Mama culpa

Dear Mom,

I'm sorry. Years late, I know. Perhaps it will bring you comfort to know that your granddaughters are currently locked in a vicious intergalactic war with no exit strategy. I'll explain.

As Ana sees it, her little sister is Zuul, destroyer of worlds, habitat-thief and crowing monster. She is like the evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers, the one who takes all of Gromit's stuff and then convinces the Wallace - allegedly the responsible household adult - to behave like a complete tit and a bit of a criminal.

From Ali's perspective, Ana (who is actually just a giant hairball in need of vigorous hair-pulling) should adopt a more relaxed attitude. Ana's toys need a lot of breaking, because they are more fun broken, especially balloons. And if you rip the pages out of books, you get to make up your own story, right? Crowing to high heaven helps to drive this point home.

THIS IS SPARTA!!!

Their perspectives are clinically insane and totally irreconcilable. There is simply no way to communicate to them in Babish, their native tongue, that 'favourite' is a pretty dumb word to include in the same paragraph as 'I love you both more than the cosmos and would gladly go under a bus for you tomorrow - yes both of you - if only you would just stop squabbling about who gets to push me under.'

You see, all I really want is a little quiet. And to sit down. And for the bickering to go out with the tide, or on the breeze, or with the rubbish - I'm not picky about how it leaves. I suspect you know this feeling well.

Mom, I am guessing that you had a pretty relaxing life before my sister and I landed from Mars. Maybe you didn't enjoy separating claws from scalps on a daily basis for a decade and a half. Maybe the necessity to always have TWO OF EVERYTHING ALL OF THE TIME because we were too primitive to share ANYTHING drove you completely batty and left you with little option but to ABuse the CApslock FunCTION. Maybe as you went to bed each night, just the thought of waking up in the morning made you feel profoundly beat, because you knew we'd be up by 6 and locked back into our demented prizeless tussle by 6:15.

Keep your friends close and your frenemies closer. 

It's a sick cosmic joke really: kids do the most damage to their captors in the early years before they are even capable of forming memories. It's a watertight defense - better than insanity and innocence put together. Which is why prior to having kids I never even realized that I owed you such a huge apology for all the million awful things I surely did to you in my pre-school years that I can't even remember.

Mom, I wish I could return to you the years of lost sleep and peace. However, rest assured that your revenge is currently being enacted by two very talented horsetoddlers of the apocolypse. Their dedication to the job is admirable, and you'd be proud to know that they have both been nominated for a Nihilist of the Year Award - they are currently trying to out-campaign each other, Miliband-style. They are clearly worth every fruit shoot you (or Zuul) paid them, and more.

'Would I fire my sister? No, but I'd sell her for ice cream in a Night Garden minute.'

Take solice in this: your years of exhaustion paved the way for a great life-long friendship - seriously - Tanta is my best friend. She is not even paying me to say that, although she will certainly dash off and pen something even nicer about me, and then we'll be stuck in a bitter flying compliments war that could last for weeks - who knows, maybe years. But seriously, I haven't clawed her scalp in over a decade and I don't know what I'd do without a friend like her. Or you.

With much love and thanks on this and every Mothers' Day.

Mama

*Not that I know what the word means. Seriously, is it Greek?

Peas in a painted pod

In this house, we find that Jackson Pollock research is a good bonding activity. This is a post on togetherness for Tara Cain's Sticky Fingers Gallery.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a shape sorter? 

16: Schwesterhood of the travelling nappies

Day 16 in Advent and I am pleased to report that Santa Claus, glass in hand, has just granted me my one Christmas wish: my sister. Apparently the cookie-based siren call was too strong to resist, so Tanta has booked a last-minute trip here for the holidays.

Two in a pair.

Tanta and I live an ocean away from the rest of our relatives. We have a history of spending Christmas together on our side of the world. Children have made this annual winter gathering logistically difficult in recent years. But Tanta, Onkle, Neffe (and Santa), brave people that they are, have pulled it off for another year running.

So a toast to sisters is in order, via Christina Rossetti:

For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; to cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.  

'Mwaaaaaaw!'

Jekyll Baby, Darth Baby

Ali is mysterious. I ask her what her motive is every day. She considers the question by frowning and breathing heavily, so I call her Darth Baby. Darth pretends to follow external stimulus to indulge me. But in reality she is governed by a complex internal whirlwind.

Newborn Darth cried for hours. She writhed as if in the vice-grip of some malicious invisible monster. Then as quickly as it started, the invisible monster wandered off, and Ali was content again. Thankfully, the monster morphed into a clown after the early months. Now he hides behind the sofa (everything does) and under ever-present piles of laundry, whispering raucous jokes about tall people to earn hysterical snorting laughter from his very short audience of one.

Quickenings, tummy butterflies that crescendo to ninja rib-kicks, were my first hint of Ali's nature, coming at all hours and in different rhythms. Belly goop-wielding sonographers gave me my second hint. Their scans indicated that Ali was possibly a rare breed of deep-sea fish with ear-grabbing tendencies (recessive trait) and hiccups.

Ali shed amphibiousness for Winston Churchill (a look commonly known by birth mothers as 'the most beautiful thing I have ever seen', and by birth fathers as 'where's the baby, and what's that bald alien-vole doing here?') This rapidly melted into soft cherub, before shedding like snakeskin into something else, again and again.

Ali's first smiles ghosted across her face like pure fleeting magic. Her digestive system was infinitely baffling ('Honey, is it supposed to be black? Oh wait, now it's yellow...') Her initial exhaustion following birth gave way to stubborn insomnia.

After a month or so, she commenced desperate unicycling while attempting to focus her wibily-eyes on anything at all. With crawling came such dedicated floor-slurping that I can only assume babies are paid on commission per chokable. Now she cruises, mostly as an excuse to bash her head on things and fall over. What motivates all this self-destruction is beyond me. Time and again I ask, but she stays mum.
 
Ali's mood swings are probably her greatest mystery. Even now, long after the trauma and exhaustion of the invisible-monster early days, Ali transitions from beaming joy to pouring misery in no time. Sometimes her funks have a basis in this world: fatigue, hunger, frustration. Mostly they don't.

Slobber through the looking glass.

Ali has two hobbies. The first is discussing current events with her reflection. Her reflection is a bit of a surly jerk though, so these conversations inevitably end in bouts of vigorous head-shaking. Her second passtime is playing a combined hide and seek/peekaboo from her play tent. She has a longer attention span for this game than I do, but due to mama brain syndrome (to be discussed in detail later), this isn't saying much.

This afternoon, she chased the invisible clown all over the house, giggling madly some terribly rude joke that only she could hear. Then the clown went off shift, so Ali and I played tent hide and seekaboo until I felt my mind wandering...CRASH! Without warning, Ana barrelled into the tent like a Monster Dog in a china shop. Before I could caution her to calm down and avoid squishing her baby sister, Ali suddenly, accidentally, got the upper hand: a fistful of her sister's hair. Temporarily Genghis Khan, Ali released a piercing war cry, then collapsed in a fit of maniacal baby giggles. In that moment the invisible clown was made very proud. Ana wriggled free and ran off screeching 'MY, MY, MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!'

What a profound change babies undergo when they become kids. Ana has only the faint memory of mystery about her, although I know that she too was once baffling. Her own motives have become easier to suss (generally world domination, but more on this later).

The whole sisterly interaction took less than three minutes.Perhaps more flummoxing than any of Ali's mysterious moods, is the eternal disconnect between the planet Ali lives on, and the galaxy Ana inhabits.

Through a shape sorter darkly

A question recurs when I am in the presence of another mum of two and we experience a miracle: our babies drift off and our toddlers drop protocol and commence peaceful, bite-free playing for a vast stretch of several minutes (eternity, in two-year-old terms).

There is a pause. Then the question."Why didn't anybody warn me about two?"

Subsequent kids grow families in an exponential, not linear fashion. One is just one. But two is an army (and under-fives don't adhere to the Geneva Conventions). No one gets a break. There aren't enough hands, nor enough hours in the day. There aren't complete conversations, or even complete thought--

Which is why the question remains unanswered. Toddlers notice their respective social secretaries relaxing and  resume protocol. Kid A bites Kid B. Kid B smacks Kid A over the head with the COVETED TOY OF THE MOMENT (think the conch shell from 'Lord of the Flies'). Both babies go off like car alarms. Parenting resumes and the question is forgotten.

Shapeshifter fingerprints.

Perhaps no one warned me for the same reason that veteran mums to never tell expectant mums about the horrors of labour. Or maybe no one remembered to warn me due to a sort of Mama Stockholm Syndrome--eventually we learn to identify with our captors to survive. I suspect this because I feel myself slowly becoming one with the two-kid army. I am forgetting the horrors of the early months with two under-threes, just as a promised I wouldn't.

Recently I watched Ana repeatedly bash the round peg into the square hole of her shape sorter. In that moment I really identified with her. Most of my days feel like that. But there must be light at the end of this shape sorter tunnel, albeit faint, because I have time to sit here and write this.