Warning: this post is about toddlers, constipation and poo. Not for the squeamish.
We began to suspect that little elf was constipated when she didn’t poo for 48 hours. Finally, I came home to find a slightly grouchy supermum who, when little elf had stood up, straining, then crying with pain, had had to literally help pull a compacted turd out of poor little elf’s bottom. Immediately after, she’d snapped back to her usual self, plainly relieved in every possible way. Meanwhile , we resorted to the internet to research constipation and toddlers.
It wasn’t great news. Constipation in someone of her age can be caused by too much dairy, not enough fibre or any number of other reasons. When it does, immediate remedies are cutting down on milk, apple juice and the old stand-by, prunes (references). Thankfully, little elf quite liked the prunes and and quite happily submitted to replacing her usual yoghurt with a couple. She was a bit grumpier about the milk but we persevered. Nothing happened the following day. The next day, I had my turn at extending my parenting experience into new and unwanted frontiers. She began to make her “poo face” then stood up, grunting and screwing up her face with effort.
“You’ll have to help her.”
“OK, OK…”
We pulled down her jeans and nappy and had a look. It was another compacted one and it was clearly stuck so I had to get a wet wipe and assist. It was like pulling a log out of her poor little bottom and I’ve no idea how something that large and solid could have emerged from such a little person without the aid of extra-dimensional technology of some kind. As soon as she was rid of it, she cheered up again and we agreed that, if nothing happened over night, we’d take her to the doctor as recommended. The next day, however, she began to poo normally so we let it ride. A week later, however, it started again.
This time, supermum whisked her off to the doctor and came back with suppository pills and a bottle of laxative (Lactulose). It seems that treating this is going to take two or three months with one pill a day and two doses of the laxative on an ongoing basis.
Thankfully, the laxative can be taken in apple juice (or we’d never get it down her) and she hasn’t raised too much hell (comparatively speaking) about the suppository. I managed to plead flu this morning about administering that but my turn is coming. Supermum reported that while I was at work yesterday, she pooed several times, with some of it clearly being the icky compacted stuff.
There was a reality gameshow a while back which featured various c-listers (included a middle-aged but utterly charmingly, beguilingly sweet Kim Wilde) at a detox spa where the key challenge was to review your stools at the end of each day. I think someone’s secretly filming a new series without the celebrities.
Really, they do. Over and over again.
1. “I really did not get on with my boss”
You know that little box where we ask ‘Reason for leaving current position’. We want to know that you’re a go-getting kind of individual, a a little bit ambitious, someone who’s achieved a lot for their last employer and now, regretfully, need to fulfill their true potential elsewhere. Like with us.
We don’t want to know that you hated your last boss almost as much as they hated you. Or that you were bullied out of your last position. Or that you are currently taking your last employer to court for attempting to poison you. All these things may be true. But your application form is not the best place to explore them.
2. “I see your organisation as a place where I can truly express myself, take advantage of the training you offer and gain valuable experience that will help me advance in my career.”
And what do we get out of the deal, exactly? Next!
3. “I have a degree in graphic design/media studies/crochet so I am obviously a creative person.”
Obvious to who? Next!
4. “I have been waiting to apply for this role for ten years.”
Trans: “I have been in prison.*” There is no other reasonable explanation for waiting this long to apply for a data-processing job.
5. “Please see the attached CV.”
Trans: You are too lazy to list your jobs in the format we’ve asked for to make it easier to assess everyone fairly and you obviously didn’t think we meant it when we said ‘CVs will not be accepted’. Next!
6. “Please see attached 8 page statement.”
Attached, that is, to a question asking for an answer one page long. Next!
7. [Actually, I can’t read this one because its hand-written in writing that spills out of each box on the form and follows its own dreamy little path up and down the margins and back into the box again. The writing is illegible.] Next!
8. [Can’t read this one either. It’s a statement typed in a point-size so small, the font probably functions in its spare time as a billboard typeface for microbes.] Next!
9. “I realise I have none of the experience or qualifications you require but I hope that you can see that my enthusiasm and commitment to the role make all the difference.”
Now you’re making me sad. Next!
More positively, applicants:
- Please read the instructions.
- Please read the job description
- Please address the person specification
- And please, please, please use a bloody spellchecker.
I’m glad you asked.
Well, since my last rant on the subject we’ve actually had sex several times. Unfortunately, only one of those occasions was in the last two months.
“Once in two months?” I hear you cry, à la Monty Python. “You’re lucky!”
Well, yes – but the problem with trying to move on from a drought of effectively some eighteen months or more is that any kind of a gap now becomes not an intermission between instances of loving coitus due to the exigencies of daily living but the end of everything .
It also builds up unrealistic expectations of what’s going to happen if we ever do get around to it again and that sets up another kind of tension – between having enough sex so that we can’t say we aren’t having any and not having enough to reasonably claim that it’s a meaningful part of our relationship. And that’s before we even get to the bit about what exactly constitutes ‘enough’.
Actually, we both kind of agree on that one – more than we have at the moment. Just like any other married couple really. Except we aren’t actually married and supermum could probably live without, if the choice was sex or crochet.
I suppose we have any number of problems in this area but a fundamental one has to be that we aren’t very good at it and express ourselves through a very limited sexual vocabulary. In fact we talk about it with a very limited vocabulary. We don’t go any further than “sex”, “it”, “Don’t touch me there” or “Can’t we just do it and stop fiddling about?”
So, as a great believer in the power of books to alleviate just about everything, I embarked on a campaign to expand our vocabulary. I went through a phase of leaving subtly entitled tomes like “The Sex-Starved Marriage” or “Passionista” or something to do with cupcakes lying around the house in the two or three places where supermum might be guaranteed to pick them up whilst looking for something else. That stopped once dudelet learned to read. In any case, they didn’t do much good. The Cupcake one (I can’t remember the name – it’s somewhere around the house but supermum’s hidden it) contained a ninety page breakdown of the mechanics of oral sex (both kinds) that both of us were too embarrassed to read or own up to having read (okay, I read it. I’m only human. Or male, at any rate, which is almost the same thing). Then there were the testimonies of ‘sexually empowered women’. Did I mention it was written by sexually empowered women? Supermum reported feeling fifty kinds of inadequate in comparison and I didn’t feel much better. Unfortunately, this particular tome is fairly typical of the genre.
Passionista had a smidgen of some pretty practical advice – I especially liked the idea about hugging and whilst I haven’t asked her, the drought-breaking sex of three months ago was kicked off after supermum just hugged me, fiercely and continuously, for about ten minutes – God it was powerful! But the book still suffers from relentless stories of erotic athleticism and inventiveness that, frankly, aren’t much help if you aren’t that physically comfortable with each other in the first place. The Sex Starved Marriage was even worse, sparing us blow by blow (sorry) instructions but ladling out glutinous homilies about the obvious over and over again. The book’s thesis – marriages without sex kind of starve to death so, like have sex already, people! – is sound enough. But that’s all there is! And the author spins it out for 224 excruciatingly pious pages!
The one book that actually struck a chord last year was, strangely, a library book I got out called Eat Chocolate Naked: And 142 Other Ways to Atract Attention and Spark Romance by Cam Johnson. Now I’d normally rather pull my fingernails out than be seen pushing this type of text through the library loan desk but last year, you might remember, I was really desperate. And this book, basically a list of 143 fairly silly things to do to spark romance, actually worked. Not all of them were practical – you’d need grandparents for some of them (in a baby sitting sort of way) but they at least got us talking again. I even went so far as to set up a spreadsheet with a random number generator with the idea that we’d try and do one daily (most of them didn’t involve sex – we’re talking attention and romance here).
And it started to work.
Until we all got gastric flu and spent Christmas throwing up and hallucinating. That kind of killed the mood for the next six months (see previous posts – nothing worse than something starting to happen and then stopping dead again).
So what am I going to do about the rut we’ve so easily slipped back into again?
I’ve ordered our own copy. In fact, I think I’ll buy two. And I’ll keep you posted.
And if you’ve got this far, you’ve earned a Nick Cave song. So here’s Grinderman.
Our childminder gave birth a couple of weeks ago and has unsurprizingly taken a break from minding our children*. In the meantime supermum and G, the other mum who the childminder works for, have divided care of their children between them. I take the occasional extra day off to fill in but can’t help out with the whole brood – I wouldn’t be allowed to follow G’s three year old into the nursery toilets to wipe her bottom, she apparently doesn’t get on with her own father etc., etc…
This has meant that time dudelet would normally spend with supermum and little elf has been shared with two other girls, L (six) and M (seven). L is one of dudelet’s best friends and he likes M a lot but it hasn’t gone as smoothy as we might have expected. He’s squabbled with L a lot, actually had to be sent to his room by G yesterday (and you know how they normally behave immaculately with other people) and has generally been a stroppy little beggar for most of the week. I think I’ve worked out why.
We’ve always felt very lucky that dudelet has never really expressed any jealousy of little elf and watching the dynamic of this week, I’ve realised that it’s because he feels a real sense of ownership of her as his little sister – his and no-one else’s. When she does something clever, he crows with delight, just like we do. She comes and finds him to do simple things for her when we aren’t around. If he gets to her first thing in the morning he’ll even (hair-raising this) get her out of her cot and grobag. They fight, wrestle, tickle each other…actually, they adore each other.
But this week, for the first time, little elf has been consistently spending time with other little girls, imitating them, following them around and trying to dress up in their clothes. In turn, they’ve positively doted on her and little elf has thrived. She’s started to babble in almost identifiable sentences, she’s gaining even more physical confidence (though she already had a lot) and she’s strongly starting to express preferences about the TV she watches and the clothes she wears. This was all developing anyway but seems to be going through one of those patches of acceleration you get in two year olds.
And dudelet has been sidelined. For the moment, his primacy as the sibling, the main way I think that he copes with the addition to the family and the amount of attention she gets, has been displaced.
It’s difficult – we’ll need to make sure we all spend some quality time together, as a family and in pairs this weekend so he can feel the centre of attention. This is going to go on for a couple more weeks then things will get back to normal and, really, he’s coping very well. But it’s hard for him and it makes me realise all the more what a brilliant big brother he is to little elf. And, once again, how lucky we are.
*We’re paying her for a few weeks. She’s self-employed but out of a mixture of ethics, guilt and self-interest (we really don’t want someone who’s just given birth trying to keep up with little elf, exhausting for even the non-recently pregnant), we don’t want her to go straight back to work.
Andre Who?
Andre Norton, aka Alice Mary Norton (1912 to 2005). Science fiction writer and Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. My high school’s library had many of her books – she initially defined herself as a writer of ‘juvenile fiction,’ back in the 40s and 50s – and I devoured them, sometimes two or three in a day. Then I left school, went to university, got on with a myriad other things (and authors) and forgot all about her until I added the invaluable Stanza e-book app to my iPhone and discovered that a number of her texts had passed out of copyright and were available on Project Gutenburg, one of my favourite websites.
So I downloaded half a dozen or so and read them and suddenly found myself keeping company with my 15 or 16 year old self. And I’m just as much a sucker for an inventive, star-spanning, rollicking good yarn now as I was then.
So what happens?
I wouldn’t say that there was a formula to a good Norton novel but there’s generally a protagonist who, whether adult or teenager, has some kind of growing up to do. All her novels feature some form of rite of passage. There’s usually a strong environmental theme or engagement with the wild, either literally in the form of the wild oceans the heroes of Key Out Of Time find themselves adrift upon, or the symbolised by the wolverines who accompany Shann in Storm Over Warlock.
There are also aliens, frequently very convincing aliens. In both the aforementioned books, the dominant gender in the alien races encountered are is female, with males either non-existence or powerless and firmly kept off-stage. Critics might complain (with some justification) that witchy female aliens and action-oriented male humans reflect rather stereotypical gender attributes but there’s no doubting the power of her extra-terrestrials. It’s heady stuff.
Why on earth would I want to read her?
Her books are fun! And they’re also very well-written, in that economical, efficient prose that the best writers of 50s hard SF had down. The ideas flow, plots accelerate and pages fly by. There’s plenty of action to be had but some of the best (like Plague Ship) demand that their characters find non-violent means to solve their problems and grow up, whether through guile, science, negotiation or tough choices. As with Heinlein’s ‘juvenile’ classics like Starship Troopers or the charming Star Beast, there’s a didactic undertow but never at the expense of the story
So these are children’s books?
Look, I think after Phillip Pullman, J.K. Rowling and the rest, we’ve pretty much established that there are good books and bad books and that the ostensibly targeted age group is by and large irrelevant. Good writers ultimately balance pleasing themselves with pleasing their audience. Norton loved to write and it shows.
And where next?
Off to Project Gutenburg, of course, and search on Andre Norton. Start with the ones I’ve mentioned then dig around for copies of the Witch World series. Her official site is here. She deserves as much of a cult as is belatedly gathering around the wonderful Diane Wynne Jones and I’m happy to do my bit.
Little elf toddles into the kitchen dragging supermum’s zipper shoulder bag. I use the term advisedly – it’s made entirely out of black zips, even the long shoulder strap, though supermum’s customised it with a single yellow zip to keep it closed. Little elf rounds the table (the bag following about two feet behind her) chanting “ja ja ja” and then begins to hum.
“Hmmmm….”
I join in.
“…mmmmmmmmmm…”
She tilts her head to give me a big, noisy air-kiss.
“M!”
Mission accomplished, she heads happily out of the kitchen.
“Ja ja ja ja ja ja…”
***
Dudelet returns to the issue of what I could do if I lost my job.
“You could take your guitar and go and play for money. If you play songs people like, they’ll give you some!”
Reassured by his back-up plan for my future employment, he returns to his drawing.
***
Little elf arrives in the kitchen. She gives me a big cushion, a teddy bear and a pair of trousers then demands (“Tha! Tha! Tha!”) her glue and glue spreader.
***
Dudelet is playing with a pirate set and has turned it into a rap musical.
“And then you shoot him, ah-ah-ah/And he shoots the other one/And you’re all dead/And the skel-e-ton gets the trea-sure…”
Bon Iver’s ‘Bloodbank’ is a song and a performance that keeps on resonating and haunting me, pulling up childhood whispers, memories and half truths; there’s a line about ‘Christmas morning’ that never fails to tie a little knot in my stomach. I find it hard to explain why. There was nothing terrible about my family Christmases as a child and trying to unpack any memories I have doesn’t reveal very much.
My earliest Christmas memory is an image of my father creeping into my room and out again, leaving the Christmas bags of brightly wrapped presents, walnuts, tangerines and novelties behind him. It was at an age when I knew there was no Father Christmas but hadn’t yet told him that I knew. I think my sister and I were sharing and I must have been about six or seven. Presents were important to me but they had to be a particular kind. From six onwards, I wanted books, boxes of Airfix soldiers and model planes. I also wanted a Scalextrix, a big railway set like my cousin P., a big, complex set of Lego and an Action Man. I got the books and the soldiers but not the bigger items and if I had, I probably would have wanted something else. Consumption never ends. Besides, my adoptive mother and father were brought up during the war by parents who were themselves quite old and I think they saw something quite wrong in conspicuous consumption of any kind.
We weren’t poor – solidly lower middle class – but my parents were always very set on our being ‘not like’ other families. They were both from what you might call aspirational working class backgrounds with little to differentiate them from the neighbours beyond pretensions to gentility and a certain sense of beleagueredness. This they drew from their identity as Catholics of a peculiarly rigid and unforgiving type and Christmas, like everything else throughout the year, was seen in particularly dogmatic and religious terms.
Do I remember those early Christmases before puberty as happy times? I do, I think. They certainly weren’t specifically unhappy. I don’t think my father became seriously unhappy until his fifties when he took early retirement. What’s odd, though, is how little I remember. There was the tree, the same box of decorations pulled out every Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass (always crowded) to avoid having to go on Christmas Morning, the crib set out in the Lounge and so on. The Lounge was the Best Room. We never used it, except when there were visitors so the living room was extraordinarily crowded as a consequence – a lumber room of oddly matched armchairs and a sofa, a dining table, laundry racks, ironing boards and one of two massive pre-war sideboards full of crockery and ‘best china’. There was also a kitchen table we could have eaten at but we always ate in the living room because that was where we were supposed to live.
So what was the lounge really for?
Well, until I was five, a grandmother lived in an identical house across the road. When she died, the lounge was where they laid her out. Not much of this is specific to Christmas but it’s a clue – life in our house was always an image of something deferred to the next life, the real life to come, as you’d expect from their particularly puritanical strain of Catholicism.
Everything centred around Christmas dinner to which a particular aunt and uncle were always invited. After the Queen’s Speech (listened to with immense respect) we’d go for a walk on the beach (we lived in a seaside town called Southport in the North West of England). I liked that because I got to walk with the uncle in question who was a very good listener. Boxing Day would be spent doing rounds of visits and then life would return to normal. I’d return to my books and collection of tiny plastic soldiers, meals would return to hotpots and rice pudding and my parents would get on with whatever it was they did. To this day, I have no idea if they had anything that could be called an inner life of their own. That’s a terrible thing to say about your father and mother (and there’s another whole post to be written on that point alone) but their interactions with each other seemed to amount to a hemming in of, a corralling of any kind of difference or individuality beyond being Good Catholics, doing their Duty and bringing me and my sister up to be dutifully Good Catholics too. You’d have thought Christmas might have heralded even a tiny outbreak of modest Saturnalia but it never happened. The closest they came to it were the small glasses of Stones ginger wine or Emva Cream sherry that would appear when certain relatives did their own Christmas visits. One bottle could last several years.
I do remember the tree in particular at the house we lived in up to when I was nine. It felt huge, enormous, room-filling. I didn’t know that that much tinsel could exist without draining the world of silver. I think it held all the unlived life backed up in our house over the whole of the year.
After dudelet arrived, supermum (a huge fan of Christmas, cursed to live with a Grinch) started getting real Christmas trees and amassing her own collection of decorations. Dudelet loves Christmas and this year, I’ve no doubt that Little Elf will. It’s taken two children to get me to the point where I can regard it with anything other than dread but (don’t tell anyone) they ensure that I can even look forward to it. A bit.
Writing this also reminds me that I’m also prone to deferring life till later. I need to look carefully at that, I really do. Oh, and here’s the song. Don’t blame Justin Vernon for any of the above – it’s a gorgeous tune.
Or, in other words, what this blog seems to be about.*
Blog #1 started as a parenting blog and for some reason, nearly everyone who read it lived in the US. Eventually, certain members of my family and supermum’s family cottoned on to it as well. This began to get a little uncomfortable and I definitely began to self-censor a little which, as the whole point was self-expression, felt wrong. So I stopped and started again, kind of.**
My previous blog had a fairly respectable readership at one point – not huge but not insignificant. I’ve met and maintain online relationships with a number of people whose friendship I treasure. One thing that always struck me as odd, though, was the lack of UK readers, for the most part.† So when I shut down blog #1 and started Dad Who Writes, I thought it would be interesting to see if there were any UK parents out there who had something in common with me and my concerns. I kept in touch with the people I’d built up relationships with (“same person, just a different body”) but started looking around to see if there was anyone in the same timezone.
Quite honestly, I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted some kind of approval? Or perhaps I had a misguided idea of wanting to belong to something (I have a long and undistinguished history of trying to join things, failing and leaving). I really don’t know. Perhaps I just wanted more people to read my stuff. After all, if I didn’t want people to read my stuff, I’d write it down and burn it (qv Kafka’s novels, Jung’s Red Book, Nabokov’s final novel etc etc. I’m obviously in the same league).
I probably suffered from reader envy quite a bit on #1 but not so much on Dad Who Writes. I don’t work hard for readers and as a consequence, I have a small, much-valued number of regulars whose blogs I also commune with, at least weekly. It feels like being part of a village and I love that.
I comment on other blogs I like when I possible but most of my blogging time is spent writing and I’m incredibly grateful when anyone has a look, let alone leaves a comment. I actually prefer knowing pretty much all the people who visit well enough to envisage checking in with them regularly.
And I do love comments.
I also started twittering as Dad Who Writes (I’d been twittering under my “real ID” for a while and was curious to see what would happen – as I’ve hinted elsewhere, I have an ongoing professional interest in this stuff). What’s been interesting is that the majority of the twittering amongst UK parent bloggers has, if anything, shown me that I’m not a parent blogger at all. It’s a part of me but the subject of this blog is quite the reverse – if anything, its about resisting parenthood.
The observant will carp that it is quite impossible to resist parenthood. Wrong – resisting parenthood is essential for my survival. I am not a parent. Parenthood is one of the things I am. This blog is an expression of that and of the damage and marvels that parenthood and families produce. I’m not saying I’m going to be more on-topic about this in future but I might be.
I haven’t managed to say anything of value above so here’s a picture. This is what I mean, really.
Taken at the memorial for the Wild Geese. I'll write about this at some point.
*This is evidently one of my more confused posts.
**Actually, I’d just skip straight to the photo below the fold if I were you.
†I should clarify this, some 18 comments later – it’s not that I didn’t want American readers – quite the reverse, actually. My mother’s American, supermum and I both have Canadian relatives, she’s originally from Kenya etc etc. It’s just felt a little odd that I only had about two or three readers who lived in the UK and as a UK parent, it was kind of puzzling. I suspect that the truth is my blogging at the time was simply closer to the the style of American parent blogs – they were my original models when I started reading blogs regularly a long time ago and when I finally started my own first substantial blog (three years ago? Must look it up), they were the first ones I read regularly. But this isn’t the place for a post reflecting on the history of blogging. In short, I worked for American new media companies and in an American context and this might have had something to do with it.
I don’t have time to post tonight and I’m bored of thinking about blogging about blogging. So here’s a photograph I made a few weeks ago.
