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December 6, 2004
Monday November 6th, 2004.
Scarlet Poppy is 8 months old today!!!
And FINALLY... (can you feel the largest ever exhalation of air whooshing around your ears?) ...I feel compelled to write again.
I was looking through Pixie’s baby diary the other day, to compare Scarlet’s developmental milestones with her sisters, and felt a pang of regret for not keeping such a detailed record of Scarlet’s babyhood for her. When I read Pixie’s diary it was amazing – so much detail, all her developmental milestones recorded in detail, almost down to the day, and it brings back so many funny memories, little details I had forgotten and was happy to remember again and chuckle over. It was like lifting up her baby blanket to my nose and breathing her in once again. I feel I have robbed Scarlet by not performing the same task for her, and robbed myself of the awesome experience of revisiting her babyhood in years to come, so I am going to TRY and make up for it…TRY and find the time to write again….
Yes, that was TRY in capital letters…repeated twice, well, three times actually. I am finding time to be a slippery customer these days. Days, weeks, have slipped away where I have barely found a moment or two for self-indulgences. (insert sigh) Yes, these are the days where reading is deemed a self-indulgence, where writing in one’s journal is considered a self-indulgence (when it used to be a mental-health necessity!), where even sitting down for a cup of tea FEELS like a self-indulgence some days! Yes, life is busy in this corner of motherhood – and as time slips through my grasping fingers like the slenderest and slipperiest wisp of silk, I am sad that I haven’t MADE the time to try and capture some of these baby-days on the page, pinned some moments down in words, so they won’t be forever lost in the busyness of this cluttered mother’s mind. But it takes so much effort to hold time at bay for a moment or two, to try and halt its relentless march forward, so I can steal some time to tap away here on the keyboard, to search and sort and fondle the memories of the day or week.
Scarlet only catnaps during the day. Thirty minutes and she’s done. That’s thirty minutes for me to run around like a mad woman stuffing slapped-together sandwiches in my gullet whilst hanging stiffening washing on the clothesline, answering a few rushed and undigested emails, making a few phonecalls, tidying up here and there, and trying to make sure I get three minutes to sit down…alone…in peace…to drink a cold cup of tea. Ha! Oh and finding a moment to put my contact lenses in and brush the bird’s nest of tangles out of my ponytail. …doesn’t happen every day I’m afraid! Pixie is only at kinder two days a week so the days when she’s home those thirty minutes also must include making her lunch and morning tea and afternoon tea, giving her some undivided (Ha!) attention, pulling out the long promised play-doh or paints and setting her up for some messy play, cleaning up her messy play or not as the case may be….yadayadayada….B.U.S.Y. Busy!
By the time I get both girls to bed it’s about 8pm, and I fall heavily on the couch and just try to breathe for 30 minutes or so. It usually looks like a bomb-site around me…dishes, toys, books, tissues, a thousand scraps of paper (Pixie has a cutting paper obsession), congealed food in bowls left over from breakfast…ARGH…you know what’s it’s like don’t you? Admit it, being a stay-at-home-mum is (ironically) completely incompatible with housework! Anyone out there who can look after kids AND keep a clean house is in possession of some profound secret that I am not yet privy too! I struggle not to let the chaos swamp me. I struggle to not get depressed and cranky about the PROFOUND level of household maintenance I am expected (by whom, I’m not sure? Society??) to perform and always fail to keep up with. I am trying to learn to be COOL, you know, to be nonchalant about the whole thing and look to all the world like I enjoy living with a thousands of scrap-paper piles littering my carpets and congealed dishes decorating my benchtops. I WISH I was the type of Mum who was so into my kids, so into creative projects with my kids, that I LEFT the housework alone ON PURPOSE so I could paint paper lanterns and make little knitted puppets!! I am trying to cultivate that particular strain of ‘cool’…with very limited success (can’t you just feel how tightly pursed my lips were when I said that?)…yes I am busy and I feel SWAMPED!
Scarlet. Man, this is supposed to be about Scarlet isn’t it?
Okay, okay, so obviously I need a rather long dose of diary-therapy too! So there’s not much of Scarlet in this first entry…but hey, hopefully this has broken the ice and in the coming weeks I’ll be flooding back with anecdotes about the wee ones and the delights of being deliriously tired and never getting to enjoy a hot cup of tea. Is it only ME who suffers from this particular brand of crazed motherhood? Sometimes I wonder if everyone else isn’t simply coping perfectly with this motherhood gig and I’m the only dazed and confused whirling dervish on planethood Mum!
I’ll be back…with the promised up-dates on my delightful 8 month-old non-sleeping feeding-machine, Miss Scarlet Poppy SOON!
See you then, the longly-absent without much of a sick-note, Eloise.
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