Perth - the things I need to say

At least half of my heart dwells thousands of miles away.  Thousands of miles which equate to days of travel costing thousands of unaffordable dollars... just to connect with half of my heart.  And the longer I am away from half of my heart, the more the distance grows.  Every day that I stay away, another connection grows weaker, another life moves on away from mine, another kindred-spirit risks tearing away from me forever.  Ghosts will gather in my heart and I will be left only with hauntings, severed cables dialling endlessly to lines that will never again be answered.

There are people who love this town.  I love some of the people who love this town.  And they can't understand why I hate it.  Yes, we are incredibly spoilt down here; the sunshine and the standard-of-living are difficult to find anywhere else on earth.  Yes, it is the place of my birth and my childhood.  But if I could have chosen my home-town, I would never have chosen this place.  For me the benefits, and the people I love who are attached to them, only make the pain worse - they are the things that keep me stuck here, they are both the gilding and the iron of my cage.  Some days, I wish for nothing more than to erase every memory of this place existing.

I am, against my will, tied to one of the most isolated cities on the planet.  And I cannot forgive this town for being that.

Some day we shall escape.  We shall find enough sunshine and enough money to sustain us on the other side of the world.  I will stay always with my closest loves, the core of my heart, my little family.  We will find a way to make a good life away from this hown-town which spoils us so cruelly.  I will reconnect with any segments of the half of my heart which remain intact.  And I will leave the other half of my heart behind... to tear, and sever, and fill me with different ghosts.

Operation: Nurture

Two months into motherhood and my brain is a little less fuzzy, but I have discovered it can only really focus on one topic - my son.  I am interested in all sorts of things still: I continue to (somewhat) follow world events, political happenings, the books I occasionally get time to read, and the lives of friends with not entirely feigned curiosity... even formulating (somewhat) intelligent opinions on such things.  But for anything outside of my personal and present experience of motherhood, I have only fleeting concentration.

And I have decided to stop fighting it.  Afterall, I did sign up for this parenting gig, it's probably a good thing that I am feeling rather involved in my new job.  Especially as it is by nature a thoroughly involving undertaking.

The only dilemma is the friendships I could lose as a result of throwing myself 100% into baby-brain, and the sort of friendships I could be left with.  Personally, prior to motherhood I had very little interest in pre-adult humans; even now the only baby I have much time for is my own.  So outside of my current circumstances, I have rather more affinity with the sort of people who aren't that into babies - ie exactly the sort of people I would bore the pants off just now; and the folk who love babies might be interested in my current circumstances, but their attitude concerns me - don't they know that babies are really BORING?

In any case, I don't have much choice.  The baby is here, and my baby-brain is here with him.  I have this important and VERY full-time job to do, and I'm trying to do it well... and if that means some entertaining people slip out of my life, and some strange baby-lovers in, then so be it.

So in this state, I was thinking about our job as parents the other night.  One thing that has struck me a few times is that he doesn't quite feel like "mine", even though he is clearly not anyone else's; and I realised it's because he doesn't belong to me - he belongs to himself.  At only 10 weeks new, we are amazed by how much of a 'person' he is; how much of an independent will and character he has, and how little control we have over it.  Yet it is surely our job to help shape him.

And I decided that baby is like a tree, and we are like the soil.  The basic components of 'who he is' are contained within the seed from which he grows, but how well he gets the opportunity to be the best version of himself is up to us.  We need to work out what specific 'nutrients' he needs to thrive - what best fits with this particular little life - changing the mix as his needs change.  We need to prop him up, and protect him from the harsh elements while he's growing, but allow him time in the sun, and remove the scaffolding before it becomes suffocating.  We need to bend with his seasons, learning from him when they are changing.  And if we get the balance right, then perhaps he can be as lush and magnificent a whatever-he-is as it is possible to be.

I got very excited by my analogy, but of course it doesn't actually tell us anything about the all-important 'who he is' bit that we need to figure out how best to nurture.  And as it seems to change every day it is rather tricky to get a hold of.  But we are throwing some emotional-fertiliser at the situation, and hoping for the best.  The smiles we get so far suggest we're not too far off.

Have Baby, Will Blog

Before giving birth I expressed curiosity over whether a baby would inspire me to write.  Well, here I am, writing... so I suppose we have an answer.  But do I have any words worth writing, that is the real question.

Firstly I must acknowledge how incredible it is that I am here at all.  All the parents and people-who-know-parents around us have been in awe of my relaxed and organised state.  It is thanks to a combination of having the most involved, loving, generous and just plain available partner in the known universe, and of being mother to the most relaxed baby I have ever heard of.  Reactions to the latter condition have ranged from highest praise, suggesting that our relaxed attitudes and superior parenting are the cause of our child's calm demeanour (hardly likely), to bitter jealousy.  Never fear jealous parents of difficult babies - he's only 5 1/2 weeks old, there's plenty of time and means yet for him to break mummy's heart.

So, here I am - has the little one given me anything to say?  Well... yes... and no.  About motherhood itself there is both too much and too little to say.  Motherhood is: exhausting, overwhelming, WONDEROUS... and boring as hell.  You don't want to know every detail of his development and my hours, and sometimes, neither do I.  But things are being written, so I must feel there is something to record.

Mostly what I find is that I am interested... a general feeling of interest in things, in understanding this job, and equally in the world outside of it... but my thoughts are scattered.  I'm pleased that things are being written - this blog, my diary, 'correspondence' (as I now refer to emails... it lends them a pleasing poetic weight don't you feel?), and even an attempt at a novel - but it is very difficult to complete a coherent idea, to string the links of thoughts together for analysis or even clarity.  My diary, for example, like my conversation, has some substance, but little structure.  Ideas are repeated, missed and poorly articulated.  A study of my pre and post-baby diary would reveal a sense of the time distortion and interrupted nature of parenthood by its format alone.  Once there was a narrative, and barely an edit to my words; now they come in bursts and dribbles and back-tracking, meandering muses, with sentences crossed-out, re-included then crossed-out again as I attempt to gather the threads of meaning together.

I am reminded of those cruel but fascinating experiments recording the resultant webs of spiders given drugs.  If words are my web, then my brain is on some serious narcotics.

On that thought, I'll end this piece and submit it for public scrutiny, noting that those on drugs are often fascinating to themselves, but tedious to any sane audience.