Dear Stowaway,

You've been around for a few weeks and I just wanted to get some things straight. Just because you are unplanned does not mean that you are unwanted. On the contrary. You've been my favourite inconvenience so far. Those voices from the outside is your dad and me talking to you and telling you to be good and keep working industriously on cell division and the construction of your placenta and your rudemntary heart.

I would like to think that my almost complete absence of the usual pregnancy symptoms (except for itchy skin) is God throwing me a bone, saying "what with work and studying and a toddler and a 20,000 word dissertation, that woman has enough on her plate. let her be spared nausea, and dry, heaving, and aversion to any food that is not bacon or liquid smoothie.", rather than say, the lack of nausea being an indicator that you're not growing as you should, Stowaway. It's not that I'm ungrateful, because believe me being able to walk down Kilburn High Street without sensitivity to smell is a blessing I am grateful for every single day, but I love you a bit already you see, so I worry.

I think I know when you were made. I just felt ...something.. like a tiny light, a small star in my belly. It lingered for a day or so and then nothing. Just silence, no symptoms of anything at all. If it hadn't been for that persistent nagging feeling and the tidal sweep of fatigue I would have sworn I had imagined the whole thing. Except that my period never came and I did a test, and there you are.

It was similar with your brother. I remember the same glowing of something, and the sense of something beautiful and shy and a figure in a dream saying "Capricorn Boy", and then nothing more for three months and then only an intermittent flash of something until the last ten weeks when I could feel him. A sense of who he was going to be. Flurries of distress or delight, although none of that prepared us in any way at all for the reality of your brother as a newborn. Frankly I don't think anything could have prepared us for that except army bootcamp in which you have to lug a 4 kilo bag of flour around all day while not sleeping for more than an hour's stretch at a time.

It was hard, that. But we survived. So much so that now we want to do it again. But more than anything we want you. So be good, and multiply, and do all the things that you fetuses? feti? are supposed to do. Like dig in, grow, grow, grow and I'll see you in July.

Love

Yo Mama.

Z and I talking about Apocalypse in the car, on our way home after watching 2012.

Z: If I think about the possibility of the world ending, it just... makes me more sad than I can tell you if I only start to think about the horrifying choices and lack of choices our children would face. How unfair it would be that they never got to flourish and live.

N: That's very moving. I was convinced that you were about to say how torn up you'd be inside about earthquakes and tsunamis ruining the plexiglass roof you spent all that time building in the garden.

Yesterday I had to drag my child with me to work, after work, to receive my employer-sourced Swine Flu shot. A 20 minute journey took us 50 minutes on account of 1) the buggy (see below) and 2) Matei's insistence that he examine literally every car, like so:

Matei: "It has a light! This car is wet." or "This car has a light! This car isn't wet. Man dried it."

Anyway.

Receiving swine flu - fine really. Swelling and pain in injected arm is minimal, although I'm still using it as an excuse not to do any heavy lifting.

Matei bursting into tears and attacking the nurse in an attempt to defend me from the injection - wonderful but misguided.

Googling *how to release brakes on maclaren techno xt* on my phone, in the rain, while my engine-smitten child tries to hurl himself into the path of motorcycles - something of a low point.

Lying in bed with my son, while he questions whether my arm hurts and then gently strokes my face and hand until he falls asleep - a moment I've been travlling my whole life towards.

Parenting is tightrope-walking. Putting one foot in front of the other, not looking down. Breathing, and focus, and keeping your eye on the end of the line. Balancing the task of educating children and challenging them to stretch themselves, against nurture and not overwhelming their mental/emotional capacities. It's often stark, on the parenting frontier, with the buffetting wind and the faces of the people far below. Just the pole in your arms, and the vibrating rope beneath your feet. Just the accumulated weight of all the knowledge and skill you've acquired and all the burdens you carry. It is exhilirating and tiring and angry-making and surprisingly enjoyable.

Z and I tend to be pretty lax in the morning, because well, the application of discipline requires speech and the opening of eyes and possibly even getting up, but when a day starts off with your child throwing his toys on the floor and then weeping because they are fallen, and then hitting you with a fury because you won't pick them up for him - well then even I am motivated into action.

"If you don't stop hitting your father you will go to the naughty corner!" I threaten. Matei pauses momentarily and strokes Z, but then again our refusal to pick up the toys he has thrown and our suggestion that he should do it himself overcomes him and brings on another volley of furious/underslept toddler blows.

"Right," I say and get up and carry him to the naughty corner since he refuses to go himself. "Sit here and think about what you've done."

This is the fifth time the corner has been called into use and the first time when Matei did not spend his allotted time there in a hysterical weeping fit and/or attempts at escape. I sit some distance away and he looks at me with huge eyes and rocks slightly and says:
"Must touch gently! Must touch gently!"
"That's right! And what else?"
"Hitting, no! Hitting, no!" *
" That's right." M looks at me with huge, imploring eyes and says: "Are good? Are good?" and my heart breaks a little, but we are still not done.
"A bit more. What else shouldn't you do?"
"Must touch gently! Hitting, no! Hitting, no!"
"You also shouldn't throw your toys. If they fall on the floor, just pick them up, like so(I mime picking up)"
"Hitting, no! Throwing, no! Picks up toys! (he copies my mimicry)".
"That's it exactly. Well done!"
"Are, good? Are good?"
"Yes you are. Come here." And I open my arms and he flies into them and I envelop him in the hug I've been wanting to dish out for the last minute.

He trots off to the bedroom, bursting with pride to share all his insights with Z, and when "picking toys off the floor" briefly turns into "throwing toys at father on the bed" a frim tone and a demo and practice session of what he should be doing instead corrects him. There are showers of praise and glows of happiness.

Then 20 minutes later at nappy changing time when he's flailing and kicking me and I'm fairly sure than another session in the naughty corner will just produce a drawn out fit of weeping, it's time to switch tactics.

"Matei, would you like a biscuit?
"Biscuit!"
"If you get dressed nicely, and with no fighting, I will give you a biscuit." Instant co-operation.

I feel as proud as he does, when I get the balance right. Parenting is tightrope-walking, and a drawn-out exercise in heartbreak. I'm a good mother, even though I never expected to be.


* Matei's chanted instructions to himself are best things ever. Watching him drink a cup of juice while telling himself "Drink, nicely! Don't, spit!" between sips remains hilarious.

pumpkins
Originally uploaded by rainsinger.

Lessons learned from pumpkin-carving:

1) Tools sold by Tesco for £1 = useless.

2) Children's kitchen utensils by IKEA = brilliant and just the right size.

3) If you are fed up of cutting slivers out with knives, a drill works quite well and makes Z feel useful.

4) Finding Matei tasks to do and motivating him to do them without causing harm to himself or others has tasked every technique I recently learned on my Facilitation Skills course.


In a few hours we are going to be dressing up the baby in a bat costume (or as he calls it, a butterfly) and dressing Z up as a pirate (for which occasion we are brining out his turquoise silk shirt - there in the icon). I anticipate having cause for much entertainment and photography.

And finally:

This morning while I was trying to put M in a nappy and he was shouting NO NO NO DOESN'T WANT and I was saying "Matei, it MUST be done. Do you know what it means when something MUST be done?" and he replied: "I get biscuits."

In anticipation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse neices and nephews descending upon us next week, I agreed to help Z go buy presents for them. And as it turns out the pitfalls and assorted hells of braving IKEA on the weekend is nothing in comparison to winding up stranded in Toys'R'Us an hour before your boss's funarel.

As is the way of disasters, this one started well. Organisation was sound, age-appropriate presents were duly sourced without draining my will to live or the family finances, my child was behaving beautifully and I was feeling somewhat smug. This, I believe, is known as hubris and verily verily my nervous system was about to crumble like the House of Atreus.

Thus at 11am, with 40 minutes to spare before I needed to head off for the memorial, I didn't see the flare of danger when Matei went off to investigate tricycles and Z found himself mesmerised by tiny helmets and bycicle seats for children. However, 15 minutes later I was feeling somewhat less relaxed when we hadn't moved despite a flurry of customer service activity and so, still determined to seize organisation by the balls I told Z:
'I'll take the buggy and the child to Tesco's next door to buy some food for the memorial, and I'll meet you by the car'
and he said:
'Please watch the child and make sure that he doesn't get decapitated' and with a flustered sigh I went off to locate the offspring who seemed determined to weld himself to as many objects of transportation as possible. After five minutes of that fun, I saw that Z was gone. Vanished, with the buggy.

5 minutes of steering the child and the tricycle he had attached himself to through the shops using the power of suggestion and the odd shove didn't reveal sightings of Z, although it did bring us face to face with a man dressed in a Spiderman costume (creepier than I can say). By now it was 11:25 and my good humour was vanishing faster than human rights in China.

After Z's failure to answer his phone, I decided that the time for diplomacy had passed, so I swept Matei up from his vehicle with a bright: "Let's go find Daddy!" amid rigid-backed wailings and fist flailings and cries of: "Don't want Daddy! Want Tricycle! Triiiiiiceeeeecle"
By 11:30 I was racing around the store with adrenaline pumping, radiating grim determination and despair like Jack Bauer, while an unwiledly bag dug into my shoulder and a toddler repeatedly hit me on the head, chanting "Tricycle! Trycicle!" and my mind swivilled between homicide and divorce.

And then it was 11:35 and my husband was still nowhere, nowhere and I could feel my blood pressure rising exponentially and the prickling of furious tears in my eyes and Matei was still hitting me and still screaming like he was being flayed alive and everyone in the whole shop was looking at me and when he managed to wrench my handbag off my shoulder and hurl it away in an arc of frefalling Oyster cards and loose change, adoption was the mildest of the fates I had in mind.

Instead I just plonked him on the floor with a furious hiss of 'Stay there!' and set about trying to restore my posessions with the blood pounding in my ears, battling between the desire to primal scream or strangle at least one male member of my family when I heard a cry of :It fell... it felll... and turned around ... and saw my child weeping heartbrokenly holding up a pound coin like a peace offering...
and everything slowed down...
and I sat on the floor with him and wept for 30 seconds with him because it was 11:45
and then I pulled it together and gave him a hug and said that everything was going to be all right...

And then Z phoned and I shrieked Where the fuck are you? and he said in offended tones I've been waiting in front of the car for 20 minutes, where the fuck are you
and then the earth ruptured, and the walls exploded in a shower of crashing masonry and sparks
although in the real world everything went on as before
and as I bore down towards the car it was probably a good thing overall that by then the burning power of my angst and rage had rendered me speechless.

If you look at the bright sky and the golden trees, the fall of light and leaves in the park it is easy to think - what a lovely day.

And if you look at these people who gathered in front of the statue of Ghandi to speak and bring mementos of her life - photos and flowers and things that reminded us of her (several portraits of Tito, cigarettes and red lipstick)- it is easy to think, how lovely. It is exactly as she wanted it. (Except she would have wanted less praise. She was always so uncomfortable with being the centre of attention or flattery).

It was a beautiful memorial, and I am so glad that we got the chance to say goodbye.

But it is still painful to see that this vibrant, vivid woman has become two handfuls of ash.

And it is beyond devastating to watch an eighty year old woman mourn her child. To see the weight of her sorrow etched in every line of her frame, like a sackful of stones she is carrying. (And to remember a kitchen table long ago, and a woman somewhat like that one and the surprisingly physical weight of grief).

Thank you for coming, she says. Thank you all, so much for coming.
Thank you for your daughter, we reply.
I was so glad to have her. I was so happy she was mine, she sighs. And now, I will grieve for her.

And that's the point where I break inside, because I know exactly what she is saying. The dual joy and anxiety of love, of motherhood- of our children who reshape our hearts in their images and snatch them away.

It is heartbreaking to watch any mother bury a child and to know that there, but for the grace of God, go I.

October is chock full of rememberances and obituaries. A few days ago it was the 20th anniversary of my father's death, and it hit me harder than the others. Perhaps because the place in me where that grief lives has not healed so much as callused and frosted over, tight and aching as skin after a burn. Most days I trundle along just fine, but every so often I stumble into a conversational bear trap (especially of the kind my mother favours: "Oh I remember the day that I told you that your dad died, and your lower lip trembled and your eyes filled up with tears and you looked so so sad. Do you remember that day?") and I have to stop talking, I have to walk away because my throat shuts like a fist.

I am fiercely, ridiculously loyal to those I love and I'll probably keep missing him my whole life. Partially because it makes me so so sad that there's so much of the world that has passed him by - that he will never have a laugh with my husband or hold my child- and partially because it feels like it's the only thing I have left to give him. Because amongst other things that missing says: I have loved you and I will love you my whole life.

That and occasionally a lit candle and a note pinned to a church corkboard: For those who are still missed and loved as much as they were in life.

Last week my old boss died. She was an eccentric and extraordinary character who worked herself into the ground and had such passionate convictions. I miss her, greatly and I keep remembering things about her and feeling the simultaneous surge of hilarity and sadness.

Like the bright red lipstick she favoured, and the strange conceptual art she created and her passion for Tito and the colourful tales from her childhood ("And that was the night that my mother and little brother and I spent in a forest on a Montenegran mountain surrounded by wolves") and the fact that she wouldn't wear jeans because they were American.

She was always so bad at accepting gifts and seeking help, to the point of comic proportion - such as the fact that she never let anyone but her do the washing up. We all knew her cancer was terminal but she never talked about it, and she left work at the end of May and made herself (deliberately, I think) inaccessible. And then in the middle of last week, there she was, flaring in our minds like a firework so that all of us who had worked with her (even though we were scattered across many different offices) suddenly were thinking and talking about her, trying to find a way to check on her, to reach her. And the news the next day, that she had died.

And whether you call it coincidence, or the twanging of intuition that connects us to those we have loved, or the spirit of a woman saying goodbye- whatever it's name, there was a moment of something there, a pause in the stride, a shiver in the spine.

I dreamt of empty, snowy fields and it sunk in that she was gone.

Sometimes a dream is all you get of goodbye. And sometimes it's a postcard (To my Great Team, take care of yourselves. I miss you and wish you all the best), received the day after she died.

His dad and I have braved the wilds of Weekend IKEA for the sake of buying Matei a Big Boy Bed. Less in the hope that it would make him stay in it the whole night, and more in the expectation that when he woke up at some ungodly hour and decided he wanted to get out of it he could do it by himself, without disturbing either parent.

It's worked very well so far. Already this morning Z and I woke up from a deep and beautiful slumber to find ourselves sharing a bed with our son and a collection of toys, shoes, and art materials without having any real idea of when or how any of them got there. And that's the way we like it.

And truly, most days all the GBH inflicted by a sleeping toddler seems a small price to pay for the mornings. The stretching and the snuggling and the string of imperious commands. A leg thrust into the air with the stern edict of "Kiss it!" followed by "Now the other one" and the joy of negotiating.
"But I want to kiss just one."
"Kiss both!"

I'm enjoying him so much, the talking, reasoning, mimicking child.

Last night I served him lovingly chopped up creamed leeks and he looked at them and looked at me and went:
"Grass?"

and this morning while I was getting dressed he waved at me and said:
"Bye bye! Matei going to work!" and he went and he sat at his little table, scribbling on it and waving around a retired computer mouse and I came and tried to play with him and he waved me off with a stern - "Matei working!" and all the way to the kitchen my shoulders shook with the effort of repressed laughter.

I don't know what I've done to deserve him, this child. Although come to that I know even less what I've done to deserve his nanny, a magical woman who inhabits my life for three days a week and spends his naptime attacking dirt on every surface with the zeal of a crusader. Thanks to her ministrations my house has become shiny and unthreatening to visitors, and my grandmother has stopped rolling in her grave.

************************

I love midwives. But I don't love the notion that birth was the most important event in shaping my life as a mother . Birth was important, and I feel so lucky to have been able to have the relatively-uncomplicated birth and that I was so well looked-after in those hours of intensity and vulnerability.

But in the grand scheme of things, compared to everything that followed it, birth was nothing.

My life as a mother was shaped by feeding and answering that screaming child month on month on month, despite the boredom and the anger and the mind-numbing exhaustion and the longing to do some screaming myself and be anywhere else but there. But I stayed, and he grew and the pact was honoured.

It was shaped by every single night I spent soothing and holding him because he was afraid, and by all the songs I sang, and all the footsteps that I paced with his small fevered body under the neon lights of hospital rooms.

It was shaped by shared laughter, and his hand on my face, and the first time he looked at me and smiled and by every time he said Mama and meant it. It's been shaped by every scribble I admired and every story that we read and every sky that we stood under hand-in-hand, and by every single time he stopped my heart with either joy or fear.

By this and this and this and this and this and this. And most of all, by the gift of language. By the sharing of questions and answers and stories, by his chatter both elaborate and inane. I was reborn as his mother when he started to talk and reason and listen to reason. I continue to grow by every moment of joyous togetherness shared such as the sitting together at the end of a long day of running around, watching an episode of Mad Men - him leaning against me and keeping up a stream of bright running commentary: "Man wears hat. Man kissed lady. Lady kissed man. Man angry", and me thinking: This. This is all I ever wanted out of parenting.

.... for the living outloud project.

Throughout my adolescence, whenever I thought of my life I divided it into Before and After Dad, and then in later years Before and After War just for variety. I felt divided and unhealable, in the wake of all those deaths and bombs. And I spent most of those years in grim survivor mode, battening down hatches against love and the possibilities of loss and rejection.

My twenties have become the Before and After Z years. The life I have now would have been inconceivable for me in 2003. If you had asked me then I would have shaken my head at the possibility that I would be doing this - loving and trusting again, and being loved so profoundly in return. Z has seeped into my life, under my skin slowly and unobtrusively, almost by osmosis until one day I realised how much my world had been smoothed and changed by his being.



Talking about stabilising influences and cheerful optimism doesn't sound like the stuff of thrilling romance, but they are the essential components of this deepest, happiest love story I've ever known.

For so many years I thought and talked about myself in the languages of brokeness- abandonment, bereavement, betrayal, loss. Probably I will always be a bit dented and scuffed, but I am not broken now.

Whatever may happen between us, Z has loved me and nurtured me and in his wake I shine. And a lot of this relationship, and of me, is summed up in this song*:




*Z hates most of what he calls my 'waily waily girly music', of which this song is a prime example. However, considering that he spent his formative musical years sporting misguided facial hair and playing electric guitar in a heavy metal band called Orion, I don't think he's in any position to comment on taste.

All sad stories are easier to tell as fairytales. You'll see.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, in a house that bordered the forest of birch trees lived a woman with her husband and three children.

One day she had a dream of a large dinner party. A candle was fixed to the back of the chair of each guest, and all the candles were burning but one. The extinguished candle was on the back of the chair occupied by her son.

There are no witches in this story. Only an evil spell maybe. Perhaps a curse. Because not long after the woman's dream her young son starts to bleed. From his nose, from his ears, from his pores. There are no cuts. There is no clotting. There is no cure.

The bleeding is not heavy, but it is constant. The drip drip drip of it. He grows weaker and weaker and it takes him three days to die.

The woman was my great-great-grandmother. She of the lush gardens and cookbooks that featured recipes like : 'Buy enough parsley for a ruble' and 'Beat three hundred eggs'. There are images of her. Stories. Photographs.

But the boy has slipped between the pages of history books. He is lost. What age was he when he died? What colour was his hair? Nobody knows, nobody remembers his name - not since my grandmother died.

When I grieve for her, sometimes I grieve most for the untold stories. For the threads I will never connect. I have a good memory, and I scavanged what I could but mostly it's just fragments of things.

All that remains is a history of loss - dogged and terrifying and unstoppable. Visiting almost every generation. Taking mostly the boys. The women of my family are survivors. They are the bearers of history. Small ghosts follow them. They wait in the corners. They twitch curtains. They hide in the wings of ravens and owls.

And the women say: this is what was lost. And who.

Like the others I carry what I have been given. Sometimes it's the stories I've been told. And sometimes it's dreams that inhabit me like a raincloud descending on pines.

Like the dreams of places that I know but have never seen. Say, an autumn day. A sun-dappled wood. A path through white birch and golden leaves. Birds. A cloudless blue sky. Linen trousers tucked into boots. The far-off barking of dogs. And amidst it all a drop of blood, falling, blooming -unstoppable and deadly, like the curse in a fairy tale.

Z has been away since Tuesday (he's in Montenegro with the Baby) and alone I shall remain until the end of the month. That first day at work I was all mopey all 'what should I do with all this free time and this lack of demands and responsibilities' and my co-worker gave me a look of pure contempt and said "If the answer to that is not self-evident, then you don't deserve my help."

Truer words may never have been spoken so I came to my senses and flounced off into the arms of Two Weeks Of Singledom like it was made of sushi and cocktails. (Which it has been. Good times).

Since then I have been hugely enjoying this holiday from domesticity and celebrating it with irregular meals, irregular sleeping hours and all the trash tv watching I can stand. (There was a time in my life when middle of the night programmes on BBC2 were my viewing staple and lo, those times have returned).

Z is a stickler for trappings of civilisation ('people should sleep in a bed and eat at the table and verily verily we will live like these people') so I've been rebelling against his boring conformism by sleeping on the sofa and eating at the computer desk. Also if you had a mind to you could trace the history of my movements through the house by following the trail of cutlery, plates and cups that I thoughtfully leave on various surfaces where they remain until I run out of plates and cups and cutlery and gather them up and wash them and put them away neatly and the whole thing starts again.

It is one of the things that drives Z ballistic, but curiously has no effect on me. (On the other hand, if you want to see me embrace Frothing Rage in under 30 seconds then leave socks on the floor or put things away in the wrong drawer).

Anyway, the one thing I thought I would do most of during the week (answering emails and other Internet Use until my eyes fall out) I have done the least of thanks to a combination of factors:

1) Between the demands of Real Life Work and Real Life Socialising I've been too knackered to do anything but collapse amid cats

2) I got my hands on the new Margaret Atwood novel (post apocalyptic is my favourite kind) and I wasn't going to let anything come between me and that gripping baby until it was completely devoured

3) I awarded myself a No-Communication Holiday yesterday - switched off my mobile, read short stories, took long baths and cooked all the perishables in the house (roasted butternut squash with bacon and walnuts, mushroom risotto with parsley and parmesan, carrot soup and roasted peppers peeled and marinated with garlic and balsamic vinegear).

***************************

Anyway. Good reading links now.

My journal has been featured on Schmutzie's Five Star Fridays (thank you to whoever nominated it! surprised and much obliged) along with some ace writing. And since the only thing that comes more naturally to me than fretting about undeserved honours is voracious reading, I set to immediately.

Livejournal is so insular and involving, that it took me a long time to realise there was so many other blogs out there and I've been overloading my google reader ever since. ( My favourite recent discoveries: )

( Books I'm In, and Lovely Books by Other People )

My Crush of the Week - Evil Slutopia . Feminism and brains and cartoons and pop culture snark oh yis. They light up my Google Reader like a star.

Inter-ethnic Balkan conflicts and politics, as explained concisely by Z:

( Under the cut, due to swearing )

Z and I watched The Tour at the Canary Wharf Film Festival recently and it made us howl with laughter and shiver with chills just like the best of the Yug cinema should. I've been delighted to find that someone has uploaded the whole of the film onto YouTube.

The Tour is a comedy drama set in 1993 (the worst years of the war) where a group of veteran actors from Belgrade (who are largely playing themselves) are tempted by the promise of money to go and perform on the Serbian Front Lines in Bosnia and then become sucked into the war as they bounce fron one side to the next.

In the segment of the film below, they storm off in the night after a performance results in a fight with the Serbian soldiers and they end up running into Croatian troops. All the actors are Serbs, aside from Sonja (Mira Furlan) who is Croat, so they thrust her forward as a sort of ambassador while the rest either smile fixedly or try to imitate the Croat dialect.

It's something that I find myself doing quite often. Thrusting Z forward (he's a Croat) whenever we're in any ethnically tense or sensitive situations (because as he said, better PR) while I smile brightly and fixedly and go "Oooh! Look A Croat! Please don't kill me."

Well. It turns out that the biggest ennemy of internet use is not employment, or parenthood, or the demands of marital emotional engagement and intimacy, but migraine headaches now starring in Your Howling Unresponsive To Panadol Agony on 5 days of the last 7. I have dozens half-written posts and comments, abandoned mid-sentence when the computer's light would mutate from Pretty Thing to Thousand Stabbing Demons. Oh well.

Anyway. I am newsly-emerged from my cave and here is a chronicle of all the places I've lived from the ages of 0-20, brought to you by A Cocktail of Prescribed Medication and 16 Hours Of Sleep.

( Clicky )

I think I'll pause here. If you feel inspired, tell me your own. (Preview of coming attractions, part 2 - places I've lived 2000-2009).

I am ill today. So much so that instead of performing ambitious acts of garden-weeding and laundry-folding, I am holed up in bed drinking tea and transcribing the paper journal I kept in Montenegro.

(It's long, so it's under the cut, but here's a preview:)

We're in the midst of potty training which has brought much of its own hilarity from Matei's insistence on peeing 'like a man' (standing up) to complex bouts of anatomical reasoning.
Me: Let's see if teddy bear wants to go pee on the potty.
Him: (examines bear, turns him back and front) Bear cannot pee. Doesn't have a penis.

( Read more... )

Here are four of the most often told stories about my maternal grandfather The Enterprising Peasant:

1) As one of 12 children in a poor and agrarian family they were always hungry. Their meals consisted of a big pot of beans or unpalatable food that their mother would brew and give each of them a bowlful of. Since a bowlful was never enough and all the children would be begging for more, their mother would throw a wooden spoon into the pot and turn away so she wouldn't see which one of the children got the extra helping and which 11 cried about starvation.

2) My grandfather put himself through school by getting up at 5am so he could haul firewood, and water for rich peasants and earn enough money for his school books and school materials. He did so well with his studying that he got to train as a doctor, and was a renowned microbiologist in his day.

3) During WWI my grandfather and his brother were conscripted into the army. The starving, poor, Yugoslav army. To prepare them for their march across Albanian mountains, their mother stuffed their pockets with garlic, which was pretty much the only produce she had, and she entreated them to eat garlic daily in order to stay healthy. They did as told, and verily verily they did not die of scurvy and disease unlike most of their unit, and they got sent to France after the war and the French liked garlic too and they gave them a free education, and then they lived Happily Ever Most Of The Time*.

4) My grandfather died very unexpectedly after suffering a catastrophic allergic reaction to penicillin, in controlled medical conditions while undergoing a process of sensitisation to penicillin. This took place a day before my mother's twelfth birthday.

These four stories have formed the founding principles of my mother's belief system concerning

1) being grateful for food
2) the importance and redeeming power of an education
3) that garlic will cure anything *
4) that all antibiotics and medicines (aside from garlic) are poison**, and that disaster can strike without warning at any minute, so it's best to be highly anxious all the time.

*Well exept for the nine years my great-uncle spent in solitary confinement and on Barren Island for criticising Tito's industrialisation program.

** My mother's belief in the power of garlic is unshakable. Whether singly, or in combination with her other two favourite medicines (olive oil and vodka) she uses it to treat pretty much any ailment, including: hair loss, ulcers, high blood pressure, ear infection, throat infection, flu. (The only thing not treatable with garlic is a urinary tract infection, which will be cured with parsley tea).

*** my mother's attitudes to medication can be synthesised into 1) man-made chemistry is poison and 2) if it's a plant that means it's natural, therefore good. (I'm always slightly surprised that she's never bought opium as a natural diet-and-sleep aid)

Podgorica Airport smells of smoke. I am wearing my favourite summer travelling outfit- long black cotton shirt and strappy bright vest, with a wide belt, short-sleeved cardigan and gladiator sandals. On this journey it earns me a seat in Podgorica’s tiny airport café (miraculous), a free upgrade to business class (delightful) and a wink from the pilot (mostly useless), but fails to affect the larger problem of not seeing my son for another month.

The day is blustery and blessedly overcast. The promise of rain was always the most anticipated event of August here.

I walk across the tarmac trailing wind-whipped clothes and sadness. On the plane I can feel the tug in my mind (like a pager buzzing at the back of my skull) which indicates a child awake and looking for me. The call vibrates with an urgency that dents the heart. I watch the patterns of rain on the tarmac and long for him as palpably as land-locked mariners yearn for the sea.

On the Ljubljana-London leg my inablity to refuse the abudnant and delicious Business Class wine and my famously low tolerance for alcohol combine to comatise me. I wake when the seatbelt sign pings on and the window reveals a truly impressively dense cloud cover over the UK.

From the air it's beautiful, and infinite - stretching out in each direction as far as the eye can see. It's a cloudscape gilded with sunlight and painted in Van Gogh's brushstrokes- vast and mysterious and lovely.

There's a strong headwind, whipping wisps of cloud past the window. The buzzing call in my mind is gone. I shut my eyes and beam a message back - an image of white clouds, and the feeling of being wrapped in kisses.

Separation is hard. All night long I dream restless ghost dreams - tangled pathways in a moonlit wood, rain on the sea.

In Montenegro it was too hot to consume anything but fruits and salads, and my son felt that the only reasonable response to being a 20 month old person was to run around and try to climb on places that have snakes. As a result of this no-food-all-action-all-the-time I shed close to 8 pounds in 10 days. I haven't shifted weight that fast since I gave birth, but since in London I have neither problem I am having pizza for breakfast while I sit in front of the computer and consider into which part of my day I should slot a lengthy nap. Left to our own devices the cats and I synchronise our hobbies.

Spending time with my son was beautiful (he talks! he doesn't shut up! I still haven't decided whether I'm more charmed by his conversations with inanimate objects or his statement-of-the-obvious sentences) and leaving him for another month was heartbreaking.

While my desires to write endless posts and read endless posts slug it out with each other, I leave you with an image of Postmodern Childhood: Collecting cigarette butts on the beach*




* A person cannot dissuade him from this course of action. I've tried. But I'm thinking he has a bright future in garbage collection.

I fly to Montenegro to reacquaint myself with my son , leaving Z to look after the cats and make sad puppy eyes in my wake.

N: I will miss you so much.
Z: I will miss you too. Who am I going to talk with when I come home? Whom am I going to share my bed with?
N:Hopefully no onee.

It has been a month and a half since I've last seen my son and in that time I've gone through Stages Of Separation that roughly look like this:

1. Shock. Disbelief.
2. A headiness that comes from sleep and drinking and going out with other adults five nights in a row. JUBILATION for you are FREE from the YOKE OF TYRANNY of babies.
3. DESPAIR. Perhaps you need tyranny. Perhaps it lends meaning and structure to your life.
4.The excitement of road trips through foreign countries with one's beloved husband. Like a second honeymoon, if wild sex were replaced with crashing nightly into the oblivion of motel beds and exhausted sleep.
5.An aching, aching sadness compounded by jetlag and post-holiday blues.
6. Chaos. Disarray. Due to no longer having a child for whose sake to maintain pretence of competence, stop cleaning house, eating regular meals or buying vegetables. Live like students, eat like hobos.
7. Boredom. A sudden sweep of boredom which hurtles you through dark and dingy alleys of your mind and spits you into the dust and rubble of the daytime world. In your disoriented state you decide the only cure is a trip to IKEA (on a weekend no less) to replace a horrible kitchen table with a nice new one.
8. While Z does DIY you decide to welcome the Beautiful New Table (the thing you ooooh over and admire in the absence of your baby) by scrubbing the kitchen floor on your hands and knees, in your underwear. This will be simultaneously the closest you will come to giving your husband an erotic thrill, although when you realise that he is directing more appreciative 'aaahing' at the shiny floor than at your ass, you threaten to brain him with a bottle of multi-surface cleaner.
9.Heady with success of actual clean kitchen, complete with actually visible counterspace you decide to tackle the ominous mountain of CDs that infests your living room which leads us to:

Remembrance Of Terrible Musical Tastes Past

When some people move house they get rid of as much as possible so that they migrate with as little as possible. We are not those people, and our CD shelves were full of things that we had collected in our teenage years and not listened to since then. My Pile Of Shame attested to an unsavoury affection for country music and Enigma, while Z's contained a mix of German Death Metal and miscellanious Sounds Of Nature CDs (of which my favourite is called Frog Chorus).

Tomorrow I travel and will have no internet until the end of August. The withdrawal symptoms would normally be immediate and severe, but I anticipate that preventing my son from running out onto highways or drowning himself in the sea will commandeeer all my resources to the degree that if I have time to read sell by dates on a carton of yoghurt I shall consider myself fortunate.

x