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• O hai, Australia. #4am feed #
• Millie now has entry rights to that part of the living room inaccessible to the other dogs, the better to keep watch over Anna and me. #
• It is my observation that whereas you or I would feel sad, the baby gets furious. This seems to me a good quality to have. #
• Oh Anne Tolley. Your tizzes are powered by the righteous anger of a thousand suburbs. #
• http://twitvid.com/G1C9Y – Some people dispute whether fun can be had in Ashburton. We had it in the public gardens on a sunny Tuesday. #
• This evening, Rosie and Jackie were allowed on the couch with Millie for some special baby-guarding. http://flic.kr/p/8vgynH #
• http://twitvid.com/CFF6T – Some people dispute whether fun can be had in Ashburton. We had it in the public gardens on a sunny Tuesday. #
• Anna is starting to reach and grab things at random. Exhibit A: your collar. Her right hook looks mean but fails, as yet, to pack a punch. #
• We’re off to North Otago for a long weekend tomorrow. All travel tips for babies (including from the childfree) welcome, starting … now! #
• Thank you all for your travel advice, which was notable for its consistency. Looking forward to hoisting Anna above various ancestral spots. #
• We made it! Anna chillin’ in Waianakarua, ancestral home. http://moby.to/tna1zn #
• We’re staying at the Mill House where Anna’s great-great-great-grandfather was once a partner in the mill. #
• South of Oamaru were big patches of standing water – relics of the flood? #
• Just realised that thanks to harvestbaby I am achieving my wish of seeing the dawn more often. Hmmm #
• The wish never included being covered in baby pee, but it’s important not to be too specific with wishes. #
• The soporific power of staring at the ceiling. http://moby.to/xe0l6y #
• We are at Whitestone Cheese. Can’t talk; will soon be eating. #
• Before (cheese) http://moby.to/nkt8er #
• After (cheese) http://moby.to/iearec #
• Whisky company in receivership. @knedd inconsolable. #
• Consuming first Summer Ale since my honeymoon #mmmm #
• A few of my favourite things … http://moby.to/68g37l #
• Apparently Tyne St in the historic harbourside is where Oamaru’s dudes of all ages cruise their cars on a Sat afternoon. #
• Hey @gtiso, Herakles is exhibiting at the Forrester Gallery! #
• Just passed for the 3rd time by 2 middle-aged dudes towing a boat in a 4X4 playing doof-doof music. #
• In Charles Brasch’s (and Grandad Clayton’s) day it was to here that the Waitaki Boys took their morning run. http://moby.to/v71rex #

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In response to this post:

Papa Freud
or mama writer
dance atop
that leaky cap.

All kinds of fluids
seep and spatter
all kinds of fears
are here, on tap.

To stop them now’s
an urgent folly
the barons’ mess
an oily trap.

And in response to this most recent post:

Plangent or strident, the laughter of Foucault,

heard late at night from the after-hours exit.

Such a perfect storm, the “gay cancer” story

it was too good a tale to belie the truth.

Book Foucault’s ghost a direct flight to Asia;

put him down for a tummy tuck and lipo, no extra.

The world brought down by petty bourgeoisie:

too bad to be lying, too good to pass up.

From her birth-day, poured as if from a pan of batter into the crib (although I can assure you that was not the experience at the time)

to one who could go — and sleep — anywhere

to this bright spark who craves attention and entertainment (here looking at me at her grandparents’ house).

What is it like?  It is a complete rethinking and re-experiencing of the passing of time.  It is giving up the ego and going with the flow.  It has, I realised yesterday, taken me ten weeks to unwind from my paid employment.  That’s one week for every year I’ve been working there, plus an extra week.  The recession of the minutiae of employment has allowed for the minutiae of baby-care to come to the fore.  Come mid-October, I shall have to juggle both.  I do not quite know how I am going to do this, other than that it will be different from anything I’ve done before.

I have been thinking this week about the dynamics of shared parenting.  The señor and I undertook this dynastic enterprise with the understanding that all decisions would be made together.  This reflected, we hoped, the character of our relationship as it was prior to the baby’s birth, and seemed best suited to the fact that we would likely be equally involved in work and childcare together.  Even though I would eventually work more hours, I would also (we hoped) be feeding the baby, so the balance of power was fairly even.  In this fashion, the baby would have two primary caregivers, rather than a more traditional model in which one parent (or “mother”) assumes responsibility for the day-to-day parenting, and the other parent works fulltime.

This is working well, but it has some interesting consequences too.  We live in a household of cheerful banter and frequent disagreement.  Until now this has largely been over politics and aesthetics.  Furious arguments have been rare (although the one about interpreting The Mummy 3 was as angry as it was unexpected).  When the differences of opinion are occurring over baby care, however, the stakes are much higher.  We have realised, perhaps with irony rather than chagrin, that the primal desire to protect the baby from that which threatens her is most frequently activated against each other.  And since there is no sole primary caregiver to whom the final say defaults, there is often the risk that simple decisions turn into negotiating the Paris peace accord.

This is often as funny as it is exhausting, except when it’s not.

I will draw a veil over the more strident disagreements and tell you instead the story of the foldover booties.  Let me start by saying I concede the señor has the moral high ground in this.  He is, I observe, driven by the concern that the baby not be too hot or too cold.  (Keeping the room at the right temperature for newborn puppies has, I will add, nothing on keeping a baby at the correct temperature).  Every hair on the back of his hands is now a draft sensor; the condensation on his skin a temperature gauge.  I cannot confess parity in any specific focus of the baby’s wellbeing, perhaps because my care largely defaults to the pragmatic, close contact task of being the village dairy.  In a context straight out of my doll-packed childhood, however, I am obsessed with coordinating what the baby is wearing.  She must look sharp and, regrettably, one of chief concerns about going back to work is sometimes that the señor will not uphold this care to the extent that I think necessary, when his turn to look after her fulltime succeeds mine.

This brings us to the matter of the foldover booties themselves.  They are knitted, have two tiny embroidered roses atop each foot (pink, in this case, although the mythical blue roses are also available for other-gendered babies), tie tightly (and thus stay on securely) and have a moss-stitch foldover that gives the impression of a little shoe.  They are, for those who care about such things, adorable.  The decorative stitch on the foldover is of course lost, or rather, the less-decorative reverse displayed, if the bootie is not worn correctly.

A feature of baby clothes is that, unless all-in-one, they ride up.  Even the best fitted nappies are bulky and the baby’s arms and legs slim in relation to their torso.  The general business of lifting baby and putting her down means that leggings or trousers worn over booties will often expose the baby’s ankle — hence the usual high-riding nature of baby socks or booties.  The exposed ankle of a baby is of course susceptible to draughts.

Thus it was recently that I dressed the baby in the foldover booties as part of an outfit of carefully-executed coordination.  And thus it was that the señor, fearing the effect of draughts on that centimetre of ankle exposed to the air as the baby’s leggings rode up, unfolded the decorative stitched bootie-top.  And thus it was that I, throughout a busy morning of entertaining visitors and entertaining the baby, folded down the bootie-tops (and adjusted the leggings too; I am not completely cruel) each time I held the baby.  And thus it was that the señor, taking the baby, folded them back up.

This is as much as a metaphor for the experience of shared parenting, I think, as it is a true story.  It is no doubt exacerbated by the baby’s limited agency and communicative range (when she is older, she can choose her own footwear and wear it how she wishes, if I can bear to let her).  I cannot take pride in my tenacity on this particular issue, but it is how I have been acting.  What can one say?  Love is a battlefield.

I think this would be much harder if we did not already draw a certain amount of our relationship’s energy from disagreement.  Since I come from a work environment in which battles are necessarily harder-hitting and more pitched, home is a safe space in which to have out all kinds of irritants that must elsewhere be stoically borne.  But the stakes are high when our daughter is the catalyst and we are learning quickly, I think, to pull back from accelerating into what might not easily be taken back, disputes over both the trivial and the serious.  It is a working reminder that, in practice, compromise is not a form of consensus so much as it is giving both partners an equal go at having their way.

I would say, therefore, that having a baby could be described as business as usual, relationship-wise, but a hundred times more intense.  The realisation that we would, if pushed, go to war with each other for what we thought was best for the baby (bootie-battles not included) was quite sobering.  What would this be like in a domestic situation where the balance were already tipped in one partner’s favour, if that one were more belligerent, wealthier or had some other kind of greater capital in the relationship?  The scenario of which one hears, in which a baby is born in order to save a relationship already faltering, must surely be fraught.  As for us, I feel in some ways that this is what higher education is for: the ability to see a situation from all sides, to stand outside one’s own point of view even as one defends it with determination (and even evidence) but also to concede graciously for the sake of a higher goal if the argument is not in one’s favour.  In the home, however, the Socratic method is rather more short on time than in the academy.  The baby is hungry; the baby is windy; the baby needs changing; the baby is sleepy.  This beloved, bright-eyed, longed-for face is our arbiter, our fundamental, the great disperser of all our petty claims to sovereignty.  Moreover, she’s nice and warm and she looks plenty sharp.

• My bet is that Anna will have @knedd’s hair colour. In the light there is a definite red-brown tint. #
• The way in which, at primary school, kids would say, “ew, you’re mental”? That’s the kind of mental I feel today #specialmamamental #
• I reckon that, as children, we really believed that mental institutions were for people behaving oddly under stress. “Go back to Sunnyside”. #
• Robin Hyde had a great fear of being admitted to Porirua in the 1930s. Even among patients in the system such as she, it had a fearsome rep #
• And yet I remember Meg Campbell talking in a TV interview about Porirua as a place of respite for her in the worst of her depressions. #
• When I first got ill at 17 my parents were advised by a psychiatrist at Sunnyside to do everything they could to (cont) http://tl.gd/35i7cl #
• That was not so much a feed as a War on Milk. #
• Miss Anna Claire is now two months old. Huzzah! http://twitpic.com/2fjnf7 #
• Today at parents’ group we learned baby CPR and how to stop choking. No Heimlich manoeuvre, sadly, until baby is 1 year old. #
• Have signed up for this: http://www.envirocomp.co.nz/. Only in Canterbury! The technology is patented as HotRot. #
• I understand the well child provider’s attention to percentiles, but I miss the getting-to-know-the-baby atmosphere of my midwife’s care. #
• This is what happens, Larry! (I do <3 this fillum) #

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Less this be too obtuse, I should be clearer.  I am thinking about pregnant women, and women bereaved of their babies or their foetuses or denied their fertility, and of women too who make the vexed and private decision by which pregnancies don’t continue.  I don’t want these baby-centred entries to be a source of pain for those whose experiences of fertility, natality and maternity have turned out differently from mine, and I don’t want this narrating of the fog of motherhood to obscure those other stories.  This is all part, I suppose, of being what I am increasingly thinking of as a conscious writer (which is different — shut up — from all things to all people, or second guessing my reader).

I’ve been looking for some way in which I could acknowledge and reflect on all of this without sounding too heavy-handed, too overbearing.  As is often the case with writing online, however, I’ve found a source in which someone else has done this first and in a manner comprehensive enough that I need only point to it to signal my own feelings.

Anjum Rahman is keeping a Ramadan Diary, of which her second day was concerned with meditations on birth, concerning which she adds “i mean to include pregnancy and the couple of months after birth as well”.  Her theme is her own personal gratitude, which is a little different from mine here.  It’s the way, however, in which she casts her net that parallels the way in which I want also to be mindful, from how “society places so little value on women who don’t have children” to “having control over the birthing process”.

The first point I would further refine to something like this: the mainstream social narrative assumes child-bearing and -rearing as a goal for most women and foists scrutiny of varying intensity, from passing curiosity to ongoing suspicion, on those who don’t, won’t or can’t share this aim. Of the latter point I say heck yes, particularly in regard to how

this is something that is special for nz women, that we can discuss with our midwives how we want our birth experience to be, we are able to make informed choices without being dictated to. my birthing plan was really simple: i told my midwife that i wanted every possible drug available during labour, and i wanted those drugs at the earliest possible time.

(Of my own memory of labour, my midwife’s serene declaration that “it’s time for an epidural” brought me the closest to theism, or at least goddess-worship, that I have been in a long time.)

There’s this, too:

i think of all the women who have died in childbirth, and or have had their child die. i think of the women who have had to go through labour far away from medical care or any kind of pain-killing drugs. i think of the women who bring children in this world knowing that they don’t have the means to feed them, or knowing they live in the midst of war and violence. i think of women who have the responsibilty of raising a child with disabilities, and of the particular pressures that brings. i think about the women who have been forced to adopt or to part with their child soon after birth.

Parturition dragged to the surface my bleeding liberal heart; the things above were the things about which I cried during my stay in hospital, far more than the pathos of the harvestbaby’s difficult start.  I don’t suppose I was the first mother to express distress at the thought of all those other babies and mothers being born and dying with so little of what they need, but it was unusual enough for the staff midwife to raise an eyebrow and say, “well, we can’t do anything about that but we can help you with your baby”.

The happiness of one so easily rides roughshod over the suffering of another, and it’s my continual returning to this that leads me to agree with Anjum about how “it is impossible to quantify the magnitude of my privilege when it comes to issues around pregnancy and childbirth”.  The señor and I sing cheerfully along with Weezer that in future “so much pain may come our way” (and it’s probably best for everyone that I don’t attempt a post on my attempts to be mindful of the ephemerality of the moment) and yet that bed of privilege is here.  That said, if the experience of this baby can strengthen connection, can strengthen empathy with others whose experiences have been different, then this post attempts, clumsily nonetheless, to draw a line to that.  Gratuitous embedding of favoured non-baby love song, cited above, occurs below.

• Ours is a household of shared interests. http://flic.kr/p/8qrCW1 #
• The end of the witching hour, last night. Not pictured: crying photographer. http://flic.kr/p/8qovDK #
• Is anybody else with bluehost.com, and if so, are your sites also down? #
• 4 feeds in 7 hours and then she smiles at me. The baby is a mistress of manipulation. #
• Also, after nearly 8 weeks, I am still having ‘I have a baby?’ moments. #
• The baby meanwhile clasps her fingers and surveys her loyal subjects through a milky haze. #
• Identifying the source of title quotes at @danylmc’s Dim-Post = a favourite daily sport. http://bit.ly/d4J3fY = http://youtu.be/JwBcfXf2FmQ #
• Does Anna prefer Pears singing Britten’s folksong arrangements to me? My versions lack the mid-century sexual tension for sure. #experiment #
• “if the world on you should frown/ your topknot must come down/ to a linsey-wolsey gown/ where is then your glory?” #rejectioncomebacks #
• O Waly Waly has put her to sleep. Pears has it on this one: I don’t sing sustained ascending phrases very well. #
• Anna is becoming self-burping, at a volume indistinguishable from a 90kg bloke. #
• Anna has been staring at the white/black picture book for an hour. I’ve switched it to the black/white side so she can see how it ends. #
• Anna’s Cafe ex-Northlands (?), now Tower Junction. No discount for complementary infant eponymity. #
• Asparagus roll in the tearoom style, coffee mid-90s. #
• To the customer following us: would you like marshmallows with your mocha? #
• 3 1/2 hours to settle my daughter, including 2 power feeds. How do folk with multiple chil’ns do it? #
• The harvestmother has tactfully observed that Rosie and Jackie are more “rambunctious” than other puppies we have raised. #wilddogs #
• Briefly thought @chanelhughes was telling me a story about a 27-year old virgin, and then realised she said surgeon. #
• Arthur the Norwich Terrier, aged 10, has got a terrific racket going in forbidden things that look like they were done by the puppies. #
• It is my contention that all knitted baby cardies make them look like a sharp dude from the 50s. http://flic.kr/p/8ryoGr #
• My latest post (previous tweet) I dedicate to Ms @robyngallagher. #
• Since I had the harvestbaby I enjoy watching E!, unironically, in the evenings. Baby-curious childfree women, let this be a warning. #
• The leader of the Sockburn Sharpies. See http://harvestbird.tumblr.com/post/940934608/sharp-talk for context. http://twitpic.com/2e5hq3 #
• Playing Tchaik 5 for the baby & remembering long postgrad musicological arguments about whether C19 Russian romanticism = kitsch. #
• All this and she still had time to give the harvestbaby a little blue cardie: http://www.comsdev.canterbury.ac.nz/news/2010/100806a.shtml #
• My mother brought me a Mr Messy mug today. He was my first Mr Men book when I was a wee one. Other inferences likely also apt. #
• These young women on #NZNTM seem so raw to me. They are like self-surveilling colts. #
• It also seems both unethical and creepy for the hosts to make sport of the contestants to the extent they do. #NZNTM #
• Furthermore, I’m surprised at the extent to which Auckland seems like a large and intimidating place to so many of the contestants. #NZNTM #
• In my job, if you make a 17 year old cry, UR doin it Wrong. #NZNTM #
• Mind you, in my job, there is also no such thing as overthinking it. #NZNTM #
• After a day of small milestones, Emo Mummy has a 1/2 glass of wine, says ‘I have a little baby’ and bursts into tears. #
• All feels equilibrious with a 5am feed. Hello my Northern Hemisphere & drinking tweeps! #
• It’s been a morning of eruptions and irruptions, of miscues and missed cues. #
• The Warewhare has a loss-leading special on boxes of [brand redacted] nappies. We now have enough to hide them around friends’ houses. #

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Does anyone want spoons?  Because I’ve got shitloads.

My worry that the local audience would be unfamiliar with the viewer conventions and thus look uncool in front of my visitor from the north was unfounded.  Robyn’s offer of the hand-gathered spoils of the Paramount screening was eagerly taken up by our fellow adventurers in viewing.  One or two had come in costume as the mysterious Mr Wiseau, which added to my sense of anticipation.  (There was also a sense of passing regret that my choice of career, together with the fact that a senior colleague and her partner were sitting just behind me, make it largely impossible for me to say “shitloads” to an audience of strangers.  Still, that is what friends are for.)

To what can I compare the viewing experience?  In some ways it reminded me of seeing the remastered 36th Chamber of Shaolin at the Wellington festival six years ago with Faith and Gee.  Faith and I loved it but also laughed all the way through, a curious combination of “at” and “with” in the viewing (and that film is generally considered “good” not “bad”).  When we left, Gee pointed out we were largely the only ones laughing.  In The Room, the levity was the same, but shared by the whole audience.  Ms. Gallagher was the master meta-narrator, interjecting regularly with the asides of the experienced viewer — “Meanwhile, back in San Francisco…” — that both delighted those around us and goaded them, occasionally, to try their own.

Why is @harvestbird awesome? Because she used her ESL education knowledge to analyse Tommy Wiseau’s unusual phrasing in The Room’s script. #

I don’t want to attempt a comprehensive analysis of the film, primarily due to baby-brain but also for two other reasons: because, as @adzebill remarked when we ran into each other the next day, “there’s a lot in it” but also because I think its analysis is being well done in the cloud already, partial considerations coming together to form a conversational whole.  As well as Robyn’s essay linked above, you may also wish to read Danyl’s notes at the Dim Post and John-Paul’s essay at Man of Errors which also links to this valuable (pdf) article.

One key, I think, to understanding why the film plays in the way that it does is to remember that the screenplay is by Wiseau, the auteur, himself: clearly a man who has learned English as a second language, possibly as an adult.  Many of the film’s lines are not-quite-idiomatic, but performed by native speakers, such as when Mark, on the phone, says he’ll be there “at noon” rather than midday.  The differences are not great enough for the broken idioms to be obvious (as they often are in Japanese advertising, for example), but rather closer to what one might find in the English-language captions at Maru’s place, for example.

It’s part of a wider mise-en-scène that charms by unintentionally missing the mark every time, a mode of storytelling that is disconcertingly close to the mainstream, yet still works in parallel.  What makes this different from other (tragic) love stories with a mysterious foreign lead, however, is that all the players are caught inside the second-language-speaker’s idiom.  The unknown origins of Mr. Wiseau (which might be uncovered if anyone knows the language in which the title of this post is an expression) mean that the skewed tone cannot immediately be placed: it’s not, say, Engrish or Franglais, but it is something.  In some ways, he is the genuine object of which a character like Borat is elsewhere a ridiculous parody, but with the difference that his origins are effaced.  You can imagine Wiseau, like his alter ego and romantic lead Johnny, turning up at the YMCA with no money in his pocket.

I don’t agree with the contention that Johnny’s faithless fiancée Lisa is a tabula rasa.  As others have suggested, her character seems a composite of (mostly) types of femme fatale with agents of hurt in Wiseau’s past.  She is a cipher, for sure, but it’s of a story that’s missing rather than readable, an impression assisted by Juliette Danielle’s cheerful performance that seems at odds with the effect her character has on Johnny.  She is styled to look like a secondary character on the original Beverly Hills 90210 or one of the cool girls at a suburban high school c. 1989: thick dark eyebrows, blonde crimped hair, lots of eye shadow.  Plump and largely passive in the face of Johnny’s textbook ardour, the actress needn’t — as I have read — be worried about the nudity in these scenes.  The naivety of the erotic direction means that she looks like genuine lover rather than a soft-porn player.  Her betrothed’s disconcertingly angled performance above her leaves her looking patient and pretty, the visual cliches of such scenes failing to objectify her because of the way in which Wiseau, even naked on a bed, chews the scenery and monopolises the gaze in every scene he’s in.  And why mock Johnny’s repeated shedding of rose petals all over the prone Lisa?  Don’t lovers repeat for their partners their favourite moves again and again?

I liked too the way in which the film’s notorious failure to tie up its loose ends means that the boredom that fuels Lisa’s infidelity is never explained except in the expository way in which she declares it near the start of the film.  The backstory that Danyl passingly infers above concerning other characters I longed to know for Lisa, whose decision to set up house some years ago with a strange man much older than she invites the imagining of a whole hidden psychology (although her mother’s continuous histrionics and declaration that she never loved Lisa’s father might provide some starting points).  But this is Johnny/Tommy’s story, not Lisa’s, in all its offputting nearly-there-ness and stylistic collapses.  To watch it is to see storytelling through a glass, darkly, and to take, should you wish, pleasure in the sincerity with which it misses the conventional mark.

The baby is a cementer, changer and concluder of relationships, and the baby’s needs a force around which the day spins in a variety of sometimes-predictable ways. We are initiated via experience into all kinds of secret societies. There is the witching hour, which runs any time from four until ten p.m. in our house, when the young cannot be pacified, entertained or settled and mothercraft becomes indistinguishable from chance and magic. There is the fallacious phrase “leg guards” concerning the nappies of a baby not much bigger in size than a newborn. There are the long moments and short hours of a life running entirely on hormones, in which holding a contended baby is the sweetest fix of all. The erratic sleep, strange dreams and rapid mood swings are like being a teenager in love, with the accompanying rising and setting of the emotional sun. Then there is the maternal body that, in spite of the habits of a lifetime, continues to shrink. This last point is in itself neutral were it not for the general bagging and falling down of jeans that were bought to fit. Money is tight, and I’d rather spend it on her (save for buying blue cheese, which never loses its deliciousness after a long abstention).

Au revoir

We said goodbye to our midwife this week, bringing with us a photo for the wall of babies that dominates both her office and the waiting area outside. When we first visited those rooms, caught up in the first trimester’s nausea and fear of miscarriage, I thought all those infant faces oppressive, a culture into which I was both fearful of being inducted and not sure that I would ever get. Now it feels like a community in which we have our membership with one who is clearly the best-looking baby in that whole building. It was sad to say goodbye to our most regular visitor of the last few months, but she read our mind’s present set and said she would see us again next year. (I’m told this is an intention that will ease once the harvestbaby starts crawling and walking.) This is a woman who worked all night to deliver another early baby before delivering ours, who with the señor held me up through the most consuming challenge of my life and who this week first said I should feel not only proud of what we have achieved with feeding but even more so with the now-distant labour itself. Such words are better than any certificate.

Breeders and Feeders

Thanks to the enthusiasm of a reader anonymous to you, though known to me, the first breastfeeding post I wrote was included in the most recent Down Under Feminists Carnival, through which you can browse here.  I have passed the recent World Breastfeeding Week breastfeeding my envoy, much like the weeks prior.  It is now a relationship most harmonious and one to which I look forward (save the scrappy, on-again off-again witching-hour feeds).  The reasons for this are practical as well as emotional and best encapsulated in the phrase heard in all kinds of maternal locales: the baby is the best expresser.  My sense of physical sovereignty, of autonomy, now extends to include her.  Although the carpal tunnel that followed me out of pregnancy sometimes impairs a swift setting-up of the feed, we are enough together in this for her to have lost that survivalist fear that sustenance might not be forthcoming.  Once the bib goes on, she knows she’ll be fed.  All that my care team and friends said — that it would come right with help and time — proved to be true, even as I dwelt in what appears to be the widespread assumption of new mothers: that the encouragement of others is not truth but simply being nice.

It is liberating for me too, this shift to what I usually describe as “working boobs”.  After years of anticipating, containing and managing their aesthetic effects on other people, it is a relief to switch to using them for what they were intended.  I had not realised until this occurred the way in which the intense scrutiny under which young girls fall at puberty, not only from young boys but from the adults around them too, left me with something  like an overhang of self-consciousness concerning the gaze of others about which now I don’t care for the first time.  From gendered markers to gendered functionality is for me a good trip.  This is by no means a universal experience — as discussed in my last post on the topic, for some women, the opposite is true — but it is mine.  I have been thinking as a result about the way in which supporting breastfeeding means allowing new mothers to make this transition and being there for them in their diffidence, their ambivalence, along the way.

Eddies and Whirls

It is wonderful being out and about with the baby but it is easy to overdo it; being a visitor and receiving visitors excludes the quiet reflection that is the introvert’s staple, for one.  We are fortunate however that our friendships are easily stretching to accommodate the baby, given the forthrightness with which some among the childfree opine, online at least, about the social death brought to their relationships by babies and children.  I am getting over my feelings of guilt when I talk about things other than the baby, which is entirely necessary if I am to continue to function in the adult world.  At the same time our friends are warmly tolerant of our desire to talk about the baby, not least when she is sitting there with us.  Harvestbro and I spent a more-or-less blissed-out afternoon tending her, his cautious care as he picked her up reminding me acutely of my own tentative handling eight weeks ago.  Her godmother, above, gives the first lesson on looking good in leather.  Grandparents are here with sufficient frequency that she recognises them, and harvestmother’s singing of lullabies has turned out unique in its calmative and curative powers for a small grandchild.

The dogs continue to refine their roles.  Arthur rarely leaves the baby’s side, while Eddie deputises in this function.  The bitches are happy that we are happy and enjoy having people in the house at all times.  The puppies accept the restraining of their licking, nipping enthusiasm with reasonable grace.  The balance of our housework still tips toward managing them rather than the baby, who brings in less dust, grass and sticks than they.

Retrospective narration confers on all these activities and experiences a serenity and insight they lack in the raw. It is this feature of our experience that leads the señor and I to sense the importance of mastery in all the anecdotes of child-rearing that now come our way, from people we know to strangers on the street. The life-event trifecta of marriage, pregnancy and childbirth seems to have this in common: the importance for those who experience it of not just normalising but universalising their choices. It is as if individual decisions will admit no variety and must be read, after the fact, as causal in success. This is surely magical thinking par excellence, and yet it is so widespread as to be close to universal.

• A party may have broken out here this afternoon. Dogs, baby, wine, wimmins (also menz) and song. #phoofed #
• In other party news, each time the drop occurred on the Shapeshifter to which we were listening, it set off the baby's startle reflex. #
• RT @rdu985fm: Breakfast With Spanky: keeping Bob Parker honest since Jo started enjoying free muffins #
• RT @gtiso: I think we're about one Marxism Conference away from cracking this thing. #
• RT @GuardianBooks: Maggie O'Farrell, Kwame Kwei-Armah and Julie Myerson on working around parenthood http://bit.ly/b4VoUB #
• Today a friend brought her 5 month-old son to visit. Extremely fun good-times! Few things are cuter than a baby staring at another baby. #
• Sublime afternoon with harvestbro and harvestbaby. Niece's hypnotism of uncle complete. #
• Today the harvestbaby took @robyngallagher and @knedd and @harvestbird for lunch and it was choice. #
• Furthermore, the post brought lovely parcels from @johubris and @francesrosey. We are very spoiled! #
• I used to use 'leaky' as a synonym for tearful, but with babby, not anymore. #
• The grandparents are with the baby and I am for The Room with @robyngallagher! #
• It's a shame #theroom missed the last funding round, or @adzebill and I could have applied for a Centre for Wiseau Studies. #

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