Playing With My Feelings

Well, it's been another wild Wednesday, treading the fine line between motherhood and nervous breakdown...

From the moment we wake up, the boys conspire to wreak havoc with my nerves.
After two weeks of the runs, LB is constipated: a first hour-long crying fit occurs somewhere around 10 a.m.
He is eventually pacified with a vegetable purée and a generous helping of prune juice, but other than an endearing smile, no other movement occurs.

Later, BB has a high fever, and is packed off to bed with scarlet cheeks and watery eyes.
As he nods off, LB becomes hysterical again.
I mean, really hysterical. I have never had a very high tolerance threshold when it comes to prolonged crying and now, for the first time in our 6-month relationship, I have absolutely no idea how to calm LB down.

This realisation makes me panicky. I feel myself teetering on the brink of breakdown, so I do what any exhausted, scared, irate woman would do: I call FH at work, talk at him in a high-pitched voice, and beg him to come home.
He says he will.
Shakily, I say goodbye, turn to LB and, the second - the very second - I put the phone down, he stops crying. As though he has just flicked his inner "off" switch, just like that.
Not only does he stop crying, he grins.
I am baffled. He is 6-months old, for goodness sake: surely he can't have mastered the arts of emotional blackmail and manipulation so soon??

Minutes later, BB awakes from his stupor, and he too is miraculously revived.
So when FH pitches up, he is confronted with two perfectly contented children and one freakish wife who begins to look like a game-playing idiot.
"Go on, cry, show Daddy how hard you've been crying!" I coax LB.
Delighted grin.
FH looks at me with something resembling pity.
"Go out for a while if you like," he tells me, "you seem like you need a break."

In short, it's been one of those days.
One of those days I mentally file away in the "Two Kids Is Sufficient" folder. At the moment, that folder is just about as full as its neighbour, the "More Would Be Nice" file.

Firstborn

There are two little words we've been hearing constantly over the past week: "tout seul!"
Translated, this means "by myself!", and it is the new catchphrase of our strong, independent, I-am-no-longer-a-baby-didn't-anybody-notice? firstborn child, BB.
It is fascinating, and highly endearing, to watch as he struggles to take his own coat off, put his own socks on, brush his own teeth... The joy of succeeding in each of these little tasks provokes a wide, proud smile... and the frustration of failure a stomp and a sulk.

As a fellow firstborn child, I have to say that I feel such tenderness as I witness this desire to be grown up. Is it a trait of all firstborns to copy the adults, do away with all manner of childish things and express a fierce will to do it all "by myself"?
I think so, to some extent.
Your place in the family hierarchy probably determines the rate at which you "grow up". BB has always looked to the adults for inspiration; LB looks to his 2 year-old brother, so the gap is smaller, the pressure less.

The other day, as we ambled along the street, BB, LB and I, an elderly lady stopped to pat BB affectionately on the head.
"Ca va, bébé?" she asked, smiling.
"Non," BB told her squarely, as though explaining the obvious to the simple-minded "c'est pas moi le bébé, c'est lui!"
And thus he pointed to his little brother, popped his own dummy back into his mouth, and strode off, looking almost like a stroppy teenager.
Almost. But not quite.

A New Day Dawns

One morning, eyes glazed over as hands grip a steaming cup of coffee, our ears prick as, suddenly, a sweet sound makes its way through the still-closed shutters...
What could it be? Gentle at first, then louder... the sound begins to fill our consciousness and the messy kitchen...
"Hush!" we tell the baby excitedly, as we listen, frozen, hardly daring to believe...

Not the tweet of birds, nor the rustle of fresh leaves... but a sign nonetheless that a new day is dawning.

Heart pounding, I fling open the shutters: the sound fills our ears... and our wildest hopes are confirmed.

Not the tweet of birds... but the low rumble of a digger and the piercing shriek of a power drill. It can only mean one thing. Men are at work. A barrier is being erected. The car park is being closed off. The prostitutes will have to find a new place of work!

FH and I look at each other with teary pride. Ordinary folk of the world unite! It IS possible to take on the powers-that-be and win! The pen IS mightier than the sword! Spring has arrived early!

Good Karma, Bad Karma

I don't think I really believe in Karma. Most of life is determined by the choices we make, with a little bit of good or bad luck thrown in for good measure.
And yet... sometimes I wonder.

Remember last August, when I bashed the car for the first time? I was lucky enough to select the perfect "victim": an easy-going, retired car mechanic who agreed to settle cash-in-hand and only made me pay for his broken headlight.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I bashed the car for the second time? The garage we took it to quoted me around 1000 euros. It has to be said: half of the front was hanging off (and has been loosely held together with a strategically positioned piece of rope ever since...).

Well, determined that there must be a better alternative to the loss of 1000 euros for 3 seconds bad driving, I had the bright idea of calling round to see my first accident victim (who happens also to live nearby). I asked him if he could recommend a good garage, maybe someone who would be prepared to cut a deal for cash (see how French I am becoming??).
What actually happened is that the sweet guy examined my car, ummed and aahed, said that there was really no need to replace the bodywork, and offered to repair it himself for a small fee.
"I may be retired, but I still have all the tools," he told me, conspiratorially.

And repair it he did.
In just one day, in his garden, and all for 150 euros and a bottle of wine (the wine was my initiative).

So I can't help but wonder... If I hadn't had the first accident, I'd never have met him, and I'd actually be far more out of pocket now than if I hadn't had that first accident... which seemed so "terrible" at the time.

Could this possibly be what they mean by Karma? Or is it just old-style, pre-Facebook networking?

Reducing One's To-do List

Like most people, I like to feel that I have some kind of control over my life.
Sometimes, in order to create this feeling, I make little lists, either on paper or in my head: you know, sort of "things I would like to accomplish before the end of the week" lists.
They are modest yet worthy aims, such as "buy nappies" or "phone a friend."

And yet, there are phases, like mid-January with two small kids, when the illusion of control becomes virtually impossible to uphold.
We are fighting a losing battle against tummy bugs, coughs, rain, broken cars-that-must-be-repaired, oh - another tummy bug...
So gradually, we must learn to let go, give up the hope of achieving anything, and just make it through the day in one piece.

Hard as it is to shelve my"To-do" list with not a single item ticked off, I am learning that some days, when 9 pm finally swings round and my two boys are tucked up in bed, fed (not well fed, but fed) and not covered in sick... well, that's enough.
It's not much, but it's a day well lived.

Making and Breaking

There’s a popular myth that says “work is useful and fulfilling”.

That is undoubtedly true in many sectors, but in some, such as my own, well… I wonder.

Sure, if I think about it, I can find a certain usefulness, but as far as I can judge, the usefulness of any work carried out in the private sector is just not comparable with that of vocational activities (doctors, teachers, fundraisers, etc.).

Let me give you an example. It will be a coded example, for confidentiality purposes (not that I am a UN ambassador or an undercover spy or anything, but you know how it is…).

I am a member of an international committee that meets up twice a year in different (nice) locations around Europe. This much is true, but let’s say that the purpose of my committee is to…. er… produce a tourist guide.

Every four years, a new issue of the guide must be produced. The latest one is set to hit the press this spring, so I am just doing the proof-read.

As I slog through the dozens and dozens of pages in the guide, it strikes me that the total number of changes made amounts to… a few hundred words.

Then I start to make little calculations in my head: 4 years, 10 people, 8 week-long meetings, 80 hotel rooms, 160 flights, hundreds of taxis, thousands of emails… All for the sake of a couple of pages of text that will be of interest to a handful of people.

Naturally, my calculations make me feel a little panicky, and I get overwhelmed with a sense of the pointlessness of life, etc., etc., so I force myself to stop, calm down, detach.

But there’s this niggling sense of ridicule bothering me on some level. I am reminded of one of my favourite lines from “Howards End” by E.M. Forster: the outer life of telegrams and anger.

All this hustle and bustle and self-importance and yet, is it really anything more than playgroup for adults?

Anyway, back to the proof-reading. Soon I’ll spot a typing error, and this will help me erase the image of the huge carbon footprint stamped on these few pages…

Talk is Cheap

FH and I discuss our visit to England in April. More specifically, the mode of transport we will use to facilitate our journey from A (Toulouse) to B (Cheshire).
He is fully aware that I am panicked at the thought of flying. He has been coping with this inconvenience for the past 11 years.
But now, the idea that we will drag 2 little kids across two countries by train or car seems a little crazy to him and, after hours of Internet research, I have to agree. I have been submitting every possibility I can think of to the wisdom of Google, in the deluded hope that the computer will somehow tell me "it IS possible to cover 1400 km by car in under 3 hours!"

I start to come to terms with the common sense solution: a 2-hour flight.

And no sooner have I made this decision, than the bad dreams start again.
See, you have to be a fellow phobic to understand: the fear of flying is not just about an uncomfortable few hours on the big day: it's weeks of anxiety and tension beforehand.
So, the phobic develops a different logic to other (normally constituted) human beings.
It's a logic based on the "frying pan / fire" concept, where the loooooong, inconvenient journey is the frying pan, and the plane is the...um... fire.
See?

So, FH and I are discussing all this, and he is trying to grasp it, but can't quite.

"You know," I tell him, suddenly inspired. "It's like: if you took a person with a phobia of spiders, and gave him the choice between travelling across Europe by train for 24 hours, or being shut up in a room with a load of spiders... well, you know, he would choose the train."

There is a contemplative silence.
My reasoning is so twisted yet so beyond comment, that FH is floored.
Yup, he kind of has to admit there's not much to add to that.

I should be pleased. My powerful sense of rhetoric has won through again. I'm sure I can pretty much convince anybody of anything if I really have to.
But can I convince myself?
Is it fair to inconvenience three other people for the sake of my personal fears?

The answer is: I don't know.

One Shot

I go to get the holiday snaps developed: the 25 one-shots we took on the disposable camera.
I am somewhat inexplicably nervous about collecting them: I fear they will be of a shameful quality, given our current reliance on digital cameras and the "two hundred attempts to get it right" mentality that goes with them.
It's not as though the man in Photo Service is going to give me a mark out of ten or anything.. but that's the way I feel.

Turns out, the photos are great. Photo Service man and I admire them together, getting into an interesting discussion about the downside of digital and the value of taking time to line up a single shot. We're talking about cameras, of course, but there's this vague underlying complicity that suggests the philosophical scope of our discussion is perhaps far wider.
The people in the queue behind me shift noisily and start to cough.
Photo Service man continues to defend the merits of old-style cameras, oblivious.
I am British, therefore I am not oblivious to the impatience of the other customers, but I choose for once to ignore them. Because it's Friday, it's my special "I fought for this" day off, LB is with me, and I promised myself that I would never ever rush and stress on Fridays.

The photos are alive and spontaneous in a way that digital photos are not. It's hard to explain why. Maybe it's because, with the digital ones, you know deep-down that for every great one, there are 20 rejects.
Whereas here, it's just one shot, and, regardless of the little flaws, each moment is captured exactly the way it was.

Bowing to the Inevitable

One full week at crèche for LB =

4 runny noses,
4 hacking coughs,
2 funny tummies,
1 sick bucket
And an untold quantity of aching muscles.

Sounds like a modern version of the "12 days of Christmas", doesn't it?

Ah, dear. However much you know it's not your fault, however much you reason that you must work in order to pay for the roof over his little head... you can't quite shake the guilty feeling that you've thrust your little one into the lions' den of germs and viruses.

Going Round in Circles

Have you ever cycled to work on ice and snow, in –5°?

If the answer is no, I can report with some authority that such a venture is not actually as bad as it sounds. There seems to be a greater amount of public spiritedness on snowy days than on your average day, when cyclists are generally sprayed, honked or sent wobbling towards the curb by harassed drivers.

And, whilst I skidded along, I had a Profound Thought.

It went something like this: people who live in parts of the world where there is more to contend with physically (harsh climates, lower comfort levels, etc.) must have less time to think and ruminate about the small stuff. And there is something very intellectually liberating about devoting more time to the physical side of life. In fact, perhaps the slightly twisted downside of our machine-dominated society is that, when our muscles are underused, our mind starts to twitch...

OK, I admit, this Thought is not quite as profound or original as it first appeared.

But it’s hard to think clearly when you’re freezing and looking out for ice patches.

Which I guess is sort of the point…

The Animal Kingdom

Aside from the many other potential categorizations, I think that the population of France can be neatly divided into two groups: the dog lovers and the dog haters.
With all due respect to my dog-owning readers (there are at least two of you), I must hereby confess that my place is firmly in the second group.
And my feelings towards "man's best friend" have been reinforced since this morning's little incident at the boulangerie.

To set the scene: it's freezing, it's snowy, the bakery's so busy that there's a long line of people waiting out on the street for their Sunday morning baguette. BB and I join the queue.
A dog-fanatic and his THREE yapping friends join the queue right behind us.
Dogs scare BB: hence he starts to cry. Wail. Yowl.
This is not the part I'm complaining about, let me stress. I'm not so intolerant I think people shouldn't be allowed to own dogs or anything, you understand.

The plot thickens when it's our turn to step over the threshold into the bready warmth of the boulangerie.
Dog-man follows us in, even though he really should have waited for the next customer to leave, and that's how we find ourselves squashed into a too-small space: me, BB, dog-man, the three yapping dogs and about fifteen other customers.

The dogs go crazy, yapping around BB's feet, which promptly sends my boy hysterical.
This is the point at which my legitimate grumble begins: see, dog-man does absolutely nothing. Surely he can see that my kid is scared, right? Surely he has noticed that every other customer in there is staring at my wailing child?
Because he continues to stare wonderously at his three furry friends, totally ignoring us, I blurt out: "Look, would you mind moving your dogs away from my son, please?"
I required nothing more than a contrite "oh sorry, of course, yes, I see now that he looks terrified", but in the event, all I get is a black look and an indignant "How dare you speak to me in that tone? My dogs have a right to exist you know!"

Blood boiling, I gear up for the showdown. I was willing to be reasonable, but now the words "dogs are not people, you know, for god's sake!" are just itching their way across my tongue.
I refrain, because anyway, dog-man has flounced out of the shop in a huff, three waggly bottoms in tow.

"Hum!" I exclaim haughtily, looking around for some support. You know, a sympathetic smile from the other customers, a "tut tut" or something of the sort.
Nope. Nada.
What I get is a sea of hostile faces, a few black looks and a mumbled comment that seems to include the word "intolerant".

So I slink away with my baguette under my arm and my sniffling child, and a cold wind of opposition follows me out of the shop and down the road... as dog-man re-enters to the warmth of a sympathetic crowd.

Dogs: 1
Kids: 0

Chaos Reigns

Something quite remarkable has happened since I left work last summer. I don’t know if it’s the new office, the pot plant revolution or the series of financial scandals that have plagued the Firm over the past few years… but my colleagues have become – what’s the word? – cool.

They chat, they smile, they drink coffee, they leave early, they have a sense of perspective about their work, their priorities are elsewhere… In short, they have all turned into me!

So suddenly, instead of feeling like an anarchist among model employees, I actually feel strangely at home.

This is quite disconcerting.

I returned to the office on Thursday with one major objective: to brood quietly behind my computer screen until hometime.

In fact, I spent 3 hours conversing with my boss about the flaws of capitalism and the need to put one’s personal life first.

Could this shift in attitude be a side-effect of the economic meltdown?

If so, I can only say bravo! At last, something positive. Maybe the ordinary workers of the world are finally starting to unite and say enough! Conscientiousness is falling by the wayside: the office is mutating into a self-help discussion group with free coffee, heating and electricity.

It’s far from perfect, and I’d still rather be conversing with LB, but at least it’s not a constant charade anymore.

Buoyed up by this spirit of revolution, I decided on my first day back to cut down to just 3 days per week. It’ll cost me, but in return, I’ll get to stay at home with LB once a week. And how much will that be worth, when the big day of reckoning arrives?

Mmm, something tells me the answer is “priceless”.

Losing It

I haven't cried this much in a long time. Every morning when I leave LB at crèche for his brief "trial period", I end up in tears. Practically ever member of staff has had their arms around me at some point since Monday.
I am walking along quite serenely, and all of a sudden, my vision is blurred by yet another veil of tears.
I have reached hereto unknown levels of ridicule.
I feel that there's only one baby around here, and I'm it.

Today, it's that Sunday-night-after-the-holidays feeling multiplied by a thousand.

On the way back from a very successful play date with his friend J., BB sreams and cries like a maniac because he doesn't want to go home.
There's a great gaping hole in the car from where I smashed it on Monday, BB is screaming, my hands are gripping the steering wheel and I say nothing. I have no words of comfort to offer BB, because truth be told, if I wasn't an adult, I know that right about now, I'd also be screaming and crying from the depth of my lungs: Don't make me go! Don't make me go!

Meeting the Future Head On

So, yesterday we embarked on “adaptation week” at the crèche. There are only two wonderful days of freedom remaining before my return to the grindstone: The Firm awaits with open arms, a full inbox and monthly payslips that unfortunately only find their way to my bank account on the condition that I at least show up in the morning. It’s tough.
Officially, of course, adaptation week is so the baby can get used to his new surroundings. But as I make my weepy way to crèche with LB clutched to my chest, I’m pretty sure we all know that the person who really needs to adapt is Maman.

I see it in the sympathetic eyes of the staff, and the understanding smiles the other mums shoot me as our heavy hearts pass by in the corridor.
Truth is, it’s not just the separation I’m sad about. It’s the whole lifestyle: this cosy routine / non-routine of milk and coffee and cafés and walks and pyjamas until 11 if we feel like it. It’s the way LB looks at me, that little thrill that – I admit – runs through me when FH and BB leave for the day and baby and I are alone again to enjoy each other, and life. It’s listening to the radio in mid-morning, and mid-afternoon, discovering topics I’ll no longer have a need for when my days are once again devoted to the values of The Firm… and all that that entails.
I’ll miss being out of the loop. The freedom that comes with motherhood: this freedom which, to my immense surprise, I’ve seen emerge over the past few months from what previously seemed like a constraint.

So what do I do?
I do what I always seem to do when under emotional pressure or sleep-deprived: I smash up the car.
Yep, you did read that correctly.
I smash up the car, just like that, on the way to the crèche.

I would say (and the car can confirm) that my feelings towards adaptation week are pretty clear, wouldn’t you?

Picture This

Here’s why there are no photos of our week in Ile de Ré:

On the morning we leave Toulouse, the car is packed to the brim with all the Stuff (the capital S is required) we think we will need in order to spend 7 nights away from home with two offspring.

Said Stuff includes (at random): four towels, two prams, bed sheets, teddies, dummies (regular and back-up), jumpers of varying thicknesses, scarves, gloves, olive oil, butter, bread, kilo-size bags of pasta, etc, etc.

By the time we heave ourselves away from the curb, the car is so jam-packed that only two little pairs of eyes are visible among the heaps of things on the back seat. Good: the kids appear to be on-board.

We reflect briefly on the fact we purchased this “bigger” car only 8 months ago.

It seemed like such a daring move at the time.

And yet, we’re already thinking of trading it in for a small lorry.

And no, the punchline to this happy little tale is not the predictable “we forgot the camera”.

Oh no, we did much better than that.

We are such organised parents that we PLAN AHEAD and actually think to remove the camera battery and recharge it the night before we leave!

Then, of course, we throw the camera in with all the other Stuff.

“Did you remember to pack the camera?” we ask each other worriedly at the first traffic lights.

We stop to check. Yes of course we packed the camera: we are such organised people!

In fact, it is only as we line up the first happy holiday shot, two days later (a sort of breezy, here we are running and laughing, pink-cheeked on the beach, having fun shot) that we realise.

Sure, we packed the camera.

We just forgot to put the battery back in.

Back in Toulouse, that battery will be charged up for the year.

So, while we all wait with bated breath for the photos we managed to nab with our freshly purchased disposable camera, here are a few Ile de Ré shots from 2007 (we are two years younger: just pencil in a couple of dark circles and a few lines and you pretty much have the 2009 version…).