Sleep log

22:30 - nursed to sleep in own bed; 15 mins nursing
06:15 - (7h45) woke whimpering; called Meemee (clocks not changed!)
06:45 - nursed back to sleep after I *made* her take both sides for my comfort.
09:15 - (2h30) woke cheerful and chatty (8:15 today's time because the clocks changed)

Total nighttime sleep: 10h15 which is about perfect.
Longest sleep period: 7h45 omiGOD.

16:15 - napped on Rob's houlder / in buggy
18:15 - woke

Total daytime sleep: 2h00
Total sleep in 24 hours: 12h15 which is perfect.

Interview from hfnuala

1) If you could live anywhere, would you stay in Reading?
( Read more... )

2) Have you always written poetry or has it been a reaction to what happened to you?
( Read more... )

3) You've mentioned homeschooling. Are you on the unschooling end of the
axis or will you be more structured?
( Read more... )

4) I sometimes flipantly refer to my moving to London as 'running away' - was it like that for you?
( Read more... )

5) What single piece of advice would you give to someone about to become a parent?
( Read more... )

And so to sleep

Linnea had a mad, wild, exciting day with a whole new fan club, and has only just wound down and gone to sleep.

And I'm thinking about letter-writing. I need to write to the GP practice, about the GP who said that breastfeeding too much is bad for a stomach bug, and about the GP who made me take my bra off for a chest complaint only when I visited him alone, but not when Rob came too, and who didn't offer me a chaperone, and possibly to request that Rob, Linnea and I all be given the same damn' GP, and not the one who makes me cry, either...

And I need to write to the hospital, to find out why I was induced using the drip and not the gel, because I'd heard of people who had inductions and could WALK, and to find out why they don't just introduce a policy that the phrase "I have to examine you" shall henceforth cause uttering ob/gyns and midwives to implode, and to ask why it's apparently ok for medical personnel to walk into a room containing a female patient naked apart from a hospital gown, arms and legs akimbo, stirrupped and strapped, and not even introduce themselves, let alone ask her permission to be there, with a prime view of her public privates.

I need to write a long letter to the hospital - the timeline, and a detailed birth story, and a sheet of questions, and a cover letter, I think. It will need appendices at this rate.

And I need to make my "If I was a stay-at-home-mother you couldn't read this tshirt" tshirt, and see if I can find out how many women I know personally who had traumatic births with healthy babies and were told "Well, the baby's alright, and that's what matters." And who told them - I have a feeling, from half-remembered conversations and from my own family (including in-laws) that it's close family who say it, not distant but well-meaning acquaintances.

And I need to write to Arriva and the people through whom I booked my tickets, about not being allowed onto that train. I'm annoyed about that.

Justify!

The lovely man in the train station who responded to "I'm a full-time mum" with "That's a job in itself, of course," was trying hard to be nice. I mean, I'm sure he thought that parenting is hard work. But I was immediately defensive.

What I do is hard. Whenever people see me out with Rob, mind you, it looks easy, because I make him do all the running - I just sit around, whenever that's possible, which isn't actually all that often as a percentage of my actual life. But I've recently read "What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing" and it made me want to cry so often that I almost did, and in front of my mother, no less. The biggest thing it articulated for me is that there aren't any commonly-understood words for what I spend most of my time and energy doing.

There's no word for my job. I'm a mother - but so is every female who has borne or raised a child. It doesn't have much to do with whether the child was cared for 16 hours a day by a nanny or 12 hours a day by a nursery or 24 hours a day by the birth-mother or sent out for adoption after birth or adopted by the mother at birth or raised in a hippie commune.

I'm a non-working mother, which is so offensive that I don't use the term. I'm a full-time mother, which is deeply offensive about mothers who do have paying jobs as well as mothering (at least, I am pretty sure it'd offend me!). I'm a stay at home mother, so I spend more time out and about with my child than any "working" mother I know.

OK, so no word for my job except some which are inaccurate and dismissive.

What about my job description?

Full-time carer for infant. Responsibilities include washing, dressing, feeding, playing (ha!), singing, dancing, shopping for, laundering for, disciplining, teaching, guiding... comforting, cuddling, loving, being patient with, allowing space and time alone...

It's hard. I mean, what do I do? I can learn to draw horses upside-down on a moving train. I can wash crayon off a window with a wet-wipe while singing a finger-action rhyme to keep the baby from running away. I can learn the signals that command a game of "This Little Piggy Went To Market" and figure out whether I am playing it on her toes or she on mine. I can interpret baby-speak well enough that she practices until it's intelligible to other people. I know when she's sleepy or hungry or tired-but-sleepless and have a long, long list of Things To Try when a situation arises that needs to be dealt with.

I can do all of that in five minutes, easily. If she sleeps 12 hours a day, which I'm not sure happens very much, that's 144 5-minute sessions. I can't possibly log all I do in that time; so much of it happens concurrently, so much of it I have learned so well it's unconscious - almost instinctive, though I didn't have these instincts three years ago!

I'm a nutritionist too, though I may not be a very good one. I am a very good shoe-fitter, which is good, because not all trained shoe-fitters are and Linnea has funny feet. I can tell which clothes will fit her by looking.

I'm a mother, and I do all this...

And besides, I deal with the medical bureaucracy and the intermittent pain and the daily inconvenience of my birth injuries and the PTSD, which is a lot less ugly than it was a year ago, thank all the gods.

And the normal self-and-household maintenance that normal people with or without children do, making sure that neither I nor the kitchen becomes so filthy as to grow mould, that we don't get into hideous debt unless we have a good time doing so, that no-one's birthday is forgotten too often for the ties of friendship to remain unbroken (some of them are a bit frayed), and I write a bit to keep myself sane. And knitting, that's a new sane-keeper.

But I'm just a mother, although that's a job in itself, of course.

We need some new vocabulary.