Carmen

This week it's a year since I left my job and packed up my old life and headed back to Perth. I can hardly believe a whole 12 months have ticked by, the Earth has made a complete journey around the sun, while my own existence has been swirling in a haze of compounded exhaustion and wonderment at my little rose, unfolding every day to reveal more and more indescribable beauty. I’ve been up to my elbows in pureed pumpkin -- meanwhile, the world economy has crashed, swine flu has taken hold, presidents have been sworn in, people’s children have grown a year older, weddings have been planned, babies have been born, houses have been bought and sold, jobs have been lost and found, and the seasons have changed again and again and again.

Baby A is now seven months old, with two little teeth and a mop of hair that turns worryingly wavy in the humidity. She still makes me more tired than I ever imagined I could be, and I still get frustrated when she’s resisting sleep like she’s Jack Bauer being tortured by the Chinese, but most of the time I can see clearly enough to know that I am witnessing precious, hilarious moments and glimpses of a sunny, fierce, determined personality.

Some mornings when she wakes for a 2/3/4am feed I bring her into bed with us and cuddle her back off to sleep, and she repays me by waking me up with a nice wet bite on the nose around 7am. I take her to morning tea with our mothers group friends and in a millisecond she swipes her little hand through the bowl of whipped cream and wipes it through my hair and down my face, and then when I’m madly scrambling through my bag for a cloth to wipe up the mess, she vomits all over me, and then laughs. I take her to playgroup and try to feed her carroty chicken mush and she spatters it across the room so it lands on the other mothers. She taps her foot expectantly while I heat up her dinner. At the sight of the five o’clock news team on Channel 10 (particularly Narelda Jacobs for some inexplicable reason) her face breaks out into a big gummy smile.

In Sydney two weeks ago she had her first taste of city life, saw the bright lights of Oxford Street, heard the cacophonous merry go round of traffic and sirens and drunks and crazy people, and her eyes widened, madly processing all of the latest information about her world. We took her to the butterfly enclosure and she watched intently as the Very Hungry Caterpillar’s alter ego sprang to life around her. She sat like a joey in her special pouch and watched all the new things, legs dangling over the edge while people cooed at her.

If she sees a new face hovering near her she does everything in her power to direct the stranger's attention towards her, and if they pretend not to notice her, she just tries harder, winning over teenaged boys and businessmen and stern old ladies with her larrikiny smile and her waggling eyebrows (you must understand, this child could have tried out for the Cadbury ad). She pokes her tongue out indiscriminately and laughs at news stories that aren’t funny. She adores Upsy Daisy and she adores our cat and she adores being tickled and cuddled and Eskimo-kissed.

Forgive the sentimentality, but what a year it has been. I think if I had to sum it up, what’s happened in the year since I moved home, it’s that I learned the meaning of life.

Although my precious baby A insists on wrestling the spoon from me and feeding herself, and consequently coating all kitchen surfaces in pureed fruit and veg of varying shades of the rainbow, I’m pleased to report - after three weeks - she‘s enjoying her new culinary adventures enormously and the whole solids thing has been a resounding success thus far. Pears rule. Life is good. (Now if she would just stop vomiting up her milk on my library books. But that’s another story.)

I am head chef of the baby food section, while H continues to prepare the grown ups’ meals, which he does incredibly well. I think I’ve mentioned before that I tend not to bother with our food preparation because it takes me twice as long to cook and the end result does not justify the effort, to put it nicely. And H isn’t one of those guys that chokes it down to make you feel better. He will let me know by subtly pushing his plate away and making up an excuse about not being hungry, or just not liking lemons, or toffee, or tofu, or water. I accuse him of being a food snob. He is the second coming of Gordon Ramsay, with his bad temper and insanely high standards in the kitchen. Even though I’m furious when he won’t eat my tofu and vegetable kebabs or my Spanish omelette or my toffee mandarins (usually declaring it’s the last time I’ll ever cook him anything), the whole Gordon Ramsay thing is mildly endearing and has become a bit of a family joke.

However there’s been a lot of talk lately in both families about how like her father baby A is. They are mirror images. She’s his mini-me. I might as well buy her a baby-sized Foo Fighters shirt and a pair of long shorts and be done with it. She certainly has his foul temper. She gets unreasonably cranky with me if I don’t keep the pureed mash coming quickly enough, or if I have the blender going for too long, or if I’m too slow getting the milk bar ready for service.

So I got to thinking. My algebra is a bit rusty but…

If H = Gordon Ramsay, and
if Baby A = mini H,
does Baby A therefore = mini Gordon Ramsay?

Is this what I have in store for me when A reaches school age?

Apologies for the lengthy break between posts. How life has changed in 2009.

I have a hectic social life revolving around Baby A, who's now almost six months old. I have learned the words to three hundred or so nursery rhymes, which we (when I say we, I mean I) sing in the library on Thursdays and the hydrotherapy pool on Mondays, and which I hum in my head while I drive across town to mothers group on Tuesdays and Fridays. (Meanwhile my sister's emailing me her essays on modernity and asking for constructive feedback, which is nice - I certainly wouldn't be asking me for intelligent commentary on anything right now.)

I am a slave to Tizzie Hall (so-called Baby Whisperer and author of “Save Our Sleep” – which has become my bible) and my life revolves around my endless quest to get baby A to sleep for more than twenty minutes during the day and more than four hour stretches at night. My new idle fantasy is to invite Tizzie round and present her with my super strong-willed, party animal baby who doesn't like to miss out on a minute of her exciting new world. Come, Baby Whisperer, I dare you.

I no longer read novels, or the papers, or even the catalogues. I read about solids and sleep routines. Cot safety. Car safety. CPR. I wonder how other mums find time to write journals and study and work part time, but in my own precious spare time I can be found surfing the net, deliberating over which frilly bloomers to buy for baby A, or taking facebook quizzes about where I should be living and what job I should have (Paris, and tattoo artist). That, or I’m slaving over recalcitrant vegetables for baby A, or sometimes even attempting to create edible food for adults.

I assumed that with motherhood came some sort of bonus hormone that would guide me in the brave new world of baby food production. Kind of like the magic breastmilk-making one, but with pumpkin and apples. Alas, it took me four hours to prepare three carrots for baby A last weekend.

Filled with boldness and virtuousness, I put the carrots in the steamer.

Then I waited twenty minutes. The water had all but evaporated and the carrots were still a bit hard, so I removed them. (I was worried about the nutrients.)

Next, I put them in the blender and pressed Puree. A small pool of carrot mooshed around the blades and the rest of the carrot chunks just sat around the edges like nervous street theatre spectators.

I transferred them to a bowl and tried to mash them. Still the nervous lumps persisted.

So I pressed them through a sieve using the back of a spoon, a surprisingly drawn out and physically taxing process.

And this is how my Saturday night passed. The whole process seems insanely inefficient (why spend hours mashing carrots when you could be answering facebook quizzes), and yet I would hate to confess to the other mums that I have given up and opted for Heinz, less than two weeks in.

One of the girls from my mums group had a birthday the other day, and since I happened to be hosting the group at my house that day, I decided to bake her a chocolate cake. Sometimes I just forget that my baked goods are always, without exception, disgusting. I forget lots of things these days, thanks to my rock and roll sleep patterns. The recipe called for two 20cm diameter cake tins, and I only had one, so I decided we’d just have an extra thick cake, like the ones you see in the cake cabinets in cafes. The timer went off and the middle was still runny. I left it in for 20 extra minutes and then the inevitable smell of burnt cake began to seep from the oven. I took it out and undid the springform bit around the edges. The cake appeared to be stuck to the bottom of the tin. I asked the girls for their advice. They suggested a knife. About 60% of the cake came away, in a kind of inverted chocolate volcano. It tasted awful but the mums all (or I should say both) ate a piece and even agreed to seconds when I apologised for the awfulness. It was in that moment that I realised I will probably be friends with these girls forever.

As Christmas closes in on us again and another year is about to be relegated to the history books, I can't help but reflect on the huge changes that have taken place in the last 12 months of my life.

Last Christmas it snowed and we traipsed out to the public phone boxes at midnight on Christmas Eve to ring our families from a ski resort near the French-Swiss border. We exchanged gifts with our friends in the morning. We returned to London on a bus a couple of days later. We flew to Edinburgh for New Years Eve and listened to the young backpackers in the room next to ours, shagging loudly. I went back to my awful job in the Square Mile the following week. On my birthday we went to a retro bowling alley in Bloomsbury and sang karaoke and drank wine. H went to Ireland for an interview. I went to Iceland with my best friend and sat by the fire in the hotel drinking vodka that we'd bought at a bus station in Reykjavik, and we discussed the year ahead and what it might have in store for us and what we hoped to achieve.

For the last ten years my wardrobe consisted of office outfits – sharp suits and tailored shirts and fabulous heels, jeans and fitted tshirts for the weekends, and the odd nice dress for special occasions. It was an easy recipe, I enjoyed shopping, I knew the rules for my body shape and I knew the shops that sold the stuff that fit me well.

Then I got pregnant and discovered the world of maternity clothes. This wasn’t the end of the world – I found some decent maternity jeans and some fitted tops that accentuated my bump, and a nice dress for special occasions. It was a novelty to be showing off my new body and I knew once I had the baby I’d be able to go back to all my old favourite shops again and re-invent myself as an uber cool new mum.

OK, I’ll admit I’ve not been doing this long, but since boobs and milk production have been the centre of my world 24 hours a day, for the past three weeks, I feel qualified to write this list. Women seem to revel in passing on their war stories from the labour suite, but breastfeeding tales are never shared with the uninitiated. These are the things I’ve had to learn in a hurry:

I’ve been thinking a lot about London lately. Probably because I find myself in front of the tv a lot, breastfeeding, and London seems to be on the telly all the time. This morning on Sunrise they crossed live to the Leicester Square premiere of the new James Bond film and I actually cried. How many times I wandered through Leicester Square with the world at my feet, eating Ben and Jerrys, pottering around the book stores on Charing Cross Road, meeting friends for a film or a play or a glass of wine at All Bar One.

I was sitting on the lounge room floor last Monday night, consolidating my to-do list and making mental notes to prioritise the stuff that had to be done before the baby arrived. I was 38 weeks and 2 days, so the countdown was on.

Week 38 of the journey, and I feel like I’ve become a bit of an airhead. Losing my purse and only realising it when I’m standing at the checkout with a hundred dollars worth of packed groceries and 12 people queueing behind me. Not picking up on obvious humour (a friend of mine in London mentioned in a recent email that she and her Swedish boyfriend are engaged, and since many of her family live in India, the only logical place to get married is Iran. Iran! I replied excitedly – brilliant idea!) Etcetera.

But even beyond bog-standard pregnant brain behaviour, when I meet new people – and the majority of my new acquaintances are pregnant – they all want to know what I do and whether I’m still doing it. I haven’t been doing it for months now. I’m “between careers”, which is an even worse and far vaguer place to be than “between jobs”.

It’s been a busy week. Not normal-person busy. Not busy as in working a 50 hour week and cramming in social engagements every night, keeping a house ticking over, staying in touch with family and studying part time. But busy in the context of my new life.

I bumped into a girl at aqua aerobics earlier in the week who’s due two days before me – I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks – and she looked knackered and told me she was struggling. And I suddenly realised my batteries have started to run flat too.