Impressive

Always amazes me those parents who use their precious Facebook time in the evenings to post on the school Facebook page. They must be genuinely interested in school things. Things like what is happening with the sports day after all that rain and who is running the grocery shopping fundraiser.

Huh. You’re really not faking it with parenthood like the rest of us, are you?

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Sticks

My friend has banned toy weapons for her sons. I kind of haven’t but I still feel uneasy about it.

The other evening we are at the beach and my son finds a stick shaped exactly like a bow and her son finds a stick shaped exactly like a rifle… and that’s how that weapon ban is going.

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Difficult babies turn into heavenly eight year olds

Lauca was a really difficult baby.

Really

fucking

difficult,

like

that

first

year

of

motherhood

about

killed

me.

But fast forward on oooh, say seven years in the future.. that difficult baby turns eight years old and you are dragging your tired self home from work one evening and you ring ahead to ask if you need to stop at the shops to buy something to cook everyone for dinner:

Lauca: “No, I have already cooked dinner”.

Me: “What on earth did you cook?”

Lauca: “Pie”.

Me: “What did you put in it?”

Lauca: “Whatever I could find in the kitchen”.

When I walked in the door that evening I found her lying on my bed reading a novel while the pie finished baking. So wonderful. And then on the weekend she woke me up with breakfast in bed. She had found a recipe for Greek yoghurt pancakes in her cookbook. Finally, that evening she asked me to show her how to cook a roast. My god.

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You can’t afford to lose your temper when you’re poor

A few things about the extraordinary vulnerability of being a parent who is poor:

• You can’t afford to lose your temper. (You could lose everything).
• You can’t afford to unwind by sharing your problems with someone.
• You can’t afford to be tired and stressed and making less than perfect decisions.
• You can’t afford to cobble together solutions; for your own protection cobbled together solutions are illegal.
• You can’t afford to take time off work to deal with your kid, who is now stressed and tired and making not so great decisions, too.
• You can’t afford to pay fines, even ‘reasonable’ ones – so you end up being imprisoned.

No prizes for guessing the race of this mother who is now in jail in New Jersey.

 

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Best t-shirt

Willow Smith in a t-shirt celebrating feminist icons. Image via For Harriet: celebrating the fullness of black womanhood.

UPDATE: Rats, it’s photoshopped, but there’s a link for where you can buy the t-shirt.

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When your child finds Internet porn

This is a good piece of writing from Lizi Patch over at Daily Life, “My son saw violent porn”.

I was looking at this through the eyes of my 11-year-old. He could see that there were gradations of porn. Some of it, though an unrealistic view of sex between two consenting adults, was bearable and allowed you to retain a basic positive belief in the world. But then there was the degrading, shockingly violent porn that showed him a dark underbelly of an online world that until that moment was largely populated by Minecraft and Harry Potter. Faced with this hideous new information, he simply didn’t know where to file it.

Also on this topic, previous posts on blue milk:

What would you do if you found your 13 year old child’s porn viewing history in your browser?

And,

Guest post: Being a feminist and raising a lad.

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My new article: The sexualisation of girls

I have a new article in Essential Kid discussing the four biggest problems I see with the conversation around the sexualisation of young girls. And I almost never say this about an article I have written but you can read the comments.

Not so long ago there was controversy over child models being photographed in French Vogue mimicking sultry adult poses and being dressed in women’s clothing and makeup. Everyone agreed that it was little girls looking like adults but some people still wondered what the fuss was about. Even some feminists view the concern about the sexualisation of children as really being a sneaky resurrection of female purity obsessions. To my mind, there’s nothing bad about little girls playing dress-up, or even playing with sexy dress-up ideas, if they’re genuinely choosing this play idea from a range of gender-diverse options. Shaming girls about femininity, even artificial constructs of it, is a big mistake. But the Vogue photos weren’t pictures of little girls playing – they were adults playing dress-up with little girls. That’s an important difference and we should pay attention, particularly when it is for commercial purposes. What was the magazine selling? Notably, little boys are not typically used to represent miniature versions of sexy adult men, why is that? It could be that this collapsing of sexiness and materialism into displays of girlhood is part of a wider trend in sexually objectifying women.

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Parties

My nephew’s Naming Ceremony.

Arranging a baby and its frou frou on your lap.

I was so cross with Lauca for putting tattoos on herself the day before but now I kind of like the effect in the photos.

Old friends of mine who years ago watched me craftily set up their workmate with my sister.. and now there’s a baby to show for all that.

Cormac’s 4th birthday party. My least effort yet… and a success.

Cupcake decorating activity.

High on turning four… and sugar.

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Oh my god, Autumn

This is not what it normally looks like when I working on my laptop, but let’s imagine it is..

This weekend, seriously.

My city has a truly wonderful autumn and spring and even though I know it does each year still kind of takes me by surprise. On the weekend I had this beautiful morning where the kids were off with their dad and I used the time to ride to the gym and the Asian grocer and then I rode home and cooked myself brunch. And while I was cutting eshallots in the garden I noticed one of my lavender bushes was also flowering. It was all very reassuring, like my life is just absolutely toodle-pip perfect or something.

I spent the late afternoon and evening at my sister’s house where we walked in the park and played with her baby. In the evening when her husband came home from work we all drank beers and ate take-away curry and laughed too loud and woke the baby up. My sister’s husband is working hard on this big case and he was fretting a little and wanting my sister to look over the work he’d prepared for cross-examining witnesses. I told them to go do that together and I will put your baby back to sleep. Of course the baby would only sleep in my arms which was quite frankly, lovely, and I lay with him on their bed in the dark.

The next morning I promised my kids a bike ride and we went to see some friends to tempt them along with us. Their kid and mine played Lego while she got ready and I took photos of all the lovely light in their house. Because the weather is so beautiful and the preparation is inevitably so involved we took the kids on quite a long ride, sufficient to eventually break the spirit of Cormac, the youngest. So then we called her husband to come and get the kids and the bikes in the car and she and I rode back together. How amazing is this ride without them, we said, and do you think we’ll ever go home.

Behold the morning sun on my friends’ deck.

Cormac stuffing Lego into his pockets like a little thief.

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My new article: Returning to work: a walk in the park?

I love my work and I’m terribly grateful for the flexibility my employer provides. I’ve had the benefit of maternity leave (both paid and unpaid), some flexibility in my start and finish times, and occasional work-from-home days in emergency situations. It has made all the difference; I have a career and two children and I do not feel torn in half by the process. And my appreciation makes me a very loyal employee, too, so it’s win-win. So I must share a confession: if I had been asked to write this article a couple of years ago, here’s where my conclusions about working part-time would have ended. But I would be lying if I said it has all been easy.

Combining work outside the home with the work of rearing children and running a household has often been a grind. Working part-time has been the best of both worlds, and in some ways a taste of the worst of both, too. We frequently fall short of money, I’m exhausted, the house is disorganised, often I fight a sense of not being taken seriously in the workplace, the children sometimes feel ignored, my after-school care arrangements are in a permanent state of near collapse, and I’m getting increasingly petty about wanting the corner office again. Like the Wall Street Journal article, the workplace is both encouraging and discouraging of mothers returning to work.

Essential Baby asked me to comment on the Wall Street Journal article and write about what it was like for me returning to work after maternity leave.  My article is here.

Update: Corrected the link, sorry everyone.

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