Post natal something or other.

I drew a cartoon with the above text about ten years ago. I tried scanning it this morning but the quality was really poor. I have a lot to say on this subject and I've just spent hours dicking around with all that stuff above so now I'll get on to what I really wanted to do - which is to reach out to anyone who might identify with what all that says.

Ten years ago my son was six, my daughter one. I couldn't say I had post natal depression. Saying you think you have post natal depression feels like saying you don't like being a mother. I couldn't separate the two. Now I can. I loved being a mother. I hated the drudgery that went with it. I loved the smell of my children, their perfect skin, the things they did and said, the way they lit up for me. Sometimes I found reserves of patience. Sometimes I didn't.

I hated that the white noise in my head wouldn't allow me to listen to music, the white noise of a cry, the constant demanding, tantrums. I hated that I never managed to achieve what I had hoped to achieve on any given day. I shrank my goals until they were tiny and I still failed. My world became tiny. The endless repetition of daily chores, the Sisyphean weight and pointlessness of them. It was like showing up for a job that I was massively under-qualified for and failing, day after day after day.

At some point I went under. I could neither breathe, nor scream.

Nobody knew.

The cartoon I drew was as close as I could get to saying it out loud. I showed everyone and they laughed and told me I was clever and I wondered that they couldn't see the terror in my eyes. Or the shame. The cartoon was me screaming.

I waited another three years to get help.

It's not like those years were joyless, they were just really hard. Harder than they should have been. Even today I play it down. "I think I had mild post natal depression" I say. I have massive difficulty owning it. I know women who had a much harder time than I did and I don't seem to be able let myself off the hook on that one. Just because other people were having a harder time than I was didn't mean I didn't need help.

I asked for help the day I felt my body catch up to my mind, it stopped coping. It refused step into line and continue pretending everything was okay. I started having panic attacks.

Yesterday, driving over the bridge into Freo the traffic stopped and I was next to a woman with two tiny children in the back seat of her car and I was hit by a wave of relief that those years are done for me, and, hard on the heels of that, a wave of grief that I hadn't enjoyed them as much as I could have.

Post natal depression doesn't mean you're a bad mother.

And just in case your mother or your husband or your mother-in-law or your sister never tells you that you are a wonderful mother could you please say it quietly to yourself now, because you are. Don't be afraid to ask for help.

Maturity.

Eleven year old is nagging and whining about wanting Facebook four years sooner than I am ready to allow it.

I explain that I need to see some maturity and that nagging and whining is not very mature.

The remainder of the day is comprised of:

Two hours of sulking and filthy looks aimed at me over a game of Mariocart.

4 hours of fun filled social activity.

Roughly 45 minutes of compliance, which is made up of doing what she's been asked to do without whining and then flagging how mature she's being in case I fail to notice.

"So, can I have Facebook now?"

"..."

"Can I have a back tickle?"

He was a Good Boy.

This is about the fifth time I’ve tried to write about this. The epic fail proportions of previous attempts might have something to do with the amount of alcohol consumed at the time. Alcohol consumed morosely, moribundly, lugubriously, lachrymosely – while listening to Josh Pyke on loop. Moribundly wasn’t even a word until now.

I met The Pilot at work; he had the desk next to mine. I was 31 and skinny on a diet of cigarettes, coffee and single parenthood. Jim was just two years old and I had gone back to work, delivering him (Jim) screaming and enraged to daycare each day and trying all day to stuff my blind terror into a place in my heart where it didn’t feel like it was ripping the flesh from my bones. There is no such place.

So The Pilot sat next to me and he has since admitted that he took up smoking to get to know me better. He had this nice way about him and he had a 23 year old girlfriend and that combination was always a lethal one for me – sweetness + unavailability = searing crush. I took to wearing pretty dresses to work and pretending my shit was together instead of all over the place and I postured as this calm, wise, HILARIOUS adult– i.e.: not a 23 year old girl.

So without deceit or lies or anything unseemly we managed to start seeing each other. The 23 year old had wandered off, all by herself, I didn’t even have to pour sugar in her petrol tank.

He had a dog-named Max; I had a kid called Jim.

I always called Max my step-dog and, on the whole, The Pilot did a much better job of taking on the role of stepfather to my son than I did of welcoming the dog to the fold.

Max, who patrolled the boundaries of the yard with his low growl and hound-from-hell bark. All. Fucking. Night.

Max, who buried his nose in the crutch of every visiting female and inhaled - deeply, un-selfconsciously, persistently.

Max, who mounted every visiting toddler and small child and, no matter that they were the wrong species, humped like there was no tomorrow.

Max, who seized the opportunity to devour a pooh dropped seconds before by a 1 year old having ‘nappy free time’ in the back yard, subsequently sending my father into a fit of dry-retching so violent it appeared life threatening.

And, while we’re on fecal material, in a chaotic moment when Jim was suffering from diarrhea and was being carried, bare-arsed, frantically, to somewhere his bum could be washed, Max ducks into the frame and LICKS THE DIARRHEA.

Seriously, how do you love that? Love as a verb, I mean. How?
But then there’s this.

Max, who endured being ridden around the back yard, who waited at the gate until the humans came home, who got brought home in the back of a paddy wagon (6 months ago) because he busted out one last time looking for bitches, and the police knocked at my door and were so sweet, like it was the nicest thing they’d had to do all day, bring home a dog so old he can barely stand but thinks he can still cut it with the ladies.

He learned how to smile. When we all got home from the school run he walked towards us in a kind of crab-like way, tail wagging furiously and the left side of his lip lifted in what could be mistaken for a snarl, but I knew he was smiling, and it made him snort.

In the last two years Max was pretty much stone-deaf. His talent for standing right where you needed to go, or sleeping where you were bound to trip over him (but if you’d seen him first, and stepped over him slowly, so as not to wake him – we had all got in the habit of pausing, mid-step, to check that his chest was still rising and falling, that he was still breathing, still alive) we’d stumble over him and cry out his name in frustration – but he couldn’t hear and just stood there, like a demented old person, probably wondering if he was related to any of us.

My sneezes managed to penetrate his hearing. He would be sound asleep in the back room (kitchen, living, family, i.e.: Life Room) and I would sneeze (loud) and Max wouldn’t so much as wake from his sleep as startle and leap, like a much younger dog, but then land on his hundred-year-old, unsteady legs and kind of stagger hurriedly outside. He didn’t hear “ahCHOO!” he heard “OUTSIDE!!” and it made us laugh and be sad all at the same time.

Max’s life was lived in parallel with me and The Pilot, he’s been on every holiday, exuding foul odor from the back of the car while our luggage was tied precariously to the roof, as much of a daily fixture as a favorite comfy chair - there, taken for granted, loved - sometimes distractedly, half-heartedly. I had my quiet moments of commune with him, after the kids were in bed and I sat outside with a glass of wine, Max would come and rest his head on my lap while I scratched the back of his ears and told him he was a good boy in the dumb voice I reserved for him.

Maxy died in January, one day before Anna’s 11th birthday. I wrapped him in a rug I made for her when she was a baby. We buried him under a tiny Poinciana tree with a ring of petunias at the bottom, in front of the chook house, keeping watch.

I have wept at the dog-food counter at the supermarket, I have wept when he failed to show at the gate, when I thought I heard him shake his collar, or heard his feet on the floorboards in the hallway. I polished the brass name disk on his collar and put it pride-of-place on display, so that all who visit might mourn with us. I sent out a text to our nearest and dearest to tell them the news and my phone was flooded with messages about his legendary appalling behaviour. I dug his grave (The Pilot was away), held him for one last long hug and we played a special Josh Pyke song for him.

Max is with us in stories.

Thank you, if you stuck with this.

One and a half decades later ...

This is about the fifteen year old. I fell pregnant with him when I was 28 and the circumstances weren't brilliant. I had just bought a little house (on my own) and his Dad and I weren't living together. We fought a lot.

I had a roof to put over this baby's head. It seemed that simple.

The nine months passed and I veered between a kind of bovine contentment and terrified panic. My pet budgie died and I thought that if I couldn't even keep a budgie alive my ability to keep a whole human alive was probably questionable.

I listened to the Pixies album, Trompe le Monde, incessantly. I painted The Whole House. I tore up the carpet. I sanded the floors with my Dad. The vacuum bag for collecting dust from the floor sander blew off and my Dad copped a giant cloud of dust in his sweaty face and was jarrah-coloured for the remainder of the day. We stopped at a pharmacy on the way back to his house, a filthy middle aged man covered in dust and his equally dust-covered pregnant daughter. We looked like something out of Deliverance. I wanted bath salts, thinking baths salts might wash away the dust and my abject terror. I was eight months pregnant.

I remember thinking that I had a due date to fall in love, that no matter what else was going on, this parcel of love would arrive sometime near the end of February.

I grew up because of him.

Early this week he approached me with a request to go to a gathering where there was to be no adult supervision. There would be alcohol. His gaze was frank and steady and he maintains this gaze while I fly around the room like a rapidly deflating balloon - exhaling panic.

Without spelling it out he is asking me to trust him. He knows he needs to sit back and endure my furrowed brow, the tightness of my smile - he lets me waver. He knows it will be a death-knock yes or no. He knows that I know who he is, his faith in that is strong.

He is sensible. He is honest and kind. He has humour in his bones.

All week I feel like a fish pulled from the comfort of water. I talk to other parents whose views rainbow from outright prohibition to a weary resignation - a knowing look on the pain of letting go.

I make one last stop, the Mother of a friend of his - her knowledge of him soundly objective. She describes my sensible, kind, funny, honest son to me. It's reassuring that he presents the same self to everyone - that he has nothing to hide.

"This is about faith isn't it?"
"Yep,"
"And trust?"
"Yep,"
"He'll be fine, right?"
"Yep,"

I call him and give him the go-ahead. And because I am nowhere near as cool as he is I get all shrill and spell out "This is about me trusting you, okay?".

I want to surround him with a magical, protective forcefield. One that repels dick-heads and danger.

"Ily," he says. I can hear the smile in it.
"Ily too,"

So right now it's 9am the next day and I imagine he's sleeping, maybe he watched the sun come up with his friends. And the only way I can get through this bit is to write about it.

I remember being fifteen, the years wouldn't go fast enough. It was impossible to imagine a time when I might wish they would slow down.

Wherein My Boobs Combat The Forces Of Darkness

I decide I need an outlet to write and then I have enough wine to puff up my faith in my ability to do so and then I do it and then I spend the next hundred hours tied up in knots that this is a roooolly narcissistic forum/space/format and who gives a shit what I think anyway? Blogging ...definitively defined by Gravel Farm thus: Blogging has an effect on society, very much like walking through a crowded shopping mall whilst wind-milling full nappies at arms length and shouting "LISTEN TO ME!" at the top of your shrill, shrill voice.

And then to prove how fucking narcissistic I am I check and check and check the stats page and run around the house shouting about my growing fan base in South Korea!! And Russia!! All this after the page views peaked at 6. Yes, 6, apart from that day they went up to 37, which, when illustrated in graph form, makes all the 6 days look like crap by comparison and then I decide to stick to writing doggerel on kitchen paper. And sucking my thumb.

But here's a bit of news anyway.

The fifteen year old spent most of Friday hurling, all 6'2" of him folded (concertina'd?) into the loo, knees at odd angles, making that hhhhhherrr(sploosh)noise. Then roaring temperature, then sleep.

And because I worked in a newsroom for nearly twenty years I am instantly able to diagnose this as a terrible case of Imminent Death. So I lie awake upstairs wondering if Imminent Death is quiet. My Ability To Worry Unnecessarily collides with my Horror At Making A Fuss and the two of them wrestle me into a fitful sleep ... and then ...

3am

the sound of terrible gasping and thundering footsteps and a giraffe-like, semi-nude 15 y/o has escaped its enclosure and is leaking nightmares all over the house. A sight slightly less alarming than the looby-boobed, semi-nude mother who runs downstairs, making a mental note that her tits 'clap' when unrestrained and in a hurry.

So the two of us parents coral the still asleep kid into the kitchen while he remains in the grip of unseen forces of darkness (using his super-swearing-power for defense). In my distress I hug him and am smartly told that if the kid wakes up while his semi-nude, looby-boobed mother is hugging him, the forces of darkness currently terrifying him are going to seem like Mary Poppins by comparison.

So I wait until the morning to tell him all about it, especially the 'clapping' part -just to make sure he appreciates the good days.

All I know is that whatever was in that mirror wasn't related to me genetically.

Pretty much everything I do is poorly thought out. Like my Brazilian. I am on the record about Brazilians already. I am also a hypocrite. That I was young and hot when a good, honest muff was ... a good, honest muff is a thing I am eternally grateful for, in a zeitgeisty way. I'm not sure what came over me, maybe it was one of those 12 days each year when ovulation sends signals out from my middle-aged reproductive organs to my middle-aged girl parts, signals that scream DO. IT (sex). NOW. Or else.

So there I was, frothing at the mouth, husband due home the following day, possessed by a succubus with a wont for hairlessness.

So here's the entire planning stage. I call exactly one friend who might know about such a thing and a font of rapid-fire knowledge she turns out to be. I am instructed to avoid beauty salons in middle-class neighbourhoods like the fucking plague. She says "Bogan chicks are the best, they don't judge you." So I'm thinking that, with my knees splayed and my bush offered up to the Gods of personal grooming, it would be nice to not be judged. I think my life probably depends on it. It is actually possible to die of shame. Bush shame.

So I find a salon as per instruction and my practitioner turns out to be a young woman whose teeth appear to be trying to escape from her skull. All of them. Independently. Pointing separate ways out of her mouth. Throughout the 'procedure' she calls me 'Hun.' I love her for this, until I think she might be taking the piss out of me and the reference is Post Attila, like in some sick way the reward for her plundering my nethers is getting to hear me scream about it.

At some stage I am instructed as to the different *hair-styles* that come under the broad label of Brazilian. This is too confusing. I hadn't planned for this. 'Landing Strips' and 'Triangles' are discussed and due to the fact that the whites of my eyes are probably freaking her out, she chooses to get on with The Procedure and ignore the gibbering wreck splayed on the table before her.

People in the next state heard my screams. My screams were measurable on a Richter Scale. Joan Sutherland (R.I.P.) couldn't have screamed the notes I screamed. Jesus. H. Motherfucking. Christ.

This is beauty?

At this point in proceedings I'd like to point out that I HAD TWO BABIES WITH ONLY FOUR PARACETAMOL FOR PAIN RELIEF (ie: 2 per kid). And that maybe my pain threshold was so severely crossed on both of those occasions that my willingness to endure ANY MORE PAIN is zero. Mano-a-mano ... this is cool between us, right? You understand, yeah?

Somewhere in the middle of the ordeal my practitioner has returned to the whole Triangle versus Landing Strip discussion wherein I have responded in tongues and told her her mother sucks cocks in hell, or something, because it wasn't until I got home that I discovered ... one side: Landing Strip, other side: Triangle. Close your eyes and take a moment to picture that. One side STRAIGHT, other side ISOSCELES TRIANGLE ANGLE.

And then she holds up a mirror and shows me what appears to be a Purple People Eater with a totally cockeyed hair-do. All I know is that whatever was in that mirror wasn't related to me genetically and if a sharp toothed baby alien had shot out of it and bitten my tits off I wouldn't have been surprised.

More screaming.

For this I paid forty-five bucks?

I will never, ever be ungrateful for any job I have held in the past or might hold in the future. Including motherhood.

All of this is small fry. Here is the Stay Up Late Telling Scary Stories part. I decide to tell my Mother about it (more of that poor planning mentioned earlier).

And she says ...

"Ooooh, I shaved mine off when I started seeing X and I felt like a LITTLE GIRL."

Condolences welcome.

Breastfeeding and the perilous descent of a pair of rectangular tits.

Found this old thing lying around, I drew it in 2001 when Bloss was 12 months old. Things have got a whole lot worse. It's like an old photo that you hated at the time and look at now and think, hey, I was hot!

I'm trying to drum up the courage to talk about that lopsided Brazillian. You'll have to beg me.