Comfortable Disorientation

When I didn't have a phone

I recently spent a week without a mobile phone.  My old one disappeared one Thursday afternoon, possibly dropped, though more likely swiped. Either way it was gone and it took Orange a week to send me a new SIM.  Of course, it had to be the week when I was leaving Joe with paid childcare for the first time. So for those two days the missing-limb feeling was acute.  I kept imagining phantom vibrations. Which I guess was my sense of guilt manifesting itself in a physical sensation.

Aside from this,life without a phone was just fine.  I was amazed at how little I missed it.  At times I felt a gleeful relish about being uncontactable, as if I was slipping about invisible or somehow was unaccountable too. 

There was one occasion when I really needed to make a call.  I was out and needed to speak to someone urgently.  My first instinct was to wonder whether a passing stranger would lend me the use of their phone.  This didn't seem unreasonable because having access to a phone is something I take so for granted it feels like a right.  But as I realised I was too shy to actually ask anyone, a dim memory triggered reminding me that public phone boxes existed.    

Two such boxes appeared right in front of me just as I was thinking about them.  They'd been there all the time though ordinarily I don't see them because my subconscious categorises them as irrelevant street furniture.

I made my call and hung up. Then the phone rang. I picked it up on instinct, wondering who might be calling as my hand was in motion.  In that fraction of a second my mind flitted between 'oooh how exciting, a mystery caller', 'it's probably the person I just spoke to' and 'am I being watched?' It turned out to be a recorded message offering me a possible way out of debt. It freaked me out a bit, so I quickly hung up.  I don't know whether it was a dubious debt service praying on the vulnerable or a more benevolent body trying to reach those who really need help.

It's quite sad to think about what that suggests about the kinds of calls that are made in public phone boxes these days.

6 months

Where did 6 months go?  I have it all documented in endless photographs of Joseph but no idea what we've actually done with the time. 

Joe has been very busy growing and developing and at 6 months is beginning to categorise similar objects together.  I know this because tomorrow we're going to the Birkbeck Babylab so he can participate isn a study looking at what makes babies categorise different objects together. 

Today I also saw this new understanding in action.  While we were hanging out in the kitchen, he was staring at my mug.  At first I thought this was because it has Daffy on it and was reflecting in the shiny binUntil I noticed he kept turning his head and checking out Matt's Bugs mug on the table before coming back to Daffy and making little "ha!" noises as he switched views:

6 months is also when it's recommended to start offering food other than milk.  For the hell of it we're trying baby led weaning, so rather than spoon-feeding him pureed mush, we're giving him bits of the stuff we eat and are letting him go at it himself.  It's proving to be messy (very, very messy) but a whole lot of fun.

   

Parenting styles

Since Joseph made his arrival, the cat no longer has the run of the house. At night she's restricted to the kitchen and garden.  Matt and I have different methods of getting her off the sofa and into the kitchen before heading to bed.

I pick her up, give her a cuddle and carry her into the kitchen.

Matt encourages her to come into the kitchen of her own accord - by putting a small amount of food in her bowl and rattling it.

Hmmm...

Suburban and mumsy?

I'm struggling a bit with my self-image.  I feel like I've been unceremoniously booted out of my old life and identity and haven't yet settled into my new one. 

As I go on my daily walks around nappy valley, smiling and nodding at the other 30-something mums pushing their Quinnys/Bugaboos/PhilandTeds, I have never been more painfully aware of being a demographic.  It's only recently dawned on me that I've moved to suburbia, in my head it was just down the road from the gritty midpoint of Brixton-Stockwell-Clapham where I used to reside.

I no longer fit into my old clothes and as I slowly buy new ones I'm no longer sure of my style.  Is a new uniform in order or not?

There's a distinct lack of acceptable inspiration for my freshly evolving identity. I keep running into stereotypes I would rather back away from.  When it comes to mums of small babies the only images you ever really see are:

The Celebrity Mum:  I'm avoiding images of these at the moment. 

The Frazzled and Not Coping Mum:  The polar opposite to the celebrity mum, these run the full gamet from teenaged-single-mum-in-bedsit to previously-successful-and-together-professional-in-meltdown

The Poster Mum:  You see a lot of this sort of dewey skin-heavy idealised image in advertising and packaging. The Johnson's Mum if you like.  I think the idea is that the perfect innocence and purity of the baby somehow magically rubs off on it's mother.

The Nurturing Glow Mum:  This crops up mostly in health brochures particularly anything on breastfeeding.  It always feels a bit dated and 70's to me.

Oh and then there's the Yummy Mummy. Urgghh, don't even get me started on this one. The mere phrase manages to sound twee, smug and a bit ick all at once.

So you see, a lack of positively real images of mums.  Which is why the Be A Star campaign, intended to increase the number of breastfeeding young mums in Lancashire is so refreshing.  It's not often you see images of mums that are both real and aspirational.  There's nothing mumsy about these girls. Shame they're all so young!

IYHKYWU

Since becomming a mum, my perspective on the world has changed.  Not so much in a profound or existential way.   What I mean is that I've lost the structure of the working week; the distance I travel in any given day has shrunk dramatically; and I spend a huge amount of time and effort thinking about how to achieve and manage things that were once so automatic they were inconsequential (feeding, sleeping, bathing...).  I now see the world through a first-time-mum lense.   

On a forum I use arguements occasionally erupt over the phrase "If You Had Kids You Would Understand".  Typically a non-parent posts a comment (usually about kids/babies/parenting) which a parent considers insensitive or offensive and the infamous phrase is hurled forth. The arguement usually then gets sidetracked by a discussion over the validity of this phrase. Essentially, do you need to be a parent in order to truly understand what it's like to be one?

Those that answer no have the best of the arguement. As a researcher, I would want to believe that it if you listen, observe, empathise and imagine hard enough it is possible to get under the skin of someone else's experience.  But now I'm in the position of being in a situation I've previously tried to describe and translate through research, I'm very aware that I didn't completely get it.

I don't think I've ever grossly misrepresented the experience of the new mum. It's more that my understanding was sometimes shallow.  I didn't always understand the depth and quality of feeling that lay beneath things that I had previously described matter of factly.  Consequently, some aspects of motherhood have completely surprised me.  There are things I expected to experience, but now I'm experiencing them I realise my expectation was never quite right in the first place.

Does that make any sense?  I'm not sure I'm doing a very good job of explaining myself. Anyway I think I might try to set things straight over a few posts - describing how the inside experience of being a new mum is not quite as I thought it was when I studied it from the outside.

Naming our son

This is Joseph. He's the main reason why the frequency of posts here at Comfortable Disorientation have been dwindling for some time.  I was never sure whether to post about the pregnancy, worrying it was too personal and somehow off-topic and this had the effect of constipating other posts. I daresay, they will continue to be sporadic for a while. But following Joe's arrival, I thought I'd describing the process by which we chose our son's name.

I've been interested in baby-naming trends for ages, so getting the opportunity to choose one for myself made me giddy with excitement. How much fun we would have picking the perfect names for our boy or girl. I was convinced these 'perfect' names were out there, just waiting for us to uncover them.

Although I didn't articulate it at the time I had a clear idea what 'perfect' meant. Something fresh and original but not even remotely strange or contrived; a proper and recognised name, without being obvious or staid; a name that our child would love and be proud of, but that would also reflect his parent's impeccable taste. 

Very early in the pregnancy, Matt and I wrote down some key criteria, a set of 'rules' which we felt were important to us.  Many of these were the obvious guidelines for avoiding anything stupid (because everybody knows somebody whose parent's failed to consider such matters) but perhaps more particular to us was the fact we wanted a name that lent itself to shortened versions to provide flexibility.

Given our surname, were also keen to choose something that wasn't too popular and this was where we came unstuck.  We had no problems finding girl's names that satisfied all the criteria. Boys however, were much more difficult. Over and over again we discovered that the names we preferred were the same the ones that everyone else is been choosing. 

Our problem stemmed from the fact that there are simply fewer boys names to chose from.  Generation after generation have been more conservative and less creative when naming sons versus daughters, creating a smaller pool.  So when we search for a 'proper' name that sounds fresh (i.e. not one that was common amongst our own or our parent's generation), we're all unearthing the same few names. 

When Laura at the baby name wizard blog wrote about this her post title  Congratulations! It's a...uh oh was bang on.  Not that we were disappointed to have a boy, just that we still hadn't got a name worked out.  We had a short list, but were unconvinced about all the names on it, and faced with having to actually make the decision, we knew the solution wasn't to be found among them. 

Feeling a mounting sense of pressure - "Come on, you've had 9 months to think about it!" - over the next couple of days we went back to the name books and started again. 

The idea of calling him Joseph was mooted:   

- "I like that. Why haven't we thought of that before? What's wrong with it?"

- "It's popular, very popular... we said we were going to avoid popular" 

- "Oh"

According to the National Statistics Joseph was the 13th most popular boy's name in 2007 and even higher in preceding years.  Still, it was a name we both loved and the more we looked at our freshly minted baby, the more it seemed right.  I've come to terms with the popularity of the name by embracing it - I love the solid everyman-ness of Joe Taylor. 

So there it is, our selection.  It's up to him now to decide what to make of it..

Resolution failure

I didn't make any New Year's resolutions this year.  With a baby on the way, it seemed a forgone conclusion that enough change was going to occur of its own accord.  It hardly seems fair then, that I've experienced the failure of a resolution I'd only half-realised I'd made.

I've developed a pregnancy complication, obstetric cholestasis, a problem with my liver which has left me extremely itchy and puts the baby at risk.  However, I'm being well looked after by clever medical types and the itching is just about under control and the risk is being eliminated by an earlier than scheduled appearance of the baby.

The resolution I hadn't been aware of making was to remain drug-free throughout pregnancy.  How stoic I thought I was being when I refused (the perfectly safe) paracetamol when I had  slight headache a few months ago!  I wouldn't have been so smug if I could have seen into the future and watched as I gleefully left the hospital carrying a carrier bag-full of tablets and potions that promised to help control the itching and give me some sleep.

Perhaps the learning here is that resolutions that haven't been fully considered are destined to be half-hearted? Or maybe that resolutions tend to be sweepingly idealistic and don't take into account the fact that life is lived moment-to-moment?  Either way, I don't feel particularly bad about it. It's one annual ritual done and dusted at least.

Facebook's for girls

So the word is out that women dominate on Facebook.  This has been my hunch all along, so it's good to discover the stats prove it. As far as I can gather the figures are based on number of users, I reckon if you were to look at activity the female bias would be even higher. 

The kind of seemingly pointless, touch-basing social interaction that Facebook excels at is just a more female thing.  In the same way that women in couples are more likely to write and send cards and organise the family photo albums (I'm not so sure this last still holds in the Flikr age, but it used to be true).

"The dog ate my homework" and other excuses

I have the guilts.  It's been weeks. I've mentally written posts, but not got them down and now the moment has gone.

You know things are bad when you have a master list of lists to keep tabs on all your different To Do lists.  There's been the house move, and then the push to get 'sorted' (by which I mean having functional curtains) before Christmas. Because after Christmas, I'm going to be really quite pregnant and that brings a whole load of other things to be getting on.  Important stuff, like taking it easy while I still can.

Actually, the biggest and by far the most frustrating problem has been lack of home internet - I can't believe that it takes 3 weeks to flip a switch.

In my absence, Northern Planner has been writing a series of posts on moderating groups.  They're well worth a read.  I really should have a think about doing more of this sort of thing myself. Perhaps next year...

How to buy technology

This is one of my occasional notes to self.

When buying technology - especially technology of the personal and portable kind - always, always let the heart rule the head.

This thought has been prompted by the rediscovery of my old friend the Nokia 8310 found languishing in a box full of wires* in a dark and dusty cupboard.

Gosh, I loved this phone.  I remember vividly the first time I saw one, sat outside a pub with my friends Gemma and Chris.  Chris, who always has the latest and greatest gadget, pulled his phone out of his pocket and Gemma and I exploded into a cacophony of cooing. Chris is quite a big bloke, and I have to say the 8310 seemed incongruous in his paws. In hindsight it really was a girl's phone.  But a beloved girl's phone at that.

I got my own as soon as I could, and kept it way longer than considered respectable by technology upgrade enthusiasts.  I eschewed camera phones for yonks because they were so damn ugly in comparison. I'd still use it now without a hint of embarrassment. In fact, I think I just might.

Every phone I've had since, including the one I have now, has been forgettable.  For all the functions and features, each has disappointed.  All were head choices, selected after a process of research and semi-rational comparison, all left me feeling flat and wistful.

Perhaps the iPhone will reignite phone delight?  The wonderful Stephen Fry's description is the most compelling piece of persuasion I've seen for it so far...

"Beauty. Charm. Delight. Excitement. Ooh. Aah. Wow! Let me at it."

* I can't describe the sense of dejection and depression a big box full of wires gives me. Wires and cables are one of the most miserable aspects of modern life. If I ruled the World wires, cables chargers and the like would come in a rainbow of colours, textures and patterns and be sold and exchanged in haberdasheries like ribbons.  I like ribbons a lot, they make me very happy.