Once upon a time . . . I learned another language

Let’s be truthful, twice upon a time I’ve done this; moved somewhere where I had to learn to speak a language other than my own.  The first time, I was an exchange student living in Brasil – I learned to speak Portuguese.  The second, my husband and I took a secondment to Canada, living in a very Francophone area.


That first time, I was 17.  The younger you are, the easier it is to learn a language, and crucially, the easier it is to copy the sounds of that language.  The younger you are, the less likely you are to have a “foreign” accent when you speak.


Before I went on exchange, I was given a series of language cassettes – my cousin collected them from the Brasilian Embassy in Canberra for me.  Given that I was studying for my final exams, I didn’t really put much effort into the language-learning.  I didn’t think much about the logistics of learning the language I’d need to speak; I figured it would sort itself out.


And so it came to pass that on a hot and stormy January night, I arrived at Guarulhos airport.  I could say, “Good day”, “My name is . . .” and the phone number of my first host family in Portuguese.  My first host family had three daughters, and my host father and the eldest daughter spoke English.  The eldest daughter left on exchange herself the week after I arrived and the only conversation that my host father and I ever had in English was the one in which he said, “I will not speak English unless it’s urgent.  You must learn Portuguese.”


I never took formal Portuguese classes.  I never had a Portuguese teacher whose purpose was to teach me the language.  I learned by a technique that is usually referred to as “immersion”, and which sucks for three-to-six-months, depending on your aptitude.  During this time, one of my host sisters lent me her Portuguese grammar book, and I wrote out my own copies of how to conjugate regular verbs, as well as the long list of all of the irregular verbs.  I still have all of those handwritten notes folded up in a dictionary downstairs.


Portuguese, like all Latin-based languages, has clear grammatical rules. In the case of Portuguese, there are six personal pronoun conjugations (think: I, he, she, you, they, we) over multiple tenses (present, past, conditional, future) in both simple (“I danced”) and composite (“I have danced”) forms.  Happily, Brasilians only use four of the six personal pronouns in general conversation, so that cut down what I needed to memorise for everyday use.  There are three groups of regular verbs, and then the large number of irregular verbs.  As far as I can tell, in any language “irregular verb” is the term for “all the good verbs”.  In Portuguese, this means to be (there are two), to have (also two), to go, to see, to come, to be able to, the list goes on.  


Now, most of this made sense to me, but I could not for the life of me work out the two most frequently used verbs – ser and estar.  My dictionary told me that they were both forms of “to be”, but I couldn’t work out what that actually meant in an English sentence.  In Australia, we don’t learn grammar in anywhere near the technical way that Brasilians do, so it took me a while to work out that “to be” was the verb that gives us I am/you are/they are . . . once I worked that out, however, things moved along.  Keep in mind that the only way to learn these building blocks of a language is by repetition, practice and rote learning.  Eventually, it just sticks in your head and you know when it sounds wrong, but it takes time to get to this point.


There’s also pronunciation (can you roll your r?), region-specific words and accents, and not being able to understand a conversation when people are speaking at regular speed.  Oh, and once you can understand them, you still can’t get a response together in a timely manner to join in.  You’re left either not understanding or not being able to join in even when you understand, both of which are very isolating.


The advantage to the manner in which I learned Portuguese was what I needed the language for.  I didn’t need it to run my life – I was living with a host family and they managed the day-to-day stuff.  I didn’t have to make phone calls; I didn’t have to organise things.  What I had to do was go to school and meet people.  I’d already graduated high school in Australia, so I didn’t need to do anything in class – I was allowed to skip exams and tests if I wanted to – I didn’t need to pass the classes.  


Even so, it took three long, lonely months until I understood what people were saying most of the time.  It coincided almost exactly with my 18^th birthday, realising that I knew what people were saying pretty much all of the time.  That was an exciting feeling.  From then on, all I did was have a lot of fun.  I went traveling with friends, I went to parties, I visited places I’d heard about.  There was all the regular “family” type stuff going on too – I was hosted by three separate families over the year that I lived in the town.  


By the end of the year, I was damn good at the language.  My accent was close enough that people assumed that I was Brasilian.  I’d learned the local accent well and used the correct regional words, so people usually correctly guess the region that I lived in.  They would also often comment about a particular difference in my pronunciation of a couple of words that indicated that I may have lived somewhere else in my younger years – this corresponded to the accent of my first host family, who were from a different state and had a different accent.

When I spoke Portuguese, I thought in Portuguese.  I dreamt in Portuguese. For at least a year after I came home, I would struggle to remember certain English words – the Portuguese one would be the first one to my mind.  I could swap between the two languages effortlessly – thinking in English while speaking English; thinking in Portuguese while speaking Portuguese.  My accent and my language skills remained good enough that for many years when I met a Brasilian, they’d always ask where I grew up.  When I said, “Australia,” they’d want to know where my parents grew up.  The notion that an Australian could speak Brasilian Portuguese as well as I did always surprised people.  Even now, all these years later, there are still Portuguese words that come to mind before the English ones – I commonly call my children “meu amor” (my love), I’m still likely to say “Deixa” instead of “Leave it be”.  I can still read in Portuguese, can understand a Brasilian movie or TV show when I see one.


There seems to be a part of my brain that works in Portuguese, that stores all the information that I learned, that only needs a day or two to bring the language back to the forefront of my mind.  I went to Brasil many years after my exchange, while working in Canada.  For the first few hours, I kept throwing French words into Portuguese sentences.  By the end of the first day, I was thinking in Portuguese again, discussing technical details with laboratory staff and making notes, all in Portuguese.  It’s all still there, it seems; it just needs a reason to reactivate.


When it came to my second round at learning another language . . . well, I was older this time, 30 instead of 17.  My reason for learning the language was far more serious – I needed to be able to manage my life, to do my job, in another language.  I had to organise the logistics of adulthood – a bank account, a social insurance number, health insurance, driver’s licence, home and car insurance.  I had to run my laboratory, argue technical points with older, established technicians, learn to understand the differences in how a unionised workforce functions, as opposed to the non-unionised one I’d previously worked in.  All in a language I’d never really spoken well until I arrived.


My husband and I were in the same boat – we’d both learned some French over the years, but nothing beyond a couple of hours a week in a class given by a French teacher (and by French, I mean someone from France.  Which is very, very different from Quebeçois).  Neither of us were anywhere near ready to function like adults in French, and we were certainly not capable of doing our jobs in French the day that we arrived.  This was why we both did an intensive French course at first.


The course itself was very structured and was the same one that was attended by government officials.  There was a pre-course spoken examination to determine your current level of French, and your personal course was designed based on this.  You lived with a local family for the duration of your course, to ensure that you spoke French after hours.  You had your own personal teacher, who worked through the programme designed for you. There were twice-weekly visits to local facilities and attractions where only French was spoken.


Personally, I found this better than the “immersion” I’d had in Brasil.  Given that I was older, this structure probably helped my brain.  It also fast-tracked my learning, because I spent my first few weeks getting used to the language, to the accent, to the way that people spoke.  My previous experience meant that I knew the most crucial question to ask, which is, “How do I say ‘Please repeat that’ and ‘Please slow down’?”


In learning French, I had two significant advantages over my husband – firstly, I’d learned another language before and had a definite aptitude for languages; secondly, the language I’d learned previously was a Latin-based relative of French.  Even before I started learning French, I could “read” a French document and understand (basically) what it meant, as many French words are similar to their Portuguese equivalent.  This skill, it must be said, did not apply to spoken French, because of the very different pronunciation rules.  In (Brasilian) Portuguese, every letter except H is pronounced in a word.  In French, a consonant (or many consonants) at the end of a word are not pronounced at all.  As an example, the words “parle” and “parlent” are both pronounced the same, ignoring the “nt” on the end of the second word.  Of course, like any good language, there is an exception to this – when the word that follows starts with a vowel (a liaison).  So, when you say “How are you?” as “Comment allez vous?” it is pronounce “Com-muh ta-LEE voo”, pronouncing the ‘t’ on comment while ignoring the ‘s’ on vous, but when you ask it in the re-arranged form “Comment vous allez?” you would say “Com-muh voo sa-LEE?”, ignoring the ‘t’ on comment but pronouncing the ‘s’ in vous. 


My previous experience with a Latin-based language also meant that “gender” in language didn’t bother me.  In Portuguese (and French, and Spanish, and Italian), objects can be feminine or masculine (and sometimes neutral, depending on the language).  The possessive (my/your/his/her) is attached to the gender of the object, not the gender of the owner.  In English, you will say “her house” if the object belongs to a woman, “his house” if it belongs to a man.  In French it is always “sa maison” (the feminine possessive), irrespective of the gender of the owner, because “house” is a feminine word.  In a similar vein, you would say “my house” and “my oven” in English, but in French this would be “ma maison” (house is feminine) but “mon four” (oven is masculine).  My husband struggled with the illogical nature of the gender of words.  “Why is it,” he always asked, “that ‘fishing’ is a feminine word, but ‘perfume’ is masculine?  It makes no sense.”


Again, it took a lonely, isolating three months before French fell into place for me.  Three months doesn’t sound like a long time, until you’ve spent three months not quite understanding what’s going on around you.  As always, the telephone took longer, but over two-and-a-half years of my three year secondment was comfortable from the language point of view.  I continued to do language courses for about half of my time in Quebec.  My work also required me to speak (and write) both English and Portuguese.  Entertainingly, my ability to speak French and Portuguese are almost mutually exclusive – once I start thinking in one Latin-based language, the other suffers – if I’m speaking predominantly French, when I speak Portuguese I will frequently throw French words into Portuguese sentences, and vice versa.  Having said this, there seems to be a portion of my brain, separate from the Portuguese spot, which functions entirely in French.  Once it gets activated, I go back to thinking in French, speaking fluently and with confidence.


I don’t get many chances to speak either of these languages anymore.  I tried speaking Portuguese to my eldest when she was a baby . . . but it turns out that speaking a language that isn’t your own to a baby or small child is actually quite challenging.  I do throw the occasional Portuguese or French phrase into conversation, and while my children know what the phrases mean, they don’t actively identify them as a different language.  It’s just one of those odd things that Mummy does.


I do, however, remain very pleased that I got the opportunity to learn other languages properly.  When your first language is English, you can get a little complacent.  In most places, you can find someone who speaks English, so lots of people travel the world without ever having learned anything more than the very, very basics in another language.  Because I speak two Latin-based languages, I find that I can read (and often understand slowly spoken) Spanish and Italian, and I can generally make a good guess at Latin.  I’ve also learned the very basics in a non-Latin language (Mandarin), and understanding how to learn a language helped immensely with that.  And having worked and lived in a place where I wasn’t speaking my native language has also helped me appreciate just how challenging it is to live your day-to-day life outside of the “normal” constraints of language.  How sometimes misunderstanding (or even mishearing) a single word or qualifier can mean that you totally misunderstand the entire conversation.


And just so you know, the two hardest situations to be in when speaking in another language are very different things.  Number one is a medical situation – a doctor, a nurse, a dentist.  The second one?  Well, that would be the hairdresser.

And sometimes they all wear pink

For our eldest daughter’s first birthday, my husband bought her a truck.  And not just any truck.  An old-school, metal tray Tonka dump truck.

From the moment she opened it, she was in love.  Especially after her father sat her up in the back of it and proceeded to push her around the floor at speed, the pair of them cackling like fiends. 

It wasn’t always a truck, mind you.  Some days, it was a dolly bed.  Other days it was the easiest way to transport a pile of toys from one place to another.  At other times it was an ambulance with injured people (usually teddy bears) in the back.  At one point, it was even a mobile library for a week or so.  And a lot of the time, it was simply a truck.  There were many backing up and tray-lifting noises invented to go with the truck.  She worked out how to sit in the back and roll herself around the floor pretty early on.  She’s heading towards ten now, and her brother is the most likely to be playing with it these days, but she still loves it and calls it “my truck”.

Given the success of the first Tonka toy birthday present, the other two both got one on their first birthday too.  Our second daughter got a front end loader, our son a bulldozer.  Both were (and still are) well-loved, but neither was ever as successful as the truck.  I think it had something to do with the fact that a kid could sit in the tray of the truck and be pushed around or push themselves around.  Something that the girls still do with their brother, who is now perfectly capable of pushing himself around.

My husband buying a truck for our daughter’s first birthday seemed to give a lot of people the idea that he really wanted a son.  An acquaintance even said one day, “Well, would he have bought a dolly as a present if you had a son?”  For the record, my husband bought her a truck because he thought she’d love it, which was 100% correct.  The truck had nothing to do with him wanting a son.  And the answer to the dolly question is yes.  Our son got a doll for his second Christmas, and he wrapped it up and dragged it about everywhere, calling it “my baby”.  He would occasionally sit on the couch and pretend to breastfeed his baby, then swaddle it up and pat it on the bottom until it was “sleeping”, then tuck it into bed (often mine).  His baby is still a popular plaything, and is often pushed around in the back of the truck.  He also has a couple of Barbie-type dolls that he plays with, and it is not uncommon to see him with a Barbie in one hand and a small truck or other vehicle in the other hand.

And then there is the colour thing.  Personally, I don’t like the colour pink.  As a result, I actively encouraged everyone I know to buy my daughters things that were decidedly not pink.  Of course, this means that both my girls adore pink anything, particularly if it’s sparkly.  Over the years, they’ve accumulated pink towels, pink sheets, pink blankets and pink toys, as well as a selection of pink clothes and shoes.  I have become accustomed to the pinkness of our house, and having a son hasn’t changed this.  He had pink towels and sheets for the first year of his life because that’s what we had at home, having been gifted pink baby things when our daughters were born. 

Nowadays, he likes to go through anything (clothes, toys, games) that his sisters have outgrown to decide which things he’d like to keep for himself. And, by his own choice, pink remains in his life.  His bike (acquired from his younger sister) is pink.  His favourite pair of sneakers were originally bought for his eldest sister and are blue with pink stars on them.  He has a pair of unicorn slippers (with extra pink and a few sparkles) that he adores, and some days he’ll tell you that his favourite two colours are “rainbow and pink”.  He probably has more pink things right now than I’ve ever owned in my life.

People told me that I’d notice the difference when I had a son after two daughters, and that is true.  My son is far more physical and boisterous that his sisters are.  What is interesting is how some people treat boys versus girls.  Very few people ever raised an eyebrow at my daughters having trucks and Tonka toys, or thought it was unusual when they would wear clothes from the boys’ section (for their own practical reasons – boys’ shorts have proper pockets for keeping treasures in; boys’ t-shirts have sleeves that cover the shoulders and upper arms, which means better sun protection).  There are, however, occasional comments from others when my son wears his pink-star sneakers, or carries a dolly around with him.  It’s as though it is ok for girls to choose boys’ things, whereas a boy can’t like anything considered ‘girly’. 

Now, even though I don’t like pink myself, that’s got nothing to do with my kids.  If they all want to wear pink, I’m fine with that.  If they want sparkles or dinosaurs or emergency vehicles or unicorns, hoorah.  And if they want pink fairy wings today and a pirate costume tomorrow, all well and good.  And if they decide that the pirate costume needs fairy wings and a sparkly wand, that’s just fine.  Unless someone starts hitting others with the wand.  That’s when I intervene.

On the miracle of pregnancy

Pregnancy is an amazing thing.  I think this is something that we can all agree on – the fact that one complete, new human can be grown by another; that it takes only nine months to pull off this feat.  When you consider all the body parts that have to grow, all the nerves and the mental wiring and all the rest that have to link up just right to result in a functioning human, it’s pretty damn impressive that it happens so often.


I came to the parenthood game later than many of my friends, so by the time I was pregnant with my first, a majority of my friends had already had a baby or two (or three).  Of all my friends, I recall one having horrific morning sickness, and a second friend suffering what doctors determined was likely the miscarriage of one twin (she carried a singleton pregnancy to term after this); I don’t remember any other friends having any major dramas.  And I had a number of friends who commented on how much they adored being pregnant.  How pregnancy made them feel womanly, amazing, extra-ordinary.


Not me.  Pregnancy was not something that I enjoyed.  Please let me point out – I had dead boring pregnancies.  I did not suffer from any significant issues.  I fell pregnant quickly, I had a normal pregnancy, I had a baby.  All three times.  I had no miscarriages, no issues with conception, not pregnancy complications.  The conception of our third child was totally accidental – we just didn’t bother with a condom one night.  Once.  Just shy of forty, and I fell pregnant.  My obstetrician told me that I was the patient all obstetricians wish for – no issues, no dramas, no problems.


And yet . . . even with a boring, normal pregnancy, I didn’t really like growing another human.  I mean, yes, I was impressed by the fact that I was growing a person while going about my daily business, but it wasn’t really a fun experience.  All three of my pregnancies followed roughly the same pattern – approximately four months of no actual throwing up, but feeling constantly hung-over, with a side-order of being unable to stomach chocolate; followed by roughly four weeks of feeling pretty sparkly, actually, and with fabulous boobs; and then finally the run-down to labour, during which the baby seemed to bounce happily between my ribs and my bladder constantly, making me either short of breath or in desperate need to pee (or both).  I had cravings only with my first – a desire for Twisties and Cheezles (neither of which I actually like) and for bacon.  Now, bacon might not seem like a real “craving”, but given that I hadn’t eaten bacon for about 18 years, it was quite weird to really feel a desire to eat it.  A lot.


I remember being horribly tired with my first; rolling my ankle when I was about 30 weeks’ pregnant and limping for the next 10 weeks because it remained tender due to the extra weight I was carrying.  I don’t remember tiredness with the second, but I had a toddler at that point, and she still woke at least once a night, plus my husband was away a lot for work that year, which meant I was already tired, so I couldn’t tell where my “regular” tired ended and the pregnancy tired began J  With the third, I was always in bed by 8.30.  I had heartburn constantly with all three, and extremely vivid dreams, often about vampires (I was a mad Buffy and Angel fan back in the day).  Whenever I was thirsty, the only thing that would quench my thirst was either soda water or tonic water – it had to be bubbly, but not sweet.  And I was constantly hungry.  I put on 13kg with the first, 15kg with the second and 17kg with the third.  I felt constantly out-of-balance because my centre of gravity seemed unbalanced with the extra weight at my tummy.


I did love feeling them move about, even when the rocking and the rolling (and in the case of baby #3, the finally turning to head down at 37 weeks) was dead uncomfortable.  But, the lack of breath, the tiredness and the constant need to pee was not fun.  But let’s be frank, knowing that I was personally creating a brand new member of the human race was pretty damn cool.  So I could deal with all of the annoying aspects of pregnancy, even though I didn’t like it.


And while I didn’t really enjoy being pregnant, I do enjoy the three very individual humans who were the result of those pregnancies.  My eldest is a bit of a perfectionist, likely to be nervous about events yet to happen, yet thoughtful, caring and considerate.  She needs time to herself, loves to read and enjoys activities that are non-competitive and creative.  My middle child is dramatic, loud and entertaining, loves climbing and any sort of gymnastics, and hates to be ignored.  She wants to be involved in everything, doesn’t like to be left out and always talks back.  The youngest plays well by himself, but loves to be with his sisters.  He wants to be included in everything, and doesn’t like to be left behind.  He refuses to accept that being smaller and younger than the others should prevent him from doing the same stuff that they’re up to.


I see aspects of myself in all three of my children, particularly the oldest one.  I see my husband in them all as well, notably in the cheekiness of the youngest one.  And most entertainingly, my second daughter often mirrors my younger sister; my son frequently reminds me of my little brother as a boy.


I never imagined myself as mother in my younger years.  Even after my eldest was born, I didn’t realise just how much I was going to enjoy being a mother.  But motherhood has grown on me, and now I can’t imagine myself any other way.  

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’.”

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.