single parent

And through light, darkness is clearer

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First things first, this photo is actually from the previous holiday in which I started to feel that the black dog was starting to gnaw upon my doors once more.  I’ve known for a while that the signs of depression were creeping ever closer but I have been in utter denial.  Partially because I’ve been in the metaphorical hole so many times that I was sure that falling back in was impossible and partially, in all honesty, because I’m stubborn as fuck.  I have a tendency towards depression.  Always have.  Just writing those words makes me want to punish myself somehow but it’s true and always will be, no matter how many times I pretend to the contrary.  It’s a part of my make-up, these misfiring neural pathways and somehow I’m trying to own them.

I’m just back from a joyous few days in Portugal with an old friend who I knew I could trust with a bit of a meltdown and who wouldn’t judge.  I flew out with my daughter and was greeted with warm hugs and understanding and for the first time in over two years was able to fall asleep in someone’s arms.  It was so beautiful and relaxing and emotional to actually allow myself to just be held and sleep.  And that’s how the rest of the days progressed; playing with my daughter and beach trips galore followed by friend therapy, hugs and wine in the evening.  It took me all of 12 hours to start crying on him.  Sometimes, when you’re low, kindness is the thing that tips you over the edge…

Anyway, I must have known that this was coming as at some point, about a week ago, I got back in touch with my therapist who saw me through an extremely tough few years a long while ago.  In these times of black, she is almost the only person I trust and certainly the only person I feel I can legitimately sob to for an hour.  And that’s what I did today, on full moon, on Beltane on this turn of seasons and pagan festival of yore, I bawled my wee eyes out until we had a mini action plan and we had laughed that basically all I need to do for a modicum of sanity is plant some lettuce.  Sometimes what you need is really fucking simple.

Not that I’m saying lettuce is the answer to all psychological problems because you know, that would be ridiculous but actually, is there any situation that isn’t at least a little improved by getting your hands in earth and growing something?…  The thing is, I’m really happy as a mother.  I love my daughter, I love being able to spend this part of her early life with her and I’m grateful for every giggle and every snuggle.  I’ve just lost myself as an individual and have somehow allowed all of my tendencies to expect failure as standard to re-permeate my existence.  I have no job, I have no lover and I can’t even grow a fucking lettuce!

So, today, I see in Beltane with a whisky in hand and a tear in my eye and I pray that the blossoms of spring will carry me with them as they turn to the light and radiate it from within.  I search for surety within this flux, to know that I can reroute these neural pathways once again and to believe that I am worthy and I am enough and to run with the dreams I have and to believe that they too, are enough.  So for now, I’m taking all the Bach remedies that seem appropriate, sitting in lotus and drinking my national spirit and trying to access the strengths of ages past.  I do believe that recovery is entirely possible, perhaps it’s just time to accept that I need to balance potential relapse into my future.

Darkness is just the other side of light, it’s what comes before dreams…

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The end of an era?

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My daughter hasn’t breastfed all day.  She refused this mornings feed although, she still wanted to sit with my nipple in her mouth and the same has happened this evening.  I’m both heartbroken and hopeful.  Why does parenting always seem to result in such a dichotomy of emotions?  No wonder we’re all a wee bit barmy!

I mean, for anyone who has practised baby led breastfeeding and gentle parenting, self-weaning is the dream we hope for.  It’s the thing that many people tell you is impossible… ‘Oh, you’ll still be feeding her when she’s at school’ and ‘she’ll never stop by herself’ and ‘you’re babying her’ and other such choice parenting titbits from the wankers who always proclaim to know better.  Well, my just turned 2 year old seems to have decided that she’s done.  She clearly still wants the closeness and was insistent upon cuddling up to my naked torso.

5 days further in and she now calls them boob snuggles.  Still no actual feeding though.  I do wonder if this is one of those ‘feeding strikes’ that one reads about and in a few days she’ll want to restart.  I guess time will tell.  I’d have thought the milk will remain for a while.  From my perspective, I’m finding parenting a wee bit of a struggle without the defined 20 minutes of breastfeeding that used to bookend my day.  I miss the closeness and the warmth and the feeling of her relaxing into my body as she nursed.  I miss knowing that I could settle her from trauma with my breasts.  Like the time she fell down the stairs and was pale and scared and I just breastfed her for a few minutes and it was as if it had never happened.  Magic boobs!

I miss my baby.  I love my toddler.  She’s getting so grown up already.

If I had a husband, I’d be trying for another baby right about now.

Wanting to breastfeed again can’t be the worst reason anyone has ever had another kid, surely?

But, as a 38 year old very single parent, I am trying to come to terms with the fact that this may be it for me.  I’m so grateful for how easy it was for us and for every moment of special bonding that we got to enjoy together and for the feelings of overwhelming love when she made her little happy dinosaur noises as she fed, which way surpassed the pain of engorgement in those early days.  The frozen cabbage leaves were still vital and I did remain topless for 2 weeks (my postie still can’t look me in the eye!). I’ll tell her all about it when she’s older and hopefully one day, this will be a joy that she can experience with her own children and I will reminisce with pride.

Exposed

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It’s been a long time since I’ve been held by anyone.  Just held and stroked and allowed to relax into a warm body and strong pair of arms.  And yesterday, it finally happened for me again.  I allowed myself to be held, to snuggle, to give and receive reassurance, to murmur whatever the semi-platonic version of sweet nothings are and it was so lovely.

The last time someone held me was when my daughter was around 2 weeks old. She’s just turned 2. The last person to hold me was my daughter’s father before he decided he really couldn’t bear to be around us any more.  So it’s been nearly 2 years in which I have been the giver of many hugs, have held and soothed and reassured and loved my daughter over and over again.

I wouldn’t change those years but the truth that remains is that I haven’t been able to let go in that time.  I’m never off duty.  Always there, always listening, always loving and at the end of the day it’s still just me, alone, listening to her breathe over the baby monitor as I watch netflix until I feel myself pass again into a numbness from which I could potentially sleep.

And always accepting that loneliness was a part of single parenting but never really allowing myself to feel it as a burden or indeed engaging with it in any way other than in passing. But after yesterdays cuddles with a man of whom I think highly, today has been filled with tears and longing and a real sense of exactly what it is that I’m missing and with no real idea of whether this will ever change.

So this evening for me is about watching a sad movie and doing the ugly crying and allowing myself to feel as utterly alone as I am.  Then I’ll wash my face, get some sleep and wake with gratitude for my daughter, I’ll resume pretending to myself that I’m not lonely and the show will go on.  And maybe, hopefully, someday soon, I’ll be lucky enough again to have a moment or three with someone who can throw light into the darkest corners and remind me where my edges are.

 

Still me, still standing

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Sometimes, being a single mother is gut-wrenchingly lonely.

I sit here, alone of course,  with face dripping as I finally release and let the tears flow.

Mostly, I just don’t find the space in which I can allow myself to fall into sadness, I have a baby to take care of and her needs come first and I don’t have the time to indulge in my own emotions.  But today, today has been different.  Today I realised that I was developing feelings for a man who has been messaging me daily for a matter of months.  Real feelings, real hopes, real me, real future.

So, the question that I have been avoiding because I didn’t want to pop the bubble, ‘how is tinder life going?’ I asked and he replied ‘Well, I went on a date last night and she’s still messaging me so I must have done ok’, I nearly threw up on the floor in Waitrose.  Spontaneous physical response to emotion is not a sensation I have experienced for a long time.  And despite the sensation of my insides heaving, even then, I found gratitude for experiencing such a real feeling that was just mine to breathe through.

Thing is, having a baby rips down all your barriers.  You are so in love with this little person that everywhere you go and in everything you do there is love emanating from you and you are free.  Free in the oddest sense really as on a daily basis my routine completely revolves around my child.  But free in the sense that there is a little person who needs you so completely and whose needs you fulfil so completely, that there is no need for the sort of barriers and walls that we all tend to create around ourselves when it comes to fully experiencing love.

And yes, obviously, the love one has for their child is of a different sort to the kind that one might experience with a significant other but there is a commonality.  And I found that I let this man in, which is not something I do as a general rule, in my entire adult life I can only think of one relationship in which I ever allowed myself to need.  It ended horribly.  Anyway, the point being is that I’m finding myself to be more open than ever before, because of the depth and nuance of the relationship with my child.  And what that means is that my barriers seem to be gone.

And so I’m hurt, a little deflated and lonely again.  But actually, I’m still happy, I still have an amazing child and somehow, I’m still able to experience all the joys and all the heartache involved in letting someone in.  I’m so unbelievably grateful for that.

I am grateful that I met this amazing guy who ticks so many of my boxes and I am grateful that he has let me down somewhat and I am grateful that I still miss him and I am grateful that this journey has led me to crying in my meditation practise on the living room floor.

I know that I’m alive.  I’m fucking buzzing with life.  And I’m excited to know which sensations this new me can experience next.

It’s now the next night and yes, I’m still fucking grateful for this experience.  I do, however, feel as if I’ve experienced a break up and so duly got round one of my oldest friends and drank two and a half beers and smoked three whole cigarettes.  Which was also fucking amazing.

I guess what’s really happened is that I’ve realised that I do still have feelings that are just mine and that don’t relate to my child.  I’m still me.

And that’s just the best revelation I could have asked for.

Where is he?

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So, after all the dramas of the previous week, last weekend I finally went on my date.  We went for a walk along a beautiful beach and then went for lunch in a village pub.  Sounds good right?  It was.  Mostly.  I mean, from the second I saw him walking towards my car in the passenger side mirror, I knew he was a slightly broken shadow of his former self. Something in the walk gave it away.  Like someone who was trying to remember how to swagger when once it would have come without thought.  But, I still felt a wee bit excited, was still intrigued to know more and was just looking forward to a lovely afternoon with a man who wasn’t my Dad.

We got on fine, he’s good company, conversation was easy but it became really clear that he’s just lost his mojo since his wife left him for a woman.  I don’t know if any of you have ever had to embark on the mojo hunt for yourselves but it is an intensely personal journey and one that to some extent no one can help you along.  Once you have been on that journey yourself, you can always see when others are going through it.  I hunted out my mojo a few years ago, it took me several years of intense therapy, facing myself and going on adventures to get where I am.  He’s at the start of that mojo hunt, having self-medicated with drink for a while, he’s starting to realise that booze isn’t the answer, or so he said. And so before we had even walked back along the beach I knew we could never be more than friends.

And then to lunch.  He drank three pints over lunch.  The first he met like an absent lover. Like he had been longing for it, like there was no other taste that could satisfy.  He had drunk half the second pint before food even arrived.  Now, I may well have drunk three pints over lunch before but certainly not with a date who wasn’t drinking. In those circumstances, one is perfectly acceptable but any more than that seems a little rude at best.  And he changed, as the alcohol caressed his brain, flashes of the cocksure man he used to be re-emerged.  And I remembered why I had first liked him.  And I realised that I liked him much more now when he was sober and vulnerable and honest and a little bit broken.  But now, I didn’t fancy him at all.

Anyway, I figured we could be friends.  We kept messaging.  And then we broached politics.  I told him I would be voting Green.  He told me IN SHOUTY CAPITALS that I had to vote Scottish National Party.  I told him shouting like a crazed nationalist and refusing to discuss anything only made me surer.  He unfriended me!!  And that’s where we still are.  I’m sure we’ll meet again sometime and I hope that he will be further down the road of his mojo hunt.

Anyway, that all aside, it was really lovely to spend an afternoon with a man who is definitely a man’s man.  He was chivalrous, he bought me lunch, he helped me fasten the baby carrier, he held doors open, he held the baby while I went to the loo.  I’m so accustomed to single parenting at this stage and so ferociously independent that allowing anyone to be ‘the man’ was both a surprise and a treat.  It made me yearn for a partner in crime.  For someone to lean on.  For someone with a big hand to hold.  For someone to mock me.  For someone to help me even when I don’t need it.  For someone else to take charge for a change.

And then that evening, my travel husband came to visit.  I loved this man from the moment I met him in Johannesburg bus station.  I loved him all through our crazy Mozambique adventure.  And I love him now.  I told him to leave his girlfriend and come and play baby daddy and I was only half joking.  He told me it was beautiful to see me as a mother which still makes me well up just to type it.  And he told me he was proud of me. We played backgammon as we always did.  And I won as I always did (that bit might not be strictly true, he claims he won more, but perspective is an odd thing).  But mostly, why I fell in a heap and cried my little eyes out when he left was because he walked into my house, picked up my baby and other than one feed I gave her, he held her all night and she fell asleep in his arms.

I want for my baby girl to grow up knowing a man with arms that she can feel safe enough in to just fall asleep.  I want that for me as well.  It’s not that I need him.  I don’t.  We’re doing just fine without this man figure.  And women do it all the time.  And women cope. Because that’s what you have to do.  But oh, I would love for these circumstances to be different.  I would love for my baby daddy to have tried to at least be a friend to me and a father figure to her.  I would love to have someone to talk to in these long evenings after my baby has gone to bed.  I want to feel desirable.

And so, a date with a broken man and a reunion with an old lover, all in the same day, made me face these things and realise certain inalienable truths.

I want a husband.

Where is he?

Tinder?!

I guess anything is worth a shot…

Well, that was intense

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I’ve had very little sleep over the last 48 hours so this may be a somewhat incoherent brain dump in which I write about shit a lot. Please excuse the indulgence. It’s necessary for my sanity.

My 14 week old daughter has had diarrhoea for 3 days. Actually, possibly for 6 but the first three were only 3 poops a day so I thought maybe there was some new developmental phase of the sphincter occurring.  The last three days there have been over 10 poops a day. That’s a lot of poo to clear up.  It’s a very tender bottom for my wee baby.  It’s a horrific amount of nappies going to landfill.  I do try to use reusables but when faced with three pooey nappies in as many hours there is just no way to keep up with the washing.  It’s also very fractured sleep for my wee one, who usually sleeps through the night.  I seem to have the mythical sleeping baby, 10-11 hours is the norm.  I have to only mention that to close friends as announcing that kind of information in yoga class gets you a combination of dirty, envious or disbelieving looks from your peers.  Thing is, even with a baby who sleeps that much, I’m fucking exhausted.  Baby rearing is a relentless pursuit.  No rest for the wicked.  And certainly no rest for the single mother.  I’m sure a certain section of society equates those two things nicely but frankly, those people can kiss my white ass every day and thrice on Sunday.

Anyway, I seem to have digressed already.  I feel like I’ve had my first real ‘Where is the nearest adult? Oh fuck it’s me’ moment.  So, to resume my shitty tale, on the second day of diarrhumpi I had to take my daughter for her MeningitisB vaccine because I’d already missed the previous appointment. I wanted it administered separately from the combined vaccine as they are apparently less likely to develop a fever and therefore less likely to require dosing with Calpol which is full of noxious E numbers.  Fuck only knows why they put things that are known to have ill effects in medicine for children.  I have some tinfoil hat wearing types of friends who would say that the whole pharmaceutical industry is a massive scam purely interested in perpetuating, if not sickness, then certainly drug dependency.  Do conversations of the type  ‘Oh that additive has been linked to hyperactivity disorders so maybe we should remove it from products for children…oh no let’s not because then we can sell more of those ADHD drugs that we conveniently also make’ really happen? I would like to think not but drugs companies making obscene profits must lead to some conflicts of interest.  Either way, when your baby’s temperature hits 39.5 degrees Celsius you hit the panic button and for most people I know, that means grabbing the Calpol syringe.

That’s what happened to us yesterday.  Went for a nice lunch after vaccinations with the ante-natal ladies and Nessie slowly got grumpier and sleepier so we came home.  She continued with the sleepy/grumpy (babies seem to embody each of the seven dwarves at varying stages!) thing for a while then slept for a few hours with me neurotically checking her temperature every half hour or so.  I was feeling a little pleased with myself as she had no fever and so I had escaped the E number roulette wheel.  And then…then it was 39 degrees and my evening changed from smug to panicked.  I got her from her cot and stripped all her clothes off.  She was pale, clammy and burning hot to the touch.  And screaming so loud.  So loud.  Up half a degree from the screaming and I went and found the Calpol, having hidden it in my pre-emptive smugness and loaded the syringe.  I then misjudged the force required and spurted it onto her chin.  I called nhs24, the notoriously annoying helpline and got through to some woman who was clearly just asking me a long list of questions from a script and wouldn’t transfer me to the doctor until  I answered.  All the while trying to drip Calpol onto her tongue so she could lap it and not choke or vomit.  And all the while she was screaming so loud.

By the time I got off the phone she was 40.0 which is way too hot for a baby of this age.  It can trigger seizures and a whole host of other awful reactions.  The nurse had told me she ‘managed to get me an appointment’ in 90 minutes and seemed unconcerned by the temperature.  She had even asked me if I could give the baby to someone else because she couldn’t hear me over the screaming.  No.  No, there is no one else.  There is only me and her and she is screaming and I am holding her impotently.  Waiting for something to change, to worsen or to ease and just hoping the screaming would stop for a good reason.  I tried damp swabbing her which made her scream more so that the temperature went up.  And then, then it started to drop.  And I cried.  And she cried.  And she shat.

All the way through this she was shitting copiously.  And continued to do so every time I managed to get her to sleep thus waking herself up and so the screaming would start again.  I sang her to sleep, I spooned her to sleep, I nursed her to sleep, I cuddled her to sleep over and over until finally we got a 3 hour sleep.  And then a big shitty nappy.  And then more sleep.  When we awoke just before 11am she still had a mild fever and was still shitting.  Which is how today has passed.  I think the fever has finally broken…not so sure about the shitting.

It’s now two days later and the fever is gone but the shitting continues albeit at a slightly slower rate.  Not every fart is a poo and not every nappy change is because of a poo.  So she must be getting better.  I’m exhausted.  I missed my date.  Not that either of those things matter particularly, they just are.

 

Friday night is party night

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Or it used to be anyway, not so long ago.

This evening, I had a green smoothie for dinner in an attempt to shed the baby weight and then ate an entire Easter egg to myself because lets face it, I’m breastfeeding so obviously burning loads of calories and because, well, since when did a smoothie constitute dinner?!

I’ve then bathed with my beautiful daughter. I usually get in with her because it’s a lovely bonding experience and it’s the closest thing to a relaxing bath that I get these days… Anyway, I digress.  This evening, as we sat down in the bath I heard a farty bubbling noise and then smelt the whiff of baby poop and, as the waters around me slowly turned yellow, I realised she had shat in the bath. For those of you who have never experienced such a joy, it’s like the world’s worst bath bomb! Needless to say, bath turned into shower pretty quickly amidst much hilarity from me and baba.  It’s just as well she’s cute!

I’m sure there was a party in Glasgow one night where someone did actually shit in the bath.  Someone certainly shat on our doorstep after we kicked him out of the party.  God only knows what we kicked him out for, all manner of craziness was de rigeur those days, I blame the buckfast personally.

So, with my child in her bedside cot, I’m working on the theory that she will sleep through as she usually does and I am having a wee glass of Malbec and trying to figure out how to blog. Today has been a little odd, pretty lonely to be honest, sometimes it really is a struggle to keep a smile on my face.  I love my daughter so much but lets face it, at 3 months old she isn’t providing me with much intellectual stimulation. My brain is also slightly mushy in this post partum phase, completing a Guardian crossword the other day was a fairly major achievement.

I figure that I should declare my hand so to speak, and explain how I got to be here, on a Friday night with my blog and a baby next door.  I registered for this site last year after a few illuminating months in Bali where I did a lot of yoga, my teacher training in fact, I did a lot of surfing (pretty badly!) and I did a lot of partying and played with a lot of men.  But mostly, what I did was just be present in my life.  I gave up trying to plan, I gave up worrying about the past, I forgave myself for just being me instead of being some wondrous unicorn type A overachiever. And I was happy.

And then I ran out of money and came back to a pretty good job for the summer, roaming around surveying birds in scrubby woodland, with plans to return to Bali in Autumn.  I was lonely then and quite isolated in my living arrangements (a wee cottage in the middle of the woods!) so after a cocaine fuelled weekend in Edinburgh, I arranged to meet up with a friend from facebook that I had never met in reality.  There had been a lot of flirting and fairly sexual chat and needless to say, one thing led to another.  And it was good.  So we did it again the next weekend.  And the one after that.  And then I found out I was pregnant. And I was happy.  Terrified but happy.  I knew I would keep the baby despite the far from ideal circumstances, because she was a person to me from the second I found out.  I have had terminations before and had no qualms whatsoever but this was different.

And then he freaked out.  He vaguely tried to be enthusiastic for a week or so.   And then resumed freaking out.  And that’s pretty much where we still are.  I didn’t see him from the time I was 3 months pregnant until 3 weeks before I gave birth.  He wouldn’t speak to me on the phone, would only message me and kept telling me that I should have got rid of my baby until I was 31 weeks… Suffice to say, he made my pregnancy a lot harder than it would have been if he had just left me alone.  I invited him for the birth in the hope that perhaps it would trigger some actual emotion in him.  And I think it did.  But he won’t/can’t/doesn’t express himself.

Having a baby rips you open both physically and mentally and those first few weeks are exhausting, exhilarating, terrifying, hilarious and everything else in between.  And you need told that you’re doing well.  If you know any new mothers, and them and their baby’s are alive, then tell them they are doing fucking amazingly.  And do their washing up.  And tell them they are beautiful, even if they are flabby and covered in random stains which probably originated at one end or another of their darling child.

So, my baby daddy, to use the modern parlance, isn’t interested in pursuing a relationship with me.  He doesn’t even want to try.  He doesn’t tell me I’m doing well.  Which kind of breaks my heart a little bit.  My sister asked me the other day if I was in love with him.  I told her ‘No, but I want to be’ and then cried quietly during my facial, hoping that the cotton pads would absorb my tears and the beautician would not notice.

And that’s it.  That’s where I am.  I am finding new strengths as well as new vulnerabilities.  I am finding the feeling of love I have inside me grows with every day. When my daughter laughs I am happy in the very pit of my stomach, which is not a place I even knew you could feel happy.  And that, that feeling, will carry me over anything.