Posts made in March, 2010
Have you seen my principles?
Before I became a mother I prided myself on being a Woman Of Principles.
I had loads. Envrionmental ones, ethical ones, political ones… I wore my window stickers with smug pride (well, my windows wore my window stickers, but you get what I mean).
I would write letters on behalf of noble causes, keep lists of boycotted and unethically produced goods and shop carefully, I’d give money every month to my favourite charities. I joined local campaign groups, sitting on stalls and encouraging people to sign petitions. I even stood for local council elections on behalf of the Green Party.
Oh yes. Get me, I hear you say.
And then Kai came along.
In a few short months my entire world was turned upside down. And one by one the principles got left behind, jostled out of my brain by fun things like colic, and sleep deprivation, and trying to stop myself losing my mind. You know, the usual parenting stuff.
I stopped giving money to charity because, well, I’d given up work and we were broke. I didn’t have time to write letters, or rather, the time I did have I preferred using to write sanity-saving blog posts, and zone out in front of Desperate Housewives. Cheerios crept back on to the shelves because Kai loved them, and with Mr Fussy you take what you can get. And politics? ZZzzzz. I just didn’t have the energy. News overwhelmed me, leaving me feeling raw and emotional, unable to sleep. I self-protected. I changed the channel.
What happened?! Where did my principles go?
To be fair to myself, I didn’t become a completely heartless cretin. I have tried to do my bit here and there, especially in terms of environment ‘lifestyle’ choices. I’m not going to start listing them because this post is supposed to be how shit I’ve become at giving a damn, but, I have tried. (Although, granted, cleaning the bathroom floor with baby wipes was probably not one of my finest choices).
With the election looming I find myself switching off to the political talk. I’m disillusioned, left feeling it’s not even worth listening as pre-election spin seems to bare no relation to the reality of what parties actually DO once they’re in power. I’m not even sure what the difference between them is any more, they all blend into one big blah blah blah in my mind. And I’m not even sure I WANT to know. I’m seriously considering not even voting. Left feeling, what’s the point.
This is not like me.
I’m inward-centred. Concerned with Kai, Ant, myself, my family and finding it hard to find energy left for anything else. I’m buried under a mountain of personal goals, and nappies, and pots and pans, and laundry. Making ends meet, surviving, has become more important than the bigger picture.
And my principles are no where to be seen.
I’m ashamed. Really ashamed. This is not the example I want to set to Kai.
But I’m not sure I have the energy to change right now, emotionally or mentally.
I know I should cut myself a break, that was can’t all do everything, but how little is enough? At what point are we just ducking out of our global responsibility? At what point are we just being selfish?
How about you? Did you find parenting took over your hard-won principles? Or do you, admirably, manage to find a way of still giving out, standing by your ethics?
I’d love to hear your views and experiences.
Photo credit: stock.xchng
Read MoreProud to be a MAD Blogger
I honestly can’t remember which one of us came up with the idea to call our new Parent Blog Award projects ‘The MADs’. I know we discarded some pretty embarrassing first draft names: The Bloscars (like the Oscars? Yeah I thought it was rubbish too…) The Mammy’s” (like Grammy’s, yep I think that was mine…*cringe*).
All I do know was that months ago Sally from Who’s the Mummy and I began talking about the idea of putting together a Parent Blog Awards programme. It’s done in almost every other sector, film making, writing, music, for example, as well as within other niche blogging communities, all designed to celebrate the achievement of people in their particular fields, normally nominated by the people that love them and wish to hold them up as examples to be proud of.
With the amazing surge in parent blogging in the UK now seemed like the perfect opportunity for us, parent bloggers ourselves, to put together our very own grass-roots awards programme. We hadn’t a clue how we were going to do it, but we thought it’d be fun to give it a go.
We knew what we wanted. We wanted something that allowed us to take a break from stats and tables and indexes, that allowed the vast number of people reading parenting blogs to celebrate their favourites by one simple measure, by saying “You’re ace. I love your blog. And here, I’ve nominated you for this award to prove it”. It wouldn’t matter how many page impressions you got, or how ‘well known’ you were. If someone had read your blog and been touched, or entertained, or inspired by what they’d read there, you would be in the running.
And it wouldn’t matter if you got one nomination or fifty – you’d still get to display your awards badge proudly and bribe all your friends to nominate you. When the top five nominated blogs in each category were announced, the short-listed blogs would be those who had the people power behind them, whether loyal readers, or friends. And chances are they would be people who shone in the blogging community, and who had touched the lives of the people that had nominated them.
People, that as parent bloggers ourselves, we should be so proud of. Proud for them to represent our community.
And people that should be proud of themselves. So too often we end up muddying over our own achievements, in some kind of uncomfortable modesty. (I’m the worst culprit, let’s face it). We wanted people to be shown how much they were appreciated and how highly they were thought of, and for that to make them feel good about themselves, as they should do.
And so the MADs, the Mum and Dad Blog Awards, was born.
Soon we had the fabulous Ellie from Insomniac Mummy on board, and with a huge HEAP of help from lots of other bloggers, and contacts we built our awards programme. We had to figure out sponsorship, and web site building, CSS (EVIL), and privacy policies. We learnt as we went along, made LOTS of mistakes, spent hours wailing on the phone as we tried to bring it altogether.
And finally, yesterday, we launched. Ten categories covering the whole spectrum of Parenting Blogs, all with amazing prize packages which we put together to represent what we knew our fellow bloggers would love.
In less than 24 hours our site has seen over 1200 different people come visit. More than 250 different blogs have already been nominated, big blogs, little blogs, well-known blogs, new blogs – the vast majority of whom I have never come across before and have loved seeing for the first time today.
It’s been so much fun to see people’s excitement today, their delight as they realised they’d been nominated and proudly told the world.
And today’s only just the beginning. We have the most exciting Awards Party planned for September, and lots of surprises along the way.
I can’t wait.
Thank you to everyone who’s already helped to make it such a success and been so supportive in spreading word today and giving us such positive feedback.
And Sally? You are a one-woman dynamo. Never have I seen anyone work so hard. You are a super-star, lady. Thanks for having me and my mad skillz on your team x
Ok. That’s enough of my big speech. But since I’m not eligible for the awards I had to get one chance to stand up and have my big moment, right? At least this way I get to stay in my PJ’s…
And if, by any chance, you’ve been living under a rock, then go see what all the fuss is about and get nominating some MAD bloggers!
Read MoreWriting Workshop #19 – The Big Question and a Lost Hour
Welcome to Monday morning’s workshop prompts! Hope you find one that gets your creative cogs clunking…
For any newbies to our weekly workshop (and it’s never to late to join in), here’s how it works… I’m going to give you 5 writing/blogging prompts. Pick one, pick two, or do them all if you’re really keen – it’s up to you. How you respond is your choice. You could share a real-life story, or make one up. You could write a poem or just free-write without thinking too hard and see what happens. It can be funny; it can be serious; it can be emotional. It can be whatever you want it to be. The only rule is to enjoy writing your post.
Prompts each week will take their inspiration from blogs, current affairs, daily life, or just whatever everyone happened to be talking about that week. If you’d like to suggest a prompt then send me an email or catch me on Twitter – I would love to hear your ideas.
So here they are:
1. We lost an hour over the weekend into the mysterious ether of the universe. Imagine you could get it back to use whenever you wanted. When would you ‘spend’ it and what would you do with it? Be imaginative!
-Inspired by the change to Daylight Savings Time this weekend.
2. What eagerly anticipated experience turned out to be a complete and utter let down?
- Inspired by Sandy at Baby Baby and her not-so-Ideal Home show!
3. What a story or a poem or something descriptive to try and share your view of what happens when we die. Perhaps you could write it as a way of explaining a hard concept to your children? Or just to express your own feeling about the Big Question.
- Inspired by Christine at Thinly Spread who has had to deal with the difficult question of ‘What Comes Next’ with her son his week.
4. Share a time when you felt a deep sense of rejection. How did you move past it?
- Inspired by Heather who has bravely been rising above the hurt of a professional knock-back.
5. When was the last time you really, really wanted something – to the point where it was all you could think about. Was it something material, a holiday or a new car perhaps, or something less tangible. Love? Success? Acceptance? Respect?
- Inspired by me and my familiar feeling of wanting this week.
Now here’s what you have to do. Write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please.
Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.
Feel free to use the Workshop badge on your blog or as part of your post if you like. Code is here:
Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.
See you Thursday then!
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This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.
A Familiar Feeling
An old familiar feeling has crept back of late.
It lurked back in slowly, quietly, lodging in the back of my brain and deep in my stomach. It was the feeling of something missing, like that feeling where there is a thought floating just outside of your mind that you can’t quite get a tangible grasp on. Like you’ve forgotten something really, really important.
It’s left me grumpy, and sensitive, and confused about myself and life in general.
You may have noticed.
It’s been a feeling of wanting. Of being in a kind of limbo and not feeling, well, ‘right’. And for a long time I didn’t know what the hell it meant.
I think I’ve figured it out. Actually, I know I have.
It’s hormones.
More specifically, it’s those longing, stomach-churning, completely beyond your control, weep every time someone announces they’re pregnant biological clock-ticking, baby hormones.
I want one. I want another baby.
It started with the ‘almost baby’ in January. Which knocked me for six and left me very low. And since then it’s built, rearing it’s head in the odd, deep twinge as I heard of another friend’s pregnancy, or looked at their new baby pictures, and in vivid dreams where I wake up with my arms aching, feeling like something’s missing. But I’ve been trying to ignore it.
It’s not a new experience, this. Before Kai I had two years of intense wanting. But I was too ill then to make it a realistic decision and we decided to wait until I was better and after we had got married. I’m really glad we did, but it wasn’t easy. I’d go through patches where that longing for a baby was so real and so intense I would feel like a physical pain deep down in my stomach. But I needed to be well enough so I waited and it became one of my main motivators in working to get better.
I never, ever, knew before that time how much my body’s hormones could affect me. It was completely involuntary, nothing to do with logic or reason, just a pure, guttural feeling I had absolutely no control over. My body wanted me to have a baby, and I was pretty powerless to ignore it.
And now it’s happening again.
I know that maybe those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may be rolling your eyes at this point. “Oh Josie!” (you’re probably sighing), “when are you going to figure out what it is you want? Writing? A Career? I thought you found motherhood hard enough already?”.
All of which would be valid points of course.
But part of what I’m finding so confusing right now is the future prospect of baby number 2. We’d always planned another and being in the inbetween of having Kai and a sibling I’m finding that I don’t know what to do with myself. I want to take my writing somewhere but I find myself thinking, what’s the point in starting something seriously if in a year or two I have to stop again to concentrate on a new addition to our family.
Maybe I just need to focus my priorities. Recognise the reality of where I am right now.
Right now I am a mother. A mother who writes, yes, but a mother who writes for fun and for experimentation and, mostly, to test to see if she can do it.
So, if that’s the reality, couldn’t I be a mother of two? Wouldn’t now, in fact, be the perfect time to add to our family? In this time where my writing is just a big experiment, before I am committed to a career, or a book, or a publisher or any of the other things I dream about for my future? Right now, while I have the time and the space? Maybe a sibling would take some of the focus off Kai, ease the intensity of having all our energy poured into such an intense little guy.
Or, maybe I’m a fool. I find Kai almost impossible at times as it is. What on earth would I be thinking adding a new little personality to the mix? I’m already exhausted, feeling torn between wanting to be a mother and wanting to pursue my own personal dreams and ambitions. Isn’t another child just going to make it worse? Just make it harder?
Honestly I don’t know.
But I know what my body wants.
This is either going to be exactly what I need right now, or exactly what I don’t need.
But me and the man, who’s decision this is just as much as mine, have talked. And we’re both pretty clear about what we want to do.
We’re going to go for it.
Wish us luck.
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How did you know you were ready for a baby, or a second, or a third? Is there ever a ‘right’ time, do you think? Or do you just have to take a chance and go for it?
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