Daily Life
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Wednesday, October 17th, 2007I pause at the garage door, boots on, coat and hat pulled tight, and look up at the ominous sky. It’s still dark and more than a little bit foreboding even though I know our walk like the back of my hand and even though I know sunrise will be here within a few minutes. Yesterday the field was subsumed by thick fog, rendering me blind beyond my own fingertips. The dog, familiar with every bump in the terrain and being blessed with better senses bounded ahead, unafraid of the white wall ahead of us. Today no fog, but the rain starts to fall thick and heavy. The thick mud will be slippery enough that I will lose my footing at least once, sending me painfully over and making me flush with embarrassment and annoyance even though no-one is around to see me. As I step away from the shelter of the door, the wind blows stinging rain into my eyes and cold air down anywhere my coat is not glued to my skin. I haven’t even set off yet I long to be back, hot cup of coffee in my hands.
As I reach the gate my thickly-gloved fingers struggle with the latch. I look back at the house, lit up like a Christmas tree, lights twinkling in the rain. I see Harry, fresh from sleep and energised in the way only small boys can be, shouting and running up the hallway like a demented creature, his face distorted in the wet glass. I see William, with a twelve hour night of sleep acting as catalyst, clinging to Matthew’s legs in a dawn rugby tackle. I see Ben sobbing over the latest toddler injustice, building his daily list of grievances that we can neither anticipate nor solve. I see Matthew looking exasperated, cross and defeated in just one facial expression.
I pull my hat down against the wind and smile smugly because I know at this point of the morning, despite the cold and the rain, I definitely have the better job.
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Posted in Too Many Children, Daily Life
Should she stay or should she go?
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007Meriel looks annoyed with me. She’s been annoyed with me for a while.
‘I’ve cleaned the loos so there’s no need to do them again and please don’t worry about cleaning the sideboard in the kitchen this week because I haven’t had a chance to clear it,’ I say as I rush to get ready to take William to preschool.
‘Is there a reason why you don’t want me to do the loos each week?’ she asks, almost proprietorially.
‘With four boys in the house and a toddler who has learnt that playing in the loo is really good fun, I clean them every day anyway so there’s no need for them to be done again,’ I explain, thinking about how I find Ben fishing about in the water from time to time despite my repeated appeals for the older boys to keep the bathroom doors shut.
She still looks annoyed though.
I’ve been so sick that the levels of clutter in the house have reached new levels. But when I come back from our morning out it looks like a burglar has broken in. Clothes have been swept to the floor, books that were piled up have been moved and scattered across tables, even the bottles in the shower looked like they have been thrown about by my toddler in a tantrum.
So Meriel cleans, but leaves me almost more work to do when I get back than if she didn’t come at all. She leaves early every week, thinking I don’t know (my neighbors tell me because they love to be involved in everyone else’s business). I turn a blind eye to this because cleaners are hard to come by here. And most importantly if she didn’t come, I don’t know where I would find the time to do even the most basic of cleaning around the house.
At the beginning of the year I was talking to a mother at William’s preschool. ‘I hear Ben isn’t doing so well,’ she says. I look a bit confused because I hardly know her. ‘Meriel comes to you, doesn’t she?’ she says by way of explanation. ‘She was telling me about Ben.’ I feel my heart sink. Does Meriel repeat everything she hears in our house to other people she cleans for, people I know?
Since then I have been careful what I say to her. I didn’t discuss Harry’s schooling plans because every week she would turn up and say to him (until I had to ask her to stop) ‘have you found another school to go to then?’ to a confused boy who was frightened about school and thought, rightly, that he was being homeschooled for the forseeable future. I didn’t tell her right away about the pregnancy, not wanting it broadcast around the surrounding villages until I reached the end of the first trimester. That would be reason for her to be annoyed. I suppose. If it were ANY of her business.
So instead I get back to a house that looks like it a tornado has swept through it.
This was the woman who arrived a couple of weeks after my beloved dog died, when I could still scarcely keep from crying when I talked about her and said to me, ‘but have you noticed how much less hair there is to clean now?’
Because, yes, when your dog dies there are so many hidden benefits.
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Posted in Daily Life
Sitting on the floor in tears
Monday, September 24th, 2007I peed in a cup. I waited an hour and a half. Then the consultant spent three and a half minutes telling me that a VBAC was entirely possible seeing as I had achieved one already and that was it.
The upside of the appointment is that she said I don’t have to go back to the hospital unless I go overdue (I’m pretty sure I went several times last pregnancy) so I will not have to endure such another waste of a morning.
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I find it really interesting that those who commented on my last post and those I have spoken to who have had c-sections have found them (me included) to be such a positive birth experience. I know that there are a lot of positive vaginal (sorry, awful term, but can’t think of another less awful term) birth experiences but there are also a lot of awful ones (mine included). I know that a VBAC is the right thing to attempt (best for mine and the baby’s health, especially if the consultant has said it is safe) but I’m already dreading it (but in a bury-my-head-in-the-sand kind of way) even though it’s 25+ weeks away.
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Finally, FINALLY, the sickness has stopped. The nausea remains, sometimes as bad as ever, but my appetite has partly returned so I am at last eating something other than chocolate cake and this baby stands a chance of getting some basic nutrition. And I no longer fear throwing up in worrying places, like the grocery store, or at preschool, and that helps. Not to mention the fact that the people who work in these places no longer need to look at me with that wary look like I’m a shoplifter.
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So you’d have thought that I would be feeling pretty good, right? But I feel really low. Lots of stuff going on, Matthew may be away a lot more over the coming months, we may be moving (hassle), we may not be moving (just as much hassle because we need to), homeschool is not working, I’m tired and Harry is going through a phase - of being frightened at night, frightened of being left in the car when I pop back inside to get my bag even though he can still see and hear me, crying several times a day and annoying the hell out of his brothers. I need a break from him and as usual I can’t help but feel that school might be the answer, especially as things get set to get more busy and tiring around here in the next few months.
I find it hard to judge if I need help for these low periods. I’m just coming to the end of ten terrible weeks and I’m feeling physically very low. Is that, combined with a few weeks of poor sleep and my eldest son going through this ‘tricky’ phase enough reason to be feeling so low? If I’m sitting on the floor dissolving into tears because I’ve had enough, that makes me think I should be doing something to deal with it.
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Posted in Parenting, Daily Life
Why I need to feel better: hyperemesis gravidarum (or severe morning sickness to you and me)
Monday, September 17th, 2007One of the hardest things about hyperemesis gravidarum or severe morning sickness is having to cook. I have survived on the most nutritionally deficient food I can think of because a) I can’t face cooking anything and b) I can’t eat anything I have cooked anyway. However the boys still need feeding and every day I have to prepare meals that makes my stomach heave with displeasure.
So on Friday I made egg fried rice with left-over sausages and bacon. Those three ingredients alone are enough to make me throw up even writing about them. But the children need feeding so I persevere.
The smell from the frying pan is terrible. I cook the rice but when I stir it I notice a piece of black rice. I fish it out and look at it in horror realising it is not black rice but a fly. Unable to believe a fly has got into the rice pan - which has a lid on it - I look again.
I feel so unwell, I can’t start cooking it again, I think in desperation. I know any minute I am going to be sick again.
I look at it, willing it to be a piece of black rice. But it is definitely a fly.
Well, the fly’s out now and the rice will have boiled away any germs.
I can’t avoid throwing up so I disappear to the bathroom for a few minutes. When I get back I don’t feel any better.
I look again at the fly.
Shit, a wing’s missing. That means it must still be in the rice.
My legs are shaking with nausea. I want to get supper on the table and the whole cooking process over with. My type-A personality, which would have thrown out the rice and possibly the pan in disgust on any normal day, deserted me when the morning sickness started.
I review the situation. A wing is in the rice. But the rice has boiled for a long time and any germs will be dead, I reason.
So I serve it up * **.
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*I’m not proud of myself.
** The boys are still alive.
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Posted in Pregnancy, Daily Life
I’m calling a moratorium on weekly parties
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007Another day, another party.
Parties for school age children tend to exclude parents and siblings of the children invited (understandably or it would get a bit crowded) but this time we were all invited and Harry bounded in with only a moment’s hesitation and played happily for the entire time we were there. Much nicer for him. Much nicer for me.
I think for now we will stick to parties where we are all invited and hope that his confidence about being dropped off comes gradually. He’s hardly going to want me accompanying him to parties when he is a teenager so the independence has to come at some point, right?
Besides, the parties were averaging one every week or two and I’m not sure a child needs that many invitations - or that much sugar - and I’m not sure his mother needs that much money disappearing from her purse in the form of presents or spending her Saturdays being a taxi service when we could be out and about having fun.
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Posted in Daily Life
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