The overarching trouble with motherhood is that you can’t do it drunk

A shitty viral FB post that popped up on my feed the other day about motherhood. It was from some advertiser of some ‘lady’ product or other. It was a picture that said “Motherhood is …” and they invited you to expose your social media profile to their marketing dept and spread the word of their product by finishing the sentence in the comments.

One of my mother’s group FB friends had written “... the most rewarding thing I have ever done.”

My immediate reaction was OMFG, could you be more pedestrian?

Then I thought for about 0.5 seconds on what I would write. I came up with three potential responses: horrible, tedious, and difficult.

This is not to say I hate being a mother; it’s just that motherhood is pretty much like every other part of life – sometimes good and sometimes bad and mostly very, very hard.

Worst cat ever

For the first 3 months of Elsie's life, Damien would go to work every day and I would spend my time mainly cuddling and feeding her in the nursery with a giant bottle of water nearby and a feeling that I was VERY lucky to have a tablet computer and access to the internet. I watched a lot of online TV and listened to a lot of podcasts.

Having a tiny baby is like when there is a cat on your lap and you need to go to the bathroom but you feel bad about disturbing the cat - only about a million times worse.

I am REALLY not looking forward to doing it all again, but Damien wants to give the one frozen embryo we have a shot. I hate everything about that, because I don't want another 3-6 months of newborn hell and I equally don't want another miscarriage. Also, I am thirty-fucking-nine this November. Surely I am too old for this shit?

I have explained all this to Damien. He does not care. He just wants another fucking baby. Feminism is dead. I have no reproductive rights. Huzzah!

** I am not quite as anguished or angry as I sound; just very, very miffed. **

F**k mother's day

This year on mother's day (my second 'real one' with Elsie), I got thinking about all my other babies. Elsie is my 5th child. The others didn't make it. Now that she is no longer tiny and entirely chaotic, she makes the others seem more real.

On mother's day, it's easy to forget - or ignore - that not everyone wants kids; and not everyone who does can have them; and not all of them will survive or thrive. 

Life is a crapshoot. Forget thankfulness and mindfulness and 'magic happens'. Just do whatever the f**k you want and try not to hurt anyone else while you go about it.

Spiderman - Turn Off the Dark

Dear Mr Bono and Mr The Edge:

Your music is uninspiring. Really. Truly terrible. The cast tried, bless them, they fucking brought it - but your score! OMFG, talk about amateur.

I'm no expert, but I know what I appreciate in a musical. Let me tell you, Messrs Bono and Edge, you need to spend a little less time trying to look like spokespeople for Raybans and a little more time watching Rodgers and Hammerstein.

That's all I'm saying.

Disaster at LAX

Disaster! With only 1 hour at LAX to clear immigration, collect my baggage, pass customs, re-check my baggage, pass domestic security and get the fuck onto my New York flight; I made it to the gate with fully five minutes to spare before the scheduled take-off time.

This was despite the total lack of helpful signage, flight information screens and even escalators to take you from the ground to the 4^th floor as required. (LAX is getting some renovations and, apparently, commuters don’t need all these fancy trimmings.)

Naturally, the gate was closed, locked and abandoned by all airline staff.

Lucky for me a surly janitor was able (though apparently unwilling) to point me in the direction of the United Airlines customer service desk.

Unlucky for me the service desk was clogged with approximately 100 other people who had variously missed their connections or had been booted off a flight to Denver that had been unceremoniously cancelled, leaving 200 people in the lurch. Apparently this is what flying domestic in the USA is like All. The. Time.

Joy.

At this point I would like to make special mention of the lack of organised ground operations. At no point during immigration, customs or domestic security processing was any attempt made to identify and/or fast-track commuters with a time critical connection – I am pretty sure this is a standard activity in Australian airports.

So I get in the queue and I wait, and I wait, and I wait, wait, wait, wait. I miss the next available flight while I am waiting. Finally I reach the front. I am put on the stand-by list for the next flight and I bugger off to the gate to await my milky doom.

While I am sat typing this – Success! My name is called and I am on the flight. It’s two hours later than my original, and jeebus knows where my bags will be, but I am one step closer to getting where I needed to go.

Post script: it turns out, presumably because this sort of shenanigan happens all the freakin’ time, UA were competent enough to get my bags switched on to the actual flight I was actually moved onto. So it all turned out for the best in the end.

And now I am in my hotel in Manhattan watching Adult Swim and waiting for the sleepiness to kick in. There seems to be quite the happening club on downstairs, which I would totally check out if I had not only had 5 hours for intermittent doze time in the past 24.

Please sleep, take me. Take me now!

True quote

The space between your ears exceeds modern measuring techniques, a vacuum of cosmological proportions, an absence greater than the distance between the furthest of geriatric galaxies, a terminal cataclysmic nihilistic aberration inconceivable by the sum cognitive ability of a dozen generations of intellectual progeny.

Birds with arms

Seriously, you NEED to look at this.

Things is OK. Just normal and boring etc.

I go to work, come home, drink too much wine and go to sleep. Have put on weight – oops!

My sis is moving to Byron Bay in about a week. He partner’s brother and his young family live there. They were both bored of their Melbourne existence and hated their rental house but had no luck getting a fresh one, so they decided to bugger off for an adventure. Good for them.

13 working days until I got to Port Douglas!

I am full of exclamation points today.