Blog Post Revisited: Using Life’s What Ifs

My Three Darlings

I finally sent a complete draft of Class Act to my fabulous Beta Reader yesterday, and found myself at a loose end. I know it needs more work but, quite frankly, I’m sick of the sight of it and am starting to doubt whether it even works as a story. Time for a change.

I want to start something new, rather than working on one of the three or four half-finished manuscripts I have on my laptop, courtesy of years of NaNoWriMo. But I’m a bit all chick-litted out, after Two-Hundred Steps Home and working on Class Act. So I got to thinking about other ideas I’ve had, and I remembered the Middle Grade Novel idea I had nearly a year ago. This is a bit on how it started.

A few days after writing that post, I wrote the one below. A little insight into where some of my writing ideas come from.

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Writing out some of the background for my new novel today I realised I was inadvertently writing a ‘what if’ about my own life, or one tiny aspect of my life. I think sometimes that’s what writers do. They use their words, their imaginations, to explore different lives they might have lived. Mine is a little thing that might have been huge.

Close Siblings

I was late for my period this month: second month in a row. Now, we’re careful. We have two beautiful children and I’m in my late thirties. My first child was born at 37 weeks, the second at 35 weeks. My pediatrician friend said that a trend to premature babies could easily continue.

So, even if we wanted more children (which we don’t – only when I get occasionally broody) the risks are far too high. And I KNEW I wasn’t pregnant. I’m more likely to be menopausal, as early menopause runs in the family. But, still, you start putting two and two together and making five. I was tired, grumpy, teary and, above all, late.

The protagonist in Baby Blues & Wedding Shoes gets pregnant against the odds. These things happen. I worried. I read up about menopause at 2am on my phone. And, being me, I re-planned my future with a third child in it. I needed to be prepared, just in case. I worked out the age gap, when the third would start school. I decided it would be nice for my son to have a play mate when my daughter starts school in September. I tried to decide whether I’d prefer a boy or a girl. I’m a writer: I wove stories.

Drove hubbie nuts.

Then I decided I ought to actually get a test and part of me was actually a bit excited (damn you, breeding hormones). I didn’t need the test, as it turned out. As if just buying it was enough, I knew before I got home that it was no longer required. In a tiny way I felt as if I’d lost a baby, even though no baby existed. Because I had made the scary future so plausible.

I wasn’t going to talk about it on the blog – it seems to come under the ‘too much information’ category. Until I started writing out my character list for the new book this morning:

George: 11. Two siblings, Ben (14) and Susie (16). George suspects he wasn’t planned. His sister tells him their mother used to say ‘I’ve only got two hands’ or ‘one of each, job done’. George feels unwanted and an outsider. Susie is academic, Ben is musical. They’re close. George likes football and computer games and being lazy.

My Little Bean

I realised, half way through writing it, that George is my imaginary third child. The things I worried about at 2am were all there: that any other children born into our family would feel left out because my two are so close in age; that my eldest would remember me saying ‘one of each, job done’; that a third child would feel alienated, like my Uncle and my Mum – both the last of three kids.

The loss of my imaginary child, that hurt for a day, doesn’t hurt so much now. When I see the kids needing another play mate I do wish I had started my family earlier, so more children was a possibility. But now I can write them in to existence instead.

So much cheaper and no need for cots, bottles, stretch marks, swollen ankles and endless dirty nappies. Hurrah.

Medicate Me: Day 22

Outdoor painting

I don’t really want to write this, after my positivity a week ago, but arrgghh. That’s all I can say. As I approach my monthly cycle the drugs are no longer controlling my mood swings. I’m irritable and sad and low. The kids are grating on me as if my skin has been scraped off by a potato peeler.

The side effects of the medication are starting to drive me potty. The yawning fits that go on for twenty minutes until my lungs and jaw ache. The fidgeting and nervous energy in my limbs that makes me unable to sit or lie still. The dry mouth, blurred vision and now floaters which dart across my sight and haunt me like flies round cattle. (The optician says they’re not because of the meds but old age which, at 37, increases my depression. I do wonder if the meds have made me more aware of them, though.)

And, without wanting to give too much information, the sweating. Yuk. It’s still spring and it’s awful, what will it be like in summer? I have mini anxiety attacks and palpitations. And did I mention the floaters? Imagine having several black flies constantly moving across your line of sight. I want to claw my eyes out. All in all I feel trapped in myself and trapped by the meds, knowing I’m on them for six months. Jittery, lethargic and snappish is not an improvement on exhaustion and rage. I’m as unhappy in my body now as I was in my mind before, and the attraction of ending the misery is almost as compelling.

I’m booked in to see the doctor next week. This no longer feels like I’ve been thrown a lifeline. More that I’ve been dragged into a different but equally cold and choppy ocean. I’m just as close to drowning, I just seem to care less. Sigh. I suppose nothing worthwhile is ever easy and life is just hard. I must not give in to those thoughts though as they fuel my belief that there’s not much to live for. Time to just keep swimming.

The Hidden Cost of Parenting

Seven gifts for the next three weeks!

Of all the things I thought would cost time and money as a parent, it would never have occurred to me to factor in birthdays. Not my children’s birthdays – of course they are costly things – but the birthdays of other children.

It wasn’t a problem until this year. My daughter had maybe half a dozen close friends at nursery, my son has about the same. I like going to children’s parties – it gives us something to do at weekends and someone else entertains my child for two hours while I drink tea and gossip. Lovely.

But since my daughter started in Reception it’s been relentless. I should have realised, when we invited forty-odd kids to her party, that it would be reciprocated. And it has been. We have two/three parties every weekend for the next three weeks. Most of which only my daughter is invited to, so we have to divide and conquer on parenting, rather than taking it in turns to have a break.

And the gifts, and cards, and wrapping paper. Never mind the cost (and I set a miserly budget!), having to sit with my five year old and try to tolerate her attempts at wrapping is an exercise in patience I don’t have. Ditto writing cards and labels. “I can do it, Mummy!” yelled at volume is a common occurrence. I like wrapping gifts and pride myself on my neatness. And my ability not to tangle yards of selotape or cover it in dog hair and fluff. Some parenting tasks are above the call of duty. At least I’ve stopped letting her choose each gift. Now I buy them in bulk as part of the weekly shop.

Rumour has it it isn’t so bad in year one, when she’ll only mix with her class rather than the sixty kids across the whole year group (they have a shared classroom much of the day). I love that she’s popular, I do. But I could live without five parties a month for the next decade!

The Ocean at The End of The Lane and Childhood

Beautiful cover

This weekend I read one of the pot luck books I picked up from the library – The Ocean At the End of The Lane by Neil Gaiman. I like choosing books I don’t know, just because I recognise the title or author or just because I like the front cover (and the library is much cheaper than all the books I’ve bought in book shops using the same method and have then never read!)

This ticked the last two points – I have heard of Neil Gaiman (I follow him on Twitter even) and I was intrigued by the cover. I first came across Neil Gaiman when a friend bought me one of his Sandman graphic novels as a teenager. Then I loved (although was creeped out by) his Doctor Who episode The Doctor’s Wife.

The Ocean at the End of The Lane is the first novel of his I have read. It creeped me out, too. Just one bit in the middle which I made the mistake of starting to read at bedtime. I had to switch to a Georgette Heyer and skip three pages in the morning.

It’s an interesting book, simply but compellingly written. It recounts an event from the childhood of the forty-something protagonist, which he recalls after revisiting his childhood house and a farm at the end of the lane. The telling of childhood was fascinating; viewing the world through the eyes of a seven-year-old. It also made me think a great deal about the difference between being seven thirty-odd years ago and being seven now. I kept thinking Oh he wouldn’t have been left to roam free like that, surely? And then I realise that I was, as far as I can remember. Certainly some time before I was eight (when I moved north – my childhood is bisected by that move) I roamed the fields, climbed trees, visited friends’ houses on our estate, all without taking much notice of where my parents were.

I like this cover too

My memories of childhood are almost non-existant, apart from one or two key events. The book recreates that fluidity of childhood and memory with great authenticity. It also made me wonder what my children will remember. It’s so different now: their lives are recorded through photographs, video, school reports with images, social media, parents’ blogs. So many aides to memory. There are probably fewer than fifty photos of me between the ages of 0 and 16 in total. I can take that many of my chidren in a day.

Is it a good thing? Maybe we should be able to rewrite our childhoods, change our recollections at will. Like the protagonist in the novel, maybe our childhood memories are not entirely accurate, and maybe that’s necessary. Maybe we don’t want to be reminded of every tiny detail. Our lives are really only stories we write in our mind, with heroes and villains. The truth, as revealed by endless photographs, is bound to feel much more ordinary.

Mind you, all our photos are stored digitally. There’s a strong chance they’ll degrade over time and the children will only be able to retrieve fifty images in thirty-odd years time. And perhaps that will be just as well.

Too Many Words!

Why can’t they all be nice and quiet like the dog..?

After my day of zen on Friday I had a bit of a relapse on Saturday, culminating in me loudly biting out the words “just shut up” to my son in the middle of a busy supermarket. I so love making other parents feel better about themselves.

The problem is the talking. The endless, incessant, dual voiced, competing in stereo, “Mummy, mummy, mummy” talking. Alone or together, my kids are driving me nuts.

The irony, of course, is that I am a chatterbox. A talker rather than a listener. I have spent my whole life being teased for having too much to say.

My mum thinks it’s hilarious that the kids are driving me crazy. Of course, as the office-based parent when I was growing up, with my father the working-from-home one who presumably looked after us (I don’t remember) she didn’t have as much first-hand experience as she might think.

For six hours a day on nursery days and twelve on days when they’re at home, I’m expected to be able to hold two or three concurrent conversations, and tantrums ensue if anyone isn’t answered directly. And I do try. Because it upset me so much to be ignored as a child or to be ridiculed for having too many words, I try so hard to answer every query with patience.

But oh my the repetition.

Chatterbox Children

In the twenty minutes preceding my loss of control in Tesco, my son had said the same sentence a dozen times. Like a Chinese water torture it broke through even medicated calm.

I suppose the difference is that, instead of blowing up at them, ranting and bellowing, then sobbing and apologising, I’ve had no release, so I’ve been snapping at them all afternoon. Frustratingly to the same end result that my daughter sobbed through dinner because of something mummy said: albeit in a snappy voice rather than a sergeant major shout.

It seems that maybe the bellowing rage works as a release valve and without it I’m just a mean mummy instead of a monster. I read a beautiful post on Amy Saab’s 2me4art blog today saying she is trying to listen to her ten year old son because she knows it won’t be long before he stops wanting to talk. I found myself looking forward to the surly uncommunicative teenage years today.

I’ve heard people say ‘listen properly to the small things or they won’t ever tell you the big things’, but how can you listen and listen and listen when you’re a talker? A ‘babbling brook’ as Gary Chapman describes it in The Five Love Languages. And as my children are talkers rather than listeners they’re not even happy using up their words on each other: I’ve taught them not to talk over people so all I hear is “he talked over me!” “but she wasn’t listening to me” followed by a tantrum, tears or a thump, because no one hates being ignored more than a three-year-old second child.

I don’t know what the answer is. The more I sit in silence the harder it is to be abused by the torrent of noise. And, is it me, but do they use fewer words at school than nursery? I suppose it’s all that listening they have to do. Certainly my daughter seems to need more of my attention than she did before she started school. I might have to go back to plugging them into Cbeebies before we all go mad.

Medicate Me: Day Fifteen

Sleeping Family

Day fifteen on my antidepressants and I have found a love for life. I laugh more. I am more gentle on myself. I take time to read my book with a cup of tea, or cook dinner while watching Homes Under the Hammer on the iPad, instead of trying to blog, fold laundry and iron at the same time, doing all four things badly.

I leave early for the school run and read my book in the car, arriving at the school gate with a smile on my face. I walk the dog mid-morning rather than running around ten minutes before I need to collect the children. I sleep when I need to, preferably in a sunbeam in the playroom.

I haven’t bellowed at the children or sworn at them in a fortnight.

I’m still not sleeping. I still feel anxious about lots of things (schools, food, teeth!) My writing and particularly the blog have taken a back seat. I miss it. I miss logging on in the morning and seeing blog post likes and new comments. I worry I’ll lose everything I fought so hard to build up last year. But not having to come up with a new topic to discuss everyday is giving me time to breathe. Not having to make time to take pictures to go with my posts is increasing my reading time.

I’m awake!

It isn’t all a result of the medication. Reading The Five Love Languages brought smiles and understanding back to my marriage and increased my ability to see when the children need my time or a cuddle. The longer days, the sunshine and warmer weather are all mood enhancers, especially for me.

But most of all I have given myself permission to heal. I’ve accepted I don’t have to do everything all the time. I don’t have to fill every minute with sixty seconds run. I accept I am the luckiest woman in the world to be able to cook dinner calmly at 11am while watching TV, or to be able to read my book.

But also I acknowledge that I get up at 5am to wipe bums, crawl out of warm covers at 2am to replace blankets that have fallen off chilly children, and fold laundry at midnight when hubbie is already asleep.

Mine is the responsibility to cook, clean, empty the bins, iron and shop. Mine is the juggling routine of remembering when to collect the children and when to make them packed lunches or sign forms.

I realise I’ve been competing mentally against working mums, needing to prove I work just as hard as they do. Why? What does it matter if I don’t? We made choices for me to be at home. We go without meals out, babysitters, expensive holidays. Surely a happy mummy is an important part of that?

It reminds me of the poem I read at my Mum’s wedding; the Desiderata: “Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence … Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

Words to live by.

If It Aint Broke…

Happy at school

We had my daughter’s parents evening this week, just to add some extra fuel to the fire of my schools dilemma. Oh my goodness.

We knew she was doing well, that she has considerably more merits than the other children, and that she enjoys reading and numbers. What we didn’t realise is how well she’s doing in every area, including social. I took the fact that she doesn’t have a close friend, and is clingy at drop off, to mean she hung out with the teacher all day. Apparently she did in the beginning but now she’s off playing with this group and that.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion if it aint broke don’t fix it. We have the same issue on a wider scale (with a similar division of opinion between me and hubbie) with regards to the local schools generally. Our local council currently operate a 3-tier system, with kids going to primary school ages 4-8 years, middle school aged 9-12 and upper school from 13 to 18 years old.

I went through the same system, albeit a different primary and middle school to the ones my daughter will attend, and I like the system. I like that those tricky pre-teen years are experienced separated from the young children and the almost-adults. But there is no doubt some of my school concerns involve not wanting to send my daughter to the upper school I went to. There is also some difficulty, if we do decide to go private, at moving her at 11 when she’ll be half way through a school rather than at a natural transition point.

When news of the consultation came in, therefore, I was supportive. Then I started reading the anti-change literature and felt the arguments had merit. Hubbie went to the consultation meeting and he’s all for it. He thinks the academy status and cash injection will be brilliant, and moving to a bigger, newer building will only be beneficial for our primary-aged children. On the other hand, I see more congestion at two already-busy sites and terrible upheaval, particularly for our son who will start school in the year of the change.

Then today I watched a promotional video for the middle school and was blown away. The eloquence of the head of site and the headmistress (pilfered from our primary school to sort out a dodgy Ofsted rating), the passion and humour of the children, the lovely middle school building (which I’ve never been inside) were all much better than I could have anticipated for a school currently struggling to achieve a ‘good’ rating. It just shows the power of video (although in general I never watch them because I prefer to read stuff on the internet).

So now we have a division in the family: one for, one against a move to private, one for, one against a shift to a two-tier system. It’s all pretty good humoured, because most of it is out of our hands and the rest is irrelevant while our daughter continues to thrive in her current school. What does it matter if she doesn’t have access to a wider range of subjects, a posh new building or gourmet lunchtime food? She’s happy, she’s learning, she’s doing well. That’s good enough for now. And all the rest? Time will tell who is right. 🙂

Food And Filling Prevention: My Latest Sources of Mummy Guilt

Mummy-guilt trip to Waitrose!

Today I have been obsessing about food and tooth decay. I found out recently that my three-year-old son has cavities. I was horrified. He loves his sweets and juice and though we minimise his intake of both, he is also a fussy eater and so has many other bad-teeth foods like dried fruit and toast with jam.

Probably as a result of latent anxiety, which seems to be the latest phase of medication side effects (or just my natural state), when I saw the hole in my son’s tooth this morning it tipped me over the edge. Even though I later allowed him to eat a muffin (and don’t get me started on the guilt I felt when I saw the 11 lines of ingredients, most of which were unpronounceable) and some crisps.

So while he slept this afternoon I spent an hour on Google. It didn’t improve my anxiety; quite the opposite. Because it turns out that grain-based foods are bad for teeth too. And my fussy child only eats breakfast cereal, sandwiches, toast and pasta. All wheat. (Also all full of salt – and a news report I heard this morning bemoaned how much salt kids eat – is there no end to my parenting fails?).

My sister has started following a Paleo diet (a diet that seeks to recreate the foods our ancestors would have eaten – meat and veg – while eschewing grains, potatoes, dairy, refined sugar and processed foods). She’s the foodie in the family. I hate cooking, I hate thinking about food and I’m rubbish at anything that requires hardship and excessive thinking. A diet without grains falls into all those camps, especially when pancakes and pasta are key elements of happy parenting for me. I have got lazy recently, feeding particularly my son the things I know he’ll eat, like spaghetti bolognaise and cheese sandwiches. I thought as long as he had a few fruit pouches, plenty of milk and some rice cakes, he was getting an okay diet (he gets great food at nursery and eats better for strangers).

But while I figured he would outgrow his fussiness, I hadn’t factored in his teeth issues. And now all my laissez-faire parenting, my not insisting on fresh fruit and vegetables and fish in the hope that – like his sister – he’d come to all the things in his own time, seems to have backfired. Because apparently nutrition can affect teeth. Obviously I knew that calcium was important, but both my kids drink buckets of milk. I didn’t really think about all the other vitamins, like A and D and the Omega fats. My daughter doesn’t like cow’s milk so she has powder milk – fortified with vitamins – as well as happily eating fish and meat. Is it coincidence that her teeth are fine?

Anyway, I won’t try and unravel all the sources of information I ploughed through today. I came away with one relatively-easy solution: cod liver oil, with one concern – vitamin A overdose. I didn’t come to a happy resolution, but I did decide that cod liver oil might be good for all of us (particularly hubbie’s bad back and my dodgy knees). I also decided that if I can’t banish grains from our diet, I might be able to widen them away from just wheat. A bit more maize and rice. Cornflakes (also nicely lower in sugar than most of our current breakfast cereals), rice cakes, some minestrone soup. Baby steps. And eggs, eggs are meant to be good. I used to cook lots of scrambled egg, until my son refused to eat it. He might just have to learn to eat what he’s given or lump it!

Conscientious parenting: so full of pitfalls it should come with a health warning.

How Much Should You Entertain Your Children?

Picnic in the sun

It’s the weekend. The sun is shining and it’s warm outside for the first time this year. The children are in shorts. Hubbie and I are not at fighting strength and the desire to spring clean house and garden are being decimated by an overwhelming need to curl up and read a book (me) or get back to stripping the engine in the garage (hubbie).

Saturday saw a whirlwind of sorting from hubbie, in response to a plea from me that the lounge had disappeared under weeks of accumulated detrius. I do cleaning, he does sorting, that’s our skill set and division of labour. I was still feeling sick and disorientated from the tablets and the kids were slightly flummoxed by having a whole weekend without children’s parties to go to.

Grandpa came round to put the world to rights and help tinker with the engine. The children were told to shush, go play and mostly they did. But promises were made that today would involve more games and attention. Then Grandad called late to say he’d pop in for coffee in the morning. So Sunday started with a frenzy of cleaning (as he comes less often I make more effort to maintain the illusion that his son married a clean and tidy person. My stepdad knows this is a lie – my mum won’t even come round anymore because the clutter in our house drives her bonkers.)

By 10am this morning (his anticipated arrival time) we’d cleaned and hoovered and found the house under the filth and clutter. The children assisted by cleaning dust with wet wipes. But still, they reminded us continuously about the request for attention and games. Grandad spent half his time looking at the stripped engine and the rest imparting typos to me that he found in Two-Hundred Steps Home. When he left at 12 o’clock the children had been left to bounce on the trampoline and play in the playhouse. They were quite happy, but still asking for games.

Playing with the hose

Hubbie finally managed a game of chess with our daughter while I baked cookies with our son. I then played dominos with them both for twenty minutes. But that was the extent of our attention, as I went off to iron school clothes (and ended up writing this post!) and hubbie mowed the lawn.

They’ve been happily (mostly) playing with the hose and trampoline for the last hour (hurrah for early spring sunshine!), but I still feel a bit concerned.

After all my reading on The Five Love Languages, I suspect that Quality Time is important to both of them. But they do also need to learn to play by themselves. Weekends can’t always be children’s parties and trips to the farm. I at least get time during the week to myself but hubbie needs downtime at the weekend. I used to take them to lots of places when I had them both at home, because they’re easier to manage at the zoo or the park than in the house, but I worry that they had so much fun and mummy time it is why they both cry when being left at school and nursery.

They’re not neglected children, but parental attention can be pretty thin at times. They have each other and are expected to find solace in that. And mostly they used to do that. But more and more, since my daughter started school, they’ve been demanding adult attention at home. Assuming I had the patience to offer it, is it still wise? I don’t remember our parents doing much in the way of entertaining us as kids. We were taught to ride bikes and taken to gym classes, but we also played with our dolls and books and colouring. We sat in the car eating crisps while they went to the pub to play darts, or while they did the supermarket shop.

Parenting these days is all about quality time and enjoying every moment, but what if we’re raising kids that don’t know how to be and play by themselves? What if school becomes harder and harder because being with mummy and daddy is such fun? But what if they need my attention to thrive? It’s a pickle. I’m beginning to understand why people take their kids to ballet and football at the weekend. Wear them out and pay someone else to entertain them. We’re not quite there yet, we enjoy our relaxed weekends too much, but it might happen soon.

In the mean time hubbie is explaining rugby to them both while I cook tea. Somehow it’s only 4pm. Is it bed time yet?

4000 Gifts: A Story of Arrival

I was looking for a post to reblog for International Women’s Day (having failed to write anything inspirational myself) and I discovered this gem in my reader. Such an inspiring post from an inspiring lady. I want to start my own book of gifts. Beautiful.

HAVING DECIDED TO STAY

Some years ago, I was seventeen, and life made almost no sense. What a surprise.

That is, I had my bearings on a great many matters, and I had a veritable collection of high ideals, but they were just that: ideals. And when you are young and living in your parents’ house, it is probable that everything worth having will seem to be far in the distance. If you are not careful, that will never change.

The story of the seventeen year old whose life makes no sense is hardly a novel one. But neither is the story of the college graduate whose life still makes no sense. Or the mid-career professional. Or the young housewife. Or the wealthy, retired couple that vacations in Europe. Or the worn old man, full of days, who finally holds up the white flag and gives his surrender to cancer, and whose life makes…

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