From tutus to two babes….a TSIB interview

Well! I’m having a bit of a run of goodluck with lovely people offering to be interviewed by me for a TSIB interview.

This week, just like last week, we have a blogger talking about her space in between. I actually got in touch with Amy about her call out for guest posts and then in a generous twist she ended up saying yes to having a chat about the impending arrival of a new bub to join her little (and big) man.

Take a break and if, like Amy, you’re about ready to pop eat some snacks and put your feet up. Here she is…

Ames…tell me a bit about you

I’m a stay at home mum to lufflump, who is turning three this year, and ready to give birth to sesame hopefully around her due date in early March. I live in Brisbane with my boyfriend, the mister, who works in hospitality while applying for the air force.

You’re coming up to the end of your second pregnancy. I remember before having my second babe that I was fine until the home stretch when I suddenly remembered about the birth…how are you managing?

So far this pregnancy has been so different to my last breezy pregnancy where I often forgot I was actually pregnant. I can’t wait for it to be over but at the same time I’m petrified about having a newborn and a toddler around the house. The birth doesn’t really bother me as I know the feelings after birth so will be using that as motivation to get through it all nicely. All babies are so different but I’m hoping that sesame will be a happy baby like lufflump was, that’ll make it easier to manage two children.

What about that space between your son going from being an only child to a big brother. Are you sad about what that means in terms of you having to share yourself with another small person?

I’m sad as this was an(other) unexpected pregnancy, we wanted to wait until lufflump was in prep (two years away) until we had another baby. At the same time though I’m excited. He’s at the age where he is happy to help, can to an extent but still wants mummy time. I’m an only child so never had to experience my parents splitting their time with someone else which I think will make it difficult and scary for me to do with lufflump and sesame. Everything in life is a lesson though and I think the mister and I will work together to learn what works best for our family.

If you could go back in time and tell the childless you what you’d learnt from being a mum would would it be?

Sleep! Sleep is precious, do more of it. Take long, hot showers. Pamper yourself often. All those things taken for granted that are such luxuries now.

What are you looking forward to the most.

Meeting sesame, getting to know her, watching lufflump be a brother, having a newborn in the house and watching the mister’s heart melt again.

Thanks Amy….Amy has a lovely blog that you can visit here. I can remember when my little girl (who was almost 5 when her little brother arrived) became a big sister…she struggled for the first few months and would pretend that she couldnt remember what his name was. Once he got a bit more interesting, she became a bit more interested. A bit like life (or relationships!!) but it all worked out in the end.

Pop back and read some other interviews if you’ve got a few seconds!


The telling of stories

Ive been absent from the blogging roundabout for the last couple of weeks except for my post about pancakes. I began to worry that Id lost my capacity to sit and concentrate for longer than 12 seconds. Holidays with kids can do that – all I want to do is sleep, drink coffee, watch bad TV and hang by the pool…oh wait thats what Ive been doing!

I put it out to the twittersphere tonight that I was worried I had lost the will to blog and the lovely Marnie came straight back telling me to write about my lost words. And so thats what Im doing.

Im in the last stages of a book on my holiday reading pile that explores the trauma of peoples lives, fictionally. The story sounds incredibly familiar to me. I’m not sure if, as a social worker, Ive just been exposed to so many similarly horrific stories or if its been lifted from a real life story with just a bit of tweaking to make it non identifiable. Regardless of how it came about it makes me a little uncomfortable as it starts to cross that imaginary line between fiction and real life. Its isn’t escapism its stark realism.

In the early stages of my blog I latched on to some creative writing tasks to get my fingers moving. I guess I passed off these fictional attempts as just that – fiction – but to be honest most of them were true stories about me just crafted into small pieces that maybe someday could be glued together as the basis of a short book. A girl can dream.

In the telling of stories we share tiny bits of our soul. I have been able to share a lot of spaces with people as they tell me about parts of their lives – the intricate tapestries that brought them to where they are. Yesterday I felt that I had stepped back in time. I met with some people that I had knew from my working world many moons ago. People who by trauma or misadventure got to meet me and in turn I got to sit with them when they heard the worst news any person could ever hear. They shared their story with me and they continue to do so. It sounds ironic but I guess having this blog makes me wary of sharing of stories from your own vault because each time a little piece escapes so does the anonymity and the solitude that comes from working through it in peace, in your head.

Some days I feel that all I am is one big repository of stories but maybe instead of thinking of it as a hindrance maybe I’m just one big book with lots of real stuff to tell.

Im hoping that this year gives me more chances to tell more, to hear more and learn more and I wonder how many more faces, names and stories will continue to leave little reminders on my soul. Only time can tell.

Are you a story teller or a story keeper?

 

Harnessing the memory machine.

Every year my husband and I and the kids head here. Its an annual thing and its something that he has done every year since he was a kid too. I always remember Mia Freedman when she said that holidays with kids was really just moving the kids to another location without the usual props to entertain them. This year was no different, we almost had to leave a child behind with the amount of stuff we had crammed into the car.

Going to a place you went to as a child inevitably increases the stress to recreate the memories you had for your own offspring (or step-offspring). To visit the same holiday spots, the same twee amusement parks all with that rose-coloured glass nostalgia that makes you forget about vomiting after your first ride on the pirate ship or the sunburn that was so bad you had to shove cotton wool under the straps of your swimmers to relieve the pressure. I think its safe to say there is a space between the truth and what you really want the truth to look like.

On our way up the coast we stopped for the night at a place we’d been to for the last few years. The kids had scattered memories of it and most remembering revolved around the breakfast buffet and a dodgy pancake machine. I actually wrote this post in my head during that overnight stay – it was 313am and I was lying awake with a sniffing child to the right of me, a snoring husband to the left, an even smaller child in a port-a-cot directly next to the bed who was doing seal impersonations in his sleeping bag all night and two stepdaughters sleeping on the foldout lounge whispering louder than their actual voices are….its at this point that I wanted to yell ‘ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?’. But what stopped me from losing it was the need to harness the memory machine, to not sweat the small stuff so that in two decades time my son can turn to me, grateful for the memories we created, and say ‘remember that place we went to where we all slept together, ate pancakes and had a great time’.

And I’ll smile serenely and say ‘of course I do, that was the best holiday ever’.

How are your holidays going? Are we having fun yet?

cracks through to light…

I’d been following Kristian’s blog since I saw that snippet of his life on a big American TV show. I was impressed with his honesty , his integrity and his capacity to put into words what love meant for him.

It was with great sadness that I saw a little post on twitter the other night saying that he had slowly slipped away. I went back to his blog that I had been reading and was really struck by what a fast decline there had been in his condition – only a few short months ago he was talking about his hopes for the future but probably the most difficult post to read was how he was slowly answering his children’s questions. I kept wondering after I saw that little blip on twitter what his boys must be thinking and how they could slowly be sitting with that first layer of sadness hearing that their dad was now gone.

I did some creative writing prompts early on in my blog career (well September). This one played heavily on my mind when I read about answering stuff. It also played on my senses when I thought back to last week and the struggle I had in explaining how unfair life can be to my beautiful girl. I watched her struggle with the rawness of truth, the shitiness of how other people’s behaviours can impact the very core of you and how loss can be exaggerated at different times. Some of the year we happily skip about not noticing what is absent and then at certain times loss knocks at your day and you just cant turn it away. Difficult concepts to explain to little people.

I got an email from a research fellow this morning asking for some thoughts about how young people live with the loss of a missing person and I pointed out that there was so little (well nothing) written about it but that many moons ago when I had sat with some kids I did notice that no one should fear saying “I just don’t know’. It doesn’t provide the answers to any of life’s questions but it does give a response that is honest, respectful of the child’s need to know and the starter of a conversation that might lead to more uncovering of layers as time goes by. It provided an opening line to a very long dialogue.

Parenting in happy and sad times probably teaches me more about life, resilience and moving on than any book I could ever open.

Vale Kristian Anderson