23 Sep 2012
This past couple of weeks have been the toughest my family has endured for a long long time.
I am not going to discuss the specifics.
When everything is going to total crap I have one coping mechanism – it is perverse, because it involves a complete mind fuck.
I imagine my perfect life. Not the life I am living, but the life I want to have. This is perverse because it brings into sharp relief how my actual life is going and its manifest physical defects. Read More
14 Mar 2012
9 January 2010
I am wearing a sign. It floats above my head. Like a speech bubble. It reads:
I have only one child, please ask me when I am having another one.
4 Mar 2012
It was my birthday, last week, and I decided it was about time I had a birthday party. Haven’t had one (well a proper one) since about 1995, so waste not a moment more I thought. A practice go for next year.
It has been the wettest summer in Canberra for years and years. Naturally I planned an outside garden cocktail party. And naturally it started raining at 2-30pm and by 7pm we’d had another 30mm of rain. My minions slaved away with tarps and portable heaters, 4 million helium balloons and candles, while I tried in vain to get the toddler to keep out of the water, eat his dinner, and stop setting fire to things!
16 Feb 2012
Today, being Thursday, I stayed home with my child. That’s how it goes. Thursday rolls around. We wake up, have breakfast, wave goodbye to Robert. Then we fang around a bit and maybe go for a pram walk, to the shops, just do stuff.
In a hectic week, sometime we don’t even get out of our pyjamas. Read More
4 Jul 2011
I have been in a persistent funk lately. Since Easter really. It’s a bloody long time. Read More
17 Mar 2011
Tomorrow I return to work.
I haven’t been to work since Friday 13 November 2009. Boy was I ready to not go to work anymore that week. I was quite pregnant. I’d had last minute projects heaped on me. My staff were mournfully staring at me and occasionally breaking into not helpful little speeches about how they would miss me. Colleagues came and wrote suggestions on my whiteboard for my weeks post work, but before baby – massages, haircuts, eyebrow waxes, movies. People came past making jokes about seeing my toes – like I couldn’t! Well, I could, if I sat down. Read More
11 Feb 2011
This week I couldn’t work out what was the matter with me. This week was supposed to be great. I was supposed to be enjoying myself on my two days off, doing interesting things, being alone! Instead I walked past every single person with a child in tow thinking, oh what a lovely kid, or oh look at that poor mother trying to drink her coffee, or look at that dad with three (!) kids hanging off him. All the while all these people who I passed, and was rudely staring at, were thinking, my god, I hope that deranged woman doesn’t come and steal my children. Because, of course, none of them would know I had a child who I had just left at childcare. None of them know that I usually drag my toddler around just as they were doing. I wasn’t wearing a sign saying – yes I am a mother too. I was just me. With regular clothes on and a regular handbag – no nappy bag, no chuck down my back, no snot on my sleeve. Just me. Read More
14 Jan 2011
Those who know me well, really really well, will know I love a good plan. Better yet, I love it when a plan comes together; just like Mr T. It has been difficult, during my first year of motherhood, to adjust to the reality that my plans are no longer entirely in my control. Read More
10 Dec 2010
2010 has been one of the longest and most difficult years of my life. It is, without doubt, the year I have had the least sleep. I am tired to the bone. Tired in a way that a week of solid nights’ of sleep will only partly remedy. I read the lovely Kerri Sackville’s blog post The Never Ending Weary. I was nodding furiously and wishing I could be in bed while reading it. Kerri has carefully categorised her tiredness. My tiredness is just the kind you have in the first year of your child’s life, with the added extra of one or two other complications life throws at you, simultaneously. Read More
30 May 2010
I’ve had a subscription to the New Yorker since 2006. I love them. Often there have been periods where, due to their frequency of publication, I have had a couple of weeks pile up. OK so sometimes when I was really busy it may have been 6 or 8 weeks. Now below is a photo of the pile of unopened New Yorkers resting on the cross-bar of the bedside table. There are probably 15 magazines in the pile. There are a few that are optimistically opened but most of them are in their plastic. Even with the housework ban, it is hard to keep up!
The New Yorkers
This is the sort of thing that people mean when they say things are different after they have children. I can still do the SMH quiz every Saturday, I still get the ‘Get It?’ every week, (that’s my litmus test to see if I’m losing my mind) but if I make it through the first couple of pages of Spectrum or the mag, I’m doing really really well. I started reading March of Patriots in February. I’ve read only 100 or so pages. The concentration required fails me. The interest is there; but fatigue beats me every time. I have finished a couple of books, at the expense of the New Yorkers. Things are different now.
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