanity
Noble Savage
Oh the joys
Notes to self plus two

Will look forward to sharing in your shiny happy things.....

On Childbirth

2010-02-09T12:10:00.000-08:00

Since reading what I thought was rather a moving post on childbirth over at The Last of the Mojitos (which may quite possibly be the best name for a blog ever) I have felt inspired to write my own post on the same subject. It has been a while in the crafting, and much more difficult to write than I had at first thought it would be.

The author of The Last of the Mojitos wrote a post about her own experience of childbirth after hearing of an interview on Brazilian television in which the supermodel Gisele Bundchen had described giving birth to her new son as having been painless. Perhaps not content with only her perceived aesthetic superiority, Bundchen feels the need to stake her claim on the title of Earth Mother of the Century aswell. Maybe as a post-natal project she might wish to consider penning the sequel to 'How to win friends and influence people'? Just a suggestion.

I have given birth to three children. Their births were the defining moments of my life. They were the most significant, pivotal, raw and meaningful experiences that I have had. I have struggled and I have swam through both the darkest depths of despair, and the giddiest heights of euphoria whilst in labour, and each time the imprint left on my psyche was such that I was never the same again.

I gave birth to my first child in a large teaching hospital. I was 23. It was frightening, alienating, and somehow deeply shaming. The staff lacked compassion, they were officious and impersonal and obsessed with policy. The constant handling and examinations felt degrading, and I experienced a profound sense of powerlessness. I remember feeling as though the pain were drowning me, crushing me with its tidal waves, and suffocating every rational thought that I had. I felt close to death, although technically the birth was straightforward - the only intervention being the breaking of my waters and an eventual epidural.

To this day I cringe when I hear a new mother who has been traumatised by her experience of childbirth being offered the cold comfort of, 'Well you have a healthy baby and that's all that matters'. I find it hard to keep calm when I hear that same line being used as an argument to prop up unnecessary intervention having been used in a babys birth. As if the mothers feelings were immaterial. As if women were merely vessels - middle men whose only purpose it was to deliver an unblemished child. As if the new mothers mental state were not intrinsically linked to her new babies sense of well-being, and a crucial factor in the bonding process.

I began labour with my second child on the morning of the hottest day of 2003. I was in my bed pleasantly dreaming when I felt a small pop, and then a gush. I woke up instantly, apprehensive, excited, alert. My contractions began gently, increasing in intensity along with the searing heat of the day, and at some point we went outside in the garden where it was cooler and lay a blanket under the shade of a tree. A couple of friends arrived, they had bought some elderflower champagne along and we all sat outside together as if at an impromptu picnic. At some point the (NHS) midwives turned up smiling, 'There now isn't this lovely', and joined the small gathering sitting under the Ash tree. I was left alone, able to move and walk, sit and stand as I pleased. I was not examined unless I requested it. But perhaps most crucially, all the focus was not on me. Everyone was just around, chatting pleasantly and allowing me to get on with it; there if I needed them. Occasionally someone would hold my hand or breathe with me during a particularly strong contraction and I felt quietly yet completely supported. It was not frightening, it was not overwhelming. The pain of my labour was coming from a good place. It was elemental and powerful and yet somehow it was under my control. It was like taming a wild horse. All the accepted wisdoms about what a woman can and can't do in active labour were completely upended for me that day. Can't walk or hold a conversation whilst in active labour? Can't eat or drink anything? All rubbish. I sat in transition, eating cherries, drinking elderflower champagne, and laughing with my friends. When I began to feel the urge to push, I stood up. I retreated into myself in order to concentrate, and something happened to me. I am not a sentimental woman, but as I stood there in the open air with a view of green hills and fields all around, I felt as though my feet had somehow sunk deep into the ground, and had sprouted real roots connecting me to all living things. The world took on a whole new dimension as I felt this palpable connection to every other woman on the planet throughout history who had ever given birth. It didn't matter what our circumstances were, or where we came from, or what language we spoke, we had all been here, in this moment. I felt so so sturdy and strong, and utterly euphoric. I could have run to the top of one of those hills and beaten my chest and roared. I have since joked with friends that if I was ever going to have found God, it would have been then, in that moment, as I gave birth. I can remember saying as I first held and marveled at my new baby son that I would never say 'I can't do it' about anything ever again.

The birth of my daughter was less dramatic. It's beauty was in its ordinaryness I suppose. When my waters broke, again early in the morning, I told my partner to go back to sleep. I went downstairs to sit on my own a while. I wanted to labour alone and without distraction so I could focus purely on the contractions - to feel their shape and taste their flavour. I experimented with different positions to make them stronger, welcoming the intensity, diving right into it. My labour progressed quickly. By the time my partner got up I was ready to call the midwife. A friend came round for breakfast and did her knitting and kept me quiet company. When the midwife arrived she suggested I go for a walk, so my partner, friend and I went out round the village, waving the odd hello to neighbours out washing their cars, and walking their dogs. As soon as I stepped back inside my front door, I had an enormous contraction in which I felt myself fully dilate and my baby move down out of my womb ready to be born. It was the most mind blowing sensation I've ever experienced. My little girl was born safely in my living room a half hour or so later.

Now I am no Gisele Bundchen. Far too short and asymmetrical for a start. And I would certainly not describe the births of my middle son and my daughter as having been painless. The second stages of both births hurt very much. But they were positive. They were good. Life transformingly so.

The thing is I don't often talk about my birth experiences these days. Of course at first I was full of it, but over time I have become wiser and more reticent. Mostly because I have found that to say I enjoyed labour tends to attract disbelief, and occasionally hostility. Often I sense that I am being dismissed in the persons mind as a crank, and if I attempt to describe the feeling of being 'high' on contractions - I am simply not taken seriously. And from my point of view, the last thing I want is for other women to feel that I am being somehow competitive or unsisterly. I do not want to trigger for others, those feelings of failure and sadness that I remember so well resulting from my first birth. So for the most part I have shut up about it.

I feel it's important for me to make absolutely clear in this post aswell that I am incredibly grateful to have access to free and expert medical care. Should I have needed a caesarian section or any other intervention to save the life of either myself or my child, I would have received it. I know how lucky that makes me. I am not anti the medical establishment. I am pro science, and I believe in forming opinions on, and backing up arguments with, evidence. I am neither irresponsible nor idealistic. The reason I am pro home birth, and indeed chose it for myself, is because I believe the evidence shows that for women with low to medium risk pregnancies, it is as safe, if not safer than giving birth in a hospital. That doesn't mean I am not thanking the heavens that we have 24 hour access to doctors and hospitals should we need or want them. An operation to remove my left fallopian tube saved my life when one of my pregnancies was diagnosed as being ectopic. Many women in other parts of the world would have simply died. I am also not prescriptive. Just because something works well for me does not mean I think it would or should work well for everyone. If a woman feels safer and happier strapped to a monitor in hospital, with access to every pain relieving drug the NHS has to offer, then I would be the first to fight for her right to choose that. I would be wearing a t-shirt saying 'Go on love, fill yer boots. I hear the morphine's great'.

So to end this rather long post, I am beginning to think that maybe I should risk opening my mouth a bit more to tell about my childrens births. Because I very much want to live in a society where a desire for an empowering birth experience is not regarded as spoilt and selfish. Where women can demand to have their freedom of choice respected, and not be considered to be putting their own needs above those of their unborn child, because it would be taken for granted that the mothers needs were of equal importance, and that supported, empowered mothers were better able to bond with and nurture their babies. Above all I want to live in a society where women can enjoy their bodies in the act of creation, and talk about their enjoyment without being regarded as part of some lunatic fringe, because it is so unusual.

Doctor Who?

2010-02-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

Middle son is a huge fan of Doctor Who.

The other day he felt inspired to design a Doctor Who poster, after having watched what I presume was a particularly exciting episode the night before.

In all honesty I am becoming a little tired of the constant references to, and questions about, Doctor Who. My capacity for feigning interest is running out at a stupendous rate in fact. I don't know what the new Doctor looks like. I don't in truth care that the old one regenerated in the first place. And I have absolutely no idea who would win in a fight between the Daleks and the Oods.

So when Middle Son proudly showed me his poster, I'm ashamed to say that although I made all the right noises as in, 'Ooh that's fantastic, let's find some blue tack and stick it up', I didn't actually look at it terribly closely.

Earlier today though, I was on the phone to a friend, and sitting opposite the fridge on which the not terribly closely looked at poster had been stuck. Studying it properly for the first time, I realised with a start that what is supposed to be the Tardis, in fact resembles an enormous phallus. The Doctors mouth is open in what appears to be an expression of petrified shock (presumably he's never seen a cock that big), and orange flames are shooting from his mouth and hands. All deeply Freudian. I asked Middle Son what the Doctor was doing. 'He's regenerating' he said to me in a weary tone which suggested clearly that he is sick to the back teeth of my pig ignorance.

One can only assume that this regeneration is some sort of spontaneous reaction to suddenly being faced with a penis for a Tardis.

Naked Boss. Part 2.

2010-02-04T02:40:00.000-08:00

When I first began writing my blog a month or two ago, I wrote a post that introduced (to nobody in particular, because no one was reading it) the whole bucket of riotous fun that is my Naked Boss. If you would like to read that ahem, overview, for want of a better expression, then do feel free to click on the link above. In fact it's probably advisable that you do, considering all the things you are probably thinking (don't try to deny it) as a result of his chosen moniker.

I have since then, begun to stir something of a mutiny amongst his other female employees, of which there are two, both of whom I knew prior to starting the job.

It began with a phone call to one of them - we'll call her M. Naked Boss had been my boss for about three weeks (I work for him just one day a week). I rang her and said, 'Hi M. Um.. I don't know how to put this anything other than bluntly, so I'll just come out with it. Does Naked Boss ever say things to you that make you feel uncomfortable? Does he, um... ever, you know, touch your back or put his arm around you? To which she replied a bit hesitantly, 'Er... yeees'. Now at this point I resisted the urge to shout 'THEN WHY DID'NT YOU WARN ME BEFORE I AGREED TO START WORKING FOR THE CRETINOUS BASTARD?', instead opting for a less screechy, 'And how do you feel about that?'

It turns out that he had been harassing her and another woman who works for him (we'll call her C), for months. Apparently C wasn't massively bothered and managed to shrug it off easily enough with an 'Oh he's just a bit of an old perv' kind of attitude, but M felt immobilized by it and completely unsure of what to do for the best. My frustration with her for neglecting to forewarn me faded as I heard the unhappiness in her voice. She really needed the job she said, she was friends with his wife and just couldn't face creating a scene, or the possible fall-out that might result from it. I could understand how she felt.

However, I love a good scene. The next time I was at work and he saw fit to tell me he 'Could just kiss me because I was getting the hang of everything so quickly', (bless me - might just have an ickle wickle brain floating around in there somewhere after all), I said very calmly that if we were going to have a good working relationship, there was going to be no kissing, no touching, and no making comments about what I was wearing - because it made me feel uncomfortable, o.k.? His response was to put on a 'cute' voice, cock his head to one side, and say, 'O.k. Cool.' To my credit I did not vomit, but studiously continued with my work.

I thought: Great. Well handled that Gappy. You didn't get angry, you didn't threaten to feed his testicles to the sheep, you simply set appropriate boundaries in a composed and assertive manner. Ha! That told him. Your mother would be so proud. Surely you must now deserve a prize of some sort.

That sort of pride tends to come before a fall. A few days later, M came over to my house to drop off some work for me. She looked breathless and elated. 'I spoke to him', she said. 'I told him that from now on there was to be no physical contact whatsoever, and no inappropriate comments either. That if it continued I would leave, I would tell his wife why I was leaving, and that you would back me up'. She clearly felt so much better for having taken control of the situation, and I felt better knowing that I had her support too. It was all starting to feel quite empowering untill she relayed his response back to me.

Do you want to know what he said to her? He said, 'Oh o.k. Well I wasn't expecting that. I know I'm not allowed to comment on Gappys clothes because she spoke to me the other day, and I must say I thought at the time - who is she to be making the rules? But now you've said something aswell, perhaps I can see better where you're both coming from.'

Who am I to be making the rules?

So much for my bloody prize. Perhaps the sheep are looking a bit peckish after all.

Queen of the Cube

2010-02-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

Middle Son got a rubix cube for Christmas.

And guess who has spent more time playing with it than him?

Hmm.. Note to self: Must get out more.

Oh Sh.....ugar!

2010-02-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

I am rather a prolific swearer.

It's my mothers fault. She's far worse than me - honestly, she could make a navvy balk with her foul mouth.

I first realised that perhaps this was going to be an issue in terms of my parenting when Middle Son, aged four, began to refer to our local garage as 'The bloody garage'. As in, 'Look mummy, there's the bloody garage' each and every time we drove past it on the way to the supermarket. At the time we had a car that was continually dying a death, and then being resurrected with the aid of enormous amounts of money, only to promptly die again. Hence we were spending an awful lot of time at the bloody garage (and probably single handedly subsidising it aswell). I hadn't even been aware that that was what I called it untill it came out of the mouth of my four year old babe.

I really do try not to swear in front of the children. But obviously not hard enough, as last night Eldest Son threatened me for the umpteenth time with a swear box. The idea apparently is that every time I say a 'naughty word', I have to put fifty pence in it. Then at the end he, I presume, gets to collect all the money.

I'm not agreeing to that. I'm not fucking stupid.

The thing is, if I'm honest, I like swearing. It's expressive. It's cathartic. I don't just swear willy nilly, I mean there are rules - well one actually, which is that I never swear at anyone - and it's always in an appropriate context, for example if I've dropped something on my foot. That was in fact two rules wasn't it... The point is that it's not, to my mind, excessive. The excessive curser is lacking in both imagination and finesse in my opinion - in fact my favourite line from anything ever was: 'See you, you need a fucking thesaurus' from the brilliant The Thick Of It. No, swearing only serves its purpose if used judiciously and with precision. Dare I say it, there's an art to it.

But I digress. In this post I am primarily concerned with discussing the issue of swearing in the presence of children, and finding out what other parents views are on the subject.

The other day you see, I was having coffee with some other mums (the conversation, aswell as the threat of the swear box, providing the prompt for this post) and one of them declared - rather sanctimoniously I thought - that she never swore in front of her children. Her body language was all wide eyed and shocked, as if indignant at the mere suggestion that she could ever do such a thing, and to be honest, although I was a bit taken aback by what I felt was her slightly pious attitude, I also felt suddenly self conscious. I mumbled something about how I never swore at my kids, whilst simultaneously praying that social services would take a liberal view if she pounced on the phone and called them in horror, the minute I left. Now, I happen to know that this woman smacks her kids, which is something I genuinely never do, as for me, hitting children, even if it is 'just a little tap on the bum' is unacceptable. That doesn't mean I judge anyone who has, on reaching the absolute end of their tether, smacked once or twice and then gone on to regret it terribly and vow never to do it again, (I think lots of us have been there). It means I believe it is wrong to use it deliberately as part of an ongoing strategy to control behaviour. I certainly believe smacking to be far more harmful to children than hearing their mother say the odd 'Oh fuck it' when she spills or breaks something.

I suppose that ultimately this woman and I simply come from two very different points of view, and although I do disagree strongly with any use of physical punishment, I have no desire to get into a competitive 'I'm a better mummy than you, nurny nurny nur nur' discussion. I accept that we are all doing our level best with a difficult job. But I have written this post with the specific intent of asking others for their opinions on the issue of swearing. How do you feel about swearing in front of your kids? Relatively harmless on occasion? Or setting a really bad example? Is it naive to think that it's really no big deal? Feel free to throw any and every shade of grey into the mix. Let me know what you think.

The Art of Putting Ones Foot in Ones Mouth. By Me.

2010-01-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

I am, without a shadow of a doubt, The Queen of the faux pas. The Doyenne of the indiscreet blunder. The Grande Dame of the social fuck up.

The filter located somewhere between my brain and my mouth periodically becomes faulty. Alcohol was frankly never much of a help, but even reliably tee-total things can sometimes (quite often actually) go awry.

Lets see... examples. Well there was the time when I was helping the p.t.a. mothers prepare for the village fete, and I let out a large sigh and complained rather loudly that I felt like a Stepford wife. (I was joking, I thought perhaps they might see the funny side - apparently not). One of them almost inhaled her coffee, which necessitated her having to be violently thumped on the back by her friend, who then went on to fix me with a 'Good god, you could have killed her' death stare for the rest of the afternoon. And then there was the time I declared to a new-ish friend that I wasn't really interested in using homeopathy to treat Middle Sons ailment, because if I was going to use any sort of medicine, I would much prefer it to be one that had a modicum of evidence to support its efficacy. Only to need the loo five minutes later and find a large assortment of Nelsons remedies neatly lined up on her bathroom shelf. Shit. Fortunately she did see the funny side (my how we laughed) and we are now close friends. Oh, and then of course there was the time I was chatting to my neighbour about how unspeakably tacky those awful inflatable santas were in so and sos garden, only to realise.... (deep breath) yep. And so on and so on, you get the idea.

My most recent gaffe occurred when I was out for a rare, and much looked forward to, Day By Myself. (I was by myself for chrissakes - even when let out alone I can still somehow manage to alienate somebody somewhere, such is the scope of my talent.) The weather was sunny and breezy, the air smelt wonderful, and I was happily making my way down the street in one of my favourite places in the whole world, anticipating a few lazy hours spent browsing round the second hand book shops, and sitting outside a cafe with a cold drink, to people watch and look at the new books I had bought myself.

Somewhere along the street I happened to walk past a busker, and so paused to fish around in my purse to find some money to put in his guitar case. I made a point of smiling and saying thank you - I like buskers, music on the street is always a good thing - and this particular mans music seemed perfectly to enhance the already pleasant spring atmosphere that abounded.

I don't know... perhaps I said thank you rather too pointedly, because he immediately coughed nervously, and interrupted his singing to say, 'Oh yes, er..sorry, er..thank you'. I walked on for a couple of seconds feeling ever so slightly puzzled, and then the penny dropped. Aarggh. He thought my thank you had been sarcastic. He thought it had been an admonishment, for failing to thank me properly for the measly one pound or so I'd tossed in his case, kind of like you might hiss, 'And what do you say?'to a small child who had forgotten to thank a slightly scary relative for their 'educational' Christmas present. I almost stopped for a split second to go back, but remembering my closely related talent for digging myself into even deeper holes, decided against it. I carried on my merry way, cheeks red with the acceptance that he would just now think that I was some ghastly woman with a habit of throwing her spare change at people and expecting them to grovel in eternal gratitude.

Ho hum.

A Husband at Any Price...

2010-01-28T05:05:00.000-08:00

The other morning while dawdling over my tea and toast, and flicking absent-mindedly through a copy of Sundays Observer, the following headline jumped out at me: 'Find Mr Right before age 30 or settle for second best'. The article, written by Amelia Hill, described a book entitled, 'Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough'. The author is an American woman named Lori Gottlieb. Her book has apparently caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, and the inevitable plans to produce a film are well under way.

Gottliebs argument in essence, is that despite what feminists might tell you, all any woman truly longs for is to be married and happily ensconced in a traditional nuclear family. Romantic notions of finding 'the one' and the myth that women can have it all, have made women far too fussy. Any marriage is frankly better than no marriage at all, so unless he's a violent criminal/chronic alcoholic/only has two weeks to live, marry him quick or risk being left on the shelf, which as we all know girls is the worst thing that could possibly befall us. Oh, and any woman who insists that she does not feel this way and prefers her independence, is self-delusional or just plain lying.

I see.

I was hoping that this would all turn out to be some sort of post modern piss take. Sadly not. My problem is not so much that Gottlieb advocates settling for a partner for whom you may not have intense romantic feelings; I would concede that she has a point when she states that these passionate emotions are often not sustainable in the long term. If women wish to take a more pragmatic approach to their relationships - fine - that's their business. It's her assertion that all women down the ages have ever truly wanted to do is to get married and have babies, and that it's better to do these things with just about anyone who might do, rather than risk not doing them at all, which I find so hard to swallow.

I wonder has it not occurred to Gottlieb that throughout most of history women have had no choice but to get married. That untill fairly recently we could not own property, or vote, and being unmarried meant being a huge burden on our families and having to endure horrendous stigma. The only option open to the vast majority of us was to be dependent on a husband. And although a lot of modern marriages tend to lean towards the more egalitarian, we are still, even now, ruthlessly conditioned to believe that marriage and children is the natural path for a womans life to take. Single, childless women over the age of thirty five are still often viewed by society with a mixture of suspicion and pity.

I do not deny that the urge to have children can be very strong for some, but women have far more options open to them these days - and they're taking them. Indeed Gottlieb herself conceived her own child using donor sperm. Unfortunately she now uses her subsequent regret at choosing to go it alone, to base a whole theory on:

'As the only single woman in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.

In fact the evidence seems to point in another direction entirely. Many studies have shown that women in long term marriages tend to lose out in terms of mental health when compared to their husbands, who report far less depression than their wives. I wonder how many women throughout history would have chosen to forge their own paths, and follow their own dreams, had the option been truly open to them.

I am a single woman. And I can state categorically that having a partner you do not love is in no way better than not having one at all. Being alone is infinitely preferable to that peculiar feeling of loneliness that comes from being in an unfulfilling, uninspiring relationship. I could have settled had I been so inclined. But ultimately I was not prepared to, and I see more and more women who are also not prepared to - more and more women who are striking out on their own, and treasuring their autonomy and independence, knowing that they can parent effectively without a partner, and that their children are healthier for not having an unhappy relationship providing the model for how adults should relate to each other. Of course this trend was only ever going to precipitate a backlash, for which Gottlieb has (perhaps unwittingly) become a poster girl. As a fellow single mother I can empathise with her to an extent. It's not always easy being the sole carer. But that is no reason to lose ones nerve and gratefully snap up the first man who shows willing.

Far more important to teach our children the value of self respect, and to show them that healthy relationships are built on mutual high esteem, not desperation and convenience, or a belief that women can not cope alone.

There is another post (which I wholeheartedly recommend you read) on this subject, at the brilliant Hoyden about town.

Furry Friends

2010-01-26T11:56:00.000-08:00

The Youngest has a steadily growing menagerie of fluffy toy animals.

Her favourite is a cat called... wait for it... Catty. She also has a red rabbit called Mini, and a ferret. The ferret's called Ferret. Clearly this family lacks imagination when it comes to naming things. Santa gave her Ferret when he came to visit her playgroup just before Christmas. She unwrapped it and was instantly smitten. I hooted with laughter and said, 'Ooh a ferret, how fitting!' Which prompted rather an odd look from Santa, although I'm not sure why. I meant because she's wriggly, not because she smells.

She insists on Catty, Mini and Ferret accompanying her wherever she goes. This is a logistical nightmare. Carrying them all at the same time and actually getting anywhere is nigh on impossible, but the suggestion that anyone be left behind leads to tears of genuine heartbreak, and so instead she stumbles and staggers along, every so often dropping one of them and shrieking. She has recently learned to use the bathroom by herself, and so naturally Catty, Mini, and Ferret must come to admire her every visit. Not only this, but I have to pretend that Catty is meowing in appreciation whenever anything is deposited in the toilet.

Tonight when I picked The Youngest and Middle Son up from seeing Mr S, and had got them settled and strapped in the car, I noticed that Catty was not meowing quite as enthusiastically as usual. When we got home I gave The Youngest a small snack and a drink of milk, and then took her upstairs to brush her teeth and put her pyjamas on. She stubbed her toe, and instead of crying for two seconds and then moving on to the next thing as would normally happen, she just cried and cried. I scooped her up, and she snuggled in my lap, and I felt her forehead. Definitely a bit hot. And then when I asked her what she would like for her bed time story she said, 'I don't want a story'. She didn't want a song either. She just wanted to be tucked up with her Ferret and her Catty and her Mini.

This is unheard of. Frankly I don't think she can be blamed for deciding against my rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - perhaps she has been humouring me all this time and has finally reached the end of her rope - but to not want a story...

I'm worried now. I keep feeling the urge to go and check on her. I hope she's not coming down with something nasty.

Are A Womans Breasts Really Her Own?

2010-01-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

And so it rages on with varying degrees of predictability.

I'm talking about the breastfeeding/formula feeding debate. I find it to be a variation on a theme with the working mother/stay at home mother debate. Either one can render me exasperated, yet somehow strangely depressed and fatalistic within minutes. They're interchangeable for me really, in the sense that I often see them as evidence that women everywhere have found some fine sticks to beat each other with, and by god they're going to use them.

I briefly mentioned recently, in a post on guilty pleasures (which incidentally seems to be rather a recurring theme in my writing), about my partiality to a ~~good ruck~~ stirring debate on Mumsnet. Ah... Mumsnet.com. My ambivalence runs deep. On the one hand I love it - especially the 'Am I Being Unreasonable', and 'Relationship' threads. Naturally argumentative and nosy you see. But I'm not sure how healthy it is for any individual in genuine distress to lay themselves bare and ask for help on this particular forum. The vast majority of posters, even if misguided or ill informed (and you can take that as code for I don't agree with them) genuinely try to be supportive. But a small minority of thugs will tend inevitably to circle, with a mind to giving the usually vulnerable OP a fairly thorough virtual kicking. It sometimes makes for uncomfortable reading, and much like reality television I suppose, one ends up feeling a little bit voyeuristic and seedy (although to my eternal shame, I secretly love Britain's Got Talent too, especially the first auditions. Gaah).

But anyway I'm wandering off the point. A couple of weeks ago I watched THIS particular thread unfold, with my hand clamped over my eyes, fingers open just a crack. It's a long read, but you can skim through and get the general idea...

What upset me most about this thread was not so much the dogmatic views being expressed (nothing wrong with feeling strongly about an issue per se, I have been known to be rather opinionated myself) but the enthusiasm with which women were prepared to put the boot into each other. To make vitriolic, hurtful, sweeping statements regarding not only the competence of someones mothering, but their inherent worth as a member of society, based purely on how they had chosen to feed their baby. The thread eventually disintegrated into name calling and insults, and was asked to be taken down by other users. I have since heard regular contributors to the site say that this is the inevitable trajectory of such a debate, and they had seen it all before.

For the record, and to add a personal slant to my post, I breastfed all three of my children, and have worked voluntarily as a breastfeeding peer supporter. After one failed home birth attempt I then went on to give birth to my next two children successfully at home without any intervention or drugs, and I have stayed at home to care for them all. Those were my personal choices. They worked for me at the time. I do not believe them to be superior to other choices I may have made, had my circumstances been different. I certainly do not believe that women are mere vessels who must suddenly negate all their own needs and desires as soon as they become mothers. I do believe in informed choices. For me this means giving women the facts as we know them regarding the risks and benefits of breastfeeding/formula feeding, but that once armed with the facts, women should be allowed to go away and make their own holistic decisions about what will work for them and their lives, without interference or judgement from others.

It just seems to me that by getting bogged down in this sort of competitive infighting, we are missing the point spectacularly. There is a simple concept at work here I feel, and it's called Divide And Rule. Surely we all want the same things? Whether you choose to call yourself a feminist or not is immaterial. We all want equality. We all want freedom. We all want the validity of our decisions to be respected.

These are our rights. But none of them can be achieved while we are busy tearing each other apart.

Oh Bloody Bloody Computers

2010-01-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

For a woman with her own blog, I am just one small notch above complete computer illiteracy. I wrote in a previous post about how my p.c. and internet connection were both new. Well they are now slightly less new, and what I hoped would prove to be a fairly steep learning curve has in fact turned out to be much more of a gentle incline.

In an effort to educate myself I've bought loads of those black and yellow striped books For Dummies. As in The Internet for Dummies, Blogging for Dummies e.c.t e.c.t. My children find this hilarious in a 'glad to see you've finally let go of the denial mum' kind of way, and my 'office' (read cupboard under the stairs) bookshelf is starting to resemble a giant bee. To be fair, I could not have got this blog up and running without those books (one downside of anonymous blogging being that you can't really ask anyone for help) but in lots of ways I am still none the wiser than the disillusioned Luddite that first began this whole venture. A friend had to talk me through sending an e-mail with an attachment the other day. When you notice your friends starting to speak to you very gently and slowly, is it then time to worry I wonder...

The latest computery thing to flummox me is Twitter. Other bloggers all appear to be using it, at least I keep seeing these little blue birds everywhere, and so naturally I'm interested. Yesterday I thought I would go and see what it was all about. I managed to sign up for an account, and also picked a few of the people whose blogs I like, to follow. So far so good. I even got a couple of followers myself which is really exciting, only now I don't know what to do. I have tried vainly to send out a tweet, and also to reply to someone elses tweet, but as far as I am aware, have not managed so much as a pathetic squeak.

Back to the Drawing Board For Dummies methinks.

Any tips are entirely welcome by the way.

I know I shouldn't say this but...

2010-01-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

So much 'mummy blogging' (the term itself actually proving my point to an extent) is anodyne, sugary, insipid, and well... a bit crap really.

I'm ducking the rotten tomatoes as I type.

But I can't hold back anymore. What I want to know is this: Are there really women out there for whom motherhood is always such a dewy eyed, sentimental, fluffy experience (because I'll have whatever they're having) full of foetuses with cute nicknames, and toddlers who never scream 'I hate you!' in the middle of the supermarket? I suppose there must be. But I've never met one. Not for real. Not if she was being honest.

Where is the perfectly natural and healthy ambivalence towards impending motherhood? Where are the other mothers who looked at their newborns in the cold light of day and thought for a fleeting moment that they might be the devil, because I know I can't have been the only one.

Now. I realise that not everyone would wish to emulate my particular style of 'over sharing' on the internet. Some blogs are set up just as a way to let families separated by long distance know how loved ones are doing - I understand that. And I also know that I have no right to tell women what they should and should not feel, or write on their blogs.

But I have a lot to say about the romanticising of motherhood. A lot. Because I believe it does women and their children such a huge disservice. I think it should be called up and held to account for creating so many unrealistic expectations, shattered dreams, confusion, and guilt. I blame the bible. Not exclusively you understand, but I think the holy pedestal upon which 'gentle mother' Mary was placed, is perhaps where it all originated. If we could have had just one story about Mary feeling like chucking Jesus out of the stable window because it was three in the morning and he wouldn't stop crying, then perhaps centuries of women might have been spared a creeping sense of fear and guilt arising from their own suspected 'inadequacies' in failing to live up to a mythological ideal. Just a thought.

I like children. And I love my own just as fiercely and passionately as any mother, but it's a love I grew into. It took a long time, certainly with my first. It crept up on me almost. It was no instant thunderbolt crashing dramatically down as my baby left my body, but more of a slow, painful, learning process. It was hard won, and I wear my love for my children all the more proudly for that. Whilst pregnant with my first child I bought a copy of Kate Figes 'Life After Birth'. I couldn't bear to read it. I read the first chapter or so and then put it down for fear of jinxing myself. The things I was reading frightened me, they seemed so dark. Motherhood was nothing like that I was sure. Then when my baby was one I read it again, cover to cover. And then again when he was three - and both times found it so immensely comforting that I wolfed it down in about a day and a half. Finally, I wasn't the only one.

It is 2010, and yet still there is such a huge amount of pressure on women to collude with the lie that motherhood is all pastel colours and fluffy kittens. I think we owe each other more than that. I truly believe that the most supportive gift we can give to each other as parents and parents to be, is real honesty about what it's really like. The joy and the despair, the love and the resentment, all laid bare with compassion, so that we can take that leap with our eyes wide open. And not feel as though we have failed if we sometimes land on our arses.