Does posting all my catch up posts in one day count as NanoPoblano? Is it lazy? I am at my mum’s house this week, and finally finding a moment to breathe. And that means a moment to sit down without a mountainous pile of stress and just write.
Aren’t parents a blessing, folks? My parents are. They give me everything I need, and I am so grateful for them.
I hit thirty years old this year and I am always tired. Do these two facts correlate? Or is one a causation of the other? I exercise regularly and watch my diet (not my sugar intake, though, so that might be something to keep an eye on). I try to sleep early.. in fact I find I can no longer make myself stay awake till stupid o’clock anymore, my eyes close of their own accord between 8pm and 9pm so if my kids are playing up and not sleeping on time… I fall asleep anyway. As my mum says… they put ME to bed!
I don’t know if it is because I am aging physically.. or if it is due to the fact that my age naturally assumes more responsibility in many aspects of life and motherhood, and that is what is making me more tired.
My mother in law innocently asked me if I was taking my iron but I was obnoxious in my thought response to that. Why assume I ought to be taking iron? Why, I asked her, do I look anaemic? No, no, was her kindly response, it’s just that iron deficiency causes fatigue.
Could be. Could well be.
Anyway I am just typing this out to post something. My kid ran out barefoot into the garden again, when he is supposed to be here with me doing his maths. Off I go to chase him…
Hmm, maybe it’s the constant chasing and nagging of my children that is making me tired…
This photo
Gives me a strange ache
In my chest
Some would say it is my heart.
But does a heart have feelings? Or is it just the brain projecting?
And why do the most emotive of sensations make themselves felt in the chest?
I don’t know why this photo has such an impact on me.
Something about summer, and roses.
It reminds me of my grandmother. She had a kaleidoscope of roses in her garden, plants all over her home. Silence ringing through rooms, interrupted with the soft tick-tick-tick of a clock, gentle chirping outside, the distant buzz of a lawnmower. Sunlight flooding through tall windows.
Knitting needles, clicking.
One leg crossed, over the other. Face knotted in concentration, but never frowning.
All that hurt in her heart, but always a smile.
All that pain in her body, but always patience.
Now I am going through a very similar physical pain, and I don’t know how she managed to do it. To give so much, so effortlessly, with all that burden on her heart.
So when I came across this photo today, my heart thumped painfully in my chest, probably because my brain told it to.
Because it reminds me of my childhood in her garden, her love and patience and life,
Enveloping me in warm comfort.
She was a mother to her own children, and a mother to their children too. A mother in the deepest, most emotional sense of the word.
And what is lost can never be returned.
The credit for this image goes to this blog on Tumblr.
I bought myself a milk frother. Actually in today’s language that isn’t quite true. I ordered myself one. It’s a little machine whisk, the handle of which contains a battery. The whisk part is a small circle of wire with a curly wire going all over it, and it vibrates or spins when you press the button on its handle.
You can froth milk, or cream, or in my case, a teaspoon of instant coffee and a teaspoon of sugar in a tablespoon of boiling water. Froth that right up until its thick and foamy and double the size of the liquid. Then add boiling water and a teensy splash of warmed milk and there you have something delicious.
Something like a cappuccino, but lighter, frothier, tastier and way cheaper. You can have it as many times a day as your jitters will allow.
Early in the morning before your kids wake up and drag you backwards through a hedge.
Late at night when they are asleep and you’re desperately typing away at your laptop keyboard trying to get this big project done.
In the afternoon, at 3pm precisely, when a wave of deep exhaustion slaps you on both cheeks and then parks its bottom on your eyelids. Heavy heavy, limbs like lead, but you sip from that sweet foam and you’re mildly awake again, setting about to finish off the rest of your day.
I don’t know what it is about life that feels so alien.
I want to write stories and describe things and delve into humanity’s mind, I want to talk to people and explore their minds and learn things and thoughts and opinions. But I find myself on the daily repeating a tedium that is almost set in stone. Written into my soul by the generations before me.
Duty? Law?
My grandmother and her paper thin skin and brown, wrinkly hands pop into my mind often.
I was having a conversation with my husband and mother in law about something to do with children growing up and leaving and I mentioned my grandmother and my husband said, out of the blue,
‘She was very lonely, your grandmother, wasn’t she?’
It felt like a punch in the gut. I thought about her, raising three children alone in London in the 70s, divorced and heartbroken, hardworking and efficient. She packed them all off to uni and waved goodbye as they got married and travelled across the globe and country, and there she resided in her big old Victorian house on a side street in South London.
And yes.
She was incredibly lonely.
My sweet, kind, warm, loving grandmother.
And she is no longer with us. In fact, on the 22nd of July it will have been 11 years since she passed away.
And when he said that a deep sadness rose up so suddenly that I could not control myself, so I got up to go to the kitchen under the pretext of clearing the dishes away.
‘Are you doing to cry?’ he asked me.
‘No,’ I said, as the tears gathered thick and fast in my eyes and threatened to spill out onto my cheeks. I shut the kitchen door behind me and began to wash the dishes to compose myself.
My son ran in a few moments later and his eyes were huge, ‘Mama are you sad?’ he said. He had interrupted his play to check on me.
I turned and smiled at him.
‘No sweetheart, I am not sad.’
He searched my face with his eyes for a few moments and then went back to his game, evidently appeased.
And I remembered searching my own mother’s face like he did. In fact, I still do. I search her voice and her eyes and the way her chin moves.
And I thought about how she too, would do the same to her mother. My grandmother.
I don’t know what all this means or how it relates to a milk frother and being overwhelmed.
I look at a mountain and I ask, ‘Am I a people pleaser?’
Only the mountain is not in real life but in my memory. I would never look at a mountain in real life and have such a thought. Can you even control your thoughts? I saw some real life mountains this week and my heart was sucked out of my chest. I could breathe fine, but something strange clouded my mind.
Reading Jane Eyre reminds me of warm sweet tea and hot buttery toast. It reminds me of a square pattern pink carpet, faded by the blistering heat of the desert. It reminds me of hot days, curtains billowing in dusty wind, burning air on my cheeks as a rattly van full of sweaty children speeds along shiny wide roads. Breaking necks, lives hanging on edge.
I saw some mountains this week, and waterfalls cascading down them. Not as impressive as Niagara Falls – small trickles falling over rocks and mossy branches into lakes. Fresh air, cold noses, babies with red cheeks.
I took my babies to the Lake District – well actually my husband took us. He booked everything when I was away with the kids staying with my mother, and when I saw him again he said he’d missed us and he wanted to take us somewhere. My son loved his first ever holiday. He kept telling me he was having so much fun. He slept so well, as did his baby sister. Better than they do at home.
Am I a people pleaser? I ask the mountain in my memory.
What a beautiful mountain it was. Snow-capped, green and brown, sitting in the biting storms for centuries. People coming and going. Fashions changing – what does it care for fashion? – ages and wars and the slow, sweeping turn of the millennial tide.
And it sits there, holding the earth together.
I asked my aunt if I could come visit her and her ‘text tone’ scared me so I called her sister – my mother – and said I was nervous about her answer and my mother rolled her eyes at me.
Well, I didn’t see her do it but I know she did.
‘Why are you nervous?’
‘She sounds so cross, I don’t know what will please her, I asked her if she could do Friday as Saturday would be too hard for me and she strongly hinted that although she was free both days, she’d rather I come on Saturday.’
‘Ok then stay with her Friday night!’
‘I can’t ask her that!!!’
‘Why not!? She is your aunt!’
‘I know but…’
‘If L (my daughter) called you about staying with E (my sister), what would you say?’
‘I’d say you’re crazy, E loves you to pieces, of course she would want you to stay with her!’
‘Your aunt has such a soft spot for you’
‘But she sounded so angry!’
‘Yes CALL her then, nobody sounds how they mean to via text’
‘Ok ok ok’
‘Silly girl’
Sometimes you just need to call people.
I think early motherhood is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life. Every single day is a battle I am fighting alone. It is a vastly lonely place. Time stretches endlessly yet snaps away in an instant. It’s exhausting, exhaustive, filled with guilt, self hatred and overwhelming love.
I feel like there is a huge lump in my throat and I need to cry and cry and cry but it is not high enough to spill out of me in tears.
I know I know I know this will pass and I will look back on it wistfully and sadly and nostalgically and perhaps… perhaps with heartbreak? I know this time will go and I will pine and yearn and ache for my precious babies as they are now. Thieves of my heart. Apples of both my eyes. Their names are scarred on my soul forever and my back breaks for them every single day. I ball up fury and resentment and frustration and it explodes in hugs and kisses and squeezes and promises and the occasional yell.
I am alone. I am lonely. I have no family nearby and barely any friends in the same boat as me.
We are all busy busy busy and people tell us to enjoy every single moment and we try we do we try we try try try but there is only so much you can give when you have nothing left inside.
I am a hollow shell of who I used to be. I laugh shrilly now. Anxiety lives in all my pores and breathes under my arms and heaves like a pit in the loose folds of the extra skin that has stretched and stretched and stretched over my stomach. Housing my two babies. Rent free but I paid dearly for it. A price I am not willing to accept has left my bank yet.
I think about everything all day. Everything everything everything. Things I have to do and haven’t done. I am not being a wife or a woman or a partner or a daughter or a sister. I have no time to be and no help to be but I am facing the consequences of not being those things.
I am lost lost lost lost dark drowned.
They all say every day, they all say over and over again. They say: This is hard. They say: You are not alone. They say: You’re a great mama. They say: This shall pass.
So I write a note to myself and put it on the fridge, because I am always opening that fridge. I write it with an old felt tip pen that is washing itself out.
I write:
When you are feeling overwhelmed and angry, remember this is just a moment out of many. Make it count.
So when they are old, older, oldest. When they are older and I have space to breathe and space to miss them and space for my heart to yearn for their small little faces. So when they are old I can have less things to regret and more to cherish.
Is anybody else feeling ‘Covid fatigue’?
Is anybody else sick and tired of staying indoors all the time and panting through a mask whenever they’re out around people?
Is anybody else craving a social life, when previously they were proud introverts?
Does anybody else not want to see their inlaws only all the time, because they’re low-level bullies, and it’s exhausting to brush off being undermined all the time?
Does anybody else want to see a real friend face to face, without lying to one’s inlaws about it, because apparently we cannot see anybody except for them, even if it is socially distanced?
Is anybody else emotionally controlled by somebody?
Don’t you just hate it?
Is anybody else sick to death of living life and making every single decision with the background thought of someone’s mother in law’s feelings and emotions about it?
Does anybody else’s husband act like they don’t love their wife, and tease her mercilessly when his mother is around, because he knows his mother would be jealous and hurt if he dared to show his wife affection?
When my maternal grandmother passed away in 2011, I remember my mum saying something very poignant to someone who came to see her at the funeral.
She said, “Losing your mother is losing your entire world, the one person who truly cares for you, asking nothing in return.”
I was sixteen, I did not understand it at the time, truth be told.
But recently, my mother and my mother in law were in the same room, and my husband and I were facetiming with them. They live five minute’s walk from each other.
My mother in law made one of her usual digs at me, and I laughed and brushed it off with a joke, which made everybody in the room laugh. My mother called me the next day, and asked if I was alone.
“Yes,” I said.
She told me she felt angry and upset at the low-level bullying I was experiencing, and she felt sick and tired of not being able to speak up to defend me, as I always tell her not to say anything ever.
I pacified her, and tried to explain that was the relationship, and not to worry as I don’t let anybody control me. It was kind of a lie, but I can’t tell my mother the truth, she would be furious. My mother is a strong fighter of a woman and I am ashamed to say such things to her, she would never accept it. I don’t know why I do.
At the end of the phone call, I broke down in tears.
Because my husband, who I think loves and supports me in everything, but is sadly also controlled by his mother and doesn’t realise it, would never defend me against any comments made by his mother at me. He would not dare. Hell would rip apart if he did.
Nobody would defend me, I realised. Nobody would even notice. I would fight it off myself, and deal with it, but nobody would care for my mental health and well-being, except for my mother.
She would notice and she would hurt on my behalf but she would respect my wishes and not say anything, but she would seethe inside and she would always be on the lookout for me. No matter how busy she is, no matter how many of her own troubles she has.
And that is what she meant, when she said what she said after her own mother passed away. I understand it now. So so much.
The background music to my shower is that of a crying baby, and yet when I turn the faucet off, and stand dripping in the sudden ensuing silence, I hear no baby crying.
I tiptoe out and drip on the carpet, peering into the bedroom.. baby sound asleep on my bed, ne’er a stir.
Back to the shower it is. Rubbing shampoo through my sparse postpartum hair, trying my utmost to ignore the anguished imaginary cries of my baby.
I towel myself dry and watch that peaceful little face, large soft peachy cheeks, eyelashes gentle on the roundness below, small deep breaths under the covers, a contented little sigh.
My eyeballs are burning. I am beyond needing a nap. My body screams for a good weightlifting session at the gym. I flutter about the house on my toes, doing only chores that are silent. Brooming, mopping, dusting. No hoover. No dishes. Never boil a kettle. And set the washing machine to start when nap time is over.
If I am too tired to do that, I sit on the sofa and eat ice cream. Noodles. Doritos. And I watch reruns of Gilmore Girls. Not focusing on the story, really, just mindlessly staring into an abyss.
Daily things are done as and when I can manage them. I want to kiss my boy inside and out, but don’t know how to. I live for the little gurgling laughs and the huge shy smile and that soft little double chin. I knew I would love him but never realised how much it would hurt and what sort of worry it would cause.
I miss my mother. My mother in law doesn’t like it when I visit her. She gives me the silent treatment and yet acts normal when my husband is around. She complains to my husband that I am disrespectful and always act like I am itching to leave. She doesn’t let me leave. And when I try to she asks ‘why’. Even though I spent the entire weekend at her house, and only a few snatched hours with my mother. I am not allowed to stay the night with my mother else she gets very upset and her husband shouts at my husband and calls him names and stresses him out until he fights me to the death so I give in and stay in their horrid, horrid depressing house. My father in law wouldn’t have cared if his wife hadn’t pushed him to. He told my husband that she comes first before anything and he must never upset her.
I am shocked. I didn’t think she had it in her.
What about me and my sanity and my mental wellbeing?
I miss my mother so sorely and yet when I am with her I am stressed because I know I will be ‘in trouble’ when I go back to my husband.
This time is meant to be special, and I am making it so, I really am. I am treasuring my child so very much. I just wish family was easy also. I feel trapped, because I don’t actually have a choice. I feel anxious all the time and on the verge of tears.
My husband makes it very hard for me to see my family as he prioritises his mother, and causes trouble when she causes trouble. So I have to pick my battles, and that means much less time with my parents.
I miss them so much.
Having a baby makes you need and value your mother in a way you never did before.
When I am a mother in law, I honestly will ensure that I am not so selfish and insensitive to my daughter in law. People need their mothers, while they have them.
I NEED my mother.
Hello. Yes it is me. Peering into the internet. I am sitting in bed with a baby snoozing in my arms as I type this. It has been some kind of day. He won’t seem to settle tonight unless he is being held but I don’t mind I don’t I don’t I never will mind because he will never be this little again and he is my big big blessing.
We did nothing today but are exhausted. But that is the reality of parenthood.
It’s been three months to the day since our lives changed completely, and as I was getting into the shower at 10:47pm I thought to myself – you know, self, your life is never going to go back to being like it was before. So stop thinking of that. Embrace this change and make the most of it.
So that is what I have decided to do. Babies are not a pause in life – rather an enrichment of it. See it’s taking me a while to get there but I am working on it.
See what I have to do is throw myself all the way in. Go all out. Dedicate my brain and time to learning and teaching and loving and nurturing. Not wishing for a holiday.
I love this boy more and more every single day it’s insane.
Like at the beginning I don’t think I bonded very well with him because of how traumatic the birth was – and because I was under general anaesthetic when they pulled him out of me via emergency c section – I didn’t witness his entrance into this world. They literally put him on me while I was woozy and drowsy from the operation and I tried to connect but all I wanted to do was sleep. So weird right?
But now I am in my right mind again – I think… i don’t know yet because back then I thought I was in my right mind but I very obviously was not…
anyway. Myself. That was the prompt for today. I must work on myself and not hang about the fringes of things if I want to give my boy a valuable childhood.
I want to give him the best in terms of mind enrichment and education. So that means I have to make sure I am educated and informed.
If you have had kids, how did you navigate being ‘yourself’ in order to nourish the brain of your child? Any tips would be so very welcome!
Hundreds and thousands,
Atop white icing,
Atop a cake,
On a plate,
Covered in foil.
Wrapped in a plastic bag,
Shoved
Mercilessly
At the bottom of my schoolbag.
For I was ashamed
Of the cake
My mother toiled all night to make,
for the school fair.
Don’t ask me why.
It was perfectly lovely,
Soft, yellow vanilla sponge
Simple, perfect flavours,
And the sparkly fun of hundreds and thousands decorating the top.
I just didn’t want to be
That GIRL.
WHAT girl, pray tell?
The one who carries a cake onto a bus where the boy she secretly crushes on sits coolly at the front, NOT carrying a cake.
Don’t ask me what nonsense goes on in the minds of twelve year olds.
When I got on the bus..
That boy was carrying a cake.
And most of the other kids
Had some kind of home-made concoction in their laps too.
I felt stupid
And sad.
For my cake,
On it’s plate
With white icing
And hundreds and thousands
Was a flattened, crushed mess.
And my heart, now, today, at 25
Wrings in sadness
At the thought of the love and care
That went into that cake,
As my mother,
toiled through the night
To see a sparkle
in her daughter’s eyes.
I love you mama.
Ocean Bream 