it’s not exactly my new year’s resolution to write in here, it’s just that the first day of the year co-incides with when i have more time.
i’ve been shifting a few things around in my personal life lately. just little things. for the better.
i eat better now – much better – and my body has thanked me for it. (i made a major exception for new year – chips and grog and two serves of amazing trifle last night, and then maccas and soft drink in recovery mode today.)
i exercise, for the first time in years. i’m building up to running 5km with the help of carli. the plan is that i should be able to run 5k after nine weeks so i’m thinking of picking this random fun run scheduled for the end of my 9 weeks so i’ve got a serious goal. scary!
i still do the volunteer work i was doing before, but in a different role. (someone ACE has stepped into my shoes there) so that has freed some headspace and time.
k and i are thinking of swapping our work around so that i work full time and she would be part time. we think this would be really good news for the twinkle and k to get more time alone together. and i’ve been given a really good new project at work on top of my regular work, so going full time would be a good way to manage that.
and now i’m writing in here. so that’s a few things that are different.
yesterday the twinkle and i left our sick special k at home and went off to the equal love rally for marriage equality. i was asked to represent our organisation as a speaker so i was crapping my pants, to put it delicately. but it went ok – even if i didn’t get to meet ruby rose (although i did get to meet monique schafter which was kinda cool). i couldn’t look at my notes coz i was holding the twinkle, but i had tried to memorise it so this is pretty much what i said:
I’m here on behalf of <our organisation>. We’re a community organization – all volunteers – working for equality for same-sex parented families.
According to recent research by the University of Queensland, three quarters of queer parents want to get married. Some of us already have, overseas – although successive Austrlaian governments have refused to recognise those marriages. And sure, some of us aren’t interested in getting married. But all of us want our children to grow up in an Australia where our families have exactly the same status as their cousins’ families, their friends’ families and everybody else’s families.
In our society – like it or not – marriage is hugely symbolic. We are concerned about the impact on our children and on ourselves of being excluded from the most recognised symbol of love and commitment. Marriage is an event where family, friends and the state publicly endorse and celebrate a couple. And the leaders of our country think it is “appropriate” to exclude us from this public endorsement of our relationships.
You heard Julia Gillard on TV this week: “But we’ve made you equal for tax, for Centrelink, for Medicare…” they say to us. But the problem is, you can’t be a little bit equal. It’s not equality if you exclude us from marriage. It is creating two tiers of families – those who are allowed the choice to marry, and those who are not.
My future wife and our daughter and I live in Werribee, out in the mortgage belt, living our very average suburban lives. And Julia Gillard just happens to be our local member, which I’m kinda glad about. And I’ll tell you why:
If you’re familiar with three year olds, you’ll know they’re trying to make to make sense of the world. You’ll be familiar with the question “But why?”.
When our daughter asks us, “Why aren’t you and Om married?” we’re going to have to say “Because the people who run our country won’t let us.”
And when she says, “But why won’t they let you?” we will have to say, “Because they don’t think it’s ‘appropriate’”.
And when she says, “But why?” we’re going to take her up the street to Julia Gillard’s local office and tell her to answer the question.
But why, Julia Gillard, do you think it’s “appropriate” to continue to discriminate against my family?
<Our organisation> is here to tell you that change CAN happen. You can make it happen. We can make it happen.
You might be aware that here in Victoria in 2008 we managed to have the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act passed. This means that lesbians and single women can access fertility treatments, two mums can be listed on a birth certificate, surrogacy is an option for everyone including for gay dads. We still have unfinished business on adoption but we intend to see that through too. But my point is that these are huge changes that some people might have thought they would never see in their lifetimes.
And we achieved this through people power. By turning up to their offices, and to parliament house and putting ourselves in the media and showing those politicians that we are real people, with real families – we’re not a ‘social experiment’ and we’re not ’emotionally abusive’ – in fact we’re no different to them and their families.
Let’s keep that up. Let’s keep showing the politicians that we are no different to any of them. That our love is equal.
there’s some photos here if you’re interested.
i remember that 14 months was hard, and then 2 years old was hard. but by crikey, 3 is harder than them all! the twinkle is “spirited”. she’s “a challenge”. she’s “making mistakes and learning from them”. there have been days recently when i have been reduced to tears – once in public in front of my office – by the sheer exhaustion, desperation, humiliation of being a parent. and i just have one kid, and a partner. i just don’t know how single mums, or parents of two, or parents of kids with high support needs do it. when k asks “is it this hard for everyone?” i always say yes, and i believed that was true. but lately i wonder if i just want to believe that because it feels easier to think we’re not the only ones who struggle.
one thing we haven’t struggled with is toilet training. because we pretty much didn’t need to do it. one evening about three weeks ago during her bath, the twinkle announced “i need to go to the toilet!”. she got out of the bath, sat on the toilet, and did a wee and from then on she has been wearing undies. in the first week there were a few accidents, but now she’s totally on top of it. to the point where she has been wearing the same undies for three days in a row. i know. this is bad parenting. but they are brobee undies and she just won’t take them off and she insists they are clean. and they are, relative to pooed-in or weeed-in undies. and having fights with her is so exhausting that we have learned to pick our battles, and this is one we have chosen not to pick this week. i’m secretly hoping she’ll wet the bed tonight so i can take them off her. that’s dodgy parenting right there too, isn’t it? hoping your kid will wet the bed? i didn’t know i would be this bad a parent!
did i mention that we often arrive at childcare in the morning, only for me to realise that the twinkle has porridge plastered across her face and matted hair? are we perhaps a bit too relaxed? no, it’s not that. it’s that i’m so uptight about getting the kid fed and dressed and out the door in the morning, still leaving me enough time to get to work on time, that i have just blocked out parts of my responsibility (ie keep her clean and tidy). hang on. is this our study or a confessional i’m sitting in?
one of the reasons for the many screaming/crying (her/us, us/her, both/both) episodes is her difficulty with speech. if you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll know that we’ve been waiting and waiting for the talking to all fall into place and it sort of never did. she has a great vocab and comprehension and wants to talk about some fairly complicated stuff, but she can’t make the words sound right. apparently this is a phonological speech disorder. we put her on the waiting list for speech therapy after her two-year-old maternal and child health appointment. it was a bit of a “just in case” measure. we thought we probably wouldn’t need it by the time we got to the top of the list. but around the time she turned three she hit the top of the list and guess what? she needs it. in fact, after four assessment appointments (it took that long to assess her) the speechy said, “she’s pretty um… put it this way, it’s good that we’re getting in this early.” in the meantime, k and i do our best to tune in to her particular dialect and help each other (and grandparents and others) to pick up what she’s saying. but when we don’t get it right she gets really frustrated – and fair enough too – and lashes out. we’ve had to borrow this book from the library “hands are not for hitting”.
so day after day it feels like a challenge. and then one day she’ll be delightful. like tonight. she was fun and funny and calm and we never know when it will be like that. we just try to grab those days and enjoy them. and every day we remember to let her know we love her, whether we’re having a good day or a less good one. or a really effing bad one.
i am trying to get my shit together to start posting again. i want to keep writing this blog but i lost my momentum and have found it hard to start again without filling in the massive gaps. as i said to my clever friend kasey tonight, sometimes i wish i were mia freedman and that i got paid to write my blog, but then again if i were mia freedman i would have an unnatural obsession with celebrities and their body image and parenting skills so i guess i’m glad i’m just me.
i read mia freedman’s book recently. i expected not to like it. i expected to have very little in common with her. i had decided this based on:
- her career as a fashion mag editor;
- her writing in the “how to be a suburban heterosexual” manual – also known as the sunday life magazine in the sunday age.
i read the book and i found myself enjoying it, despite myself. i found her likeable and real and not that different from me. and i enjoyed reading her honest account of her experience of parenting. now i follow her on twitter and sometimes read her blog and feel like i know her, even though i quite obviously do not. and she is still obsessed with celebs, as per her previous career, so i’m not identical to her. obviously.
ok, i’ve broken the drought and will try to keep the words trickling onto this page…
if you had peeked into our bathroom about 7pm tonight you would have found the twinkle in the bath with her “skateboard” (scooter), calling it alicia and insisting that we call her kayka (tayla). you would have heard her say to me “hey boh-yo (jojo), where’s war-ya (laura)?”
jojo and laura are the staff in her room at childcare and she now calls me boh-yo and k war-ya. and we have to call her tayla – the name of a little girl at childcare. but the bit where she called her skateboard alicia and put it in the bath and washed its handlebars (arms), horn (nose), rear wheels (feet) and front wheel (bottom) was when it all started to get ridiculous.
and then she got out of the bath, wrapped alicia in a towel and insisted on carrying “her” in a cuddle all the way to the lounge.
when we did get around to changing our birth certificate it was lots of fun to do it with the pea green boat girls and the baybeasts and the pbx crew.
later that day the “daily hyphen” newspaper called me because of my volunteer work for a comment on the implementation of the legislation. i mentioned that we had changed the birth certificate and suddenly we became the news in the paper and subsequently (and weirdly) on the radio.
i have to say that the photographer who took this photo for the paper was amazing and had the twinkle performing like a seasoned model. this photo was taken after the twinkle’s bedtime at the end of a work/childcare day that had been over 40 degrees! anyone who can make us look good in those circumstances gets my recommendation. check her work out.
it’s been such a busy couple of months over christmas and new year and holidays and midsumma. finally, we have a weekend with no plans. naaaaaaace.
the twinkle started at a new baby factory this week and has been remarkably resilient through the change. she’s also changed from two days per week to three (as k has a new fulltime job – yay for her!). for her first two days i left work early and picked her up straight after the lunchtime sleep and the carers all said she had been fine. yesterday she had a full day and again they said she was doing really well, although she was making a high-pitched whiney sound when i got there and she kept it up for the 15 minute walk home and then had such an almighty tantrum when we got home… i thought my head might explode or i might have to lock her in her bedroom naked and screaming in order to cope. but thankfully, just when i honestly reached my threshold, she calmed right down and managed to be her usual cheerful self as we read books in her room. we could hardly blame her for feeling tired and emotional after spending a whole day in a new place where people don’t know her, but i was glad she came back from the brink of crazy.
today’s a day at home for me, and this morning she was delightful, mostly, although she had no interest in putting on her clothes (afraid i’d take her to childcare if she got dressed?). she played heaps of imaginative games today, and there was a precious moment where one of her baby dolls fell over and she picked her up and gently patted her and said “ok baby”. she’s not normally the gentle type. she loves to re-enact all of our routines with dolls in the dollshouse or other toys in the house, or even act them out herself. at lunchtime she did some elaborate cooking and tea-making at her toy kitchen for me and grandma and grandpa. then she put the dishes in an imaginary dishwasher and put the imaginary dishwasher powder in and switched it on and told me the dishes would be washed when she came home from work. then she washed her hands with the soap which was dispensed from one corner of her toy stove, cleaned her teeth with toothpaste from another corner, and put sunscreen on her face from a third corner. then she went and got her “skateboard” (three wheeler scooter she inherited from my cousin’s kids) and kissed us and waved goodbye and told us she was going to “nyerk” (work) in the bathroom, closing the bathroom door behind her and the scooter. it was all very entertaining and sweet. i know it’s everyday stuff for kids, but for us it’s still a novelty.
the other funny thing she did this morning was when we were looking for something for her to wear. i was letting her choose (“poose”) in the hope that it would motivate her to hurry up and get dressed. she pulled out these floral overalls which are from one of the trendy surfie brands and told me she couldn’t wear them because she was scared of them! then she hid them in a corner of her room!
ok, so i’m back on the blog. perhaps i’ll blog more this weekend.
“slept” on floor in lounge room under air con. k and i took hours to fall asleep, only to be woken by an early-rising twinkle poking our noses and asking for apple juice. we’re all a bit hot and cranky. thank goodness sesame street is on now to distract the twinkle from yelling.
the moment finally arrived. the one we campaigned for, for years. then waited for another 13 months to come into effect. the one where k was finally able to be recognised as the twinkle’s parent. recognised on a piece of paper, that is. she’s been recognised as her parent every day for 3-ish years now in real life. but that very symbolic moment arrived where we could name her on the birth certificate. yay!
the excitement built in the days leading up to it and we got ourselves all organised bright and early that morning to go in and fill in the fateful form. but as we pulled out of the driveway a nasty case of gastro hit k and we had to go back inside and change our plans. (the next day, the twinkle got gastro and i got it the day after that. ugh!) and despite the slight sense of let-down, there was a bigger sense of “so what”? we’ve come this far, what’s another week? what difference will the piece of paper make?
the best thing about this is that a bunch of lovely families have also left it till this coming week so we’re going together and i’m sure the atmosphere will be positively party-like!
i’m not sure how to celebrate this occasion. mum asked if we were having a party. we haven’t planned one, but not because we don’t think this is party-worthy. probably mainly because we haven’t been organised enough. i wanted to find a way of marking it and remembering it for the twinkle and k. but then again, it’s a bit like celebrating the day bureaucracy sorted out its paperwork. it’s not like it’s the day that k actually became a parent, of course. i offered/threatened to send flower to k’s work but she begged me not to. maybe we will just have ice-cream and grin at each other and k can take her official parental role of licking the drippy bits of ice-cream off the twinkle’s chin, and that can be our commemoration.
i look forward to handing the new birth certificate to childcare and asking them to give back the parenting orders they have on file. (gosh, weren’t they an intrusive and offensive document to have to lug around? i remember the day we enrolled and our childcare worker read the orders in front of us and i hated it.) i look forward to the domino effect of having two mothers named on birth certificates meaning that other organisations will have to start accommodating this (instead of pretending there is just one parent because they can’t enter k’s name under “father”). time to update your client management software, folks.
the old birth certificate is in the back seat of the car where it has been since the gastro moment last monday. until now it has, of course, always been carefully looked after – filed, kept uncreased and unstained (very few things are treated this way in our house!) as befits an important document. but now that there is nearly a new, accurate birth certificate in its way to us, the old one has been sat on, leaked on, shoved around, stood on. and i don’t care to save it from this situation. it’s worth nothing to us now. they can have it back.
see you at the registry on monday.
we should have given the twinkle more credit a long time ago, when it comes to her comfort items. we steeled ourselves for a difficult week or so when we were taking her dummy from her and were pleasantly surprised.
we were going to have santa/father christmas take her dummies on christmas eve to give to a baby who needs them, and leave her presents in return. but as christmas approached we got nervous about:
- the twinkle being traumatised by father christmas taking her favourite thing and her never loving him again; and
- the twinkle crying all night on christmas eve and being ratshit all day christmas day… ditto the next two days which were also big family days.
so we put it off by three days. then we came up with this complicated scheme so she wouldn’t hate father christmas. on christmas day, along with all her toys, he brought her a little gift bag with “baby” written on it. then on the evening of the 27th (at the end of three big family christmas parties) she put all three dummies (oh no, wait, we could only find two. oops) in the bag and went off to bed. we gave each other a pep talk before this and refreshed our memories of how controlled crying works. but after just fifteen minutes of crying and one comfort visit, she was asleep. in the morning the baby bag was gone, and a dora bag with santa stickers and stamps in it was in its place. at nap time that day she did just a short burst of moaning before sleeping. and ever since then the dummy has been gone from our lives all together. it’s amazing! she can wear pyjamas more than one night in a row because she hasn’t drooled on them! we don’t have skanky dirty rubber/plastic things sitting around in nests of pet fur. i love it. i feel so free.
a few days into dummy-free life we had a very hot day and the twinkle was enjoying an icy-pole in the loungeroom (no carpet) when a piece broke off and slid under the couch. i reached under to pull it out and out came the third dummy! oops. there was this long two seconds where i stared at the dummy and the twinkle, and the twinkle stared at dummy wide-eyed and special k look on in horror. i mustered all the calmness i could manage and said, “i’ll just take that and put it where father christmas can find it and take it to the baby” and stuffed it into a hiding spot in our bedroom. and she coped. phew!
the twinkle in my eye 
