Voice of Reason, Please Shut Up

Cocktails are nice, aren’t they? How I’ve missed my flavoursome friends. I’ve been blanking them since I had my son (two years ago!) and ironically acquired the enviable skill of seriously impressive hangovers along with the ability to clear up someone else's puke using just one hand. This weekend, however, I dipped my toe in that refreshing pool of cocktail bliss...but,I didn’t dive right in. I stopped myself before getting in over my head. I stayed at the water’s edge. My extremely wonderful, oldest friend, though, dive-bombed her way in and swam submerged lengths with her eyes open as if she could somehow extract oxygen from Cosmopolitans. In the past, I’ve tried to help this friend out by reminding her how she sometimes regrets getting massively drunk. I’ve held her hair a few times using my new-found coping-with-puke skills.  This morning, she just sent me this text ‘My poor head! It all went downhill after you left. You were my voice of reason! What a silly idea to drink more and more cocktails. Silly. Silly.’ 

Do you know what? I wish I’d gone and drunk a shit-load of cocktails too rather than heading home after a few glasses of wine. I wish I was more able to throw caution to the wind and switch off that sensible voice in my head - the voice always calculating the odds, working out the worst-case scenario. I’ve always had a problem with control. Yes, I have definitely lost myself on several occasions and enjoyed it A LOT, thank you very much, but I find it hard to stop the anxiety and worry long enough to stop angsting and worrying rather than just laughing and enjoying. It’s definitely got worse since being a mum. Predictable, I know - It’s not just me I’m responsible for now and all that. But sometimes I so wish I could drown out my Voice of Reason.  

I think this voice is a big part of the problem for mums.  I reckon that the issue’s often not about being irrational and emotional - it’s about being too rational and emotional. When you are doing all you can. When you’re carrying out the instructions declared as being transformative in all those baby books. When you’re trying and thinking and analysing and battling...and still your child won’t sleep through the night, or won’t eat their food, or won’t breastfeed or won’t stop trying to sample anyone within biting distance...THAT’s when Motherexia (see previous post) is at her strongest and THAT’s when reason can be anything but your friend. 

When it comes to mothering, I reckon sometimes it is best to stick your fingers in your ears and tra la la until your Voice of Reason buggers off. Kids aren’t rational. What they do isn’t rational. Resigning yourself to the fact that sometimes stuff is simply out of control and makes no sense whatsoever is often the best sanity saver there is. I say, embrace your Voice of Treason! Rebel against what SHOULD work. ‘Should’ is a very dangerous word. Should, schmood. Throw Gina Ford against a wall. Give that quest to be a Good Mother (whatever that is) a rest. Leave it all up to chance for a change.  It’s bloody hard, but killing yourself trying to change or ‘heal’ stuff can be exhausting and pointless. Sometimes there really is no reason your child is doing or not doing something. It’s nothing you’ve done wrong. Nothing that’s wrong with them. Sometimes they just spontaneously sleep all night, acquire a taste for broccoli rather than blood, or favour chatting over screaming ‘poo, shit, poo-poo, shit-shit’ in public. Sometimes Voice of Reason just needs to shut the f*ck up. Your kids mostly refuse to listen to it...and maybe sometimes you should too.

P.S. I am currently having to read this post to myself hourly as my son has just developed a taste for head-butting. Must take own advice. Must take own advice.

May I Have This Dance?

Hullloooo. I’m back. Sorry. I’ve been away in tele land, entirely absorbed in things like TRYING TO CONVINCE THE BBC THAT A DOCUMENTARY ON PND is really VERY WORTHWHILE and that A LOT of people would watch it. Feel free to write to said BBC about said subject. FFS. If some grinny nob presenter dicking about with c-list ‘celebs’, a giant sieve and some tomatoes to demonstrate that...OH MY GOD...packets of tomato soup DON’T CONTAIN THAT MUCH TOMATO, is considered worthwhile ‘science’ television on BBC1, then why, oh why, oh why isn’t an illness that ONE IN THREE of us suffer from worth an hour at 10.35pm, hmmmm? I’m not saying that it’s going to be a laugh-a-minute-escape-from-your-sofa experience  (whereas tomatoes really are very funny - just look at what happens if you bite into one too quickly and the SEEDS SQUIRT EVERYWHERE! So funny.), but it’ll be informative, moving, heart-warming and IMPORTANT. Sooooo....you see why I’ve been distracted. In fact, I still am. I’m still bloody determined and I’m still going to fight the fight until someone tells me to ‘fuck off’, which is actually what happens in so many words during quite a few of my ‘pitches’ to my often very nasty bosses. It would be so much nicer if they actually just said ‘fuck off’ sometimes rather than engaging in an intellectual arm-wrestle/patronisation to the max combo. God, if I do actually get this sucker commissioned and during ‘research’ someone reads this blog and figures out who I am, my career is over. Caput. Ah, well. Sod it. I’ve had 6 hours sleep and my hangover has thrown my caution to the wind via a toilet-bowl.

I really am rather worse for wear. I must apologise. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to attend the first of my ‘close’ family’s weddings. That’s if you don’t count my father’s 2nd wedding, to which he was nice enough to decide NOT to invite my sister and me....and only told us about it after the fact. “It was just something we needed to do for US - Just  Laura and me. It was very personal. It wasn’t about YOU”. “But you invited our two half-sisters and half brother”. “Yes.” Luckily, he was kind enough to invite us to his third wedding, mostly because his 3rd wife isn’t a psycho.

Anywaaay, I digress. Or DO I? I can’t remember. Yes, wedding. So, 2nd wife is now ‘Ex Stepmother’. She’s remarried and has had 2 more kids. She now has 5 in total, including my 3 half-brothers and sisters. I’m not sure why I’m including all this detail. My hangover seems to want to write this post. 

Yesterday’s wedding was for my half sister. There were two big tables next to the top table. One contained my family. The other, 2nd wife/Ex Stepmother’s family. Before the big day, I was VERY nervous. Kept waking up early (no change there, thanks, son). Extremely anxious. Bit teary. I really do hate it when the whole ‘family’ gets together.  A lot of bad shit went down in our family history. A lot of bitching still goes down. A lot of loyalties are constantly tested..A lot of emotions we all keep picking the scabs off. I imagined an episode of Eastenders - cross-table punch ups and shouts of ‘YOU SLAAAAG’. Actually, that was the best I was hoping for, because, you know what, the unsaid is so much worse than the shouting and stuff, isn’t it? The pretending that you don’t just want to weep or tell it like it is or synchronistically cuddle and smack in the face all those people who have fucked you up since you were 6 years old (Ex Stepmother was my babysitter from aged 6. Nice. Lovely. Marvellous. You couldn’t make it up). 

So, nervous, worrying about what I was going to wear, annoyed that I was worrying about what I was going to wear and that I cared about what ‘they’ thought. Rehearsing what my ‘attitude’ was going to be: Aloof, ‘friendly’....honest? Mostly concerned that my usual default position is honest. BUT, after 6 bellinis, it was strangely fine. I still couldn’t leave my emotions at the door, but, luckily, my son (now 2) and my nephew (3), didn’t either and THEIR default position is to grin at anyone they meet and ask them whether they fancy either building a pirate ship, or smearing ice-cream on their faces, or dancing like nutters. My enduring image of the wedding is of my fantastic nephew stripping naked on the dance floor, brandishing an ice-cream cone in both hands whilst my son chased him wearing some pineapple sunglasses and Ex Stepmother’s ‘new’ kids danced after him throwing profiteroles......and EVERYONE in the room LAUGHING with them. No family division. No self-consciousness, just an opportunity to muck about. 

My son may piss me off a lot. He may brain most other children most of the time and make it very difficult to socialise for fear of the raised eyebrows of unfamiliar mothers. He may hit and bite and all that other 2-year-old shit. But mostly, like all kids, he is brilliant.  Like nothing else, kids are amazing at reminding you that we are all the same. It is all about love. We may grow a bit gnarled and twisted. Our bark might get a bit thicker. But underneath, we all just want to be friends and be loved...and dance around naked. No, sorry. Not the last bit. I may be emotional, vulnerable and prone to depression, but that’s OK: People fuck us up because we have HEARTS. Yes, we want to protect them, but most of the time, it’s better just to open them up and throw caution to the wind, along with profiteroles, of course. 

P.S. I seem to have gone a bit Sarah Jessica-Parker meets Disney. Sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried hair-of-the-dog today. I bloody love you.