Once upon a time . . . the 2000s started

When I was 9 or 10, I remember thinking about the year changing from 19-something to 2000.  I remember working out how old I was going to be then (24 years old on New Year’s Day; I’d celebrate my 25^th birthday in the year 2000).  I remember thinking how very, very ancient that 24 and 25 sounded to that much younger me.  I remember hoping that I wouldn’t be too old to realise how cool the turn from 1999 to 2000 was.  


There is no way that 9 year-old me ever envisioned exactly where I would be in the first moments of the year 2000.  Through a combination of finally managing to save enough to go back to Brasil, a host sister who was studying in Rio and a family member with a massive apartment three streets back from Avenida Atlantica, I saw in the New Year with three million other people on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.  

There were six of us our group, three Brasilians and me (who all spoke Portuguese), the English girlfriend of one of the Brasilians and my then-boyfriend, now husband, both of whom only spoke English.  We had dinner in the aforementioned apartment, sharing drinks and food on the balcony as we watched the people gathering at the beach in the evening.  We walked single-file through the crowds at the beach, all holding hands.  We wedged the English speakers each between a pair of Portuguese speakers, figuring that even if our group got split up, the English speakers would be with someone who spoke Portuguese.  We picked a landmark (a church with a tall, neon sign out in front) to meet up in the event of getting separated.   


I’ve never seen more extraordinary fireworks before or since.  It was an extreme, intense, overwhelming 30 minutes of light and colour and sound, all around.  The climax was a cascading fireworks explosion down the side of a hotel, which looked like the building was about to erupt into the sky.  After the professional show (which would never, ever have met safety requirements in Australia), people (including those out on boats in the water) set off their own fireworks.  When we walked home, still holding hands in a single file, it took us over an hour to walk three blocks within the crowd of millions. 


The next morning, my husband and I (with complete disregard for the potential calamities that the millennium bug could have caused), caught a flight from Rio to São Paulo.  We’d had no more than three hours sleep, and as we drove to the airport, we saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people asleep or passed out on the beach.  It still smelled like fireworks and beer.


And so that was the start of the year 2000.  It was the year we got married, which makes it a very important year to us.  2010 was another one of those turning point years – the year we became parents.  And now as we stare down the barrel of 2020, I can’t help but wonder what this year will bring.


And so, in rough order of occurrence, I give you the list of Important Things that I have done to date in the 2000s:

• Got married
• Bought a house
• Moved across the country
• Became an aunt for the first time (and now have two nieces and three nephews)
• Bought a second house, sold the first one
• Finished my PhD
• Moved to halfway ‘round the world to Canada for work
• Learned to speak French
• Visited the US, Brasil and Greece for work purposes and had Christmas in Cuba
• Moved back around the world, from Canada to Australia
• Renovated our house (which proved that renovations are not our thing and that we’re never doing that again)
• Was a bridesmaid (first and only time) at my sister’s wedding
• Had a baby
• Bought a third house and moved house (with a nine-month-old baby)
• About six weeks after we moved into our new house, made it through a flood, which damaged large numbers of homes around us (we were lucky to not be flooded)
• Had another baby (and determined that we were done with babies)
• Had two family weddings seven days apart – my husband’s sister got married on a beach the Friday before my brother got married on a river bank
• Found out I was pregnant the week before my 40^th birthday
• Had a third baby (definitely done with babies NOW)
• Was made redundant from my job

And in amongst all that, was the nitty-gritty of every day – pushing children on swings and reading stories, laughing over dumb jokes that we’ve been telling each other for 20 years, eating and drinking and being merry with friends and family.  There are the countless pictures that have been drawn for me, the songs that are sung to me, the letters that get left on my pillow.  There are the people who tell me they love me, the people I say, “I love you” to.  There are the friends who can be counted on in emergencies just as much as in the regular day-to-day.  There are photographs and memories and songs and paintings on the walls.


And overall, there is the knowledge that in amongst all the rest, we have made ourselves a very nice life that suits us, and that we are very happy to have.  We are lucky, and we know it.  And that has made the 2000s better than 9-year-old me could ever have thought.                                                                                                                                                                  

On Children and Hot Cars

About a decade ago, a friend told me a terrible story.


One of her colleagues, a father of one, had changed his routine, just for a day.  Both he and his wife worked full-time and both took the train to and from work. To makes sure that their nine-month-old son was in care for the shortest possible time, they’d come up with a plan.  He started work early; she took the baby to day care later, starting work several hours later than him.  He work till mid-afternoon, picking up their son on his way home from the train station.  She worked until the early evening but she would always be home in time to kiss their son goodnight before bed.  And this worked beautifully.


Until the day that his wife had an early morning meeting that meant she had to be in the office a few hours earlier than normal.  It was no great drama; they simply swapped “shifts”.  She would go to work early; he would drop their son off at day care.  She would come home to pick their boy up in the afternoon; he’d be home in time to kiss the baby good night.


And so, one day, she went to work early.  He got ready, later than normal, dressed their son, packed his bag, put their son in his car seat and drove in the direction of the day care.  He caught a later train to work.  He was in the office till early evening; caught the train home.  And he never, ever realised that he’d forgotten to stop at the day care; never dropped his son off for the day.


When his wife arrived at the day care, she discovered that their baby had not been dropped off that morning. She sped back to the parking lot of the train station, arriving to find the back window of her husband’s car smashed open, paramedics still in the parking lot.  Her son was not there – he’d been transported by the first responders to hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.  He’d died in the back seat of his father’s car; had probably fallen asleep and then never woken up after leaving home that morning.  His father, acting outside of his usual routine, had forgotten their son, asleep in the back of the car.


This was a loving father, a caring man.  The little boy was a longed-for, much-wanted, much-loved child.  His parents had adored him, had both been doting, devoted, caring parents.  And a simple change of routine had led to his father, operating on auto-pilot, to forget to drop him at day care.

When my friend told me this story, I was six months pregnant with my first child.  And the whole idea terrified me.  Would I ever forget my child in the back seat of the car?  Could I do something like that?  My husband and I shared a car (we still do), and I really don’t drive much.  Could the change of routine, me driving the baby somewhere, mean that I forgot that the baby was there?


The answer to that question is, quite clearly, yes.  It is possible to forget a baby.  It is possible to not remember that you’ve changed your general routine.  It is possible that you may, while loving your child utterly, forget that you are actually responsible for a particular task that day, just because it is outside of your regular routine.


From the day my friend told me this, I made a change.  I started to put my handbag in the back seat of the car.  I purposely put it into a place that I couldn’t reach from the front seat, in the foot well of the seat where the baby’s car seat was strapped in.  The only way to get my bag was to get out of the car and opened the back door, leaning over the car seat as I reached in.  By the time my first baby was born, it was an ingrained habit.  I continued it through my eldest daughter’s entire babyhood and throughout my second pregnancy, even after we owned a much bigger car; a van in which you could clearly see all the seats (and car seats) in the review mirror.  Most days I still do it automatically – the girls are long out of car seats and put their own seatbelts on, but when I strap my son into his car seat, I leave my handbag on the floor beside him.  My kids are all older, the girls are able to get themselves out of their seatbelts and out of the car unassisted, and they are all unlikely to be asleep in the car and extremely likely to call out, “Hey!  You forgot me!” if I tried to get out of the car without them.  


And yet I still do this one small thing, just in case.

Once Upon A Time . . . I had a son

I already had two daughters.  As is common during pregnancy, once you hit the “obviously pregnant” stage, random strangers will suddenly start chatting to you about your baby-to-be.  “Is this your first?” “How are you feeling?”  When it’s your first pregnancy, people are generally inclined to offer advice.  If it’s your second, they’ll tell you all about dealing with a toddler and a newborn at the same time.  Once you’re up to three, I think they figure that you’re sufficiently crazy already, so you don’t need any further advice.  Either that or they have less than three themselves and don’t have any further advice to offer.


My third pregnancy was a surprise, but very much welcome.  It is probably best to describe it as a non-planned conception, but a very much planned and wanted pregnancy that we were happy and lucky to receive.  It was boring in its normalcy, except for the part where the baby refused to turn head down during my third trimester.  By the time I reached 36 weeks and he was still not head down, my obstetrician explained how unlikely he was to turn (less than 5% chance), and so we booked a caesarean.  I had lots of questions about this to mentally prepare myself; she was awesome in her responses to all of my questions.  While I was less that happy with the notion of surgery for the delivery of my third child (I am a boss at labour and delivery), I made my peace with it as the safest option for the delivery of a healthy baby.  For the record, anyone who says that a caesarean is the “easy way out” has clearly not considered the specifics of the process of CUTTING OPEN THE ABDOMEN of a woman who will then need to care for a newborn while she’s recovering from a significant surgery.


Anyhoo, after what was a horribly uncomfortable seven days, I went for my 37 week appointment.  During the appointment, my obstetrician did a scan, and it became completely apparent that my horribly uncomfortable week had been caused by the fact that my son had finally decided to turn himself head down. At 37 weeks.  Because he is contrary like that.

And so, after all my mental preparation of a caesarean, I wound up going into labour naturally at 38 weeks and 6 days.  Six hours labour from start to finish; the longest of my three labours.

I gave birth just after three in the afternoon, which happened to be shift change at the hospital.  This meant that I had two midwives (day shift and afternoon shift) present at the birth, as well as my obstetrician.  Both of the midwives had clearly read my medical notes, and they were aware that we had two daughters already.  


Once our son was born and we’d both held him, they took him across the room to weigh him, and they put him in a nappy.  When they bought him back, Midwife #1 looked at me and said, “When you put a nappy on a baby boy, always point his penis down.”  Midwife #2 nodded sagely and said, “Definitely.  Point it down, or he’ll spray out the top of the nappy”.  It was, quite literally, the only piece of advice I was offered by anyone for my third child.


A few days later, I was speaking to my sister, who has two sons.  I was telling her about this single piece of boy-specific advice.  She started to laugh and explained that no one had told her that when she had her first son, and she found that his clothes were always wet when she changed him.  She mentioned this to a friend (a mother of two sons) and her friend said to her, “Didn’t anyone tell you? You need to remember the rule: always point the doodle down.”  My sister and I had a giggle over this.


A little later, my husband was changing our son’s nappy, and I said to him, “You need to remember to point his doodle down.”  My husband gave me a strange look, so I explained.  “So he doesn’t spray out of the nappy when he does a wee.  That’s the rule – doodle down.”  My husband gave me a very considered look, and then he finally said one of the most entertaining statements he has ever uttered.


“In other words,” he said, “you’re telling me, ‘Don’t cock up’.”