Bye Bye Baby

Since successfully weaning myself off Venlafaxine a couple of months ago, I’ve been suffering with something of a crisis of identity. So single-minded was I when I was taking the stuff, so focused on running, losing weight, living healthily, that I lost myself a little. Admittedly, it was the perfect antidote to the preceding five years, in which I was enveloped in a kind of motherly baby-haze of pregnancy, plumpness, breastfeeding and the nurturing of others. But the strange result of my year of tunnel-vision is that I find myself catapulted suddenly back physically and mentally to a time before babies; before even the need for babies.

Being the youngest in the family, the Very Small Boy will, in some ways, always remain my baby. But as the summer has progressed, he has all of a sudden become rather grown-up. We decided to toilet train him at the beginning of the Small Girl’s summer holidays, and ditching the nappies felt to all of us like a symbolic step; leaving behind us the last vestige of babyhood. And as much as I loved The Baby Years, I suspect I am better suited to dealing with children: real people who eat real food and are able to walk downstairs by themselves, and with whom you can (in most cases anyway) reason with.

Boys baffle me in many ways: whilst I understand the Small Girl in an innate way (princesses; pretty dresses; a tendency to over-accessorise – I just get it), the Very Small Boy’s propensity to climb and jump, throw things against walls and generally fling himself violently on the floor – this is behaviour which just leaves me feeling puzzled. Of course, his bewildering boyishness is also incredibly endearing and often when I see him dashing about playing football in the front garden with The Big Boys from next door, I can’t resist the impulse to run out and gather him up (much to his embarrassment) and smother him with kisses.

So I am trying, at the moment, while I decide who I am (sensible almost-nearing-forty mother of two? semi-glamorous vaguely youthful mum? teetotal hippyish fitness fanatic?), to relax and enjoy these two small people with whom I suddenly find myself living.

The Very Small Boy is even sleeping longer now, finally - often not waking until almost half past six… I was woken yesterday morning at the usual time of 6.24am by the familiar sound of his bedroom door crashing open, followed by his Very Small footsteps thudding down the corridor, before the sound of our own bedroom door being flung violently open.

“What’s the craic, poop-head??” demanded the Very Small Boy cheerfully, before clambering over us, into the middle of the bed and under the covers for his morning cuddle.

Keep It Together, Girl

Not so long ago, around two months into our kitchen extension, DH was unexpectedly called to the States for a week to work, and I was left alone, living in a building site with two children. We had no hot water, the entire downstairs of the house was unusable and the constant and deafening drilling meant that we had to be out of the house every day from 8am to 6pm.

“Keep it together, girl!” said Ken the Builder cheerfully one morning as he stood, sledgehammer aloft, in the rubble of what once had been my kitchen.
“I’m trying”, I sighed, attempting to prise an enormous screwdriver from the Very Small Boy, who was jabbing it alarmingly into the salmon-pink smoothness of a freshly plastered wall.

I gazed through the hazy dust at the scene before me. Despite knowing that the three builders, two plumbers, two plasterers, a roofer and an electrician were carefully orchestrating the various complicated stages of destruction and creation, all I saw was a grey mess of ugly wires protruding from bare breeze-block and copper piping sticking out of drilled-up concrete; everything covered in a thick layer of dust and great blood-splashes of plaster.

I suppose I had expected some kind of grand finale - an unveiling - but of course it didn’t end like that. We lived a few weeks with the kitchen half-finished. I fretted quietly about painting the woodwork and putting up shelves. The constant stream of workmen slowly decreased before ending finally, undramatically, with an electrician calling by one Saturday morning to fix a boiler problem.

And now, when friends call by and admire my beautiful new kitchen (“the skylight!” “the worktops!” “the fridge!”), I can’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable to be surrounded by such excess. And I realised today that, although I'm thrilled with it, and the new kitchen has made my life easier and much more pleasant, it’s not the source of real, unadulterated happiness that I thought it might be; it's more a pleasing background to the things that make me truly happy.

A couple of days ago, the Small Girl (who’s on her summer holidays at the moment) came with me to pick up the Very Small Boy from Playschool, and after strapping them both into the car, we set out back home.

“What happened at Playschool today darling?” I asked the Very Small Boy as we drove.
“We played with shaving foam!” he cried gleefully, before adding thoughtfully “And Samuel did have hair like Jedward...”
The Small Girl looked up sharply from her Barbie. “Jedward?” she asked

And they both burst raucously into song: “She’s got her lipstick on, here I come, da da dum…”

I laughed out loud, and I was still smiling to myself ten minutes later when finally we got home and, still singing, they climbed up together to the new breakfast bar to wait for their milk and cookies.