Week 40

This time last week, only 3 days fashionably late, 7lbs 11oz of Ernest George was born in a birth pool in our dining room.

We have been so dazed with sleep deprivation and heart-stopping love for our new baby that we only realised last night we hadn’t even played him a single piece of recorded music. We have been too busy singing him silly Ernie songs and squishing his delicious cheeks.

Parenthood so far is a glorious, screaming technicolour smack in the face. The emotional power of every single second of the day is set to overload. I cry at least five times a day, and find myself absent-mindedly beaming at my son at least ten times that. It’s like somebody ripped off my skin and left my nerves bare to feel every. single. thing.

Never has anything been so terrifyingly relentless and brilliant all at once.

I’ll be back with the birth story when little monkey learns to sleep for more than an hour at a time….

Week 39: Texas Is The Reason – Do You Know Who You Are

The most amazing band I never got to see is coming back to the UK for their last ever performances and playing in Manchester.

I have been quite stressed about this, because I know we have two tickets, and I know in the back of my mind that, when it comes to it, only S will get to go. This is just one of a number of incidents in the last few weeks that’s made me sit up and think about how things that I once took for granted are going to become enormously challenging. Something is very, very shortly going to become more important than all of that stuff.

I have spent a lot of time over the last 9 months worrying about money, and it all sort of ended in me having a bit of a meltdown last weekend. It doesn’t matter how many ways I turn it over in my head, I don’t have a plan, we don’t have a way to cope beyond the first 10 months. Then, this week, I got offered a small freelancing job, which turned into about 2 weeks work, and my brain exploded. It’s the most phenomenal opportunity, but I’m taking it on at a time when I’m going to be at home looking after my newborn baby – the first 2 terrifying months – by myself, for the first time ever. Yes yes yes I want the job but holy fucking shit I have no idea how that is going to work. Where to draw the line between my new tiny, screaming first priority and earning us the money that will enable us to survive. They tell us we can do it all, have it all, but I know that’s a myth. So what’s going to give?

I had been so perfectly cool and calm about everything, and now I have The Fear. The fear about labour (he hasn’t moved, and I can’t stop reading back-to-back birth stories on the internet and terrifying myself – I swear I’m not a massochist I’m genuinely just trying to find some non-horrific ones), about being unable to manage by myself afterwards, about not letting my career stagnate so I can actually go out and earn us some money to live on at some point, about this being the biggest thing I’ve ever done and the terrible, pernicious fear of failing at it.

I’m not an idiot, I know this Fear stuff had to come and dress itself in scary makeup and say “BOO!” really loudly to me at some point, and it’s not surprising that I’m sitting here on my due date having finally had it leap out and shout in my face.

There have been so many lovely people reassuring me about this, and so much has really helped. Have faith is the big one. Trusting instincts, not overthinking it (not my forte at the best of times). But the best thing I’ve heard came from my Mum, who simply said “you won’t care when he’s here”. Or rather, I will care, but not in the same way. Same furniture, different room. So there’s no point worrying about making my bed yet, before I’ve got to get in and lie in it.

Week 38: Kyuss – Welcome To Sky Valley

I think we all have those records that transport us out of our mundane lives and take us away somewhere magical.

When I listen to Kyuss, I’m floating on a psychedelic sparkly cloud 10 miles up above a desert canyon. I am not on my hands and knees scrubbing the skirting boards, rigid with backache and praying this baby will turn into a slightly less awkward position for birth.

This week I have been mostly hoping that with the gut-shaking power of rumbling bass and downtuned guitars, the baby will flipflop around into prime position, thereby saving me hours of googling back-to-back babies and sobbing with the fear of being in agonising back labour for a week. On the up-side, at least I know both of my TENS machines are working now. And there are many spare batteries. Many, many spare batteries.

Back to the music. I think when you’re a youngster, or maybe during a particularly thoughtful period of your life, you have those albums or songs that let you vanish inside yourself. It definitely gets harder to lose yourself in music as you grow up, but the second you put on an old CD or song – BOOM. You’re floating in space again, suspended above the canyon, or getting whatever it is that feeling is that transports you. I think this is what inspires legions of embarrassing uncles and aunts to leap onto the dancefloor and start fist-pumping at weddings the second a song from their youth comes on. The opening notes in that song push those magic brain receptors and they’re young again, and they can get away with dancing like that (even if they really can’t).

These magic switches are also helpfully effective at distracting you from pain. Need to push out another impossible 2 kilometres in your half marathon? Put on your favourite songs, get the endorphin release, take your mind somewhere away from it all. Stub your toe? Put on something REALLY loud and angry and let it block out the pain signals. Works with broken hearts too, ask any teenager.

Anyway. Giving birth to a human out of your foof. The music admittedly might not help towards the end of it, but if the first part is going to be a muscular endurance test lasting days on end, I’d better get prepared with with as many psychological tricks as I can read up about. And two lovely, lovely TENs machines with their sticky stinging pads all over my back all at full electrocuting power.

Week 37: Prince – Sign O’ The Times

The wall! I’ve hit the wall. I had such a good week of getting things done last week, but this week has involved a lot more lying in bed wondering if I’ll manage to get out of it before I piss myself.

It’s a deliciously sunny bank holiday weekend, and Sam has been busy pressure washing the back yard and reupholstering our rocking chair, whereas I spent a grand total of TWO hours walking round town on Saturday and then had to stay in bed most of yesterday with the curtains drawn to recover from my “exertions”, like some sort of sickly 18th century literature heroine. I’m not very good at feeling like I have no purpose. I am a giant, pathetic heap of sorry-for-myself. What’s annoying me most of all is that I’m STILL seeing things that need to be done, but unable to sustain the energy to get up and do any of it anymore. It’s scary that there could be, potentially, another whole month of this. Another whole month of getting progressively fatter and moanier.

Generally speaking though, I am in good spirits! I’m not at work and the sun is out. I’ve picked a good time of year to be useless and vegetating.

Oh apart from hayfever, good LORD. I’m going to have to send somebody else to the chemist for me as they won’t sell me so much as a Halls Soother anymore. The days of hiding this with a baggy jumper and buying contraband over the counter drugs are well and truly over.

No, can’t be bothered to talk about Prince either. I prefer this record to Purple Rain, which is just overplayed. That’s all you’re getting.

Week 36: Joni Mitchell – Blue

More blue ladies this week!

I’m not blue though, I’ve just had my first week of maternity leave and I’m absolutely buzzing. I can sleep when I need to, I can eat when I need to, I can order things off the internet and actually be at home to receive them. I feel like a normal human being again, albeit a rather fat and achey one. The house is even slowly becoming something like an actual place where grown-ups live, rather than the student house-meets-jumble-sale thing we’ve had going on for the last five or six years.

I find myself pleading now “baby just wait til I’ve finished washing all the bedding we’ve ever owned…. baby just wait til I’ve painted the skirting boards and the banister and all the internal doors….baby just wait til we’ve put our mannequin Ken into a decent outfit…” I’m well aware that the baby won’t judge us if he’s born and Ken is wearing a dodgy blue jumper/Swedish tennis player wig/floppy hat combo that makes no sartorial sense. The health visitor might though. She eyed Ken fearfully this week: “Ooh what a lot of things you’ve got! Are these all your husband’s things?” “Oh, yes, yes, he is a one!” I chuckled, as I imagined the long-suffering wife of an eccentric hoarder might. No point social services thinking we’re both insane, right?

But let me talk about Joni.

I have this totally shallow, lazy, anti-music thing where I don’t really get into bands, I just get into records. I could sing you every note of this album, even though I have never listened to anything else by Joni. Actually – lie- I did have the Hissing Of Summer Lawns lent  to me (Prince’s favourite Joni Mitchell record, fact fans) but I couldn’t get into it. And I think I have Court and Spark lying around somewhere, which some people say is the best thing she did, but, pah, why should I bother listening to anything else when I like this so much? If I want to listen to Joni Mitchell, I put on Blue. This is probably horribly disrespectful to a tremendous artist, and definitely shows me up as being fickle and a philistine, but I’m not picking on Joni, I do it with everyone.

If a record is perfect I don’t want to go and listen to something by the same artist that I like a bit less and then think they’re not such a genius after all. I mean, who’s had a flawless career? Name me someone. Nobody has, everyone has meandered. I have enjoyed many other excellent Sonic Youth records, but in some ways I do wish I had left it at Daydream Nation, because it was my first and is still my favourite. I was so excited about the second and third Hot Snakes records, and gutted when they didn’t get within yelling distance of Automatic Midnight. And don’t get me started on Weezer.

Why disappoint yourself? Just put on Blue and sing along to every word.

(side two is my favourite)

Bliss.

Week 35: Billie Holiday – Lady Sings The Blues

I finished work! The moment I’ve been crawling towards for the last few weeks like a dying beetle has finally arrived. The relief is colossal. I never knew I could feel so tired and broken. Maybe it’s preparation for being a little old lady one day. There is certainly a similar level of tea drinking and biscuit eating going on.

As well as feeling relieved, the sense of transition has taken me be surprise. I have my feet in two worlds now, not really wholly in either. My relationships with the people around me are changing, with virtually everyone. Some people have nothing to say to me anymore, to some I am just a baby-vessel they have nothing in common with, some are wistful as if I have been lost somehow, some are excited, some are fascinated, some (a very few) are just exactly as they always were. Predictably I am being drawn closer into my own family, in-laws suddenly dancing round me like I’m sitting on a golden egg, my own parents over-emotional and more interested in me than they have been since I was in bermuda shorts. My Mum  left tearful today as she won’t see me again until I am to someone else what she is to me.

The world is moving around me even though I feel like I’m standing still. It’s a strange and dizzying sensation. People moving closer, people stepping back. I’m not honestly sure how much is real and how much is in my hormone-addled, over-sensitive brain.

Perhaps the trick is not to care too much about any of it, real or imagined. Maybe life is teaching me to have patience and rely a bit more on myself. To forge out into the unknown with nothing more than my (radically depleted) wits and a bit of faith in my own instinct instead of constantly building a picture of myself through other people’s eyes. Maybe that’s a pretty good kick-off for some confident parenting.

Billie Holiday is great thinking music, isn’t she? I promise to talk flippantly about something pointless next week.

Week 34: Crowded House – Together Alone

Here’s something. When all my peers were warring it out over East 17 and Take That, at an age when my husband-to-be and many more of my current friends were smoking badly rolled spliffs to Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine, I was sitting in my bedroom listening to Crowded House. I didn’t start to understand grunge until after Kurt died, didn’t think I liked heavy music at all in fact, so didn’t bother to listen to it. Later on, I finally heard Bleach, realised how comparatively average Nevermind was and set off on my own journey into noisy stuff, making my own map, but still occasionally putting on the same Crowded House CD. I think what I’m trying to say is that I’ve never been especially cool.

I cleaned the bathroom to Together Alone this weekend – it’s still great, although I don’t remember it sounding as much like the Beatles as it does. Cleaning and tidying is all I seem able to focus on at the moment. Anything that interrupts me from preparing myself and the house for the baby has become immensely irritating to me. I love this post on maternity leave by Esme, who is due a couple of weeks before me. Nobody tells you that  the main reason that you’ll want to finish work is not just because you’re tired and fed up (although you definitely will be), there will also be this deeper hormonal need to vanish inside your own body and concentrate on the life growing inside you, at the expense of all other mental function. For me, this has been helpfully flagged by my inability to use the intellectual part of my brain for more than a few seconds at a time. I think my bosses will be relieved when I’ve gone. Nobody wants a comms exec who has lost the ability to communicate.

(Having said that my last internal email got an enormous staff response. Maybe I am now able to tap into other people’s instinctive brains and finally get them to act through my writing. Or maybe I just sent it with the wrong attachment.)

So, here I am, vanishing into my neocortex. Everything is based on what I feel rather than what I think. For an over-analytical mind, it’s like pulling my own batteries out and watching my power run out. It feels liberating, actually.

Four working days to go now. It will be a grateful limp over the finish line.