In Praise of our Menfolk

No matter which way we look at it and whether we like it or not, we have evolved from a hunter gatherer society.  Since time immemorial, our roles as men and women are very different, very specialised and pertinent to the capabilities of our gender.  There is no getting away from the fact that we are very different.  Both mentally and physically.  We don’t think the same way, we don’t approach situations the same way and we don’t act the same way.   Men are simply physically stronger than women, and the argument could be made that some women are mentally stronger than men.  It’s widely known that men can’t multi task whereas women seem to do this with ease.  Think feeding the baby, talking on the phone and drinking coffee.  All at once.  When men take a phone call, they stand up to do it.  They stop peering at the computer screen to sign for a DHL document.  Genetics can be held to account for a lot of things; for example, eyebrows from Great Granddad Joe, or height from Great Aunt Maud, but it gets much more specific than that when it comes to the doing of everyday things. Let’s go back to the days of the caveman men, where they allegedly dragged their mate around by the hair.  Remember that Britvic ad- the original of the species?  Basically, men are the hunters, the providers.  Back then, light was natural and came from the sky; the only manmade light was due to a roaring great caveman fire and not a little switch on the wall.  Mr. Cave Man left at 9am carrying not a briefcase and a set of car keys but a club for bashing his prey.  According to Steve Biddulph in Raising Boys hunting was very much a team activity, requiring ruthlessness, a certain amount of recklessness and a lot of muscle work.  “Once the chase was on, there was no time for discussion.  Someone was in charge, and you did what you were told or else.”  So in other words, if he loses his concentration, he dies.  Multi-tasking had no safe place for men back in pre-historic times; the hunter could lose his concentration and die.  Back in the home place (some things never change) the work of the woman was equally important.  Who can argue that raising a family is one of the biggest and challenging jobs, and back then Mrs. Cave Woman did not have the luxury of television to keep the bairns occupied whilst she skinned a tiger for dinner.  The women folk had very different jobs to do; jobs that required dexterity which was handy for berry picking.  Women were sensitive which is necessary for childcare.  A bit like that movie “How to make an American Quilt” women had the opportunity for group discussions, similar to today’s stich and bitch sessions.  So in a nutshell, Mrs. Cave Woman’s work called for consistency, lots of caution and attention to detail.  Think feeding kids at regular intervals, making sure they are wearing suitable clothing and keeping little socks on little feet.  Mr. Cave Man’s job came with a certain amount of risk and danger to their lives. They needed to be ruthless and never take their eye off the ball or they could pay with their life and the family would perish as a result.  Because of the way cave women worked, evolution saw to it that our bodies became smaller.  But we are better able to continue and put up with things.  Men’s bodies were and still are superior when it comes to strength but small things like flu hits them harder than women.  Nice get out of jail clause there; don’t blame the men when they complain about man flu, blame the ancestors.  So back to today now that we’ve looked at where we came from and how we think.  When a woman discovers she is pregnant, especially with her first baby, she immediately starts nesting.  The house must be just so, the baby’s room has to be perfect and that nappy bucket which is on offer in Lidl at the weekend, is suddenly the most vital piece of baby equipment, why doesn’t he understand? And him, the poor feker, what he’s really thinking is, “shit!  How am I going to provide for this baby?  I might be unemployed next week!”  even when faced with The Big Stuff, our priorities are just different.  We’ve all got our own individual idiosyncrasies, our little quirks that drive each other mad.  But I reckon it’s easy to put up with half a dozen silly little things, like mucky boots trekked in over the floor, rolled up socks in the wash, changing the mirror in the car when he drives it (grrr!), not refilling the kettle, putting empty cartons back in the fridge and using the last of the shampoo. But who’s counting?    Years ago, it wasn’t the done thing for the man to be seen helping around the house.  Through no fault of their own, probably because they were never made do it, they didn’t know what a nappy looked like, let alone put one on a child.  But today it is expected of them.  And that is a good thing.    Most of our menfolk do it without argument.  So a lot of the time they may not do it the way we would like them to, but mismatching socks and the four year old wearing the two year olds clothes are not the end of the world.  Just comical.  In the same way that we as mothers are never going to change in our approach to raising our babies, the menfolk and their laid back attitude are pretty much set in stone too.  We have to accept them in pretty much the same fashion we expect them to accept us.       

Couldn't be Arsed-itis

I wrote this last week when I was going through a bit of a bad patch.  It seemed like the end of the world at the time, but reading back over it now, before posting, it seems to have lost its air of hopelessness.

I have a severe case of couldn’t be arsed-it is.  One of those ones that just sneaks up on you.  One day I was grand, running for Ireland and not feeling too deprived at being on a Lenten fast.  Then from out of nowhere, bam! I feel like a deflated balloon, I have no energy and just couldn’t be bothered.  I feel guilty because I didn’t go for a run this evening and now, as I type, I am stuffing my face with toast and Nutella Chocolate Spread. Fuck off Davina (McCaul) and Ruth (Field, author of Run Fat B!tch Run), I have a new best friend.  It’s called chocolate.   I feel like shite because today I roared at Screecher Creature No. 3 who is only a little over two and a half.  And in typical I-need-lots-of-reassurance fashion, he has spent the afternoon hugging the shit out of me.  I feel like a bad mother because I let the baby sleep for over two hours in his rock-a-tot this morning.  He is too big for the seat but we don’t have anything else at the moment and as he has the cold from hell, sleeping upright is the only way he can breathe without being suffocated in his own snot.  He has been waking up every couple of hours each night this week and nursing like a newborn which is why I am so bastard tired.   Things have come full circle for the fourth time and I recognise that he has reached that awareness of “shite! She’s not a part of me and must not be let out of my sight, even for a second,” stage.  Touched out?  Jesus that’s only the beginning.  I’m pissed off because, for the moment, I’ve had to give up my breakfast coffee and scone in the coffee shop.  And I miss my simple, daily interaction with the other patrons.  Some days, most days, it is the only adult conversation I get.  I can literally feel my brain cells, on these self-pitying days, keel over and die from lack of stimulation.   I am hugely dis-agreeable because last Friday I was unable to give five euros towards the schools voluntary contribution.  The next day, Saturday, Mister Husband and I, raided money boxes and scrabbled about on the floor of the car to scrape together four euros for a gym fee.  I’m pissed off because I didn’t bring Screecher Creature Numbers three and four to the doctor over the last fortnight because I didn’t have the money for it.  Although, small consolation this morning; the GP cards which we applied for almost a year ago, arrived in the post.  A week too late for Screecher Creature No. 4 who broke out in a frightening head to toe rash last Thursday.  I’m stressed out and pissed off at myself mainly.  Six years ago I jumped in at the deep end with this parenthood lark and I stayed there.  I never did find the delicate balance between being a mother and a person in my own right.  And now I fear it’s too late.  I’ve been “capable” and in charge for so long, I don’t think I know how to let go myself.    Noise levels are hurting my too sensitive brain.  The kids and their never-ending demands make me want to run for the hills.  Patience levels are at an all-time low.  Feelings of claustrophobia, anger, resentment, frustration, boredom, hopelessness and that all-encompassing bastard, tiredness, jangle my already tattered nerves and threaten to detonate an already simmering person.  There is no respite.  I hate myself because lately every day I wish the next five years would just go by in a flash.  I have no time for those who tell me not to wish it away.  They have come out the other side and find it easy to talk.  I do wish it away.  I think we all do at some stage.   I had a little moment this morning and cried at breakfast.  Part of me panicked and worried that it wasn’t my heart beating like mad but depression thumping to get back in.  This afternoon when I found myself running to the bedroom to grab a pillow, stuff my face into it and scream as loudly as I could, it wasn’t depression I feared, but madness.  I thought of the people who have approached me about my blog and used the word admire when speaking of the Serious Stuff and I thought how’s that for honesty.  Screaming your head off into a pillow at 4pm of an afternoon.  A glorious, sunny, March afternoon at that.  And in the midst of it all how can I explain what is wrong without sounding like a total and utter, drama queen, bitch diva?  Mister Husband has the world and his wife sitting on his shoulders with work at the moment and an illness in the family.  How can I tell him what I am feeling in the face of that?  How can I tell him that I wanted to run for the hills and never stop when it would be a slap in the face to him and all that he has worked for, to give us?  But you know what; I think it’s ok to feel like this.   Tomorrow will be another day and I will either still feel like shit or I’ll have gotten over myself.  The baby will peer at me through the bars of the cot, fuzzy red hair sticking up all over the place, dried snot all over his little face and perfect teeth flashing at me, a little hand reaching out through the bars, fingers wiggling hello.  Maybe he will make everything ok again and I’ll get up and get on with things the way I always do.  The way I have to because we all have our crap moments.  Children’s allowance is in on Tuesday and we’ll be grand for another couple of weeks until something else turns up.  Easter holidays are next week too.  Part of me is dreading them but if the weather is anything like it has been this week so far, we can do anything we want to.  Maybe even go swimming.  The Screecher Creatures would love that!  It’s ok to feel like crap.  And it’s ok to admit to it.  I suppose it’s what we do about it that’s the main thing.  For me, a banshee scream into a pillow helps (slightly).  I touched, very broadly on this at Group on Tuesday.  I mentioned that I am finding it all a bit much at the moment and am struggling to enjoy it when one of the other lovely mothers said “thank God.  I thought I was the only one who felt like that!”  Looks like I’m in good company!  On Thursday, in an effort to outrun the blues, I went to Carlow.  The Screecher Creatures were playing in a ride on bus when a little girl approached.  There was plenty of room so I invited her on to be the bus driver and I got talking to her mother. Aoife is a four year old twin with a nine year old big brother.  The gap, her mother confided, was a nice one especially when the girls arrived.  And then I heard a loud and distinct echo.  “There were days,” Aoife’s mammy said, “when I cried more than they did.” Words I have spoken out loud myself.  It was weird and strangely comforting to hear someone else say them.  There was a moment of companionable silent agreement.  It all passes though, Aoife’s mammy told me.  “It’s hard when you’re in the thick of it and you think it will never end, but it does.”  Thank you, Aoife’s mammy.  And thank you to all the wonderful mothers I have had the massive fortune to meet on “off” days such as the ones I have been feeling this week.                                                                                                            

The end of an Era

The passage of time in my kids’ growth was marked by two things this March. Earlier in the month Screecher Creature No. 4, the baby, who is only 11 months old, I feared, was starting to self-wean.  I meant feared, in the physical sense, for me.  I spent one day in a state of discomfort.  He was also teething so maybe that had something to do with the nursing strike.  He sometimes wakes at about 3am for a quick feed.  This is fine.  Of late, he hasn’t shown any interest in a morning feed when he wakes for the day preferring instead to have a huge bowl of Ready Brek.  It has been quite a number of months now since I fed him in public.  There is simply too much going on for him to risk missing anything for a breastfeed.  I feel like a big fake at my weekly breastfeeding group as I am the only “breastfeeding” mother there whose child does not want to breastfeed!  For a couple of nights he had been quite fussy.  Waking and grizzling over nothing in particular.  He hadn’t bothered nursing worth talking about that day.  His older brothers were all day time weaned by 13 months old but continued to night and morning feed for a further five months.  Being pregnant each time pushed the weaning process on a little bit as my supply had all but dried up. But because it was a gradual process with the others, I never had any discomfort.  That was not the case on that Friday.  I tried several times to feed him, bordering on forcing once or twice but he wasn’t having any.  In the literal sense.  I used to think I would be devastated at the end of this era.  The closing of a chapter in babyhood for him and maybe even motherhood for me as my small baby makes ever increasing advances towards toddlerhood.  But I am surprised to discover that I feel a little bit excited about it.   I am looking forward to the next stages in his life; crawling, cruising, walking and I am of the belief that weaning is an extension of that.    Breastfeeding is not just about food, there is a huge element of nurturing involved too.  I had thought, that because he is most likely our last baby, I would hang on a little longer with feeding him.  I did encourage the others to wean but had they put up any amount of resistance, I would have stopped immediately and allowed them to decide when they wanted to stop.  It never occurred to me that one of them would pip me to the post.  Sometimes it’s the child that wants to let go.  And on the same day, our eldest wanted to know why people called him by the shortened version of his name.  It is a nickname I have called him since birth and others have been following suit of late.  He said he didn’t like it and when I pressed him it appears he would prefer if his full and given title was used.  Even with me.   I was about to tell him that I have never used my full and proper name, neither has one of his aunties.  But I stopped.  He has a right to be called Conor and not Con if he wishes.  It’s going to be hard though.  How do I stop the habit of a lifetime?  A lifetime that has lasted 6 years.       

Post Script.  The nursing strike came to an end that same night but yes, it would seem that the weaning process is under way.  The feeds have definitely slowed down.  But I will continue for as long or as little as he likes.   The other boy has stopped his objection at being called Con, too.  Turns out that he just wanted to have more letters in his name!  And then two more things happened.  Our baby morphed from Screecher Creature No. 4 into the Creeper Crawler.  At 11 months and one week old, he took off.  Towards my lap top and anything else that caught his attention.  For me, once they are up and moving, they have entered toddlerhood, they are babies no more.  After that the world is their oyster and before you know it, they are being bundled into a uniform and brought to school.  Out into the big bad world.  Scary stuff.  For me!  Mister Husband knows someone whose wife keeps an empty cot in their bedroom.  I think it’s used for storage but she is not for moving it.   Their baby left that cot 7 years ago.  At the time I heard this I laughed.  And then, I got it.  Only a very small few baby items made it down through the ranks in our house.   One of these is a set of cot sheets.  One is a blue check and the other is a paler shade of grey.  It used to be white. Each of the Awesome Foursome slept on them.  Over the last 6 years snot, vomit, pee, poo and regurgitated breast milk have been washed out of them.  Last month during another clean out, these sheets were put into a bag along with old duvet covers and sheets to be used as dust sheets when we finally get around to painting.  I was upstairs last week and in a basin on the landing  was one of these sheets covered in dust and dried dirt where Mister Husband has used it on a clean-up operation.  I wanted to take it, wash it and put in in a memory box.  It really hit me.  My eyes filled up and I felt another chapter close in their lives.  God only knows the state I will be in when the newly Creeper Crawler eventually fully weans.

 

Mother Love

It may be very true that I have four small boys and have been busting a gut trying to care for them all over the past 6 years, but I have to come clean about something; being a mother is still a slightly alien concept to me.  I’m still waiting for that light bulb moment, for the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle to fit into place, for it all makes sense, because most days I’m feeling my way in the dark.  Blundering along, hoping that today will be the day they will eat what I cook and praying I won’t say or do anything awful that might threaten their future happiness and wellbeing.  Sometimes I say over and over again to myself, “I am a mother.  I am a mother.  I am a mother!” my thinking being that if I say it often enough, it will ring true. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I know I that I am a mother.  Who could forget when they hear their name being called eleventeen hundred times a day?  I didn’t take Mister Husbands name when we got married.  I kept my own as a last vestige of the old me.  But my name did change.  It is now “mammy” and I didn’t have to go the deed poll route to do it as previously thought.  I just had a child.  Had several.  When there are three little people, and one waiting in the wings, chorusing your name from dawn till dusk, you will begin to think “mammy” was the name you were given at birth yourself.  So how do you know when you’re a mother?  Is it when you’re looking at that positive result on a freshly pee’d on pregnancy test?  Is it at the first scan?  How about when you feel that first kick?  In utero that is, and not from your toddler!  Is it when you finally get to hold your baby?  I don’t think there is any one single thing that “makes” a mother, it’s a package deal.    I open my mouth sometimes and my own mother’s voice comes out. I catch myself coming out with expressions she used when we were little.  I dish them out on a daily basis to confused and slightly bored stares from the Screecher Creatures.  The most popular slash over used ones are: Am I talking to myself?  I’ve only got one pair of hands and, because I said so, that’s why!  She also liked to tell us that we were getting chopped straws and buttermilk for our dinner.  As far as I know we never sampled such a delicacy.  Quite often there were wigs on the green in our house too. When I was growing up my mother was just that; my mother.  I am ashamed to admit that to me, my mother was never really a person in her own right.  And similarly I didn’t see her with any rights of her own.  She was just there to do our biding.  It was her job.  I’m sure every child sees their main caregiver like that.  It’s only since my own family came along that we have become friends.  There is a definite shift in the relationship when a mother’s daughter becomes a mother herself.  For me, I saw my mother in a different light.  A brighter one.  She seemed to have a halo.  I have a newfound respect for everything she did for me and indeed, continues to do.  In a way, she seems to do more for me now that she is my boys’ nana.  Because she has been there herself I suppose and knows the lie of the land.  Sometimes I find myself doing a compare and contrast between the two of us.  I definitely have a more haphazard approach to parenting and all it entails.  The only time I ever saw my mother sit down to read a newspaper was on a Sunday afternoon when dinner was over.  She used to manage 10 minutes before her head would fall forward onto her chest.  I could never fathom how on earth she was able to do that – fall asleep.  Sitting up. In a chair.  Now I know.  I do it myself all the time.  It’s still a running joke between all of us that she will have to be surgically removed from her sweeping brush.  I have another memory of her coming to my aid when I was in school.  I had fallen and banged my face off a door frame.  As a result, I had lips celebrities pay good money for these days.  The wrong kind of lips that is to say, those of the infamous trout pout variety.  There wasn’t a phone in our house back then and my mother doesn’t drive.  To this day I still have no idea how she was contacted and reached the school to take me home.  I was but a child then.  Some years later, it was two days before my legal birthday and she was at my side again following another accident.  I have no recollection of how I came to be knocked from my bike but I do recall being woken by an excruciating pain in my smashed knee. Hers was the hand that was holding mine and she was crying.  I know I made her cry many times before that but hopefully not too many since.  She clattered me once.  There is no doubt in my mind I deserved it.  I have another strong and abiding memory of both my parents kicking up blue murder when my younger sister was wrongly accused of shoplifting in front of her school friends.  My parents insisted that the till roll be found.  It was and the shop manager was frogmarched by my parents over to the school and asked to withdraw the accusation and apologise to my sister in front of her class.  My parents are brilliant.  They did and still do a hard job with, it seems to me, ease.  I hope that when the time comes for me to stick up for my boys in whatever situation they find themselves, I have the grace and ability to do it as well as my parents did.  It might seem a little twee but I liked this quote the moment I saw it; to be a mother is to know your heart will forever walk outside your body.  This pretty much sums it up for me.  Mother love, there is nothing like it.