Change...

Change is a certainty in life, we can always rely on this! But what about personal change? 


Well there is a saying that goes something like this, 'You cannot help those that will not help themselves'. So personal change, personal growth or whatever you want to call it, has to be down to the individual. I guess the idea is that all the changes we make (and stick to) are born out of our own desire to change and not because we think we should for someone/something else or because someone/something else is pushing us into it. Admittedly I think another person/situation can be instrumental in us wanting to change, their desires, thoughts, needs and wants can guide us in our decision. However to truly change, to alter your life or who you are, that has to come from within. So regardless of what other people may think or say or want, unless you think, express and want all those things too then you are (it seems) eventually doomed to fail and revert back to past behaviour. 


So what happens when a person really does change, when this change comes from a place of self-awareness and an understanding of who/what they want to be? Well it should be acknowledged of course! Society, I think sometimes has a tendency when a person makes a big, life altering change to look around for someone else to congratulate. And as I said before I believe other people can be instrumental in us wanting to change, they can guide us and support us but ultimately the responsibility falls to us and thus so should the praise too. To heap praise onto others or to make them responsible for change in another, is to take away from that person what it is they have achieved. Personal change can be a challenge full of endurance, introspection, self-sacrifice and at times even self-deprivation or humbling of the spirit. It is a battle of wills, between the old and the new, the DEVIL you know and the ANGEL you don't.


So when a person has made this huge change, rather than looking to the people around them, look to them. Congratulate them. Because to do so is to validate everything they have fought, struggled and strived for. In heaping praise on others, for another's choice, is to undermine everything they have done. And yes we are all adults but we all still need validation from time to time and especially from the people that matter the most to us, our loved ones. Besides the thanks and gratitude for support should come from the person who has received it, not from the people around them.  

The night is darkest just before the dawn...

When so much of your time is taken nurturing the relationship you have with your child/children, it is sometimes easy to forget that there are other relationships that need nurture too.

Having a child will definitely change the dynamics of daily life but most importantly it can impact on those relationships closest to you. Particularly the relationship you share with your significant other.


To begin with, after a baby is born, it feels as though there is no time at all. Each day seems to require at least an additional half a day tagged on the end just to get everything done. It is like you have literally been dropped full force into the depths of a very deep pool! You stumble through the first few weeks and months, taking as much enjoyment from the experience as you possibly can, inbetween the sleep deprivation and ulcer inducing stress that comes from the spiralling costs involved in raising a child. With so much to buy and so little money to go around, most months can feel like a desperate struggle, constantly robbing Peter to feed Paul. And what is that saying 'When money goes out the door, love flies out the window'? 


You have distant memories of the days when you had that thing called 'disposable income' and 'free-time' to spend it in. Becoming a family robs you of any spare cash and even if you did have some, you doubt you would have the time to enjoy it. Not to say that couples always need money to have a good time, but it certainly helps and not having to worry about it helps even more. But having a child was your choice, right? So you take it like a grown up, like your parents had to, and you find new and exciting ways to have fun without the need for money. Well I guess that depends on whether you actually have the energy or enthusiasm to think of anything other than getting from one end of the day to the other and when you can next get some sleep! 


So as the days and months drift by you seem to spend more and more moments apart, between work, child-care and sleep, the shopping, cleaning, cooking and other commitments (family, friends etc..), the person you live with, the person you share your life with, the person you made this beautiful child with begins to become a stranger to you. You see them everyday, you pass each other on the landing or coming in and out of the bathroom, you sleep next to them in the bed, you share a conversation or a meal but you don't really see them anymore. And eventually, given enough time, you look up and don't even recognise the person staring back at you. You went from lovers and best-friends to house-mates that are time-sharing a child. And you can't imagine how or when this all happened! 


Sad isn't it?! And it happens to so many couples, behind closed doors you never really know what is going on. 


So what can you do to salvage this? Well first of all I guess the most important thing is to make sure there is something to salvage, not all couples are going to make it. That's just life I guess. Something left to salvage? Then look inside yourself and except responsibility for your part in how it all went wrong, because very rarely is it all one sided. Next try to remember all the reasons why you first fell in love, why you made the monumental decision to have a child together, except the fact that your relationship will never be how it was pre-child/children but that it could be better, because you are part of something amazing now, a family. And above all, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and talk some more. Because with love, "There is nothing lost, that cannot be found, if sought"...And so you can find a way back to each other, to be happy, to be contented and as one of my best-friends recently told me, 'There is a lot to be said for being contented' and I am inclined to agree, it certainly makes the world a brighter place.

Lists and juggling...

Life can feel like an uphill struggle at times, sometimes it seems no matter how much effort you put in, you are still doomed to fail. I always feel like I am having to weigh up my options and try to decipher what tasks are more necessary (or important) than others. Very much like you do at work, you have a list of tasks and if you are anything like me, you have to sort through them and decide which ones are the most important and work downwards from there. Although invariably (as we all know) lists can take on a life of their own at times. The theory behind lists is that you make them to prioritise your tasks, or as a form of remembering things. You tick things off as you go along and so the list becomes smaller and you start to feel like you are achieving something. My lists are NEVER like that!  They inevitably become longer, or more complicated with tasks continually added to them. Even my shopping lists seem to miss the mark as there are always at least five items that go into the trolley, that never made it to the list. And these are not luxury items or impulse buys, they are just things I have forgotten that we needed.  


So I juggle all my priorities, like constant metaphorical balls in the air and I keep hoping that I might be able to chuck a ball or two away at times. Sometimes I do but they are always replaced by more balls, new balls and I guess some would just call that 'life'. And I walk around with paper lists and mental lists endlessly trying to tick the tasks off as I go along. Ring the nurse, email the University, buy new shoes for Emily, seal the bath because everytime someone takes a shower there is the danger of flooding in the kitchen, email photo's to my aunty, organise maternity clothes for best-friend, take packages to postoffice, call my sister in Hong Kong with my free 30 minutes international call (courtesy of the nice people at Orange), finish my A&P assignment, start my presentation for study skills, finishing reading Wuthering Heights for English, send back the Lovefilm DVD's, do some more exercise, clean the bathroom, wash Emily's clothes, wash my clothes, clean the kitchen floor, tidy and sweep the yard, spend quality time with Emily, spend quality time with Gavin, spend quality time with myself. Try not to want to burst into tears each night when I go to bed and realise that I have to start the whole process all over again the next day (ha ha). And in all that try to find the time to process all the millions of thoughts that are constantly spinning around in my head, things that can at times be of very great importance in holding together the fabric of my life, so that all those balls don't come crashing down around me. 


Ohhhhh okay and breathe! In truth my life is like so many others around me and I know that to be true. However sometimes it just feels good to share and maybe it will make the people around me feel a little better when they realise, that just like me, they are not alone! 

I carry your heart with me ( I carry it in my heart).

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body...


There is one baby born each second so as I am writing this sentence now at least 5 babies have already been born, that's a lot of momentous decisions isn't it?! 


And I am certain that I heard somewhere that you have more chance of popping up in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of a life-ring than you do of conceiving a child, although I wouldn't want to test those odds. But if the previous statement is true than that would make each one of those second born babies something of a miracle. So having a child really could be the most momentous thing you will ever do. It certainly feels that way when you are having them and afterwards nothing is ever the same as it was before and it never will be. Although sometimes we may fool ourselves into thinking that it is or that it could be. Children change everything, because whereas before your choices were your own, now every action has a consequence not just to yourself but to another person too and children are always the innocent in any situation and ultimately are only here through our choices and our decisions.


So this leads me onto the second half of the opening statement. '....it is to decide forever to have your heart going walking around outside your body'. That statement could probably be interpreted in many different ways (as I have learnt from recent English classes on my Access course). However for me I think it speaks to the fact that we give our children our heart, our lives and more importantly our unconditional love. And for me unconditional love knows no bounds. It is the realisation that you would do anything for that other person and that ultimately you value their happiness above all other things. True love, love not restricted by conditions, reaches beyond selfishness, beyond what we may perceive is best for another person, beyond even what we want for ourselves. It is doing the right thing, at the right time, for all the right reasons. But most importantly it is remembering always that 'YOU' brought this little person into the world and that you are responsible in ensuring that when it really mattered, you did everything you could to make their world just a little warmer, a little brighter and a little more hopeful. 


There is a poem by a Edward Estlin Cummings called 'I carry your heart with me' and whenever I hear it I always think of Emily...


I carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
I am never without it (anywhere I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling).


I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) 
I want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
And it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
And whatever a sun will always sing is you

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

Hello routine my old friend...

I can't think before I had Emily that I ever had that many routines or any routine of any sort for that matter. Maybe only small rituals, such as the Saturday morning lie-in after a long week at work or the full-fat latte and almond croissant from Waterloo station on my way to the office each day.  


Routine became something that I embraced as a part of motherhood. And now I have embraced it, we have become as one and we have routines for every aspect of our lives it seems. 


We have the Monday morning routine, when Emily and I are both up and dressed and out the house by 8am, her off to nursery and me to College. We have the Thursday afternoon routine (which I am still getting a handle on as my friend Theresa will testify), where we must be organised and out the house by 11.40am (lunch already eaten - which in the last three weeks has consisted of a tuna mayonnaise sandwich eaten on route - which may in itself become a routine) to get to my friend's house, to collect my friend, her son (Emily's age) and her baby daughter to go onto pre-school which lies at the top of a very steep hill by 12.15am. Dragging ourselves and the children (quite literally most of the time), negotiating the ever increasing piles of dog poo, errant sticks and muddy puddles. All enticing to a two year old, although not necessarily through actually choice, more by accident where the poo is concerned. 


We have the Wednesday routine, where we go to the grandparents, the Friday afternoon routine where Emily goes to her grandparents and I go to College, the Saturday morning routine where Emily goes to her grandparents and the Sunday morning routine where we goes to Emily's other grandparents, namely nanny Joan and Uncle Paul. And yes I appreciate that this may lead to complicated question once Emily is older, as to why nanny Joan and Uncle Paul are together but yet it's Aunty Jo and Uncle Tim. Still it's easier than trying to explain to a two year old why Nanny Joan and Grandad Kelvin are no longer together, ahhh the complexities of life. 


We have the night-time routine, the morning routine, the mid afternoon routine...well you get the idea! 


So with all this routine, what then happens when you take the child out of the routine? Well you know the old saying 'You can take the girl out of the......(fill in the blank) but you can't take the ....... (fill in the blank) out of the girl', this, I'm afraid, does not apply where children are concerned. Take the child out of the routine and all chaos will ensue as I was witness to last night. At 10pm I had to call Gavin to come pick me up from my mother's house (where we were meant to be spending the night) because at 10.30pm when the rest of the house were about ready to drop from a frantic day of foggy, stress inducing, car journeys across country to Sheffield and back, Emily was bouncing up and down on the spare bed of my mothers rather small two bedroom cottage, with walls as thin as tissue paper, refusing to go to sleep!  And having endured a night of hellish similarity the previous night, sharing a bed with a wriggly toddler, adamant that she would not sleep, raising her head off the pillow at the merest hint of a noise, the very idea that someone might be moving around and therefore she might be missing out on something. Restless sleep, interrupted with episodes of little arms flung in my face or little feet kicking in my back.  I was determined that I could not bare another night of this routine-less existence.  


So in conclusion not only do I embrace routine, I fear I may be lost without it. In fact I would go so far as to say that I may well not consider any overnighter with Emily until she is at least six? Ten? Twenty-one? Fill in the blank as necessary... 

Warning: The follow blog entry may not be for the faint hearted (i.e. men)

Today I have an appointment with the nurse to try and resolve a matter close to the heart of most parents (I should imagine), birth control. 

I am not a massive fan of the condom, male or otherwise. The male condom I find slightly repulsive, so not really the response aimed for when engaging in an intimate moment. It's the smell, the texture and the fact that they are slimy that make me feel uncomfortable. Not having ever tried the female condom, as the idea of placing what appears to be a small carrier bag (sandwich bag maybe) inside my person was not that appealing and physically, although not an impossibility, extremely difficult I should imagine, not to mention time-consuming and well I would imagine a big mood killer!

So I have, mostly, always used the combined pill, with the exception of a six month period after Emily was born when I had to use the mini pill because I was breast feeding. However it would seem that myself and Cilest no longer shared a love for each other as we had before. Now I have heard the many horror stories from friends and relations about the numerous pills they have had to consume in hope of finding one that suited them. I was lucky enough to find 'that' pill the first time around but not anymore. Somewhere between my early twenties and post- Emily, Cilest and I have become incompatible. Oh the horror and the utter intolerance of it all!

See to say I was slightly testy in the lead up to my monthly visitor would, probably, if I'm honest, be an understatement. I was MONSTROUS! I adopted a vile, demonic, totally rageful alter-ego. I was so bad that even I didn't want to spend time with me during these periods (haaaa no pun intended), however being unfortunately unable to remove myself from my own skin, I was stuck with me. It was like the Jekyll and Hyde of Junction Road. So having removed myself 'post haste' from this pill, I am now stuck in the land of no birth control!

Having visited the nurse last week I was given another type, Microgynon, which I am informed by everyone I know and nearly all birth control forums, is the devil incarnate in the form of a contraceptive pill! My friend told me it turned her into a raving lunatic!

"OHHH great" was Gavin's reponse upon hearing this news. "So they take you off one pill that is making you insane and decide to give you one that will make you worse, that's just great isn't it?! And a typical example of what our National Health Service has come to"

'Well okay honey I didn't think it was that bad?'
"Hmmm" was his response. So....Clearly it was THAT bad then!


And well it must have been that bad as he begged me not to take the new pill until after Christmas. 
"Let's just have a nice Christmas" he pleaded with a look of intense fear and desperation in his eyes! 
"Well okay then" I conceded, not wanting to be the Grinch that stole Christmas. 


So anyway I am going back to the nurse this afternoon to plead my case. I quite like being relatively normally all month, not just for 21 days of it! And if you ever needed any proof that the pill was causing the insanity and it wasn't just 'me', bless my soul neither of us even knew I was due on last month. It was only when I went to the toilet and discovered the truth did I actually laugh to myself. And upon hearing this news Gavin said, 
"Well who would have known, you been quite nice recently" Cheers, thanks darling...

Impatient me?! I don't know what you mean...

Okay, honestly now, I have to admit that I may not be the world's most patient person. 

No really...you would never have guessed...how kind of you to say.

Unfortunately at times (well actually quite frequently) I am very impatient, which doesn't bode well as a parent. And to make it worse I really dislike those parents that never complain about their children. The ones that wax lyrical about how wonderful their children are and how every single moment is a joy to behold. Some of them even write blogs about it all (AHEM!). Okay, okay so you have me on that one but I think, in fairness, not all I write is about the joys of parenting. I like to think I give quite a balanced view on being a mother, some of the good, some of the bad and everything inbetween. However what I do not do is live under the illusion that Emily is perfect and never does anything remotely naughty, annoying or just damn right infuriating at times. So yes I do raise my voice and sometimes I even lose my temper. 

It's just that I only have a certain amount of energy and enthusiasm and it is spread extremely thinly at times, particularly the enthusiasm. So I do love my daughter with a love so fierce it scares me BUT If I'm honest I could really do without the following:

• Having to repeat myself four+ times before Emily will do as I ask (I think it doesn't help that I also have to adopt this same method with her dad too).
• Having to listen to my daughter repeat herself four+ times, even though I answered her question or request the first time she asked.
• Over-use of the word 'NO', by both of us actually.
• Being rudely awaken, every morning, by the sound of my daughter whining and moaning at me to come get here but once in my bed immediately ignoring me in favour of daddy cuddles.
• Over-use of the word 'CAREFUL'.
• Over-use of the phrase 'Just a minute Emily'.
• Over use of the phrases, 'Put that down/back', 'Don't touch that', 'Stop that', 'Please stop that', "Emily I am telling you right now to stop that!'.
• Constantly falling over my daughter because she is stood just behind me.
• Constantly walking around with something in my hand, which need binning, cleaning, fixing, tidying away because I am following the trail of destruction that my daughter has left in her wake.
• That she cannot just eat her food without also having to decorate the room with it.
• That everything in my life is always about what Emily wants, needs, would prefer, mostly to the exclusion of what I might desperately need sometimes (I think this last one is just called 'being a parent' though)
•  Ohhh and because she has just engaged in one now as I write...TANTRUMS!

I think if I'm honest I am not just impatient but a little bit of a control freak too which doesn't help. However at least I am honest enough to admit that neither myself or my daughter are perfect but that we still love each other very dearly dispite out imperfections.