Tripping the Time Elastic.

What did I ever do with my time before I had children? I know I was busy, but doing what?

Rarely now, I find myself with a window of time to fill without children. Often my thoughts turn to them, wondering about them, what they are doing and whether I am doing a good enough job as a parent. I always have something, too many things to do. But sometimes I needs time to get bored and often that only happens when I have some precious me time. When I talk about boredom its good, healthy, organic boredom that comes from a glut of time but which can be moved about in, felt and expressed with energy. Not the kind of boredom that happens when you are in a waiting room.

Dontcha just hate it when you are in a waiting room and each minute feels like an hour? Waiting room time is horrible because you can’t work through your boredom; stand up and spin around on your heel and sing a David Bowie song and look at yourself in the mirror and decide what you would look like with a fringe or a face-lift. You can’t go outside to collect the mail and then feel the breeze on your skin, or watch your baby sleeping with a goofy expression or even exhale loudly, wondering what to do next.

No in the waiting room you have to watch your baby sleeping with an acceptable, nondescript serenity and you can’t break into a lullaby or cry because your baby is so beautiful. No you have to read a magazine. Time is at its heaviest there because your boredom is contained, restrained and not natural. It’s creatively stifling. That’s bad boredom.

But time is mercurial and it runs away from me and I get into a lather trying to keep up. No time for boredom, unless I snaffle a few hours and I’ll tell you how later.

Modern family life happens at warp speed. I haven’t got enough time to work out how many hours are spent ferrying our children around, but I know that as the kids have gotten older, there are more commitments, commutes, drop-offs, pick-ups than I could have imagined. We have one afternoon per working week when no one needs to be anywhere after school. And our family is conservative by comparison. Our 16 month old quickly learned how to say the word “Car! Brrrrrm Brrrrrrm” early in the piece.

One hectic year, our daughter was doing so much that she made a decision to reclaim her Sunday mornings and chose to give up being a Junior Farmer at the Collingwood Children’s Farm. “I just want one day where I can sleep in and have nothing to do” she said. What a smart 10 year old she was. That year, our beautiful Immi was doing: gymnastics twice a week, dance, guitar, farm, choir, swimming. She is a shiny girl of light, a doer and an achiever. She coped so well with all of these activities, we just thought that life was full and she was having a ball.

My husband and I are both educators with a firm belief that kids require time in their lives to just kick around, get bored and use that as a springboard for creativity. Wallowing in time is a necessity, and shouldn’t be a luxury for children. We knew this at a cellular level and espoused it all over the place professionally and personally. Yet all of Immi’s activities just sort of accumulated. And it took our 10 year old to say “enough already”.

Last year Immi broke her leg at gymnastics. It was a severe break and she had to stop gym for the rest of the year. She was forced to slow down. Suddenly she went from doing 13 hours a week of gym, to nothing and being in plaster too. For the first few weeks, Immi was beside herself, bored, frustrated and stir-crazy. But then she began to draw, to sew, to listen to music, trawl my wardrobe and begin to wear my funny old hats. She began to develop a style of her own. She seemed to relish the time that this broken leg had allowed her. Now she was using her time, filling her hours and contemplating life without hours and hours of gym.

When it came time to start gym again, Immi didn’t want to. Instead she applied for a job as a trainee gym coach at her gymnastics school and was successful. “This way I get to go to gym, because I love it there, but not have to do 13 hours a week”. Smart cookie and she gets paid too. She has begun private art lessons and wants to begin ballet. Even with these activities, her hours wont come near to the gym rigmarole.

As for me I steal time. I squirrel it away from my sleep hours and then glean it back on the weekends when I can have a bit of a sleep in and a catch up. I nick time and the stolen time is usually in the wee small hours. Sometimes I waste that time with telly, sometimes I write or cook or read. It’s naughty time because I really pay for it later. But I figure I’m a mum of a little baby and my sleep is so screwed up anyway that I can play around with it a bit. That’s my feeble excuse anyway, not much of a one.

I never feel like I have enough time. Sometimes I feel perpetually one step behind and other times I feel that I’m being so consumed by my present that I lose perspective and forget to enjoy life. Sometimes life feels like a series of tasks that have to be performed and then ticked off and I’m glad they’re done. Instead I should be fully experiencing the moment and enjoying it. I don’t go in for Oprah maxims, but she once talked about the importance of living inside yourself as opposed to living outside of yourself. Being true to the moment and being present there and not thinking about what has to be done next or what people think of you. It rang true to me and I try to find a stillness and a perspective that is not so close and so frenzied all the time.

I’m not always successful, but sometimes I am and these times will make up my memories.

Dontcha just love it when you are so absorbed in something that time flies?

Left of the Centre of my Universe

Did anyone else feel like they were stealing their baby as they left the hospital with their newborn? We were amazed that ‘they’ were letting two novices leave with a tiny bundle of sweet smelling perfection. “I can’t believe they’re letting us just walk out of here” I said to my husband as we carried out precious cargo out to the car. We drove home so slowly that it was ridiculous. There should be a bumper sticker that you can put onto your car that says: “first time parents driving their baby home for the first time” , like “Just Married” or “Learner Driver”, deserving of special compensation on the road and extra indulgence from fellow commuters. Once home, we placed our sleeping baby into her bassinet and just looked in awe at her. I flung a private prayer out to the four corners of the universe that my mothering skills would match the enormity of my love for this wonderful child that was in our charge.

That precious baby is now sixteen years old . Our fourth baby is nearly sixteen months old and nearly a decade younger than our next youngest. B was a surprise baby in the most positive sense. April 2009, away at the beach for Easter, the glass of red wine infront of me made me feel nauseous. Hmmm I thought, and then “Nup” I thought, “I couldn’t be pregnant. I’ve recently had a huge fibroid removed from my uterous, I’m incapable of getting pregnant”. So I put it out of my mind and drank that glass of wine.

One week later at the supermarket, my hand alighted on a pregnancy test. Hmmm, can’t do any harm to buy it apart from the mild disappointment I’ll feel when it shows negative. So it got chucked into the trolley and forgotten about until a few days passed and my period still hadn’t arrived. I thought it more likely to be menopause than pregnancy.

It was a work day morning, and we were all bustling about when our world came to a halt. The little window in the pregnancy test immediately showed two stripes; positive! I opened the bathroom door and called my husband in. I was hyperventilating and he knew straight away. “You’re not!” he said. “I’m pregnant” I said “Oh my God”. We sat on the edge of the bath and giggled like naughty school children.

We didn’t tell our three children immediately being pretty sure that this early pregnancy would come to nothing. I had miscarried before and what with my age and the scarring from my surgery, things didn’t seem that likely to come to fruition. So my husband and I kept our secret to ourselves, but not for long. First we told our daughter who was the eldest. We thought she could cope if the pregnancy failed, but we primed her and warned her that things may not work out. Then we told our boys. I can still recall their reaction. They whooped, jumped about and cheered. I cried at their delight, never expecting such a huge reaction. “oh MY GOD” my oldest boy kept saying “You’re going to HAVE A BABY!!! MUM!” They understood that not all pregnancies become babies and that sometimes things go wrong. I crossed my fingers and hoped our little bean would make it. Suddenly we all owned our budding baby and we all held our collective breaths until we knew all was well.

“Am I the oldest woman in the world to be having a baby?” I asked my obstetrician. “Not even close” she said. “My oldest pregnant patient was 48 and she conceived naturally and did brilliantly. You’ll be fine.”

And I was fine and B was fine. And for the fourth time we got to steal our baby and take him home from the hospital. Did I feel like an old hand at parenthood after four children? Just quietly, no. I felt that it was familiar, but noted how much I had forgotten and wondered how I could have forgotten these tender, special things. Then realised that I hadn’t really forgotten them at all, but was getting another chance to be reminded and to experience these wonderful moments again. Things like inhaling the smell of your newborn, feeling the tug on your breast, those still, silences in the small hours of the morning when it seems that you and your baby are the only people on earth. The feel of the tiny hand grasping your finger and those incredible little sounds that babies make when they feed. How privileged and blessed I felt to be getting to do all this again.

Be encouraged if you are older and want to conceive. Parenting is a life time pursuit. I never want to be the ‘expert’, I will always be a learner, because my children will never stop evolving; they will continue to surprise, delight and intrigue me. I will forever be in their debt for taking me left of the centre of my universe.