Category: being

Fourteen years ago, my Dad had to ring me to tell me my Mum had died. I imagine it was a pretty shitty job.

So it was good that today, I got to spend a goodly amount of time with my Dad at the engagement party of a cousin who, it must clichedly be said, has never been happier. A cousin who, every now and then, thinks good things about my Mum. And every now and then, he thinks to mention these thoughts to us.

In fact, let me tell you, it was good that I got to spend time with my Dad. We’ve had good news this week. All of my uncles said isn’t it good and smiled in the way that brothers would. And all of my aunties gave me a hug. They’re good like that, my aunties are. They very often hold me in their arms and let the silence do the work.

And one day, maybe I’ll let my cousin know about the particular day he chose. But probably I won’t. It might tip the balance. Balance is a difficult thing.

And that explains why I have spent this week cleaning the laundry and sorting the kitchen drawers.

It’s lazy blogging, but here is a random collection of things written as they come to me and generally unedited:

• at the market last week, Opinionated Boy and I stood on the correct weight scales together, because I didn’t want anyone else to see my weight, but really wanted to check mine even though I know that I weight roughly quite a bit more than I used to. The young woman who got on after me weighed 45 kilos which actually made me feel better about myself. Still, I need to do more exercise;
• work-wise, things are really starting to come together for me, though if you were to say ‘so ThirdCat, what is it you actually do‘ I wouldn’t be able to tell you;
• doesn’t Bec’s party – and indeed Bec – look ace;
• we have finally managed to block off all the bat holes at the house in which I hope soon to be semi-living, but fully realise that my dream is still very much at the clouds stage;
• I see on the calendar there where the mister has written his name and the entry ‘fishing – Yorke Peninsula’ and am not at all sure whether this is a joke and he seems not be returning my texts on said calendar entry;
• Straight-Up-and-Down Boy is really growing up and it is breaking my heart at the same time it is making my heart sing;
• the unidentified difficult issues which I can’t really tell you about, because it’s not my business to be publishing such things on the internet are as good as they could be;
• Opinionated Boy is having a lot of trouble deciding what he is going to wear to the fairy party on Sunday – he has a skirt in a truly dreadful shade of pink and of a truly vile fabric which he often wears for dancing and I am supporting him in his decision to wear it even though I really don’t like pink, and I am quite annoyed with myself for even buying into this whole pink discussion (I think the thing putting him off is that everyone stares at him when he wears it);
• facebook really isn’t doing it for me;
• if you got The Age last weekend, the next time you share your bed with someone, you should put the magazine – the one with Barrack Obama – on top of your head when you get into bed tonight and then go psst – it is really funny;
• I have to go, because I have just got an email from someone which throws into some doubt that point above ‘work-wise, things are really starting to come together for me…’ *bangs head on table*.

Knowing the fragility of it all can wake you at 3 in the morning and leave you shivering for hours.

But equally, it can have you eating your tea, just your Dad and you, and noticing that when he speaks he holds his right arm across his stomach while you hold your left. And the next meal you share with someone is lunch across the table from your littlest boy, and isn’t it something, the way he speaks and the curl of his hair and the way he holds his fork, and for the whole of his sausage roll and all of your lentil pie, you really don’t care whether you’ll never have a career.

That’s what I was thinking at lunchtime today.

And then I had this afternoon and it brought amazing news.

And such are the extremes of the highs and lows in my life right now, I can’t tell whether the universe is conspiring for or against me and the people I love.

Or maybe luck just isn’t personal. And the deals that you make when you’re shivering are just deals that you make with yourself.

Whenever someone says ‘Therese Rein’ I can’t help thinking of this verse:

Claude Rains gave the order,
To collect the usual suspects,
And the camera came in close up on his face,
He watched as the plane left the airstrip,
Like hope leaves a dying man,
But he hung onto the choice he'd made.

which comes from a song, Claude Rains, by The Front Lawn, a group I very much enjoyed discovering when I lived in New Zealand and a song I very much enjoyed singing at the top of my voice.

It comes with a complex story, the gift of that CD. It’s around that time that my life became less simple than it had previously been. Today, I shall be listening to Classic FM and hoping that they play music which has, for me, no particular significance. It’s one of those days.

…used to be Wednesdays were as simple as double French in the mornings, triple English in the afternoons and just a bit of maths in the middle to be endured.

I’m sure it seemed much more complicated at the time. And I remember curling tongs having a significance beyond just ‘did I remember to turn them off’. But from here even the eternal embarrassment of being the fifteen year old ThirdCat doesn’t seem so bad.

Still, it’s nearly Easter. Eggs to be eaten, fish to be caught, beaches to be walked. It looks like the sun will be out, and at night, the glorious moon.

This Saving Babies show is making me think.

I’m not going to write a review of it, because I haven’t watched it. I’ve seen two ads and about ten seconds when I was unproductively flicking the other night and that was enough. I won’t be watching it. Because having had a baby whose first year was pretty much defined by surgery, I still have physical reactions – lurching stomach, ringing ears and some other things that don’t have words – when faced with the sight of babies surrounded by wires and tubes.

‘As if RPA wasn’t hard enough, who’s going to be watching that?’ I said to the mister. And he agreed with me. But, it seems that plenty of people did watch it. It was listed in Crikey’s wrap-up of ratings winners and then, in the television liftout of our weekend paper (yes, I read the television lift out of the Sunday Mail – think of me what you will), there was a letter to the editor which called this show ‘heartwarming’. I really hadn’t considered that people might enjoy watching it.

Until now, I’ve been aggressively disapproving of real-life medical shows. I had the same disdain for the people who might watch such shows as I do for people who say well, I would make a donation, but you just don’t know where the money goes without then finding out just where the money does go and perhaps making an informed decision. Or even thinking to themselves, well, I’m certainly not in a position to do that work for free, perhaps some of the money I donate will need to go on such things as paying staff, providing them with adequate working conditions and so on. But I think I digress.

There’s a lot of reasons for my aggressive disapproval. At it’s simplest and best, it is jealousy of, and/or anger with, people for whom hospitals are not heart-stoppingly painful, who can have their hospitals through such vicarious experience as television (tho I’m calm enough these days to wonder who those people might be, for just about everyone over 30 knows more about hospitals than they’d like to). And then, there was Extreme Makeover, clouding my judgement. If I tell you that my son had (has? I haven’t thought about that before – is fixing the same as cured?) craniosynostosis I’m sure you’ll forgive me for breaking out in sweat at just the mention of that show (update: the specific condition described here – a family’s site).

But because I spent a glorious day at WOMAD; my little boy is so far from his hospital experience that he just gave his dad a birthday card which says ‘dear Dad you are one big superhero’; and I’ve got tickets to Dylan Moran, I’m in a good and tolerant mood. So reading that letter to the editor, and foxing around the interwebs, I’ve had to modify my thoughts a bit (which is, of course, a whole different thing to changing my mind).

So, first up, Saving Babies isn’t Extreme Makeover. It has, for me, significantly more credibility than that. The presenter – and by the sounds of things one of the instigators of the program – has had experience in the whole fragile situation. This is an extremely important point. Being a mother doesn’t make you a gentler or more compassionate person (insert outdated Margaret Thatcher quip), but I think it would be fair to expect that someone who has been through a similar thing will have a more empathic than exploitative approach.

I am worried that the parents are approached at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives and yep, I reckon if they’d asked me I’d’ve said yes. Because at the time you are so grateful to the world. But again, I do think it’s important that the presenter has been through it. And these aren’t parents who have gone out looking for the publicity. They didn’t audition. They’re not looking for an on-going media gig. It’s more reality than most.

And if it’s not exploitative (and obviously, I can’t say whether it actually is or isn’t, not having actually watched it), then it could do some good, because what we need is more discussion about the shades of grey.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I got really, really, extremely so pissed off that I can’t tell you how pissed off I got, with the people who would end their ‘do you know if it’s a boy or a girl, oh another boy, no of course you don’t care’ platitudes with ‘as long as it’s healthy’. Maybe they were wishing me an awkward kind of luck, because of course none of us wanted to have another child facing that surgery. But to me, it was just such a dismissal of my eldest boy’s experiences. Of him. My child. I wouldn’t call a cranial vault reshaping the healthiest way to start your life, but it came with him and I couldn’t wish it away or dismiss it.

And because of that, the second time around, I drew very strict limits around the type of pre-natal testing that I would do. I didn’t, for example, take the serum screening test for Down Syndrome, but I did have the normal ultrasound scans. My reasons for this were many and complex. I wouldn’t have – at that stage of my life – terminated the pregnancy because I found out about Down Syndrome. Please do not read this as some sort of sign that I am on an anti-abortion crusade. Nor do I wish to romanticise disability, particularly Down Syndrome – that whole ‘oh they’re very loving people so I’ve heard’ makes my blood boil. If the ultrasound had shown anencephaly then I would have terminated the pregnancy. Straight away (I think so anyway – it’s hypothetical of course because I was never asked to make that choice). I think that if you’re pregnant, it’s your call. I also think that there are arguments for factoring in quality of life – at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end.

There are as many shades of grey as there are people on this earth. More. Because decisions you’d make at one point in your life wouldn’t be the same decisions you’d make in another. It’s complex, and getting more so, as our pre-natal testing becomes ever more sophisticated. They’re private decisions. But they’re social and collective ones too.

So, all of that’s okay. But for the last week, that ‘heartwarming’ letter has been niggling me. Hospitals do much more to your heart than warm them. It’s making me think that in this programme only happy endings will be allowed (and here, I can tell you, that even though I haven’t watched it, I have spoken to a friend who has). As a vehicle for highlighting the shades of grey a commercial television show has some very real limits because more than it’s a show, it’s a product. They need people to watch.

How long-term will the perspective of this programme be? Three months? Six months? A year? Even in my simple case, I realise I spent the next year – at least – recovering. I can’t speak for my little boy, and because he was just a little baby he can’t speak for himself on the matter either. But last year when his grandfather was facing surgery, my little boy said to me one night when I was tucking him in I’m worried that when (grandpa) wakes up he won’t be able to see his mum. Even the short-term become long-term things. What of the people – the parents and the children – whose lives become defined by continuous surgery, by lifting children long after they weigh ten kilograms, by the worry of what will happen when they – the parents – die?

And how many other perspectives does this programme leave out? Do they show the women who do decide to terminate pregnancies? Because there are many for whom this is the right thing to do. It’s a silly question, because the show is called Saving Babies, so that isn’t an area they’re even trying to explore and I’m not saying they should. I’m just saying on the one hand this and on the other hand that.

Happy endings aren’t all the same and we all have degrees of sad.

Perhaps if I watched the program I’d be able to discuss these things more lucidly, more credibly, more comrehensively. Perhaps I’d be able to speak in fewer shades of grey. But like I say. I’m not going to. Even not watching it hurts.

It is a headache which pulls instead of thumps. It begins in the night at the top of my neck – on the right – and pulls until it reaches the top of my eye.

The doctor has shown me the way it works on a plastic head she pulled from the shelf. She looked back through my notes, and asked me questions until I cried. They were the days of the lingering sad and I think she only asked two. But now, she could ask eight or ten or even twenty five. And the fifteen minutes would be up by then and she would not be recommending another appointment for next week.

The knot in my neck stirs my stomach and the pull on my eye leaves things blurred. It wakes me, sometimes, for three nights in a row. I wander around the house. I check the children, rubbing their foreheads, kissing their cheeks, wondering what they dream. If my head didn’t pull, I could work through the soft and quiet night. But if my head didn’t pull, I would sleep.

The headache will go. I start with yoga, then panadol, before I move to nurofen. But the only cure is time.

Sometimes, when it goes, I am drained and melancholy and if Damien Leith sings Hallelujah, I will cry. Sobs not tears.

But other times, I am light with the elation of release, and I sit on the couch chattering with the dreams which will come true. Tomorrow. When I’m not so tired.