Busy Days and Sleepless Nights: Bunking With My Hooligan

For my sins, I have never been a good sleeper.  The interior of my skull is a noisy place, and it is seldom that I am able to ignore the noise sufficiently to put together 8 contiguous hours of sleep.  From a child-rearing point of view, this is fantastic, because every parent in the world has entered into the unwritten agreement with their children that sleep is a thing of the past, banished to the same realm as dinner in quiet restaurants and furniture not decorated with brown handprints.  While my son is not as bad as some of the protagonists of horror stories I have heard from friends and colleagues, when he decides sleep is simply not part of his schedule, he certainly sticks to that decision.

Never was this more evident than the recent holiday I took with my wife and son to the majestic Natal Midlands.  For my wife and I, this was to be four days of bliss in (Relative) silence in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.  For my 2-year-old son Ricky, however, this was a whole new set of shit to climb on and break and explore and drag into the house and put in his mouth and break some more.  I have never seen him as turnt up as he was during this holiday, and his normally endless reservoir of energy seemed even more endless, like some ungodly perpetual motion machine.  You would think that all that activity would tucker him out, but no sirree, when bedtime rolled around the little bugger was just as amped as ever.

Ricky's First Holiday {In Pictures}

On the 26th of February Rod and I had officially been together for ten years. To mark the occasion we thought we'd take a trip back to the Midlands where Rod had proposed five years earlier. We also thought it would be the perfect place for Ricky's first holiday, since we had yet to take a family trip after his birth nearly two years ago! The Midlands is a beautiful part of our diverse country, and definitely one of my favourite places to holiday, and the endless green proved popular with our little man who ran around like a crazy person, exploring every nook and cranny. We booked a cottage at Caversham Mill for three nights, and were told upon arrival that we had been moved to a bigger cottage. Our "backyard" led right down to the Lions River, with beautiful views stretching across miles of endless green. I didn't object. 

On the second day we ventured into Pietermaritzburg to visit my Grammy before heading into Durban for a couple hours. My aunt Anne lives in Durbs, so we met up with her for a coffee and a catch up on the promenade before letting Ricky barrel head first into the ocean. If there are two things that Ricky loves, it's sand and water, so he was in hog heaven! We didn't even have a chance to change him into his cozzie before he was waist deep in waves, so we just let him at it. I was quite impressed with his boldness; not once did he cry or run (except into the sea), and when a big wave took his feet out from under him, he just laughed and stood up for more. Needless to say, his battery was flattened by such a busy day and he slept like a log.

What Binds Us Together, What Tears Us Apart

"The moment the child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new."

No matter how many times you may read that, how many times you may meditate on the sentiment, until you are born as a mother you will and can never understand it. I don't say this out of arrogance or self-conceit, it is a simple truth. The birth of a child means the rebirth of a woman. She is taken apart and remoulded, in the blink of an eye. On the outside we look the same, but on the inside we are changed, left open and vulnerable, at the mercy of this tiny child we hold in our arms. Yes, motherhood, it is one of the great deciders. A decider of who we are, what we will become. It makes us or it breaks us. It is a glorious journey of self rediscovery, a journey we gladly embark on, filled with hope and possibility. We meet not only our child, but the new us. The us we call mother.

But despite the wonder of motherhood, for many, including myself, it can be a time of great loneliness. Where unshakable relationships once stood, now chasms gape. The distance between mother and non-mother widens, by no fault of anyone, but by the simple passing of time. Canyons eroded by priority and misunderstanding. Yes, motherhood, it is what binds us together, and what tears us apart.

Why I've Chosen To Raise My Son Away From The Church (or, Hit Me With Your Comments About How I'm Going To Hell)

I am not an atheist. Neither is my husband. Rod is Christian Lebanese, which is just another way of saying he was raised Catholic, while both of my mother's parents were Wesleyan missionaries, my Grammy still being an active member of her church. I was raised in a moderately Christian home, attending a wide variety of churches throughout my formative years, and schools that encouraged prayer and the singing of hymns at our weekly assembly.

Yet, from a young age I knew the route I wanted to take in terms of raising my children. And it was not to be a religious one. When it came time for Rod and I to discuss our ideas, I was overjoyed to find that his sentiments echoed my own. Church has never been for me. In fact, religion is not for me. I have tried, a number of times, but have never found solace in ritual or dogma. If anything, they set my teeth on edge. I am, I suppose, what one might label as spiritual. I have very strong beliefs, but they are not to be contained within four walls on consecrated ground. Rod, on the other hand, attended a Catholic school for his entire career and, as a result, has chosen to part ways with Mother Mary and her rosaries, but not with the concept of a God. It has been suggested that I was the catalyst for his departure but, if you'll allow me to address that theory, he hadn't considered himself a Catholic for a number of years before we even met.

Momma's Getting Her Groove Back

One of the hardest things about motherhood, possibly THE hardest, at least from where I'm sitting, is seeing yourself as a woman again after baby. Too many of us slip into the habit of being "just a mother", and forget that there are many mantles we must wear. Mommy, wife, lover, friend, companion, WOMAN. Too often we forget what we were before we had a baby asleep in its crib and a lounge floor covered in scattered toys and bread crumbs. I had an amazing pregnancy, I adored carrying my tiny bundle around inside of me. And I felt empowered by my little man's tiny and growing presence. I took strength from him when I felt weak, and shared all of my thoughts and dreams with him before he'd drawn his first breath. And I loved the way my pregnant body grew and changed. I enjoyed all the new curves - the fullness of my thighs, the weight of my breasts. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I had purpose. True purpose. A calling. I felt calm, at peace, and full. I was woman. But, after a few months of erratic sleep patterns, feeding bras and ponytails, not to mention a year of being little more than a milk dispenser to a very hungry child, it's not hard to see why the former womanly you may take a back seat.