Shit on my hands

BB

I’ve had quite a week. Every so often, around once every six months, my body breaks down in a lavish display of ill-health. Attractively, this week my sorrows have taken the form of a sort of whole body ulcer – mouth, stomach, ear (well, the thing on my ear is a cyst, if you must know).  Daughter-free time has been spent lying in bed, lamenting the state of the corpse like cavity I carry my organs around in, and reading ‘Backlash’ by Susan Faludi (it never gets old and it’s more relevant than ever, young ladies!) It’s not altogether unwelcome, this enforced bedtime. The bed is my spiritual home. Some people go to India. I go to bed. There’s rarely anywhere I’d rather be, excepting the World Cat Conference and the bar. So it seems somewhat cruel and mildly baffling that for all her other gifts, my daughter is saddled with the ‘Let’s get physical!’ gene. I thought perhaps that because of my advanced state of slug like inertia, I was judging her too harshly and that she was possibly just a normal, boisterous toddler. But finally, blessed confirmation from professional child wranglers that I got me a sprightly one. ‘She’s a dynamo’ they say through perceptibly gritted teeth. ‘She ran all over the fresh laid asphalt. Her footprints are there forever now’, says another, rubbing her forehead. ‘She’s busy busy busy!’ says the sweet natured young girl charged with the horror task of putting her down for her nap at midday. Dynamo? Busy? Running? Did I really nurture this creature in my slovenly womb for nine months? Have I taught her NOTHING?

There are plenty of ways my friends and acquaintances could describe me. ‘Likes cats’, ‘Likes pizza’, ‘Likes cats, ‘Likes bed’, ‘Likes cats’, etc. But ‘busy busy busy!’ ’dynamo’, and ‘likes doing stuff’  certainly wouldn’t be on the list. It sort of nullfies the ‘apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ theory. Yes, she likes cats. But it’s been impressed upon her from the moment of birth that her mother’s love is conditional – that she thumbs her nose at the cat at her own peril. Yes, she hates getting hair on her hands in the bath. But you can’t spend 24 hours a day with a walking talking mental disorder for a mother and not pick up some of her neuroses. On the whole, she is peaceable, not one to frighten easily, not prone to hysterionics, and always, ALWAYS in need of stimulation.

How do you entertain a 2 year old from 6 am to 8pm? I mean it – how? We look at puppies, we loiter in toy shops, she draws on her books while I lie in bed, we watch anodine children’s tv till I’m almost faint with boredom, we read book after book after book, we go to the nasty fluroescent slaughter houses, sorry, play centres, we go to cafes and play with their boxes of fecal-encrusted toys. All that activity chews up maybe three hours. Then what?

Older women tend to scornfully scold me for indulging my daughters desire to be entertained and stimulated all the time. ‘Let her get bored’, they say. This tactic is great for older kids, I wholeheartedly embrace it for older kids, but two year olds? Living in small rented flats with single mothers? Clementine can entertain herself for 40 minutes at an absolute maximum before she’s bored. I know that when I hear a meow, a giggle, and shortly thereafter a cry that she’s started on the cat and it’s time to find yet another way to occupy her. It’s also a mark of my shortcomings as a mother that when the cat and the kid come to blows, I comfort the cat, THEN the kid.  

Thankfully, miraculously, after much begging, pleading, a letter from my doctor, and a hand-job (just kidding. I would never beg ), I secured a place for Clementine at the kind of childcare centre that makes you feel just a little bit smug that you were awarded a prized spot. My fellow parents and I drop off our children in the morning and give sage little nods to one other as we pass in the halls, a gesture I interpret as ‘we are good people because we pay good people to do the stuff with our kids that we don’t do because we are bad people’ .

It’s fantastic. I remember talking to a woman at a pizza shop about six months ago and telling her that I was going out of my mind trying to find a couple of days of childcare for Clementine. ‘I can’t give her all the stimulation she needs at this age’ I said. The woman snapped back ‘OF COURSE you can’. Well no, actually, I can’t. I don’t have a backyard, much less a backyard with chickens, possums, vegie gardens, sandpits, swings and tricycles. I live in a rental with wall to wall carpet, so painting is out. Our kitchen is from the 16^th century and about the size of Senator Steve Fieldings brain, so fun times stirring stuff on the stove are off the menu. It’s books, tv, or small animal torture at our house. This is the problem with living in Northcote. There are parents here who do actually spend hours with their kids hand-crafting non-gender specific dolls with organic sultanas for eyeballs, who make brown rice sushi rolls to put in their bisphenol-A-free lunchboxes, and who would smash their solar panels to pieces before they’d let their kids watch Postman Pat. Don’t get me wrong, there are some patently upper middle class leftie happenings going down in our flat too, but I don’t have the resources, or the energy levels, to really go the full inner urban hipster earth mother hands-on hog, so childcare is AMAZING. Clementine is stimulated and happy, and I’m in bed writing annoying observational pieces. Isn’t that a pip?*

 

* for all the other wretched souls who’ve sat through 870,000 hours of In the Night Garden.