Terrible Terrific Tear-ific Turbulent Triumpant

And then she was two.

Una was lying on the floor crying this morning, her forehead pressed to the ground, because I wouldn't let her have another turn on my computer (it freaks me out watching her bashing the keyboard). Martin joked, 'Are you just going to be terrible two now?' and she sobbed, with clear annunciation, 'I'm not terrible.'

I love other people's two year olds - in fact it's my favourite age in children I'm not responsible for rearing. But when Frederique was two I must admit it was a struggle. It was mostly the shock really, that this gorgeous, happy, easygoing baby transformed into a small person filled with rage, frustration and so much misplaced POWER, and most of it was turned against me. At the same time she was funny and delightful, emerging as a social creature, enraptured by her friends (though she was a bit of a thug as well) and developing a sense of humour, with its own referents, not just giggling in response to us or things she saw. Her memory for people and places was awesome (better than it is now). Her favourite movie, delightfully, was Travelling Birds (a documentary) which she would watch over and over and she had these five wooden people who she would arrange in secret corners of the house. But I was pregnant with Una from when Fred was 19 months (she was nearing 2.5 when Una was born) and Fred slept terribly the whole time, up and down and in and out of our bed, more up than down - every few nights she would just be AWAKE for hours in the middle of the night (was it so often? It seems as though it can't have been that bad...but it was pretty bad). She also hardly ate anything except cereal, bananas and yoghurt. Una has had some phases like this but for some reason I don't feel quite so personally involved in Una's body - if she doesn't eat it doesn't bother me, if she won't sleep during the day we get her up if she's wakeful during the night we pop the Noni CD in for her). She would often refuse her day-sleep or she would sleep and then she'd wake up in a foul mood that would rise in pitch until all the local birds evacuated and I'd end up crumpled in a heap in the corner of the kitchen weeping on the floor (literally, once or twice - Fred would either join me or hug me, she's always been very compassionate). Almost exactly around the time Fred turned three she transformed. She started to sleep through the night in her own bed, eat our food and stopped hitting and biting...most of the time.

Una is a very different girl and I'm more balanced these days. So I suspect I'm actually going to, for the most part, enjoy two this time round. Already cranky behaviour and extreme reactions I found bewildering and personally assaulting with Fred I find somewhere between mildly amusing and mildly annoying in Una. Part of it is that I know it's not personal this time. But an advantage with Una is that her language is more advanced, not so much her vocabulary but the way she uses it - she is far, far more communicative than Frederique was at the same age. Language for Fred was always malleable, always a game, more internal, directly connected to her imagination - which naturally led to a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunication (and still does). There's always been a sense that Fred's language emerges from the subconscious, that she's a postmodern magpie, collecting all these glittering words to arrange and rearrange for her own mysterious reasons (maybe she will be a poet). For Una language is about connecting with people and communicating her needs or inquiring politely after everyone else's. This morning when Fred wanted to hug her she pushed Fred away and said, without any kind of lead from us, 'I'm a bit cranky.' That she is this in touch with her own feelings and what they mean, and that she is able to talk about them in such a useful way, amazes me. For Una, language is more like a set of building blocks, creating structures that are practical, sturdy and quantifiable.

Another advantage is the love object. Una has baby, who looks quite a lot like this:

So much so we had to buy her the book. The only transitional object Fred ever had was a song. Which was unfortunate because it required one of us to sometimes endlessly produce it (though the uncanny sway it holds over her is one of my greatest pleasures as a mother).

Also I now know, nothing lasts forever. With Fred every stage was the new normal. There was always anxiety surrounding it. Only recently have we been able to accept that these things come and go and that there is often little we can do to ward off the harder stuff - we all ride it through together. Sometimes we made Fred's phases such an enemy that it seemed Fred herself was the enemy. Now we know the best we can often do is hold her (when she wants us) until she's ready to let go. Self-blame and guilt, anger and retribution are about as useful as trying to hold a flood back with chocolate mousse.

So two. I am not afraid. We've been here before. And I don't think it was ever really as bad as we thought it was. Or perhaps we have forgotten. The other gentle blessing of parenthood - forgetting.

When it is morning

My one year old will be gone.
And in her place I will have Una Pearl, aged 2.

Workshop 3 - Rod Jones

By the way, so I'm doing this Advanced Workshop week as part of my masters, which is why I'm blogging about these things every day. This morning's session is with editor Jenny Lee, but I'm skipping it, partly because I already be an editor and know everything there possibly is to know about it (ha) and partly because Martin did some nancy trick with his ankle and is now weak and interesting and I need to make his weetbix for him (he will be cross with me for writing this but I am cross with his ankle for being a rolled one so we are equal). Did I every mention I am not a very good nurse?

Anyway, yesterday's workshop was with Rod Jones (here is his kindly but slightly crappily written Wikipedia entry). He's the author of lotsa books, including Night Pictures, Billy Sunday and Swan Bay. No writing exercises, but lots of interesting discussion about character, voice and -ahem - possible (yet of course utterly legitimate) uses of literary grants. Nuff said. He was extremely open and generous in talking about the relationship between life and fiction, revealing quite personal details about his life in order to talk about the (sometimes ambiguous) boundaries between 'life work' and writing.

Here are some of the things I wrote down while he was talking:

We write out of the part of ourselves we don't know
Write a page a day
Reflections. Ego. Self-consciousness - this rock doesn't need to write a novel
Writing is a business to do with the emotions
Writer's block is a form of depression
Writing as secret love affair, illicit, sexiness
'I wrote once upon a time and it felt like the universe was giving me a nudge.' (Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandra Quartet

Some of this stuff really touches on my feelings about writing as my 'job'. It's become a legitimate - rather than risky or illicit or naughty 'stolen moments' - activity. I've lost some of the love affair with words, and instead I keep getting distracted by the business of them.
There was an actual rock present, very engaged in not writing a novel.

Writing exercises/play

Today I attended a workshop with poet Claire Gaskin (author of a bud). She talked about truthtelling and I found it an amazing session, pushing me to write in a way I wouldn't normally and making me think about writing from a place that I am not entirely comfortable with. She made me think about writing as risky and dangerous, about the brain in crisis, about finding your truth and telling it. Claire quoted Hemingway: 'What did I know about truly and care for the most?' We began the class writing a 5 minute autobiography. As we read them out, one of the students, Rachael (who is very interested in experimenting with abstraction) folded her piece of paper in half, reading out only the left half of her autobiography. I've done the same thing here.

Half a five minute autobiography
[crossing out] I am from a
mother of daughters. I left
the 1990s. The island groans
making tracks.
I fill my head with ideas
from my brain. I am
my girls. I am Penni
and teenagers, freelance
in bed, I can't drive
recognise myself in the
cake. I am Undine I am
my oldest daughter Frederique
will be me (she told me)

1. Freewriting exercise: write what you know. When you've filled the page, write one truth. Use that truth as your first line and see where it takes you.
2. Take a line of a poem and rewrite it five times changing the order of the words. Be free and silly, the aim is to play with it, not to make sense. Read it aloud and see where you've ended up. Try it with your own sentences. (Feel free to share in the comments if you'd feeling brave.)

Monday

Today at the traffic lights a man stood next to me and laughed. He smelt strongly and sweetly of too much soap. He said 'Did you hit the button?' I answered yes. He hit it anyway. Then he said, 'Did you hit the button for me?' It was after that he started to laugh.

I did the wickedest writing exercise today, involving the form guide (you know the horse bit of the paper). It was Carrie Tiffany's exercise. Boy is she smart. And she has the most mellifluous reading voice, I could listen to her read all day, it was like liquid gold.

I am making a cake. It has earl grey teabags in it (not the bag, just the tea) and will have strawberry jam icing. It's for Una to take to creche tomorrow so everyone can happy birthday and hip hip hooray her for Friday. Making cakes at 10.30 is madness. Icing it at 7.30am will be fun. Not. And then I don't even get to eat any.

A tale of two markets

We went to Camberwell market today and scored some great books, including this:

We have Jane Ray's 12 Dancing Princesses and her lovely story Can You Catch a Mermaid? I've been wanting to get a fairy tale collection for Fred. We have a book of Nursery Tales, which is always a pleasure to read. It's amazing how these stories resonate and I know that living with fragmented narratives is part of the postmodern experience but I really want her to know the original stories - she's already encountered many of them in the intertextual universe. I've picked this particular collection up many times in bookshops, but never on a day when I had the money to spend. So good score. Good score indeed. And being blessed with cheapskatery, this very well looked after book is going away for Christmas.

We also bought this blast from the past (and put it away for a rainy day or a trip away):

Fred loves maps and journeys and paths, and she likes pictures with lots of detail so I think this will be a hit on a quiet day or when she needs some alone time if we're camping. I remember Anno from my primary school library, poring over the pictures and putting the narrative together.

And Fred chose this:

Which is one of those simple but incredibly lovely books about a baby with a cold. The illustrations are warm and homely and observant, a mother and her toddler sitting on the floor playing with toys and the cat. The mother is pregnant but this isn't mentioned in the text, which is a nice touch and a simple reflection of life for many toddlers.

There were others: Angelina and the Princess, a Lucy Cousins sticker book (with all the stickers miraculously intact - another one for a day away) and the Ahlberg's Baby's Catalogue for $1.

Last week we went to the much quieter Coburg market. It's a quite daggy trash and treasure market at the village drive-in. It's dead cheap and there's a lot of trash and only a little treasure. But it's a great family day out. At Camberwell we have to keep Fred at arm reach because it's so crowded which is a bit hard when she wants to dance in the middle of a temporarily vacated space or march along singing 'la la la I love you' at the top of her voice or whizz away to paw through a basket of toys. But at Coburg, which is much smaller and less intensely populated, I don't get that fluttery panicky feeling if I lose sight of her for a few seconds. Which means I can actually, you know, look at stuff. Last week, for the first time really, we raided Fred's piggybank and gave her pocketmoney to spend as she wished. This is what she chose (for 50c).



We also discovered Feral Baby's long lost twin sister. She's been welcomed into the fold.

Call it doctors and nurses, call it sand in bottoms...

Just don't call it sexual abuse.

This makes me furious.

Here's some bits:

Boy, 6, Accused of Sex Abuse

THE Education Department has investigated claims a six-year-old student ran a "sex club" at an eastern suburban primary school, involving up to up to half a dozen grade 1 students.

One mother said her son, also six, was asked to perform a sex act, and that the alleged perpetrator also exposed his genitals to students.

...

The mother has been unable to make a police report because the law states sexual assault by a child under 10 cannot be prosecuted.

"Victims of a perpetrator who is under the age of 10 should still have the same rights as any other victim of a sexual crime," she said.

...

But consulting psychologist John Cheetham said six-year-olds did not have a developed sense of right and wrong. "They are too young to put themselves into someone else's shoes," he said. "We've got to be very careful about putting an adult take on it, it's all about context."

Oh. My. God.

There are so many layers of wrong in this story that it makes my skin crawl.

1. Six. He's six. Six years old. He is not a PERPETRATOR for crying out loud. He's a six year old boy who thinks his penis is cool. He wants to show it to people. These people do not want to see it. Someone needs to go up to this boy and say sternly, 'Please leave your penis in your pants, Johnny (or whatever his name is). It's no big whoop. Half the human race have one.'

2. The mother who wants to prosecute this boy borders on insane.
Edited to admit this is a bit harsh, and I've tweaked some of the following lines - of course I am interpreting this mother's actions through some pretty sensationalist reporting and I don't know what's really going on for her. I am sure she's mostly confused and upset, but even so, I do stand by my comment that it is both misguided and ethically wrong to pursue or frame this kind of play as sexually criminal, implying the same motives and intentions as an adult abusing a child.
This kind of behaviour, while not as sweet as blowing dandelion fluff is pretty freaking normal in young children. I know I saw a little wormy penis or two before I turned 7, vaginas too. Bottoms are interesting. Then they stop being interesting. Then they start being interesting again later. Read Freud. To me this says more about our perception that a mother should be able to control every aspect of her child's experience, including sexual, than it does about the six year old boy accused of (vomit) holding a sex club. Come on. If anyone needs counselling it's anyone who believes children under ten should be able to be prosecuted as sex offenders.

3. Framing this behaviour as sexual abuse is tantamount to SEXUAL ABUSE. It is turning normal child behaviour (admittedly on the precocious, possibly slightly icky end of the spectrum) into something unhealthy. If anything a child that shows extreme sexual behaviour does need to be talked to and examined carefully by a doctor for evidence of sexual abuse. They don't need to be called a perpetrator.

4. Reporting stories like this as serious news is silly. Tomorrow's headlines 'Who Stole The Cookie from the Cookie Jar?' and 'Sister punches sister, other sister dobs.' All it does is contribute to the completely alarmist view that all of society can be separated into victim and perpetrator, that the whole world is crawling with paedophiles and that every kind of touching is suspect touching.

5. As Martin said tonight, the expectation that parents will control all their children's behaviours is huge these days. To add to this burden (and to further insulate children to an unhealthy degree), articles like this suggest parents (or even worse "authorities") should also be able to control their children's emerging sexuality.

It's not about knowing the difference between right and wrong. It's NOT wrong. I'm not saying that the other kids should have to look at his penis if they don't want to. I'm just saying there's perfectly normal avenues for dealing with this and that by blowing it out of proportion, they are risking real damage to this child's developing identity.

Every now and then I meet someone who has no idea what it's like to be a child. It's like their own childhood never happened. They also seem to entirely lack the imagination or ability to put themselves in a child's shoes. They have children of their own, they meet other children, they even attend playgroups, but yet they seem isolated from a culture of children, distrustful of children's exuberance, noise and emotions and alarmed by their undeveloped social skills. Although they take a great deal of joy in their own children, and love them dearly, they admit, often freely, to not particularly liking other people's children. That's what this story made me think of. Kids can seem kind of creepy to adults, and to each other, but that's called projecting, and it's adults doing it, seeing adult motives in child behaviour. When Fred tells me she's going to be me one day she doesn't mean she's going to grow up, kill me, make a wig from my hair and turn up at my book signings. She's learning about the boundaries of herself. Theyn all are. And they have these wildly fascinating bodies and they can't learn everything they need to know about them out of a book.

It also reminded me of J & B who I used to look after nearly 15 years ago (cripes) at a creche in Hobart. They invented a game called Sand in Bottoms, played in secret in a quiet spot behind the fort in the sandpit. We did the right things - we told their parents about it and said they might want to keep an eye on it and we put an end to it, upping our supervision in that part of the playground. But it was a fundamentally healthy game. J & B wanted to see what each other's bottoms looked like, and then put sand in them. Neither of them were disturbed by it, or showed any other worrying or extreme behaviours. Normal. Normal. Normal.

Pregnancy Test

I've done a few pregnancy tests in my life. Sometimes I've wanted one result and sometimes I've wanted another, I've wept over them, felt quietly resigned, felt elated, felt scared to death. It's one of those cyclical things that brings time crashing in, so that every time I test I see those other tests - good and bad - flashing before my eyes. Tonight's test looks relatively tranquil in the pictures, but it was done in the chaotic post dinner bedlam, between dessert and the kid's bath, while Martin washed the dishes.

There's a part of me that wants 100 babies. I love newborns. I love the milky haze of breastfeeding. I love watching babies grow into themselves, discover their smiles, their ha has and their ba bas. I love watching language emerge and dreaming about who they might one day become. The thought of being pregnant again fills me with expectation.

But this probably isn't the best timing for us. I have my thesis due and novels to write. I'm breadwinning at the moment. We're moving next month. I have to get my license. Fred starts kinder soon. We've got no childcare organised for Una. And I must admit, I am a bit scared of pregnancy. I've never suffered post natal depression, but I came close to depression in my first trimester with Una - though admittedly there was a lot of other stuff going on, it's hard to separate out what's what.

My feelings are complicated. If it's positive, if it's 2 bright healthy pink lines, I know what I'm in for. The good and the bad.

But if it's negative, if it's one single line, I'll be sad.

I'll be sadder than I expected to be.

Hedgy-hog nightlight

This has been far and away the best thing we've bought Fred this year. It's a nightlight you plug in and charge up by day and switch on at night. It shifts colours, from blue, red, green and white and is a lovely dim glow in the room. The best thing about it is that it's cool to touch, so Fred can carry it to the toilet with her. There's other ones, including a little bird that sits on a base station rather than plugging into a cord to recharge (recommended because then you don't have to remember to charge it, though if we do forget we just leave it switched on and plugged in and Fred simply unplugs it if she wants to take it with her.) There's also a penguin and a dog. You can buy them online here but I've seen them in a few gift shops and toy shops now. We bought ours at a little shop opposite Piedemontes in North Fitzroy (not Luft, up the road a bit). Fred has been scared of the dark for a while now and is still in night nappies, too scared to go to the toilet at night. She seriously loves walking around in the dark now with the hedgehog, you cna see her trying to suppress her smile when she gets up to go to the toilet when we're still up. We are now under strict instructions to leave the bathroom light OFF.

They're very reasonably priced too, good for a present. The bigger ones, like the hedgehog are about $40 and the bird was about $30. The hedgehog is wicked cute though.

Made by Ikaboo.

What we're reading to them

Some picture book recommendations...

1. Annie to the Rescue by Deborah Niland. This is a beautiful follow up book to another favourite in our house, Annie's Chair. Annie climbs a tree to rescue her cat Callisto and then has a little trouble getting down, but in the end she does it all by herself. The language is simple and beautiful. Fred (4) learned it by heart after one read and Una (2) likes to listen to this one too, a good one for both ages. Deborah's illustrations are perfect, little round toddler people with little round toddler cat and little round toddler dog. Everybody will love this and it stands multiple rereadings.
2. Is Your Grandmother a Goanna? I found many of Pamela Allen's books baffling before I had children. Oh there are some obvious stand-outs like Grandpa and Thomas and the sad, dreamlike Black Dog (too sad for some, though I have no problem reading desolate books to preschoolers). I must admit I'm a bit disturbed by Mr McGee's pointy penis in Mr McGee and The Biting Flea, though not because I think it's inappropriate - it's just kinda icky (Fred is apparently blind to it). I also don't really enjoy reading the Mr McGee books, though Fred likes them. Anyway, when I first looked through Is Your Grandmother a Goanna I thought it was going to be one of her 'hard' to read books - lots of sound effects, lots of repetition. But it's actually really fun (like all these sorts of books, you have to throw yourself into it) and 'Chuffa chuffa chuffa' has become the new standard train noise in this house. This is a great 'premusic' book in a way, because of its focus on rhythm and tempo. I thought it might be a wee bit young for Fred but she loved it.
3. Daddy's Having a Horse by Lisa Shanahan, illustrated by Emma Quay. I sat next to Lisa at the A&U dinner after the Reading Matters cocktail party and she told me she sometimes reads my blog, so hi Lisa if you're reading this! Anyway, we all LOVED this book - borrowed from the library but now on the 'must buy' list, perhaps I loved it most of all, but only by a hair. It's a great 'new baby' book: Mummy is having a baby and, Lachlan is convinced, Daddy is having a horse. Of course. We never find out how Lachlan came to this odd conclusion, but we believe he believes it. The story is in the way his belief is encouraged by family and friends (with the exception of a vaguely concerned mum) and how he comes to terms with the truth. It's lovely and terribly authentic, and I just love the illustrations. And stands many rereadings. In fact every time I read it I was almost moved almost to tears, though it's not sentimental in the least.
4. Alison Jay's Alphabet. I'm not sure if I've blogged about this before, but this really is a stunning book. It's a board book, so heartily resilient to toddler paws. It's also very very cheap at about $12.95 retail in Aussie bookshops. It's everywhere, in bookshops and toyshops and giftshops - I saw it in seed and Crabtree and Evelyn recently. Una adores it - it kept us going for a nearly hourlong flight. There's lots to look at and point at in each picture, and lots of animal noises to make. Fred still really enjoys this one. I've bought it's companion volume Counting: a child's first 123 for her birthday in just under 2 weeks time. I haven't closely examined it, but it seems to be fairytale/folktale animals and it counts up to 10 and then back down again, ending with one little girl ready for sleep (Una shocked my pants off by counting unaided to twenty the other day). The illustrations are at least as nice as the Alphabet book (I like them a bit better because they're new!) Alison Jay illustrated a book called Una and the Sea Cloak which we have put away for Una when she's older.
5. If you're looking for slightly older picture books, Fred is loving Eloise, Midsummer Knight and The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (a companion pair of textless picture books with comic book style panels, which we interpret together), and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.
6. I feel in all fairness I must mention this, though I think it's pretty crap. Una is obsessed with a Pocoyo book we got out of the library. The design is oookaaay - I like the clean white pages and stark character images. But the story is, quite simply, shite -a sort of hare and the tortoise race but everyone wins by co-operating and being nice to each other. Luckily Una is happy to read it to herself, 'Uh oh Pocoyo, up get.' She's never seen the show, so there's obviously something in the imagery (or god forbid the story) that resonates with her. Perhaps she just really wants her own car.

When will she be me?

We’ve been talking again about how babies are made. Every time I repeat the narrative of our bodies, I falter. I am no longer convinced of the improbably mechanics of it myself, that something so liquid, so fleeting could result in the comparative permanence and materiality of hard bone and tooth, in individual strands of hair, or the stuffed internal stockings and tracts, her looping intestines and gullet and so forth.
‘Are you going to have babies one day?’ I ask her, and not just for entertainment value. I always have this feeling that she knows her own path, that she can see into her own future. When she answers these questions I hang on to her every word.
She nods. ‘When I’m you.’
On some level, I believe everything she tells me - even that one day she might grow up and become me.
It reminds me of our heated discussion last night when she told me how she's going to marry Daddy one day (she will be the princess he will be the King - like Sapsorrow). I pointed out that I was already married to Daddy. When she got upset I quickly backpedalled. We came to a compromise, she can marry Daddy if I can go and live in the forest. I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

Apertures opening and closing

As I write my thesis I feel rather like someone holding a camera who zooms in and out so fast that she feels a bit sick and can no longer focus on what she was trying to take a picture of. Having tightened my gaze considerably, I am now considering broadening it again, writing about a few more books, in order to actually narrow the scope of what I'm writing about to really focus on the relationship between melancholy and creativity in young adult fiction.

So I'm thinking of, as well as writing about Coraline, including one of Pullman's Northern Lights books (probably the first) and perhaps Thursdays Child by Sonya Hartnett (though I'm not sure if that's so much melancholy as simply depressing...I'm not dissing Hartnett at all, I'm too scared of her and I also think she's utterly brilliant). I also want to write about Drift, by me. It means changing the introduction but I can keep the majority of what I've written which is the discussion of melancholy and psychoanalysis and I can use fragments of the analysis of Coraline.

If anyone has any suggestions for a work to include I would welcome it. The novel I'm looking for would ideally combine real world and some kind of fantasy element, be melancholic and have some kind of notion of an artistic or creative act (in Thursday's Child I'm thinking of Tin's digging as being a kind of creative act). Short stories welcome too, but it needs to be YA.

In other news I told my publisher I'd write a whole novel by the end of the year. Ha ha ha ha ha. Why would I do that? So if anyone has any suggestions for that too, I'm all ears.

Hmm...

"The voice in my head tells me not to do it, but I'm going to do it anyway." Fred, aged 4, out of the blue in the car.

Maybe she's being haunted.

Self Portrait Challenge

I've decided to start doing the Self-Portrait Challenge. I've thought about it before, being a big fan of Muppinstuff, Janet's been doing the challenge forever. I had been thinking about waiting till we acquire a better camera, but now that we've acquired a house, a new camera seems unlikely for a while. Anyway, today we are all sick (isn't everyone?) and I finally got round to taking some photos, even though I signed up a few weeks ago. It's a band wagon that's been rolling for a while and I feel like I'm rather late jumping on it. And what if I fall off? But anyway.
The theme this month is bathrooms. I don't love our bathroom - in fact in this odd little house it's one of my least favourite rooms. It's c-c-c-c-cold with a window that doesn't close, and the bathroom/shower set up is nothing short of bizarre, though it's been quite workable. I wouldn't want to be 9 months pregnant and trying to climb (literally) into the shower. I do like this little mirror though.
I am sure the photos will get more adventurous when I work out how to use the timer.

Frederique's Make-up Factory

Water + chalk + a sunny day + Feral Baby + Rosie + Barbie + Mama

Sometimes you've just got to do a Sesame Street quiz

You Are Bert

Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you loveable - even if you don't love them! You are usually feeling: Logical - you rarely let your emotions rule you You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Hmm...maybe, except I'm not neat. I am possibly a touch evil though.