….And then suddenly, I wasn’t.

I’m not sure of the exact moment when I came unstuck. It’s not surprising really. I rarely sleep more than a few hours at a time. I work from home and look after my baby. Sometimes, I can’t believe that even after fourteen months of motherhood I still haven’t crumpled into an exhausted heap onto the floor. I just keep on going, happily, most of the time. But then something happened to my momentum.

It was probably a few incidents; of unravellings, like a knitted scarf with a loose stitch. You just have to pull it a little bit for it to start to fall apart.

It could have been a couple of weeks ago, when I picked up my one year old from her cot,  and she threw up. In my mouth. It was like a mother bird feeding a baby, in reverse. The truth is, I’ve had better meals.

A few days later, I was on a work call, conducting a phone interview with a general manager for an article I was writing. Before the call, I had made a tiny wish that the same baby would sit quietly for the entirety; that the most I’d have to deal with mid-conversation were cute coos and sweet squeaks. But no.

Baby, who for the first five minutes, squirmed silently on my lap, decided it was the perfect moment to unleash a furious torrent of brown liquid from her nappy. It exploded out the sides, oozed down her legs and across mine. It was on the couch. The carpet. In my hair. I was supremely impressed at my ability to maintain my composure, but I had to cut the call short. It’s not easy to preserve professionalism when you’re sitting in the middle of a raw sewage situation.

For a few weeks, I struggled. I wept. I felt like I had cement in my shoes. Everything was heavy. I felt irritated at my darling baby who cried when she should have been sleeping and threw her food on the floor with all the petulance of a fully-fledged toddler. I couldn’t bring myself to reply to text messages. I felt insane, like an old gate without hinges. And yet, even then, I couldn’t help thinking about how lucky I was. 

Lucky.

You see, I have an innate positivity that’s inherent in my nature. I can’t shake it, much as I sometimes want to buy all the balloons and host a pity party for one. I have too much to be grateful for. A brilliant husband. A beautiful, funny, flame-haired baby. A colourful, creative, entirely lovable family. A sweet little doggy. More friends than I ever could have imagined. A roof over my head. Sunshine. Safety. Beauty.

Any time I’ve ever undergone any sort of adversity, I’ve reminded myself that no matter how crummy my day is, there’s always an antidote.

It’s called perspective.

As composer and lyricist Irving Berlin said, “Life is 10% what you make it, and 90% how you take it.”

In other words (courtesy of the inimitable Oscar Wilde):

“The optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist sees the hole.”

There’s no denying I’m having trouble juggling the things I want to do with the things I have to do. Paid work versus writing my blog, for example (Er…. hello old blog! I’ve missed you!). Or tidying the ever growing mountain of mess in my room versus lying in bed with the covers pulled up, and not moving for days.

Anyway, one of the ‘have-to’s happened last week when I took Marnie, my sweet, sleep averse baby, to Tresillian, where they teach mothers how to teach such babies how to get to the land of nod. A baby-sleep boot camp of sorts.

It was intense. Physically and emotionally draining. The soundtrack was the sound of screaming babies, over which classical music blared, to drown out the screaming babies. Every night, when Marnie woke – hourly, half-hourly, sometimes ten-minutely – I had to jump out of bed to settle her back to sleep.

By the third night, I was so delirious with the exhaustion that comes with (eleven months of) extreme sleep deprivation, that the nurses were left to look after the baby while I lay paralysed by waves of nausea and vommed violently into the bedside bin. At 1am they called Tutti to look after me, and the next morning, two days before the end of the program, they sent me home.

But two good things happened.

The first is that Marnie appears to be (slowly) getting the message (even if she did wake 6 times last night and finally at 4.45 this morning, and I have been up since then as a result).

The second, is that on night two, in a strange moment of sudden inspiration, I decided to write a poem. Well, I decided to add to a poem – I wrote the first four lines at uni and always really liked them. Who knows how or why the urge took me to tap this out on my keyboard as I sat on the bed, insane with tiredness as I waited for Marnie to wake up for the millionth time. All I’ll say is this – you just never know when inspiration will strike. Always carry a pen and paper. And with that, I’ll just leave this here:

Ode to a pigeon

Oh pigeon how you coo and strut
As though you own the street
There’s no denying you’re a slut
A scavenger. A cheat.
Your feathers they are drab and grey
Your eyes as black as soot
And always without fail you have
At least one mangled foot.
You do not fly with style or grace
It must be said in fairness,
Your pea-brain has not gifted you
With much spatial-awareness
You scavenge in the garbage bins
You kick, and peck and sit
Wherever you feel comfortable
You care not where you shit.
Oh pigeon with your beady eye
Your little sharp dull beak
Your grubby wings, that flap sky high
You’re anything but sleek.
And yet dear pidge, when you I see
On any given day,
I cannot help but feel depressed
That you’re so dirty grey
You’re blatantly unpopular
And even though you’re dumb,
If you come near, you needn’t fear

I’ll
spare
a
little
crumb..

. .
…

.

Laughter.    Attitude.  What’s not to love?

I always have fun going out with Tutti. Besides the fact that she’s extremely entertaining to be around, I find it so fascinating watching people watching her: a 65 year old whirlwind of colours and raucous laughs and huge headscarves surrounded by a whispering, nudging, staring sea of beige. And while her eccentricity is an innate quality (like her warmth, optimistic outlook and natural instinct to be kind and helpful to everyone and anyone) she brings to mind this quote – one of my favourites by English poet Edith Sitwell:

“I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”