marriage | Motherhood IRL

It’s NOT okay. Okay?

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Motherhood IRL

When I tell nosey people who ask when I’m “having another one” that I can’t have any more babies, they unanimously do this incredibly fucking rude thing where they ask “WHY?” whilst salivating over the possibility of a story about some peculiar uterine wasting disease which has rendered me infertile. So I suppose it’s kind of disappointing when I explain, through gritted teeth, that my husband has had a vasectomy. But then they bypass social etiquette altogether and say – with a cheeky wink that never fails to make me feel sick – “HE can’t have any more children, but YOU can!” Are you fucking kidding me? In what universe is it okay to even vaguely suggest that I might as well just go ahead and get myself knocked up by someone – anyone, apparently – other than my husband? Thanks and everything, but no. JUST NO.

Of course, the next thing they ask me is, “Don’t you want any more babies?” You know what? Yes. YES. I DO want more babies. In fact, whenever I think about the fact that I’m not going to have any more babies, I feel a certain sense of grief. But there’s a difference between what I want and what I know is good for me and my family. So, Random Stranger full of personal questions, thanks a fucking bunch for that. I didn’t get sad and wistful about it quite enough by myself.

And then there’s my favourite question:

“So why did your husband have a vasectomy if you wanted another baby?”

Really? You really want to talk about this? Alright. I’ll bite. Let’s do this.

Because we both have shitty jobs and we can’t afford another baby.

Because our house is too small and we don’t really want to move ’cause we’ve spent a fuckload of money on this one.

Because I like my car and I don’t want a people carrier.

Because SPD and constant nausea aren’t really my idea of a good time.

Because the first six months of F’s life passed in a blur of misery and sleeplessness and, although I’ve tried really hard to block it all out, I know I’ll never quite forget how shit it really was.

Because we might actually get divorced next time.

The truth, Random Stranger, is that my husband and I made the decision for him to have a vasectomy together. But he walked into that procedure room alone, both physically and mentally. I, on the other hand, sat in the waiting room trying to write and occupy my mind while it screamed things like “you’ll never feel a baby move inside you again” and “you’ll never see your newborn for the first time again” and, my personal favourite, “you’ll never have another chance to put right everything you did wrong”.

Do I want to talk about it? Do I want to tell you all of this? Do I think you need to know? No, no and er, NO. And I wonder, if I did have three children, would you still ask? At what point do I have enough offspring for you to just stop fucking asking already?

I don’t know what it is about motherhood that makes it perfectly acceptable for everyone to make such blunt, frankly unacceptable statements with nothing short of aplomb. It’s not like anyone has ever asked me what position I conceived my babies in or whether I did that legs-up-in-the-air thing afterwards. But I’m not really sure why the Personal Inquisition Squad get that those aren’t appropriate questions and yet see nothing wrong with suggesting that I start shagging random men in the name of completing my family. Whatever the fuck that means.

So, do you know what? I’m changing my story, Random Stranger. I just need to come up with a realistic-sounding name for a fictional uterine wasting disease first…

“Romantic” city break

Posted on August 5, 2016 by Motherhood IRL

Over the last four years, N and I have been a bit hit and miss about spending time together as a couple. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s just that having kids makes it difficult. But, when I saw that my favourite author was holding a book signing and Q&A in Manchester, N suggested that we book tickets and make a romantic break of it.

You know how this is going to go, don’t you? Because this is me, and this blog is basically just a comprehensive list of my failures and/or disasters.

So, the first thing was that N was just getting over a rotten cold and I was just starting with it. Which led to me driving up the M62 with a raging fever, a runny nose and a horrible sore throat. N slept for some of the journey, so I was also fucking bored and kept incrementally turning the volume up on the car stereo to try and wake him up.

In 7 years, he has never stayed awake for a whole car journey

Then we got into the city centre and the GPS confidently directed me to a dingy back-alley, whereupon it jubilantly announced, “you have reached your destination on the left”. Unless I’m sleeping in a Biffa bin for the next two nights, you’ve lost your fucking mind. Obviously this was wrong, so N calmly loaded up Google Maps and we were redirected to our actual destination, a car park where we could dump The Smurf for the next two days without having to worry about it.

Of course, now we are those people navigating an unfamiliar city with a phone giving us directions. We are those people having an argument about the fact that the Google Maps app keeps crashing and why the fuck didn’t we just bring an actual map. We are those people arriving crossly at our hotel with sore feet and the dire need for five minutes of peace from each other. Which is difficult when you have to share one room.

Anyway. We checked into the hotel – “your room number is 237, dial 0 for reception, etc, etc” – and headed for the lifts. As we got into the lift I didn’t really think much of our room number. I expected that there would probably be about 50 rooms on each floor. Then we got to the second floor and we got out of the lift and there was a sign on the wall. “Rooms 203 to 237” with an arrow pointing around the corner. And I got that kind of creeping sense of dread that you sometimes get when you realise that your room is the last one at the end of the corridor. Like the cleaners might finish the penultimate room, turn to room 237 and think nah, fuck it and not bother changing the sheets. We trudged up the corridor, and as we trudged we dropped off the wifi. It was like entering the Dark Zone.

The long walk to our room in the hotel sticks

The bathroom in the room was less of a bathroom and more of a sanitation capsule. The shower didn’t connect properly to the wall, so water sprayed out of the botched plumbing in all directions. There was only the memory of a nightstand on my side of the bed, which is to say that there were still screw holes in the wall where it had once been. And the bed. My God, THE BED. The bed was a rock hard contraption made not even the least bit softer by a rock hard mattress topper. The pillows may actually have been stuffed with gravel. How we laughed, and how I died a little inside at the thought of how little sleep I might actually get.

I let N book the hotel because he likes doing that kind of thing and I find it unbearably boring. I vaguely recall him offering me the choice between a four star hotel with a spa and a two star hotel without one and that was kind of the whole conversation we had about it. Back in 2009, we went to Sheffield for a weekend break and stayed in a hotel with a spa, which we only actually used in the end because we felt like we should. So this time I vetoed the spa hotel. I mean, it was also a whole lot more expensive than where we ended up, but I’m fairly certain there was probably a middle ground Premier Inn option.

At about 5am the next morning, after a turbulent night trying to find a comfortable position on the rock hard mattress topper, I was woken from one of my brief periods of sleep by a lot of noise from somewhere near the door. My knackered and befuddled brain eventually managed to organise itself enough to understand that this was the sound of water hitting carpet, at which point I muttered “you have got to be fucking kidding me” and got out of bed(rock) to investigate. I found wet carpet and prayed that I wasn’t being dripped on by waste water from a flushed toilet, then went back to bed to half-heartedly search Late Rooms for a viable alternative to Chinese water torture.

This “Flu Buster” got me through the morning

It’s worth pointing out here that I was still sick – and getting sicker – with the awful cold, which was quickly turning into a chest infection, so on Monday morning I was GRUMPY. N and I went separate ways in Primark so we could shop without annoying each other, but I hate shopping. Really hate it. I just can’t be bothered with it at all. So I bought a few t-shirts for myself and spent a whole lot more on the boys and then I tried to call N. But he was on the basement floor and had no signal, so I then spent a whole hour looking for him. And he eventually rocked up like, “Why do you look so pissed off?” Seriously.

Watching the rain from Primark

We took a nap later before the book signing and then it was a monumental effort to get back up and drag N up and walk the ten minutes to the library. But it was worth it, because this particular author is my hero and it was a really unique experience. Of course, N really didn’t want to hang around for the signing afterwards – having spent the best part of an hour and a half surrounded by women, most of them more than a decade younger than us -, so he headed off to the pub while I chatted with a lovely girl, Ellie, who I met on Instagram before the signing. We exchanged numbers after the signing, so I hope we’ll keep in touch for book discussions in the future.

Talking Gansey with Maggie Steifvater

So, I should probably mention this whole aspect of a “romantic city break”, which is the pressure to have sex. I’ve already posted about sex between N and I, so I don’t really need to go into any unnecessary detail here, but the thing about being away is that none of the usual restrictions apply. There aren’t likely to be any disruptions (unless the beleaguered air con unit fell off the wall right in the middle of things) and being tired usually wouldn’t be the same kind of issue. Except that it was, because I was fucking exhausted and really, really sick. So N kind of hopefully mentioned sex on Monday morning and I coughed a lot and it pretty much wasn’t brought up again after that.

I mean, this all sounds like a total nightmare of a romantic break, but what I came away from it with is this: N is still my best friend. He’s still the person I most enjoy spending my time with. And, on top of that, I realised how lucky we really are. We have a good marriage and we have two beautiful children and we are so, so fortunate.

I also really missed the kids and was super happy to see them when we got home, even though F was mad at me for leaving him and didn’t want anything at all to do with me for a good hour after he got up from his nap. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how wonderful my boys are when they’re wearing me out and driving me crazy. But they are wonderful, and they fill my heart right up.

I’m happy.

Thanks for another great adventure, hubs. We fucked it up in our own specific way and I had a lot of fun.

Parental sex & me

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Motherhood IRL

Parental sex is something we just don’t talk about, isn’t it? Or is it just me? To be honest, it’s a wonder I’ve ever even had sex considering how utterly impossible I find it to talk or write about it. I can’t even talk to N about sex. I rationalise this by telling myself “sex is something you do; not something you talk about doing”, but I did once have this boyfriend with whom 75% of our relationship consisted of exchanging filthy text messages. The other 25%, however, was made up of not actually doing the vast majority of the things we had been texting about because, frankly, they involved a lot of effort and there was also a pretty marked height disparity between us, which would have rendered some of them impossible anyway. And I’m blushing furiously now, so I’ll leave that there.

I don’t know about anyone else, but sex isn’t something that happens very often for us these days. I suppose I should have known that this would happen, given that it took me 10 weeks to get back on the horse after O was born. When you’ve spent weeks grimacing every time you sit down, you really don’t want anybody poking around down there once things finally start to feel better. Eventually, I realised I’d just have to woman up and get it over with or risk developing such an aversion that we’d never actually have sex again. Now it’s not fear of discomfort getting in the way. It’s not even lack of libido. It’s the fact that I’m just so fucking TIRED.

The thing is, once we’re in a position where sex might be a possibility i.e. in a quiet house with children either sleeping or not present, I start to think about how late it is or how the kids could wake up any second and wouldn’t it be awful if we were in the middle of something if they did? So I tend to grunt something approaching a negative, N sort of sighs like “ah, this neurotic shit again” and goes to sleep and then I’m lying there in the dark, awake anyway because I’m fed up and frustrated because this just feels a little endless sometimes.

Go figure.

I have this “quality not quantity” approach to sex as a general rule. Like it’s better to have one really mind-blowing encounter every couple of weeks than sex that is just a little bit meh every few days. So I’ll pull this one out for N every now and again and he’ll nod and then say, somewhat sadly (possibly for effect), “That’s true, but I don’t bloody remember anymore because it’s been five fucking weeks.”

Well. At least no one’s counting.

When you’ve been married for a while, people must assume that this kind of thing happens because they’ll start telling you how important it is not to “let that stuff go”. Which actually makes me really uncomfortable, to be honest, as if I must look like a person who hasn’t gotten laid for a while. But, infuriatingly, these over-familiar individuals are not wrong; sex is an important tool for keeping couples close. I’ve noticed that N and I get much more easily aggravated with each other when it’s been a while, and I don’t think it has much to do with anything as basic as “sexual frustration” or whatever; I think it’s because it can feel sometimes like our connection has come loose. Like we are just roommates who happen to have shared custody of small humans. And sometimes it’s been so long that I actually don’t know how to get things started up again, which often strikes me as incredibly weird because… well, because it shouldn’t be that difficult.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that when N and I first met, a lot of our interaction was physical. Of course there were times when we would just sit on the sofa together and talk, but we would always be physically connected somehow. My feet in his lap, his hand on my thigh, my head on his shoulder. We made an unconscious effort to be close to each other because it felt natural to us then. But now it’s different. Now there are nights when I will go to bed and realise that we haven’t hugged or kissed all day. Now he sits at one end of the sofa and I sit at the other. We don’t cuddle in bed because ugh! I’ve had kids climbing all over me all day and I just want my personal space back so can you just Go. The fuck. Away. Please.

I don’t say this to him. It’s an internal monologue, but he generally gets the point when I wriggle away and create a duvet buffer in the middle of the bed.

Before the “duvet buffer” days.

The thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to have sex with him. It’s really not. It’s just that… It’s a lot of effort, isn’t it? Clothing to remove, some kind of prelude, the thing itself and then that godforsaken clean-up operation (speaking of which, if you haven’t read this thread about the “penis beaker”, you really should). Maybe you don’t mind falling asleep in the wet patch, but I absolutely refuse to. Eurgh. NO.

I’ve actually heard about parents who schedule sex one or two nights a week, and I don’t mean to be dismissive because hey! If that works for you then that’s awesome, but doesn’t scheduling nookie kinda take the fun out of it a little bit? I can just imagine how that would go in our house:

N: “It’s sex night.”
Me: “I know, but I’m tired and I don’t really feel like it.”
N: “But it’s sex night. It says so ON THE CALENDAR.”
Me: “We need to get a new fucking calendar.”

Nope.

I think that this is just going to be how it is for a while. A relationship counsellor would probably start talking about “making time for each other” and “nurturing your relationship” – GAG -, but we’ve been on the brink of divorce before and I genuinely don’t believe we’d let that happen again. It’s fine to not have sex for a few weeks at a time if we can still remember to appreciate each other. It’s completely unnecessary to get my knickers in a twist over this.

It’s just.

My knickers haven’t seen a whole lot of action other than twisting lately.

I will do better

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Motherhood IRL

Last week we went on our first family holiday. We were supposed to go to Penrith last year, but F was still waking up a gazillion times a night and I didn’t think I could cope with doing all the driving (because, between you and me, N is a pretty shabby driver) and being awake most of every night. So that brings us to this year. If you’re interested, we stayed at a beautiful cabin called Larchwood Lodge right on the edge of Greystoke Forest. We were visited every day by red squirrels and great spotted woodpeckers and the path at the bottom of the garden literally led straight into the trees… and if I’m not selling this to you by now then just go ahead and look at the website.

I’m not going to relate the blow-by-blow minutiae of the whole week because, to be frank, you’d be bored shitless by the end of the first paragraph. So I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll include links to the places we visited at the end of this post in case you’re ever in Cumbria and stuck for something to do.

A montage of our week in the Lake District

The thing is, what I really found myself thinking on the last night of our holiday as I watched my children playing at the edge of the forest through the kitchen window was this: They’re never going to be this age again. O turned four while we were away and I couldn’t help but wonder where those four years have gone. I mean, I hate myself for even typing that because how unbearably cliché do I want to be? But it’s true. Four years ago he was a tiny, helpless baby and I was just getting to grips with motherhood, crying a lot and swearing every time he latched onto my chapped, bleeding nipples for a feed. Now he’s answering back and refusing to go to bed and driving me up the fucking wall half the time, but he’s also this amazing, proper little person and it’s hard to imagine that he was ever that tiny.

Happy birthday to my big boy, O

Then I looked at F and I felt that all too familiar tug in my gut that happens every time I remember how much of his babyhood I missed out on due to worry and stress, sleep-deprivation and god awful mental illness. And I thought that as much as I possibly can, I will try to savour these moments. So I stood there at the window and I just watched my babies play with flowerpots and sticks and dirt. I watched them delight in every moment of this simplicity and I forgot that I should be calling them in for a bath because it was already long past bedtime. I forgot that I still had stuff to pack for the journey home. I forgot that anything outside of that little snapshot of time actually mattered at all.

Bear cubs in their natural habitat

I worry so much about the little things, about their routines and what they’re eating. I worry about keeping the house clean and getting the laundry done. And I worry what people think of me when they walk through my front door and see the detritus of family life strewn throughout every room. And I know that it doesn’t really fucking matter what anybody else thinks, but I worry anyway. So I lose these moments to worry sometimes. I don’t stop for long enough to notice the little things half the time. But this holiday has been good for me, because it has shown me what life could be like with my children if I put my worry aside sometimes. If I let F cuddle me for as long as he wants to instead of freaking out about everything that I need to do. If I read O just one more story before bed rather than panic that it’s half past bedtime and he still needs to brush his teeth. This week I’ve learnt that if I put off my worries for just a few more minutes, the whole world really won’t fall on my head.

These are lessons that I will forget as often as I remember them, I’m sure. But the point is that now I know and I will try. I will try to do and be better, for myself as much as my children. So I won’t regret the moments I missed when my children are grown up.

The day after we came back from our holiday was our 5th wedding anniversary, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the people we used to be and who we are now. When we got married, we had only been together for a couple of years. We were just two kids in love and we thought we had it all figured out. We thought we could conquer the world, just the two of us, with the force of that love. I look back on that boundless optimism now and I realise how naïve we really were. Because the truth is that what has kept us together for the last five years has been hard work and determination. We have been determined not to forget, but sometimes we have anyway. Sometimes we’ve screamed at each other to “just fuck off already!” at the end of a hard day – or the beginning of one after a long night. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to imagine who we were when we first met, but I know that I was a fragile, heartbroken thing. I know that I was a flight risk, and I know that N put up with a lot. I know that it took strength and guts for him to resist every one of my attempts to push him away. I know that he loved me a lot, and I know that I loved him enough in return to let him in. To give him the chance to hurt me. And I’m not going to dress this up; there have been shitty times and yes, he has hurt me. More than once. But that street has gone both ways sometimes and the bottom line is the only one that really matters in the end, which is this:

He is my co-pilot. We navigate this journey together. And, when all is said and done, there isn’t anybody I’d rather have in the cockpit with me when all of the lights start flashing at once.

Five years is wood. We are not going to be wooden.

We are going to be God damn TREES.

04.06.2011

Mirehouse & Gardens

Bank Mill Visitor Centre

Brockhole

Whinlatter

Walby Farm Park

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