Category Archives: Musings

Like a cyber-sketchbook, this is a place for ideas, and snapshots of possibilities that might end up on one of the gallery pages one day, in some shape or form…

Perspective

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Never before have I found it as easy to lose perspective on pretty much everything as I have since I became a mum. Motherhood, the most important, all-consuming job I have ever taken on deserving of our very best efforts – no pressure!

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It would seem that it’s not just me that’s struggling (she says, putting things into perspective), ordinarily level-headed women around me appear to be struggling with this too. I think much of it is magnified by sleep deprivation (my hubby keeps joking that there’s a reason it’s such an effective form of Chinese torture!), but possibly also by lack of support… And that’s a strange thing to quantify, support. How much one is getting, how much one needs.

One of the reasons I feel lucky to have grown up in a village is because I was part of a relatively close-knit community that comprised people of all ages and many different walks of life. Observing many different people in action offers perspective, and my friendship circle has always been made up of people of all ages and backgrounds, good, interesting people that help me view life from a different perspective. Yet here I am, in a city, surrounded by so many friends, but mainly hanging out with new mums of a similar age, from similar backgrounds… And I fear we’re just tying ourselves up in knots as our mums aren’t down the road, Aunty Soandso isn’t around the corner, Old Mrs Jones isn’t passing by, those friends that have known us since school aren’t around, we’re not bumping into our old babysitters… And so we’re lacking perspective, and I don’t think this is a great thing.

I watched a programme the other night about the war artist Paul Nash. In it the narrator looked at the influence of surrealism on Nash’s work when he was struggling with psychological problems after the Second World War. Made me think of Dali’s twisted reality, out of perspective…

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A few weeks ago I had an exceptionally low day, but was snapped out of it by a lady who picked up a slug from a busy thoroughfare so it didn’t get trampled to death. This is the sort of thing that I would usually do, but I hadn’t even clocked the slug. I was, and remain, so grateful to that lady for the perspective that she showed me that day, saving a precious life.

My Gran used to say to me, “There’s allus someone wuss off than yaself.” She was right, of course. That’s not to say that it’s not ok to struggle, that’s not what she meant, she was just trying to give reassurance, help put things into perspective, and she always did. I miss her.

This morning I read a blog entry, the last blog entry that Charley would ever make.

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If that doesn’t offer perspective I don ‘t know what does. Hope you’re enjoying those chocolates and that Piña Colada, Charley. Thank you for your words and for sharing your admirably clear perspective. x x

Robo Baby

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Woke up this morning imagining an army of Robo Babies, I typed ‘Robo Baby’ into Google and found that such a doll exists!!

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Pretty hideous! Started thinking about dystopian societies, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Stepford Wives… And the one size fits all guidelines laid out by the likes of The World Health Organisation.

Projections

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So, I’m currently spending a lot of time around new mums, and it makes for very interesting listening. Not having spent much time around babies before having my own I’d assumed, wrongly, that babies were pretty passive personality-wise for the first year or so.

However, it was clear from the very start that our daughter has a lot of personality. In terms of personality type she’s pretty demanding on the NOW not in 30 seconds side of impatient screams; that said she seems to take most things in her stride in terms of social interaction, and it’s clear that she takes great pleasure out of some things and is captivated by others. To me, she is perfect, and 99% of the time she seems entirely reasonable, which I reckon is pretty good going and doubt I’d fair so well! That said, I’m trying to veer away from declaring that ‘she LOVES or HATES this, that or the other’ or that she is definitively this sort of person or the other. She’s 4.5 months old, it’s pretty early days, and she’s only been exposed to the environments that I’ve introduced her to which, whilst wide-ranging, are still pretty limited to having only been breathing oxygen for such a short period of time.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’ve recently heard mums say things that have surprised me. “I feel as though I don’t know my baby.” and “I can’t work my baby out.” and “As soon as I think I’ve worked my baby out, everything changes and I’m back to square one!” I’m wondering why people are battling with this. It’s as if ‘knowing’ their babies, being able to predict their every move, will give them an element of control over their babies – like a well trained dog. Though there’s so much going on with babies, so many variables at play that are going to impact on a baby’s behaviour. Is it not better then to expose, observe, listen, and respond accordingly to one’s baby rather than try to master the baby? Kind of like Baby Led Weaning for personality/interaction? I don’t know, my experience of babies is incredibly limited, but I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of exercising control over a new, developing mind.

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I suspect I’m particularly conscious of this as I wonder if I subconsciously project my energy on my daughter. I say that because whilst I try to be Chilled-Out-Mum when I take her to the doctors for her injections she is clearly tense from the moment we walk into the surgery… And whilst I’m completely oblivious to my feelings, my blood pressure indicates that I have white coat syndrome. Equally, our baby is often unsettled around a few people, and whilst I try to play it cool, I know fine well that those people stress me out.

I appreciate that this isn’t revolutionary thinking, but it’s made me think about the way in which we project onto individuals from birth. It’s astonishing really quite how happy we are to shoe-horn, categorise and shelve… And a bit frightening. A primary school teacher once said to me, “Well, you’ll never make a mathematician, but you can draw pretty pictures.” I was about seven, and I remember being quite upset by this. It was true, I wasn’t naturally gifted with numbers, but I wasn’t bad, and I wonder how much that comment undermined my confidence in my ability. Adversely, my husband believes that he has an excellent grasp of mathematics, and studied Maths electives at University, yet he didn’t do as well as I did in school maths exams… And still trips up with his calculations now.

I dunno, I just find it a bit unnerving I think. All these projections on tiny little humans just starting out in the world. Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera sera!

Skin to skin

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Having recently had a baby I’ve become increasingly conscious of the importance (for psychological development) of skin to skin contact between parent and child. There’s also a lot of talk about the benefits of ‘baby wearing’ amongst new parents. We wear our daughter in a sling, and she is amazing; incredibly social, very alert, and insatiably curious. She looks people in the eye and explores the world, not from a passive knee-high perspective, but from a height and position that allows her to explore the world that awaits her ‘on a level’. It’s fascinating, but also so very obvious… personal and practical – we just need to look to the beautiful, wholly natural, and sophisticated relationships that exist between our forefathers, by which I mean primates, for a precedent.

A friend of mine, a brilliant photographer and inspirational man, Andrew Walmsley recently spent time in Sumatra photographing orangutans in their natural (threatened) environment. Andrew and I met for a cuppa and a catch up upon his return and, whilst gazing at my newborn baby, he talked about how blind it is of people to comment on how similar primates are to humans, when actually it’s the other way round – we are them, not vice versa!

My brother is 12.5 years older than me, and Mum and Dad have mentioned several times how interesting it was when I was born that all of his friends were captivated by “my tiny little hands, fingers and toes.” I love the way my daughter grasps me. I’m addicted to her soft, little, callousless hands. I can’t stop kissing them. It was interesting, then, to happen across this programme on BBC Radio 4 this week – Al Kennedy: Holding Hands.

Let’s all hold hands and feel better for it!

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To blindly go where no earth worm has knowingly gone before

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Thinking about underground paths that we don’t see and rarely think about I started thinking about animals that live underground and exist largely undetected. This led me to think of worms, who are blind and exist by instinct, and then to wormeries, created by humans to observe these curious wormy creatures going about their subterranean existence.

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Thinking about this instinctual / oblivious behaviour, and the addictive intrigue that it brings about led me to think of other ‘great adventures’ and to to the introductory text that was spoken at the beginning of many Star Trek television episodes and films, from 1966 onward:

Space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before

Which is where the idea behind the adapted title of this piece came from.

As a child I remember trying to ‘dance’ worms out of the ground, pouring water on a spot and dancing on that spot in an attempt to replicate rain fall that would lure worms out (what I thought I’d do with the worms once/if they surfaced, I’m not entirely sure!). Anyway, thinking about it now it just feels like taunting the animals – raindrops keep falling on my head.

This led my thoughts on to other animals that live subterranean, parallel lives to ours and yet are rarely noticed by us led me to think of moles. Like worms they’re also blind, and pretty harmless yet seen as pests when they ‘surface’. Consequently horrific traps have been created to capture and kill the moles, and they’re used on a domestic level by ‘normal’ people who seem to think that such behaviour is acceptable… Another parallel, this one with human behaviour and intervention – with the way in which some people think that it’s acceptable to interrupt the lives of others and treat fellow creatures.