Shit on my hands

As featured on ‘The Circle’, ‘Sh*t on my hands’ is stocked by all good bookshops, including Dymocks and Readings, as well as online here: 

http://www.arcadepublications.com/index.html

Only $20!

Babies being inspected at the Kew wing of Royal Women’s Hospital, 1958

MH

For a significant whack of the twentieth century, the Sisters of St Joseph operated a home for unmarried mothers in Grattan Street, Carlton. Located opposite the old Royal Women’s Hospital, it admitted young pregnant girls (often sent from small country towns by their ashamed families), looked after them for the duration of the ‘lying in’ period, then hastily arranged the adoption of the girls’ babies by infertile Catholic married couples. Only since the 1990s has the calamitous impact this process had on the relinquishing mothers (and often the lives of their children) been recognized. Those involved in the separation of babies and mothers were also haunted by their role. One elderly nun I interviewed ten years ago was stricken by the trauma she had inflicted at the home between the 1940s and 1960s. Once the single mothers pension was introduced by the Whitlam government in 1973, the adoption rate plummeted and the function of such institutions as the St Joseph’s home became obsolete.

But societal attitudes towards young mothers are, if anything, hardening. Given the liberalisation of abortion laws, pregnant teens are accused of deliberately ruining their own lives, being emotionally and mentally unstable, and ripping off the public purse if they choose to continue their pregnancies. A friend had her first baby at the same time I had mine. She was 18 and I was 30. The comments and looks she reported receiving throughout her pregnancy were shocking. Her neighbour asked her if there was not an easier way she could earn $5000 than by becoming eligible for the baby bonus. I received no such ‘feedback’. My friend is about to complete a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in psychology, and has received high distinctions throughout. Contrary to the unfair stereotype of the incapable teen mother, she is kicking serious goals in all aspects of her life. Also, in contradiction to common perceptions, she is still with the father of her child.

Which leads me to the curious response by writer Kerri Sackville on Twitter to last Wednesday night’s episode of the fantastic contraception device SBS television series One Born Every Minute which follows the hospital birthing journey of two or three couples each episode. I greatly admire Kerri’s writing and am usually heartily amused by her Twitter stream, but I was a little shocked by the comments she made about one expecting couple: the woman was 18 years old and the man 33. Both were open about his past heroin addiction and daily methadone requirements. Sackville tweeted ‘she’s a child and he is a disaster. If she was older and wiser she’d run a mile’ and ‘that poor little 18 year old with her loser partner’. Hopefully the couple in question – or any others in similar circumstances – won’t ever read the tweets. When your confidence is already sapped by sneering sideways glances and pointed observations of your youthfulness, such proclamations would be very unhelpful, indeed.

I was conversely really impressed by the non-judgemental attitude of the midwives to this couple, which departed significantly from the treatment meted out to young unmarried residents of St Joseph’s at the Royal Women’s Hospital when they were giving birth. If you had no wedding ring, you were treated like trash. For many of these teenage girls, giving birth was the loneliest experience of their lives. And if they were single, they didn’t even have the shoulder of a partner to weep on when their babies were summarily removed from their care.

While he may not have been my personal cup of tea, the 33-year-old man in the OBEM episode exhibited a great level of attention and love to his young partner – and she to him. He was able to communicate with great sensitivity to the midwives the source of his partner’s anxiety when she became upset throughout labour, and he was attentive and encouraging during the subsequent caesarean section. To me he wasn’t a ‘LOSER’, but a bloke who had stuck with his girl, was doing the utmost to change his life, and sought to give his daughter a childhood different from his own underprivileged one. He may have had to have his bus fare doled out by his highly organised young ‘Mrs’, but he was present and supportive throughout her complicated four-day labour. Who’s to say that they would not both continue to be excellent parents to the scrumptious daughter they produced? And, if they in fact do separate, that they won’t handle the experience any worse than their older, educated, financially ‘secure’ counterparts? 

I also don’t think the age difference between the two automatically equates to exploitation and inequality. My best friend had a 34-year-old partner when she was 18 and theirs was a highly loving, committed and, until they grew apart (a common phenomenon – regardless of age difference) mutually rewarding relationship. They simply got along really well – which was similarly apparent of the OBEM couple.

I don’t want to preach from the PC soapbox, but young mothers – single or otherwise – should not be automatically judged according to stereotypes. Nor should the fathers. A more nuanced, sensitive approach to individual cases is required. Only then will we have truly moved on from the ‘bad old days’ when young mothers were habitually separated from their babies.  

MH

On Boxing Day hubby enjoyed the cricket at the MCG and I imbibed my body weight in leftover Christmas pudding, kept two small people fed/entertained/rested, and followed with great amusement the Twitter feed of that fabulous feminist rabble-rouser Clementine Ford. Included in a loooong list of things giving her the pip was:  ‘Fuck pop culture pretending chicks don’t masturbate just as much as teenage boys’. Hmm, is that true? I wondered. And since then, while walking to the market or pegging endless baby clothes on the line, I have dedicated my brainpower to recalling pop culture moments that admit (forget celebrate) – girls’ self-pleasuring activities. And aside from the odd Cyndi Lauper, Divinyls or Madonna song, I’ve been pretty much stumped. As in porn, touching one’s self is performed for the amusement of males, or else is a failed endeavour. Such was the case in the recently screened ABC series, The Slap. You may recall Connie has a bit of a go in the bath but can’t get herself off – though that’s possibly because she chooses the world’s largest shampoo bottle to make the attempt (hmm, like Tsiolkas’s novel, women seem to have trouble locating their clitorises).

Yes, positive pop culture references to girls wanking are as rare as well-behaved Australians on Kuta Beach. But what about high culture? Two memoirs come (haha) to mind: Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card and Krissy Kneen’s Affection. In the former, the playwright recalls joyfully masturbating in various secret locations on the family farm. And Affection includes this evocative description of childhood fiddling:

‘I lie on the scratchy carpet, pushing my body down against the short pile. The television is on, Playschool or Mr. Squiggle or Bill and the Flowerpot Men or some other burble of music and rhyme. My hips press against the carpet the delightful pressure of a full bladder, full of milk no doubt, a lovely innocent pressure and the feel of sunlight burning a window shape on my calves … when I cross my legs over each other there is an even greater pleasure. I can hear my mother clattering through the washing up… When I fall over the edge I am surprised. Pleased.’ (pp. 14-15)

Who knew ABC’s finest had such erotic potential? But seriously, I’d bet the examples of women recalling their sexual self-discovery is negligible compared to those of male writers. Is that a result of the historical oppression of girls’ sexuality? Mmm, dunno. Boys were (until the 1960s) subjected to some hideous devices and sermons designed to prevent their masturbating. If anything, there was a cultural myopia concerning the mere possibility of girls performing such acts. If you’re a Mad Men fan, you may still be recovering from the highly disturbing episode in season four when young Sally is humiliated after being busted by her friend’s mother getting off while watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Betty demands of her poor eleven-year-old daughter before threatening to cut off her fingers. Before the sexual revolution, such ‘behaviour’ was deemed so abnormal in girls that it required therapy. (The above image is of Sally waiting in her therapist’s waiting room with her nanny).

But this response was benevolent compared to the treatment meted out to unrepentant girl masturbators in Victorian times (when self-pleasuring was considered both a medical condition and moral weakness). Here’s how one Parisian physicist treated a 5-year-old diagnosed nymphomaniac in 1864 (the quote is so extraordinary, I’m including most of it):

‘Neither the constant surveillance of her mother, nor the use of a chastity belt fabricated by M. Charrière had the slightest effect. We know, in any event that this device is much more effective in the case of little boys, by imprisoning their penis in a metal case, than it is for girls. Our little girl, thin, wasted and extremely flexible, managed to insert her toe between the belt’s metal plate and her soft parts, and thus succeeded in masturbating.

Her memory, her intellect were weakening; momentary mental blanks were becoming increasingly frequent. My colleague M. Moreau, of the Salpêtrière hospital, had been consulted and has considered amputation of the clitoris. Questioned in turn, I indicated that I found the section of the clitoral nerves, a procedure employed by some surgeons, to be of doubtful efficacy, leaving the door open to recidivism; that the amputation of the clitoris was the destruction, the irreparable ruin of the organ of pleasure an excessive thing in the case of a young girl whom one is seeking to cure, and I thus came to the idea which I then put into practice.

I operated on the child on December 31 … I joined the top two superior or anterior thirds of the major labia at their thickest point with the aid of a metal suture, leaving in the inferior section on orifice barely large enough to accommodate the small finger, to permit the flow of urine and later, of menstrual blood. Today the union is perfect, and the clitoris is placed out of all reach underneath a thick cushion of soft parts.’ (quoted in Masturbation: The history of a great terror, 2001, p.111)

Ouch. And this man was supposedly guided by Western scientific reason.

But are we comparatively enlightened these days? Well, as Clementine Ford suggested, in popular culture girls are more likely to engage in shopping and texting than wanking. Indeed, the rich interior fantasy world of young females is quashed to the point they appear brainless ciphers for male desires and commercial interests. And, when we are exposed to an honest, beautiful portrayal or image of burgeoning female sexuality, we become hysterical due to a new moral hazard – the pedophile gaze. The 2010 scandal surrounding Bill Henson’s photograph of a pre-pubescent girl was motivated by fears that sick individuals might become aroused. ‘Absolutely revolting’ responded Kevin Rudd when shown the image (remind me why people want him to be PM again?). Perhaps not the thing 11-year-old girls want to hear about themselves. And if a picture of a girl just standing in the nuddy can provoke such community outrage, the likelihood of regular, non-problematic portrayals of girl wankers in pop culture will remain rare indeed.

 

I’ve had a magnificent Christmas indulging in not only fruit mince tarts and various pig meats, but three Australian books: ‘Autumn Laing’ by Alex Miller, ‘Melbourne’ by Sophie Cunningham and ‘House of Sticks’ by Peggy Frew. This last one had a real domestic thriller page-turner quality but the protagonist, Bonnie, a respected guitarist buried in the daily/nightly routines of raising twin four-year-olds and an infant, was so damned down on herself – her looks, figure, her ability to mother and partner effectively, or hold a conversation at a party, that the novel made for stressful and depressing reading. The only glimmers of pride she permits herself – while recording and performing with a high profile singer – she rapidly represses, and the grovelling entreaties she makes throughout to her clueless and insensitive partner are plain infuriating. ‘Come ON, Bonnie!’ you want to scream, ‘stop apologising!’

My response is no fault of Frew’s (who is clearly a talented writer), rather a defensive reaction: the characterisation of Bonnie cut just a fraction too close to the bone. While I’m much more likely to boss my poor husband around the house like a 10-year-old boy casually kicks a football, and rather than constantly begging for forgiveness, fail to see any wrong-doing on my behalf at all, I can certainly identify with Bonnie’s endless self-deprecation. And I know that I’m not the only chick on this futile trip. Indeed, put a bunch of woman in a room together and they’ll often sit happily for hours cataloguing their own faults before going home and wondering why they feel so shit about themselves. I actually found it jarring on Christmas Day to hear one teenaged relative talking openly about having ‘smashed’ her year 12 English exam and another woman sharing the joys of having been recently head-hunted for a lucrative job. ‘Stop big-noting yourselves’ I thought meanly as I stabbed at the pile of turkey on my paper plate. 

You may be aware that BB and I have recently published a book. We have had a really great media response to our little literary offering and the responses so far from readers have been overwhelmingly positive. But what do BB and I focus our relentlessly self-critical gazes on? Who looks the most like a braying donkey or cheap whore in the book launch photos.

Bonnie’s inability to converse at public events was also cringe-worthingly familiar. Wary of the tendency to alcoholism in my family, I have never taken the approach of getting tanked in order to enjoy a party. And thus I rarely enjoy them wholeheartedly. Not getting smashed means remembering in alarming detail the various awkwardnesses and faux pas you have committed, which in turn makes one leery of heading out the door the next time.

Ha! It’s funny I mentioned Sophie Cunningham before. One of the few ventures I undertook during my recent pregnancy was to Readings Carlton to hear a panel discussion about the lack of critical attention paid to women writers. Sophie was one of the panellists. Afterwards, I dragged my shy pregnant arse to the post-event drinks at Jimmy Watsons. Determined to be brave, I slipped into a spare seat at Sophie’s table. She and a couple of other women were discussing writing about football. I offered a meek recommendation that they check out the work by historian Joy Damousi on the matter of emotions and Aussie Rules. At which point Sophie looked around at the inhabitants at the other tables, stood up and left. Oh, the mortification! Had I rudely insinuated myself? Had I made the dullest utterance since Bert Newton interviewed Muhammad Ali at the 1979 Logies? The interested responses from the others suggested not. But is it the ensuing engaging conversation I remember? Nope. It’s Sophie clocking me before moving away.

What a waste of mind power! If there is one thing I absolutely do not want to pass on to my daughters (aside from my wonky ear canals) is this kind of self-criticism based on piffling evidence. It’s a tricky balance though. On the Preston Maternal and Child Health Centre waiting room wall is a poster listing a whole bunch of self-esteem-boosting compliments to give your child. One of them is ‘You’re perfect!’ Frankly, I don’t think this is such a great line to feed a child. Not only does their tendency to have tantrums in the middle of pedestrian crossings of major arterials suggest that they are indeed NOT perfect, but I am very nervous now about the generation of over-entitled, egotistical Kim Jong-uns likely to be stalking the streets of Preston in the near future. But I can keep strictly to myself the self-negative ticker news feed marching around my brain. And maybe one day, when my bladder control has finally and fully surrendered (probably at about age 45, then), I’ll actually stop reading the darn thing. 

There’s a glorious period after your baby starts sleeping through the night when bedtime is a relatively simple affair. A bit of warm milk, a couple of cosy bedtime tales, a big hug, and Bob’s Your Uncle. You’ll have the pleasure of eavesdropping on your child as he puts himself to sleep with some sublimely sweet and ridiculous self-soothing rituals: fake snoring; singing loud tuneless lullabies with creative lyrical maulings; recapping the day’s activities with his own peculiar slant on events.

By 7:30 you’ll be happily ensconced in the adult pursuit of your choice, secure in the knowledge that nothing short of a yodelling contest will prompt your baby to wake.

And then one evening the malevolent fairy of prolonged sleep rituals will visit him, sprinkle glittery pixie dust all over his pillows and whisper into his ear ‘You know, you really must learn how to fuck with your parents a bit more at bedtime’. Enthusiastically embracing the idea, your young one will begin to craft his evening routine into one of eye-wateringly drawn out monotonous frustration: requests for umpteen blanket rearrangements, glasses of water, toilet trips, one more book, another goodnight kiss for the cat, a belly rub.

In time you’ll learn how to short-circuit all the procrastination devices your child has up his sleeve. Always make sure he wees right before you tuck him in. Present the cat for a one-time only opportunity to say goodnight. Do a thorough wardrobe check for bears/ghouls. Pre-empt plaintive pleas of ‘But I’m thirsty’ by having a drink bottle on his bedside table. It takes craft and cunning, but slowly the demands will recede as your child again grudgingly accepts that you’ve had an encounter with your own supernatural sprite, albeit one who’s ditched the Tinkerbell wings for prison warden britches.

MH

Getting your forklift licence. Completing a mini triathlon. Accurately painting a male nude. These are all great achievements. But what about pushing a toddler to the shops in her pram with an infant strapped to your chest, navigating a supermarket, then successfully ordering and consuming a short macchiato (while supervising said toddler’s babycino-drinking endeavours) in a ridiculously tiny and hip café? Until the lunch/toilet/teeth-cleaning/afternoon nap disaster proves otherwise, you are buoyed by the comments and looks of admiration from fellow humans confirming that yes, you are a highly competent mother indeed. And then you see snaps a friend has posted on Facebook showing her travelling from her Papua New Guinea base to Melbourne on her own with 3 kids aged under 5. How did she negotiate passport queues and airport toilets? By strapping the 2-year-old on her back, the infant on her front and holding the 4-year-old’s hand. Holy crap! Fuck knows what she did with them all on the plane. I didn’t see any evidence of empty packets of Phernergan in the Facebook album. I was already admiring this woman in effusive spades when she organized an online charity auction (in which I was, incidentally, the rapturous highest bidder for an Olive’s Friend Pip dress) to raise money for her local PNG hospital so it could pay its power bill. But this international expedition should win her some kind of award – or at least a starring role in a baby carrier advertising campaign. I hope the journey gave a major confidence boost rather than a slipped intervertebral disc. And I hereby dedicate my future efforts to get my own spawn from Preston to Thornbury on the 86 tram to Ms Falguni!

When the time comes to raise that first spoonful of solids to your baby’s milk-moustached mouth, you’ll probably have some idea of the sorts of things you would and would not like them to eat. Lollies and meat pies = bad. Wholemeal pasta and broccoli = good. Your kid will probably comply for a while and devour plates brimming with whole grains and greens: ‘Aren’t you a good baby’, you’ll coo proudly, ‘you’ll never be a sugar-crazed ratbag. I, your parent, will always prepare you nutritious wholefoods that you will continue to happily ingest for the rest of your days. You’ll probably initiate World Peace, too.’

Frustratingly, this dreamy set-up will probably go to hell after his first year. A percentage of kids will continue to eat everything on the bottom two rungs of the food pyramid (and, hey, they might be the ones the mat nurse says need to lose a kilo or two in years to come), but a greater proportion will be steadfast in their refusal to eat anything but rice bubbles, cheese, white bread, crackers, white chocolate frogs, white bread, cheese, crackers, rice bubbles, cheese, crackers, cookies, cheese, crackers and white bread. Once children realise that crap food is fun, trying to lead them back down the leafy-greens path is a fearsome undertaking. Dinnertime can rapidly become the most hateful part of your day. Holes kicked in the pantry door and silent directives to ‘eat a bowl of FUCK, kiddo!’ are an entirely rational response when you’ve wasted half your weekly earnings on new and exciting foodstuffs to tempt your child’s whiter-than-white taste buds.

When you’ve lived through thirty-odd years of disappointment and heartbreak it’s difficult to understand how the sight of a broccoli stem could reduce anyone to tears, but toddlers are yet to learn that life contains far more vexing problems than unwanted vegetables. He will learn, eventually, that there are foods worth eating beyond butter pats and toothpaste. Getting children to subscribe to the old ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ mantra is the hardest part – once they’ve actually tasted what you’re offering, they’re often less likely to reject it.

So, pretend he’s a rat and scatter bits of healthy grub about the lounge room; eventually he’ll start to nibble. Trying to force your kid to eat well 24/7 is not worth the headaches, the frown lines and mutual tantrums. Avoid food battles because he actually can survive and even thrive for a time on crackers, and banish any bad feelings about her diet by digging up the yard and using all the money you’ve saved on fresh produce to install a guitar-shaped swimming pool.

Nursing mothers of the world, rejoice! Finally, a top that permits you to attend that ‘Clockwork Orange’ theme party while simultaneously fulfilling your maternal duties! Alternatively, you could stick your face in a bucket of acid while performing high kicks. One makes just as much sense as the other.

BB

Given that my daughter can still squeeze into size 2 clothing, and is at a stage in her development where she thinks trying to store alphabet magnets in her vagina is funny , I haven’t yet done a lot of hand wringing over where she’ll go to school. She’s three. I only just finalised her middle name. Cheerfully moronic people like me, who spend all their money on miniature Eames chairs and wildly over-priced rental units, just send their kids to the local primary school when the time comes. Only people with the dough to pour into private education seriously consider schooling options when their kids are still on purees and sleep schedules. Right?

No, as I discovered this week when I took Clementine to a Justine Clarke show ( where, incidentally, I was so ensorcelled by her that when she implored the children in my area- the CHILDREN- to give her their best dinosaur impersonations, I reared up like a T-Rex, and roared in her face) While milling about the lobby, observing the pained expressions of the ushers, we bumped into a woman from Clem’s old occasional care centre, a willowy blonde American who drove a BMW the size of the Large Hadron Collider and who always made me feel like a bucket of shit. The kind of woman who makes me wish I didn’t have tattoos and a glaringly obvious dye job. The sort who releases my Armadale demons, the one’s who say ‘look how far down the slope you’ve slid, wanton slag. Is there any blondewood in your home? A My Family sticker on your car? A tasteful barn conversion for weekend escapes in Daylesford? No? FAIL’ Anyway, this woman- we’ll call her Peggy, as that’s her name- wanted to know if I’d decided on a school for Clementine yet.  It’s not an entirely unreasonable question, I guess. I want her to have a good education. But my decision regarding her primary schooling will go approximately like this: which one’s closest to our house? I assume that living as we do in the inner city, swimming in an ocean of uptight honkies, any and every school in our vicinity has no choice but to be pretty great. If they were anything less than stellar there’d be an uprising.

 I’m not expecting Clem’s primary school education to be about Rilke sonnets and philosophy. I just want her to learn to read, write, and play bat tennis. Pretty basic stuff.  But for Peggy and her ilk, primary schooling is a serious business.  Junior must be placed in EXACTLY the right surrounds to coax the delicate bud into bloom. Play based, textbook based, Steiner streams-I don’t really give a shit. I’ll weigh up her high school options a little more carefully, and pay close attention to the rates of teen pregnancy at each potential school, but I’m not going to engage in this hysteria over which primary school she’ll go to.  And unless a million bucks falls into my lap courtesy of a long lost uncle who as it turns out, is secretly the King Of Zaire, private schooling isn’t an option. Like private hospitals, private schools are a pretty obnoxious concept anyway: one kid has no more of a right to a good education than another (disclaimer: I have private health insurance. I’ve got an immune disorder that puts me in hospital about once a year, and I’d sooner die than languish in an unflatteringly lit public ward, hemmed in by heaving bags of others peoples piss. I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite)

My own life is a shining example of why private schooling is not necessarily worth the money.  I went to a private primary and secondary school, the former an obnoxiously uppity institution that makes people automatically hate you when you admit to having been schooled there. I’m now a single mother with a ‘meaningful’ tattoo, a pensioner concession card, and a tried and routine for dealing with door-to-door debt collectors. Private schooling gave me nicely rounded vowels and the ability to knot a tie properly. They encouraged my love of reading and writing. But, more critically, so did my Mum. I don’t believe the local state school would have discouraged me to read and write. I didn’t give a rats about rowing, or debating, or cross-country skiing, which are the main benefits of private school education. I did like wearing a straw boater, and I did like going to the Arts Centre for speech nights, but a nice hat and a posh speech night are hardly ample justification for shelling out 17,000 bucks a year. My friends still smoked bongs and gave sebaceous looking twits hand jobs at parties. All the stragglers and deadheads were expelled in Year 10, before the crucial VCE years, lest they impact on the school’s ability to claim ‘100% of our students received a TER of 85% or more’. From what I can gather, a lot of them are now beauticians and housewives. There’s nothing wrong at all with that. But it makes you wonder if their parents wouldn’t have done a far greater thing if they’d thrown all that money at a fistula hospital in Africa. A state school education would have made much more sense for me, and my parents would probably have gold-plated toilets to rest their over-worked buttocks on now, having saved somewhere in the region of half a million dollars.

 

 I do think education is of the utmost importance. I’m reading loads of books to Clem, and encouraging her to be thrilled by music and nature. What I teach her in her early years is just as critical as what her primary school teaches her. It’s not as if my primary school choice is going to be the deciding factor in whether she becomes a surgeon or a strip-a-gram. We’ll see how it all goes. Watch this space (in 15 years)

 

BB

Having a second child is as much a priority for me as experimenting with chili-coated tampons. I like babies. They can’t walk or talk and they look good in peter pan collars, all qualities I find immensely appealing. MH’s new daughter makes my ovaries undulate painfully, in what I interpret as a plaintive cry from below to use my loins for good instead of evil. I ignore those rumblings in a similar manner to a cat who’s registered that the chirping bird is way too high up in the tree to be a realistic catch. 

 I’m not completely averse to the idea of a second child, though. Mostly because I’m not clever enough to have figured out how to override my body’s reproductive fervor, and partially because I love maternity hospitals. If I were really serious about never having another child, I would take a less cavalier approach to birth control on the infrequent occasions where ejaculate is in my near vicinity. Interestingly, men are just as careless in this area as they were in the old pre-baby days, when it was safe to assume that I was simply a barren dilettante . I’m always puzzled by this. ‘Don’t you see’, I want to say ‘that my body knows what to do with sperm?’  So far there haven’t been any real mishaps, so I’ve not had to examine the reasons why I have unprotected sex despite my strong desire to never hear my doctor say the words ‘you have chlamydia/HIV/warts/twin fetuses ‘ I also recognise that my views on having more children are skewed, both through having had a child in an unhappy relationship, and the difficulties that accompany raising a kid on your own.

Still, it’s my belief that one is a very nice quantity of children to have. It allows you to cling to some vestige of normality, however compromised. Taking one small kid out for pizza is a pain in the arse. Taking two small kids out for pizza is the stuff of Edgar Allan Poe poems. You don’t take up too much footpath with one kid by your side. You still get invited to bbq’s and afternoon gatherings because nobody’s too fussed by one small addition to the party (this is working on the assumption that your friends are childless and have parties where the star of the show is an overflowing ashtray). And if you  teach them how to pour milk and operate a remote control, you can go back to bed in the morning. Trips to the supermarket aren’t fraught with the requests of multiple children. People who don’t know anything about kids will happily agree to babysit one child- they think it’s fun.

On the other hand…I would dearly love to experience it all a second time round for the same reason many people do: I want to know how it feels to know what I’m doing. I would take the baby out in public without fear of it doing something new and weird that would show me up as an amateur ( I spent most of Clem’s infancy feeling like a child pushing a dolly in it’s pram)  I would not buy a single book (because everything I need to know is in Shit On My Hands: A down and dirty companion to early parenthood, natch) I would not wash their hair, ever. I would take them to dinner parties. I would dig a hole from here to Darwin using only my nose before I’d shell out for any of the following: a breast feeding pillow, a miracle wrap, a wall-mounted turtle light with star projections, 20 buck colic remedies, a nightlight that goes red when the room is too warm, ergonomically designed plastic baby baths,  an 800 dollar cot, wicker baskets for storing baby balms, and a pram the size of an asteroid. I would simply feed it, kiss it’s head a lot, dress it in peter pan collars and do controlled crying once it was six months old. Oh yes. Yes I would. Because after going down the co-sleeping, demand feeding, whatever’s good for you, baby, route with Clementine, I can report that for one year I was approximately three seconds away from a psychotic episode at any given moment of any given day.

I’m not sure how the baby war being waged between my logical brain, the one that says ‘you can’t cook a fucking egg, much less raise two children’, and my pastel brain, the one that says ‘Ohh, I know just how I’d decorate her nursery!’, will end. Genuine terror and something very close to repulsion accompanies most thoughts of more children. There’s the minor detail of my being un-partnered, too, but I’m assuming that before I hit menopause a friendly axe-murderer will sweep me off my feet. Given that I freely use the word ‘repulsion’ in relation to my ideas about more kids, it seems wise to accept one child as my lot for the foreseeable future. I may not be clever enough to override my biological urges, but I’m not stupid enough to act on them.