I think I am broken.
I can't see past the crap anymore. I am sick of living like this, I am sick of the worry and I am sick of my life not being the way I wanted it to be.
A stronger person would be able to muscle through the hopelessness and the negativity, but I have used up my quota of muscle.
I am falling out of love with my husband, and falling out of like with myself.
I think I am broken. Finally.
Some Musings on Motherhood, Sacrifice and Working in an Office:
I waited until I was almost 40 to have my first child, because I thought I knew the sacrifices that were required. I was right about most of them - I travelled, so I didn't resent my daughter for removing the possibility of travelling for pleasure for a very long time. I worked hard and long at my career, so I could get a measure of self respect and income that I was proud of. I partied, did every substance known to humanity, so that it was out of my system when I became a mother.
I am fine with what I gave up.
What I wasn't prepared for was the complete lack of support given to mothers who want to stay in the work force in some capacity. High quality day care is priced out of reach in Sydney for all but the obscenely wealthy. Daycare runs from 50 - 85 per day. Waiting lists are over a year long. Nannies (the best of all possible worlds) are $500-800 a week. I was faced with the choice of taking a lower paying job that allowed me to 'make up hours at home' and work only a couple of days a week, or work full time at my old job (80 hour weeks) and work primarily to pay childcare.
So much trumpeting is done by experts to say that the most important part of a child's life is the age from 0-3, the age when they form bonds with people. learn to socialise, develop the confidence that comes from feeling secure and master basic skills like speaking and thinking.
And then we get other experts telling us that in order for women to be taken seriously economically, we can't opt out of the workforce to raise children.
What's a mother who is a feminist to do?
After doing all the research, I wanted to stay home full time. But being out of the workforce for 3 years would finish me. And if my husband left me after I'd sacrificed my career, I'd have no choice but to go on welfare or work at the poverty line. Which given the cost of daycare, would be impossible - I'd be working to pay childcare again, only in a really dead-end job.
What every country needs is highquality child care so women can continue to work and maintain their financial security.
What I think:
There should be affordable subsidised daycare and pre-schools so that mothers who want to, or have to work, can do so knowing that their children are being looked after properly.
Women try to juggle a career and family should be applauded for trying to make the most of their experience and education and contributing to the tax coffers and offered a helping hand in the form of flex-time, or job sharing.
Women who stay home to be with their kids should be applauded for sacrificing their own lives to ensure that their kids are loved and well looked after - and for giving a damn about how their kids grow up.
As has been bellowed by everyone from the new left, the old right, the new right and the old left - children are our future. How we deal with kids and who looks after them says a lot about how much we value our future.
He lost his fucking job. He got laid off on Monday. No warning, well none that he could see. No severance, because they are assholes.
Christian fundamentalist assholes.
So once again, for the second time in less than a year, I am faced with putting on a brave face, sucking it all up and being supportive. Oh and increasing my hours at work.
I bet it was because of his temper. He had a go at an employee not too long ago, and if he spoke to her the way he speaks to me sometimes....
But that's irrelevant.
We are broke. We are parents, we have obligations, and Christmas is coming up. We have just enough money to meet our obligations for the next month, and then well, I guess I'll be working three jobs - Mother, Consultant and Checkout chick at KMart.
I am so sick of things always crashing in on us when we start to pull ahead.
I am so sick of giving him advice which he then ignores and then we all pay the price. I guess it's only advice worth taking if one of his male friends offers it.
I am trying so hard not to be bitter.
But I wanted to go home next year and see my family. Instead, we'll be paying bills.
Merry Fucking Christmas.
I hope the christian sheep piss in the christian manger and they are covered with boils, like Job.
Christians.
HAH.
Song for the day: Chain Gang - Sam Cooke
I am sick of trying for another child. I am sick of writing about it.
Why isn't Mouse good enough? Why isn't she enough all on her own? I love her so much sometimes it hurts to breathe, and yet I still want more. Sometimes she frustrates to the point of madness, and I snap - and I still get ridiculously soppy with all the love inside - even when I am wiping masticated chicken off my front, or down on my hands and knees rescuing the contents of my purse.
She should be enough. It's not like I am supermum - always calm, always patient, always into my kid. Sometimes I would pay money if she would leave me alone for an hour. Sometimes ten minutes. There are times that I think I will go mad if I have to feign interest in the Teletubbies or sing the 'Katie' song once more fucking time.
So it's not like I am so great at being a mother I think the world will lose out if I don't get another go.
It's something primal. It's something I cannot explain. The more I love her, the more I battle through the bad sticky-eyed from lack of sleep days - the more I need to have more. It's perplexing.
Anyway, this whole entry is to make sense of the total meltdown I had last night when it became obvious that this months efforts were for nothing.
I beat the crap out of the boxing bag in the garage. I don't know who I was tussling with, but I think it was whatever thinks it's a good thing that I let myself get so happy and then have to crash and burn. Fuck them, whomever they are, whatever religion it is, what-fucking-evah. A big fat fuck you.
Song for the day: Fairytale of New York - The Pogues
Sick of trying to get pregnant.
Sick of timing everything and walking around hyperalert for twinges.
Sick of realising that another month begins.
Sick of the drugs.
Sick of the worry and the stress.
Sick of idiots telling me that I've done it once, I can do it again. I'd like to ram my ovulation kit and Clomid down their throats.
I want a refund on every birth control pill I ever took, every condom I ever bought and every sleepless night I had as a teenager.
So, the world is at war.
I find myself consciously filtering out the details. I don’t want to know how many bombs were dropped. I don’t want to hear phrases like ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ and ‘collateral damage’.
It makes me shrink.
I keep thinking of the people who are living under those air strikes. I keep thinking of how they’ve been bombed and raped and pillaged by one faction or another for the past 30 years, and I can’t believe I am supposed to feel justified and righteous.
I lost 3 friends in the WTC attack. I feel as angry as anyone, I guess. But I can’t help but wonder if by bombing the crap out of a country on the other side of the world, we aren’t helping to create more little Bin Ladens.
How can you reason with an 8 year old who sees things that no one should ever see?
The children that grow up in those conditions must be so badly damaged.
So, I shut up when asked my opinion.
Because I’d like to rip someone’s heart out for causing such devastation, but I don’t want war. I don’t want bombs and I don’t want any more children growing up amongst rubble and grief.
But I don’t have any alternative. I don’t have any answers.
Not pregnant again. Again again.
I had all the signs this time – tired beyond belief, ill in the mornings, aching hard breasts. My period wasn’t due for another 4 days…
I’d even bought the kit in anticipation. I haven’t had a cig or a drink since my breasts started swelling. My breasts hurt a lot. So did my lower back. I was secretly pretty sure. I hugged it to myself for the past 4 days, cautiously checking myself over, looking in the mirror, standing sideways.
We had a big day today. We got up early and walked around downtown. A market of sorts, a festival of chillis – lots of hot food and a bright sunny Sydney day to enjoy it in. But it was a long day, and I was glad to be home.
And Mouse had a tantrum. She burst a balloon she was holding. I could see the half-second of fright as this precious prized possession of hers - was gone. She had played with it all day, crushing it, hugging it, letting go and getting me to grab it back. I had rescued it twice from trees and made a spectacular leap skyward to save it once again.
And then it burst.
She was screaming and then sobbing and then frantic to be near me, to be held.
I picked her up and as I did so, I felt something ‘give’. Then a warm wet gush of blood and I knew.
In the bathroom, sobbing, looking at disbelief at the stained underwear, counting frantically on my fingers – it’s not time yet, it’s not time yet. Feeling like I have been ripped off again.
Mouse batters the bathroom door in hysterics. She is desperate. I am too. I am desperate to have a minute to grief to mourn to cry. I can feel it like a big hard lump in my gut, squeezing to get out. I am gasping, as I look down at myself. There seems no time for me to cry lately. No quiet place where I can grieve every month as they grind by – marked by X’s and O’s in a calendar. And another month to go. Again.
Mouse is lying down outside the door. ‘Mumma, mumma, mumma’ she sobs into the carpet. I do not have time for this weeping, I am a mother already. But not pregnant not pregnant not pregnant again.
They sit in the corner of my closet – forgotten, crumpled and musty. I bought them in on impulse in Edinburgh.
Bright red. Mid-shin Doc Martens complete with the steel toe and tartan laces.
They meant the difference between eating in a restaurant – or snacking on the rice cakes in my knapsack for another 4 days. They were the difference between sleeping in a private room and dossing down in a hostel for another 2 nights. They meant I couldn’t go to Milan until I got another dishwashing job. No hot showers. I bought them.
I was on a post-divorce trip – my second childhood, mid-life crisis – whatever you want to call it. I had left behind in Canada, one highly disgruntled soon-to-be-ex- husband, a whole network of friends and family, and gotten lost in Europe. I’d left behind my share of the house, all the things we bought and collected together, all the detritus of the last 10 years of marriage and before. Books, art, letters. 33 years of becoming something that I didn’t want to be when I became it.
The plan – stay as long as the money held out. Visit all the art galleries, ruins and museums I could take in – then keep running to Australia. The other side of the world from all of the people I was. And all of the people who knew me. And never come back.
The Docs. They are everything I was not. But was trying to be. They were not sensible black low-heeled business pumps. They were not canvas sailing sneakers. They were not cool elegant sandals. They were big, lumpy and awkward. And red.
They did not make my feet look smaller or dainty. They did not go with anything in my backpacking wardrobe – they clashed and shouted. They were not nice girl shoes – they made people wonder just what I really wanted when I said ‘Seat for one’.
They were to be noticed. I bought them. I had to.
They have a scrape across the toe now – a souvenir of a drunken night in a Glasgow pub. Being dragged out the doorway by a doorman and two friends. Too much booze. Too little food. A lot of drugs. Way too much anger. Anger that I didn’t even know I had till I drank.
There’s a concrete scar on the ankle from my time in Germany. The end of the Berlin Wall, the Stasi. Checkpoint Charlie, loud eating Germans who hated anyone who wasn’t them. I wore them a couple of times, then put them away. They seemed too much in sync with the ugliness and hate I saw around me. Ethiopians, Nigerians – beaten and kicked. By gangs wearing my Docs. I hid them in my backpack – sacrificed my all weather tent to do so. And yet somehow, despite their symbolism, I still needed them around.
The Docs and the Australian outback.
Far too heavy – but good protection against snakes, and spiders and sharp rocks that cut your feet when you went swimming. The Docs went swimming in Kings Canyon – clambered around the slippery rocks and stopped me falling off a waterfall into a dark deep pool far below.
The Docs wandered around Sydney. In Redfern, where they served as a warning to people not to fuck with this mad Doc-wearing woman with an amphetamine jag and a whole lot of anger. I took a lot of drugs when I got to Sydney. I was pretty scared, angry and lonely. Somehow, taking drugs, and wearing them was like wearing armour – a whole new person stood inside these boots.
And now I look at them sitting there, unpolished, dusty and unworn for years. They are my divorce. They are the letting go of everything I once had and thought I needed and wanted, only to find it wasn’t that at all. They are my battle. They are shit-kicking; take no prisoners ugly strident loud shoes.
The Docs haven’t been out much lately. I haven’t needed them. There doesn’t seem to be any time or place to wear them. Instead I wear Birkenstocks – good comfortable ugly sandals that are sensible and don’t hurt my feet. Mummy shoes. Mummy shoes that go with long thin full skirts, and khaki shorts and tees. The Docs sit lopsided in my closet. I keep them because I know I will wear them again someday. One day when the dust from the child, the marriage and my life has settled. I WILL wear them.
A Dance On September 11, 2001
My daughter is wearing a pink frilly t-shirt and a denim pinafore so stiffly flounced that she looks like she’s wearing a lampshade. She is amusing herself by pulling it over her head and showing the world her panties and her little belly button. Her fat legs are dancing around while she is headless, giggling with glee at her own daring and my heart just breaks wide open.
I am weeping. I am weeping for the loss of innocence, for the knowledge that the world is a terrible place.
I weep for the mothers, the fathers, the daughters and sons. So many.
I weep for the change in the world, the terrible realisation that none of us are safe. I weep for the changes to come, the knowledge that this won’t end; this won’t be the only tragedy.
I weep for the realisation that in a month, a year, 5 years, this will be a note in history, and life will have continued. I weep for the jokes, the cynicism and the posturing that shows how distant we have become from who we once were.
I weep for the women on the other side of the world, who love their children as much as I love my child, and know that their lives have been altered too.
I weep, and my daughter is dancing.
Dancing with hope and with the joy of living and of being who she is in that exact moment in time.
So in that spirit, I send my love to all the mothers in this world – all of them, wherever they are, who watch their children dance.
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