When I see a yellow car . . . and other things that I do now that I have children

When I see a yellow car, I say, “Spotto!” even if there’s no one else around to play the game.


When we go past a McDonalds, someone in the car must point at the Golden Arches and say, “Big M for me!”, with everyone else in the car then following suit.


When I am enjoying something (be it food, a tv show, good behaviour from said children), it requires two thumbs up as well as the declaration, “Two thumbs up for good!”


When the answer to the question, “What are you doing?” is, “Nothing!”, or, more frighteningly, “None of your business!”, I must immediately look for the child/children who answered me.  When the answer is silence, find them even quicker.  And be prepared to clean up a mess.


When the children assure you that their rooms are tidy, ask them, “Will I think it’s tidy?” If they still say it’s tidy, ask them, “Is it tidy enough that if I sweep the floor I can throw all the swept things away?”  All things of value (to them) will then be tidied up (or at least hidden away).


When I have my hand on the handle of a pram or a shopping trolley, I will rock it gently back and forth while standing still.  There doesn’t need to be a child in the pram or trolley.  I’ll just rock it empty.


Similarly, when you’re holding something baby-like (a doll, a teddy, someone’s cat), there is a need to bounce or rock gently, patting the baby-like thing on its bottom, and potentially shushing it.  For extra points, your friends won’t even comment upon this, because they’ll just accept it as normal behaviour.


When watching TV, I know the names and voices of all the characters on my children’s favourite shows, plus the general backstory of whatever it is they’re watching.  I will not know what is going on in most grown up shows.


When someone complains about something, my standard response is, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset,” even if I’m talking to an adult.  I’m also quite likely to suggest to a loud grown-up that they “use their inside voice,” rather than asking them to be quiet.


I am more likely to find out gossip from my children than my friends.  My children’s gossip will contain at least one nugget of truth.  My job is to work out which part(s) are real.  Some days, this is a real challenge.


And finally, when you ask your children, “Are you ready to go?” and they all say, “Yes,” don’t ever believe them.  As soon as you say, “Let’s go!” someone will suddenly realise that she needs to change her shoes because the ones she’s been wearing for the last hour apparently pinch her feet, someone else will need to go to the toilet (for the third time in twenty minutes) and a third someone will wipe their dirty hands and/or face on your clean clothes, just to make it fun.

Once upon a time . . . I was never having children

I always liked children, but never had any desire to have any of my own.  When we got married, it wasn’t that children weren’t high on the list of things to do . . . they simply weren’t on the list.  With a couple of exceptions, our friends fell into two categories – those who got married in their early twenties and had kids pretty soon after, or those who got married in their mid-thirties and had kids straight away.  We were both 25 when we got married, and we were upfront about the fact that kids weren’t our thing.  Everyone (especially older female relatives) told us (read: me) that of course we’d change my mind about kids.  Of course we’d have them.  I was equally as certain that I would not change my mind.


Of course, what all the other people said came to pass.  Living in a foreign country, happily travelling through my early thirties . . . and then a friend had the most adorable baby that ever there was.  Looking back, it was the perfect storm of events – my age probably led to me (unconsciously) considering the fact that I was skating towards the point at which conceiving a baby might be a lot more difficult, we spent a lot of time with our friends and their new baby, and he was just such a sweetheart.  One summer’s day, I was flying out of town on the same day as my friends, and I was seated behind them on the plane.  Their son was standing up on his father’s lap, reaching through the seat to me and giggling and gabbling at me.  It was at that moment that it hit me.  I want a baby.  At that particular point, let us all recall that I was ten years into a relationship that was never going to include children.  So, I gave it several months before I mentioned it to my husband, thinking that this baby-longing might just be a passing fancy.  When we did start discussing children, it took a while for us to decide that yes, we would try for a baby.  By that stage, we were both in our mid-thirties, so we also considered the possibility that, even with trying, we might not be able to have a baby.


It turns out that it was a very good thing that we’d been conscientious with birth control when we were younger, because conceiving a baby was not an issue for us.  Within four months, I was pregnant, and our eldest daughter was born six weeks before our 10^th wedding anniversary.  It was a fast labour (just over two hours from start to finish, and I am not kidding), and she was born with pneumonia and not breathing.  They took her out of my arms and rushed her to Special Care, where she was intubated, ventilated, hooked up to all number of machines and put in a humidicrib.  When I got to see her, about an hour later, it was sad to see a tiny, tiny little person with all these tubes and wires and things all over her little body.  Emotionally, I still hadn’t processed the idea that this was my daughter, yet here she was, under constant medical supervision because she was very unwell.


That night, sitting in my hospital bed while she was in Special Care down the hall, I suddenly realised how lucky we were that we’d gone straight to the hospital when I woke up in labour.  She was my first baby – they always say how labour takes longer the first time.  What if I’d thought that it was just the start of labour?  What if I hadn’t woken my husband to drive me to hospital?  What if she’d been born at home, not breathing?  That night, my daughter’s first night in the world, rates as one of the scariest nights of my life.  The realisation that one small change in what we’d done could have seen her die on the day that she was born.


Happily for us, the reality is that she was born in a place where she received immediate medical attention.  She recovered from the pneumonia and was allowed home six days after she was born.  She was a challenging newborn (she startled easily and woke a lot; we were first time parents who had utterly no idea what we were in for!), but there were no long term effects from her rapid (and scary) entry into the world.


After that, I was pretty happy with the idea of one child.  And I think I would have been happy permanently with only one child, but one day my husband said, “I think we should have another baby.”  And the instant those words were out of his mouth, I wanted another child.  Again, within four months, I was pregnant.  Miss #2 arrived in slightly slower fashion than her big sister (four hours, as opposed to two) on the Labour Day public holiday.  She was born breathing, healthy, normal. 


By this stage, my husband and I were skating towards our late thirties.  We figured that we had two healthy children and that the older we got, the higher the chances of some sort of issue, with conception, pregnancy or genetic issues with the baby.  One or the other of us would occasionally make a joke about a third child, but neither of us really pushed the issue. 


And then, one night, we didn’t worry about contraception.  We both figured that we were too old for an accidental pregnancy from a single throw-caution-to-the-wind moment.  And this is how, the week before my fortieth birthday, I found myself staring at two lines on a pregnancy test stick.  And at that moment, I realised just how much I wanted a third child, and how lucky I was that the universe had conspired to bring that about.


Our son arrived at the end of our eldest’s first year at school, in the very last week of Term 4.  He was the slowest of the three of them (six hours of labour) and the only one born during “business hours”.  My husband likes to tell everyone that I drove myself to hospital while in labour; he came straight from his office when I called him.  He got a call about an hour after he arrived, from a colleague asking why he wasn’t at their afternoon meeting.  He replied, “I’m at the hospital.  My wife is in labour.”  His colleague decided that was a damn fine excuse.


And now here I am, nineteen years into a marriage that was never supposed to include children with three of them – a three-year-old son and two daughters aged seven and nine.  It is true that some days I look around and the piles of books and the toy cars and the Lego pieces (oh my goodness, the Lego pieces) and I have a pang of nostalgia for those days where no one was dumping six copies of Captain Underpants on my couch or leaving dirty socks and a trail of muddy school uniform when she was sneaking into my bathroom after dinner (even though there’s a perfectly good bathroom downstairs near her room).  For the most part, however, I don’t know how my life ever functioned without these little people and all their crazy demands and their noise and commotion and stuff and activities and their, “I love you Mum, and you’re the best”.  I never realised just how much I was going to love being a mother, nor how much fun kids can be (except when they’re having tantrums.  At that point, I’m happy to sell them to the circus).

On the end of a friendship

The end of a romantic relationship has always been a story.  A romance (essentially) has heart; its end, heartbreak.  A romantic relationship, be it a coupledom, an engagement or a marriage, lasting two months, two years, two decades . . . the end of a romance is always a thing.  


“What happened?” you’ll hear people say.  


“I heard he cheated.”


“She said she fell in love with someone else.”


“He needed some space.”


There is always a story to the end of a couple’s relationship.  There is always solace.  Someone holds your hand (or your head, or just your whole self) while you cry.  Someone brings you ice cream or dinner (or wine).  Another someone will take you out to a club or a pub or a band.  Invariably, someone will encourage you to have a quick fling, “get back on the horse”, find someone for a little fun.  And, eventually, you’re likely to find another someone, develop another relationship, become another couple.  And everyone understands that story.


Friendship, however . . .


The end of a friendship, particularly a long friendship, often feels fairly similar to the death of a romantic relationship.  At least to you.  The end of a friendship, like the end of a romance, can be a sudden surprise; it can be a long time coming.  There can be something akin to infidelity (“why are you hanging out with her so much?  Fridays at the park are our thing!”); there can be a slow drifting apart, ending in something that sounds like, “We’re just such different people now.”  There can be the friendship equivalent of, “it’s not you, it’s me.”  And yet there is rarely the solace, the kindness, the compassion that you get at the end of a relationship.  Even though we all understand on some level that a good friendship should have many of the hallmarks of a good romantic relationship, we rarely think about that when someone is mourning the end of a friendship.


In the relatively recent past, a friendship of mine ended.  The events which transpired to end it are unimportant in their detail, but important for me to determine that it hadn’t actually been a two-sided friendship.  From my point of view, we were mates; not people that necessarily hung out much, but people who got on well together, who enjoyed chatting and catching up; people who liked and respected each other and were buddies, without being best friends.  For example, we weren’t close enough that I’d have asked her to babysit my kids, nor expected her to ask me to mind hers, but we were friendly enough that I’d have been perfectly fine with her texting to say she was running late to school pick up, and could I please just hang out with her children till she got there.  Or walk them to her car, or something similar.  And I thought she considered me in roughly the same fashion.


Anyhoo, something happened.  In the course of what happened, she said a number of things that clearly indicated that she had very limited respect for me personally.  Many of the things that she said could have been due to her having had a crappy day, but she never apologised for the way she spoke, never even acknowledged that what she’d said may have been inappropriate or rude.  At the time, I thought I might have been being a bit sensitive (I’d had an epically crappy day myself and my judgement may have been off). Having recounted what she said to three people whose judgement I trust, I’m pretty confident that it wasn’t (just) me.  What she said was rude and disrespectful.  And I was completely, horribly hurt by the fact that she would speak to me like that.


It was at that point that I thought back upon our friendship.  And when I thought about it clearly, I realised that essentially any time that we’d spoken, I’d been the one who instigated the interaction.  I was the one who asked how she was going; I had wanted to know what they’d got up to on their holidays; I was the one who admired her new hair cut or asked after her kids.  To test this theory out, I decided to stop being the one who started the conversations.  I figured that we saw each other around enough that if she really did want to chat to me, she’d have plenty of opportunities to do so.  And if she actually didn’t want to speak to me, I’d know that pretty quickly too.


It’s been over six months, and she hasn’t spoken a word to me.  I see her at least three times a week, but she’s not spoken to me since.  And it’s not like she’s going out of her way to avoid me; she just doesn’t start a conversation.  She clearly has no interest in doing so.  And I am okay with that.