Surplus to requirements

I knew that motherhood would be a gradual process of letting go; I just didn't realise it would happen by the tender age of two and a half.

Gertie, who until today has needed me to do or at least to supervise and support with all sorts of jobs - like wiping her bottom, brushing her teeth, wiping her nose, doing up her laces, helping her to get dressed - has suddenly decided that she can do everything 'all by mySELF'.

I came to collect her from nursery this afternoon and she told me that she needed to go to the toilet before we left. "Fine," I said, putting Gilby's car-seat down and preparing to go in and help.

"No mummy, I don't need you," she informed me matter-of-factly, locking the door firmly behind her. I peered over the top of the cubicle to see her cope admirably with the task, but she happened to glance up, and caught me.

"No mummy, don't look!" she commanded.

"Er, right." After a minute or two, I heard the bolt draw back and out she came, head held high.

After supper I went to fetch her pyjamas, to discover that she had selected different ones and was already busily getting ready for bed. The pyjama bottoms did take a few attempts to get right, and it was very funny watching her put her head to the bottom of them to try and figure out why her foot hadn't come out, but after her earlier statement of independence I was loathe to get involved.

So, after a mere thirty months, it appears that I am largely redundant.

The 'Hands-Free' Kit

I love to carry Gilby round in a sling. It is a very rustic affair, in bleached cotton, given to me by a friend. I don't know the make but it looks like something that women in some Lesser-Economically-Developed-Countries might sport. It is a brilliant device though, and has affectionately become known as my 'hands free kit'. I can do virtually anything (including blogging) whilst Gilby is nestled in there.

It does have one major drawback, however: It can look, from a casual glance, as though I have sustained a rather nasty injury and am nursing a broken arm rather than a very small child. I was attending a church service a few weeks ago and a concerned parishioner cornered me on the way out.

"Oh dear," he murmured. "That does look serious. How on earth did you do that?"

Glancing down at my baby of only a few weeks old, I didn't really have the heart to explain. Frankly, it was going to go down a whole road that I wasn't prepared to explore with a complete stranger...

When I was a baby...

Little Gertie is preoccupied with all the things that Gilby does that she used to do when she was a baby. She is fascinated by breast-feeding and acknowledges sagely that this is the way she used to get her milk. (She also likes to hitch her dress up to feed her doll when we are out and about, but that is another story.)

All the toys and equipment that have come down from the loft for Gilby she knows that she used to use, and even if we have bought something new we have to pretend that it was hers first.

She also loved the idea of my 'baby tummy', and because some of the other mums at nursery are also expecting or have just had babies, this idea is being reinforced all the time. So she is aware that she too came from my tummy, and confidently pronounced that it 'tickled' when she came out of there. Well, if that is what she would like to believe...

But I did have to put my foot down when Gertie and Gilby were having a bath together a little while ago and she pointed to a certain part of his anatomy. "Mummy, I used to have a willy when I was a little baby, didn't I?"

Life in Fast forward

I went into work yesterday. I'm not due to return until mid January, but it was one of my 10 'KIT' (Keeping In Touch) days. I have another 11 weeks at home, but the time seems to be just whizzing by. Life is in a permanent state of fast-forward. He is only 15 weeks old, but where has my newborn baby gone?

So the work visit was painful in all sorts of ways. I was there for three hours and was overwhelmed by the level of stress and workload; most people were too busy to stop and talk (the bells, the bells: I work in a school) and after a recent OFSTED inspection pressures have been piled on.

It was not an attractive picture, and I had to pretend that I really cared about this stuff when all I could think about was my husband, at home with both children for maybe only the third time. What scenes would I come home to? Had I expressed enough milk for Gilby? Would the cat have been fed?

I am so not ready to go back. After Gertie, I took eight months off, and by the end of that time I was perfectly prepared to return. I found being at home incredibly frustrating at times, couldn't cope with analysing my day and realising that the chief achievement had been managing to iron three work-shirts for my husband. I remember phoning him at work one day and making him come home because the baby was crying and I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't bear the general, overwhelming responsibility for another tiny human being twenty-four hours a day.

I wanted to generate some sort of normality and get the old 'me' back in any way I could, and the obvious way was to go back out to work and even being in a high-pressure job seemed so much easier than being at home all day.

Worse was going out to any number of activities - baby massage, baby yoga, baby music, baby swimming, baby poker (I have made this last one up, but you get the idea). The level of competition between mums was frightening and off-putting. This time round we still do many of those things, but it is the ones that I enjoy as opposed to the ones that I think I ought to be doing, and we don't really care what anyone else thinks!

But this time round something else has happened too. I have embraced the role. Gertie is (mostly) so much more fun to be with now that she is a proper little person who does funny stuff, and being at home with two really tests my skills of organisation and patience. Ironing a few shirts is easy; I can do it whilst singing nursery rhymes to Gertie and nursing Gilby in the sling and cooking supper. Ok, so meltdown is also still a regular feature (last Sunday, for instance), but it is all worthwhile.

So, for once, I am not looking forward to the new year when it will all end.

No birthday cake

I am very grateful to Josie at Sleep is for the Weak for providing the inspiration for this post on loss. This is my first attempt at the Writing Workshop, so here goes:


Can you feel loss for someone you have never known?

November 3rd was her birthday, so an observer from the windmill late in the afternoon would have seen in outline against the lonely horizon this: a woman struggling in the wind and rain with a trug of planted flowers over her left arm and a bouquet of flowers in that same hand; a heavier load weighing down the other. In fact, a car seat, containing a 15 week old baby boy. Behind, a tired little girl, running every few steps to keep apace.

The watcher would have witnessed the strange convoy heading along the flagstone path past the church and then turning right onto the grass and across a line of graves.

What that spectator could not guess is that none of the party have ever met the woman at whose grave they now lay flowers.

For that woman is my mother-in-law, who died 5 years before I met her son, and 11 years before we married. A woman who never got to know of even the possibility of the existence of her two, beautiful grandchildren.

Rosemary - for remembrance - is in the bouquet. An irony, since none of us remember. And the flowers are all pink, for this small thing I know about her: she loved pink.

And Gertie, who has not even begun to formulate a concept of mortality, and knows that we are leaving flowers because it is a birthday, asks,
"Why doesn't Grandma Janey have birthday cake, mummy?"

And I can't explain, but feel an inexplicable loss. For this woman that I never knew, whose son I know so intimately: a mother who never got to see her own children grown and married and happy. And I look at her grandchildren and hope that I will be granted this grace.

Pinchy Boy

We didn't have our happiest ever Sunday yesterday.

For Gertie, the terrible twos (which I have been fervently denying the existence of for the last six months) have finally kicked in.

At breakfast, she refused to drink from her cup as it was the wrong one. It was right the day before, so this was bewildering. Then there were tears because she didn't want the raisins 'hidden' in her cereal. (This is usually a fun game that causes plenty of giggles.) The banana got mashed into the 'cup of wrong' and smeared over table and face while I popped into the next room to give Gilby a feed. I came back in to carnage over the freshly washed floor. What has happened to her oft-commented-upon 'astonishingly good toddler table manners'?

Then there were two tantrums in public places (one of the prostrate-on-the-floor-kicking-and-refusing-to-move-variety), followed by a poo in the knickers (I have proudly been telling everyone how quickly and how well Gertie has potty-trained) but worst of all was the new nickname she has designed, completely independently, for her baby brother. We like nicknames in our family, and all have one. But Gilby's is NOT and NEVER has been, 'Pinchy Boy'.

And you can probably imagine the associated actions that come with the name. And yes, his pudgy cheeks do look invitingly 'pinchy', but surely not to a two-year-old? This is a worrying development as she has previously been very affectionate towards the new arrival.

She has gone to nursery this morning, giving everyone time to regroup, and Gilby's 'pinchy-boy' cheeks some much-needed healing time.

S.A.D: Supermarket Affective Disorder

I take in a happy, giggling child to the supermarket and inevitably leave with a red-faced screaming toddler. Equally, I have to steel myself for the trip; I skip in nonchalantly but leave on the verge of a migraine.

Now my question is why? Gertie is generally well-behaved and helpful, and Gilby will often sleep through the whole process, so it has nothing to do with the children being difficult. What exactly happens then, between the vegetable aisle and the checkout?

I have tried to analyse the experience. My mood takes a dive with the initial battle for a parking space. I don't even bother with the parent and child parking: those sacred spots are evidently reserved for more divine beings.

And then I put it down to a combination of terrible acoustics that amplify and simultaneously muffle the sound of other screaming toddlers, the unnatural headache-inducing lighting, and the trolley rage caused by overcrowding in too-narrow aisles.

Finally, and this is the clincher - the dispute over the special offer prominently displayed (and probably prompting a spontaneous purchase) that then doesn't materialise when you get to the till.

Depending on which supermarket we are in (and I change regularly in the vain hope that things may be better elsewhere) this results in either a 'supervisor to checkout 3' or another queue at customer services. Is it worth it for the 87p saving, I have to ask myself. "Yes," I screech back internally, 'Or they have won"!

Somehow all these things must impact on Gertie too, so that for no discernable reason she is in her own two-year-old rage by the end. I will monitor the age at which it seems to effect Gilbert. Or perhaps it is a gender-thing: my husband seems far less prone to Supermarket-Affected-Disorder.

Thank goodness for online grocery shopping. Worth every single penny, I say.