I’ll have a cuppa

Last night was a tough night in the parenting trenches.  We’re waiting for little A-Rex to sleep through the night and last weekend he almost did it, going from 10:30 to 5:30am without a feed.  If you don’t have kids, this probably sounds awful.  If you have kids, this is bliss.  But then, probably because he’s only just turned 8 weeks old, he realised he probably still needs food at 3:30.  Waking up in the middle of the night every night is tough, and it’s even tougher when your little dinosaur likes to spend an hour snorting and stirring in his sleep.

So last night, MR said he would have A-Rex, and I could have a blissful night of uninterrupted sleep–until the Feliciraptor woke up as early as 6.  Still, as I’ve covered: bliss.

Except I got insomnia.  Despite being exhausted, my body is trained to wake at freaking 3 am, and when I heard my 8 week old dinosaur crying and snuffling, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should be doing something.  Worse still, A-Rex was very fretful, and MR wide awake too.  Needless to say, we were exhausted.  My very kind sister-in-law agreed to have the kids this afternoon, but still, after they were asleep, I needed something warm and comforting to unwind.

So I reached for the kettle.

Growing up in America, my knowledge of tea was that the English were obsessed with it.  I didn’t really get it.  I liked iced tea, especially sweet tea, but hot tea I could take or leave.  My parents would sometimes make pots of loose leaf tea with a fancy infuser pot, and they would drink it black.  Sometimes I would have a cup, with some sugar.  I can still taste the watery, anemic blend Lipton uses.

Note: This is not tea. When you can drink it iced, something is wrong. If this is America’s favorite tea, no wonder Americans don’t get the tea thing. They don’t even have electric kettles.

On my second trip to England I had afternoon tea at the Savoy.  As it was a very posh hotel, the waiter pours your tea for you, and he offered to pour milk in my tea.  I put my hand over the cup, equal parts mystified and repulsed by the idea (remember, all I knew of tea was Lipton).  I sipped at my black tea for formality’s sake, but I was far more interested in the food.

Even when I got to know British people and was taught the correct way to drink tea (i.e. with milk, and proper tasting tea), I was a bit weirded out by the dipping of chocolate covered things in tea, like Tunnock’s caramel wafers, or chocolate covered digestives.  Surely chocolate and tea was a strange combination?  So I ate my digestives dry and didn’t think much of them.

A perfect tea accompaniment.

For a long time, I completely underestimated tea.  I didn’t have any good stuff, and so I couldn’t understand why tea was such a comfort when you’re tired or wet or cold or in need of a pick me up; warming and cheering all at once.  Now I drink Yorkshire Gold and know better than to order tea in the US–it’s either some herbal nonsense or Lipton.  When I go home, I pack my own teabags.  Obviously I drink it with milk–now I equate drinking black tea with drinking black coffee.  It’s certainly possible and sometimes done, but only by a select few who have particular tastes.

I’m becoming assimilated.  Tonight I reached for the kettle, brewed my tea in my tea-stained mug, and happily dipped my caramel wafer in it.  The warmth of the tea melted the chocolate and softened the wafer and caramel, and the sweetness of the treat was set off by the mellow, rich tea.  Coffee’s bitterness is stimulating, but tea hits a more calming note, particularly as I was drinking decaf.  I get why the English are happy to live up to this stereotype.

 

 

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Source: Underestimate

On the Shelf: parenting advice from Louisa May Alcott

Man, I love Little Women.  Ok, that’s an obvious statement, rather like saying ‘I enjoy breathing.’  I have yet to meet someone who’s read Little Women and not absolutely loved it.  Even Joey loves it:

What’s so great about the book is not only are the characters completely endearing, but the titular women in the story are way ahead of their time.  Ok, Meg, Jo, and Amy all end up with a guy, but their choices are theirs, and often unconventional.  Meg could have married Ned Moffatt and become a rich man’s wife, but she goes for John Brooke instead.  And one of the best moves in literature is Jo turning down Laurie.

I always loved the chapter ‘On the Shelf’, and it resonates even truer now that I am a parent.  In it, Meg is fretting over her twins playing mother-martyr and ignoring her husband, who looks for company (of a very platonic kind) elsewhere.  Meg eventually starts to miss him and get resentful, and Marmee tells her that John should have a hand in raising the kids too.  So Meg turns bedtime, which has heretofore been a struggle, over to her husband.  There is a battle of wills, but she wisely stays out of it, and ultimately Demi (their son) learns to go the f*ck to sleep, John gets more involved and stays at home more, and Meg is a hell of a lot less strung out..

We have a very skewed view of dads today.  They’re treated as secondary parents.  On sitcoms, even the progressive Modern Family, they’re the buffoons of the family who can’t do anything right (to be fair, I didn’t come up with that–I read it in an article once).  Then there are products like this:

Har har, Dad is so dumb he can’t do anything right!  He doesn’t know anything about childrearing.  You’re drunk, Dad.  Go play golf.

Except this becomes problematic for everyone.  Dads are marginalised in the family unit, and that’s a bad idea in general and especially when both parents work.  It leaves the mother playing the martyr role, taking on too much and trying to be superhuman when she is clearly a very regular human. (For the record, I absolutely see single moms as being superhuman because they have to play both roles.) Meanwhile, the kid never gets to feel the benefit of having both parents around and the family doesn’t come together as well.  I’m not sure why we treat dads as inept, but it’s a dumb idea which is seriously impairing the quality of family life and the equality of the sexes.  It implies that only women can rear children, and that’s problematic for a whole host of reasons.

Turns out, good ol’ Louisa May had the answer 150 years ago.  Let Dad help–he knows what to do.  It may not be exactly what Mom does, but it’ll get the job done, and just as well.  Then you can be a parenting team and make some serious strides for equality to boot, instead of being a martyr.  And being a martyr sucks because you work your butt off but no one thanks you for it anyway.

 

Postscript: For the record, MR is much more a John Brooke kind of dad.  He’s very involved, and it makes my life a lot more awesome.  Plus it’s super cute to see the Feliciraptor bond with him.  When his relatives comment in surprise about how involved he is, I stare at them in bemusement.  Of course he’s involved.  He’s her dad.

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Source: Shelf

Flow

I’m not very good at going with the flow.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of going with the flow.  When I was a kid, I really liked that song ‘Que Sera, Sera’.  And who doesn’t love a bit of Enya to zone out to?  I dare you to listen to this and not feel relaxed:  It’s like a musical spa day.  I also love spa days.

The point is, I know how to unwind and bliss out, but I can’t *stay* that way.  I always start stressing again if I don’t have closure or don’t know the answer.  One of my childhood friends is on Facebook touting the virtues of following your bliss after (from what I can put together from her posts) giving up her career as a lawyer to become a yoga instructor/ life coach.  Part of me wants to roll my eyes at this, but it’s hard when she seems so honestly happy and chilled about life.

I want to be like that.  At least, I think it would lead to a calmer existence.  After being married three years I’m not as tightly wound as I used to be (sharing your life with someone will do that), but I still want to know how things will end up so my imagination doesn’t run wild with all the possibilities of what *could* happen.  I’m very good at coming up with dramatic, though highly unlikely, possibilities.  For example: if I go to the town where my ex-best friend lives, will I see her?  Maybe there will be a confrontation!  Should I play it cool or giver her a piece of my mind because I still don’t have closure from our last fight?  I run the scenarios through my mind like stories.  The problem is, like many good stories, they are engrossing because they are so stressful.  It’s like when I stayed up all night one time to try to find a good pausing point in The Hunger Games.  Note: It took something like reading 200 pages until 4am and practically falling asleep before I could close the book.  This is how I get about life.

That’s why pregnancy is such a special challenge.  I’m now in my final few weeks of gestating #2 and I’m at the point now where I’m ready to have this kid.  Problem is, I don’t know when, or how it will happen and there are so many variables.  What will happen to my two year old daughter while I’m in labour?  Who will take care of her, and how?  My personal plan A got turned on its head for a variety of reasons, and that was the one I liked because it was most predictable: she’d stay with a relative she frequently stays with and who not only loves her, but is excellent at upholding her little routines.  With plan B, I’m not sure how she will react.  I kind of know, but I don’t *really* know.

Then there’s the method of delivery.  The Feliciraptor was a c section, which means I could, in theory, demand a c section this time.  But then I don’t know how I’ll cope with staples in my stomach when I’m trying to manage a two year old.  On the other hand, it is what I know.  I know what the recovery is like and what the pain will be like, and generally how everything will go. And if I schedule it, then I *know* what will happen, which is comforting.  But I wouldn’t be able to drive for a few weeks, which means being stuck at home with a tiny baby and a two year old, and last time I found that very hard.

And speaking of post delivery, what will having two be like?  I know what it’s like to take care of a tiny baby (simple, really, but pretty boring), but I don’t know what it will be like dealing with two children.  Probably fine–after all, this is something a lot of people do with a very high success rate.  But *I* don’t know, so my mind ticks over with possibilities.  Will Felicity provide me with some company while her brother develops a personality, or will she make my days more monotonous?  What is it like to handle two kids having meltdowns for completely different reasons?

Last night I thought I had the beginnings of labour, but no dice.  As we drove to the hospital, though, I breathed a sigh of relief thinking that this was it; things were finally decided.  Only they weren’t, and now I’m in limbo again and finding new things to angst about.  For example, at my last doctor’s visit he agreed that I shouldn’t be induced, but I get stressed about the idea of being induced and back in hospital again for ages–even though that’s not going to happen and I have the power to refuse induction.

I posted a similar anxiety-ridden post when I was very pregnant with Felicity.  Now that post seems kind of silly–I had a pretty traumatic labour in the end, but she’s fine and I’m fine–fine enough to try this all over again.  People were lovely–I had lots of messages reconnecting me with friends who all sent words of reassurance.  This, however, is where I think the idea of flow comes in–if a river flows around you and you’re standing resisting it, eventually it’s going to tip you over and carry you along anyway.  Either the flow was too strong for you to fight, or you just don’t have the strength to keep resisting.  The other option is to lie back and float and see where the river takes you.  I really need to get used to option B, because the river’s given me an interesting ride.  And when I get on the lazy river at a water park, I love it.  As for exactly how to lay back and enjoy it when I want to steer and impossible to steer inner tube, well, there’s the rub.  But maybe I should try.

 

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Source: Flow