My new blog address is www.mogantosh.com. And this essay explains why. It's long, indulgent, my way of processing. Forgive me. x
When I started blogging, six years ago, the baby vomit was milky-fresh on my membership card to the mother club. Ivy was five months old and Keith and I had just moved from our city flat to a little timber cottage with tank water and a composting toilet a couple of hours and a thousand lifestyle-miles away from our old friends and family. We were new parents dropped head-first into a new life.
When I started blogging, six years ago, the baby vomit was milky-fresh on my membership card to the mother club. Ivy was five months old and Keith and I had just moved from our city flat to a little timber cottage with tank water and a composting toilet a couple of hours and a thousand lifestyle-miles away from our old friends and family. We were new parents dropped head-first into a new life.
Small-town ways
were new and confusing to me. So was motherhood. One day I googled
‘five-month-old baby stinky neck’ when the smell rising from Ivy’s face every
time I kissed her (many hundreds of times a day) was becoming strange and
unbearable. Several thousand answers instantly returned. Turns out you have to get right under those
delightful folds of your chubby baby’s
neck and excavate out the grime that accumulates there, or else it will begin
to culture into– my apologies - neck cheese.Who knew? I
had no baby-mama friends nearby to ask. This was pre-Facebook hive mind, Keith
was travelling a lot for work and I really felt lonely. One day, I started
writing a blog with the vague understanding that it was an online diary of
words and pictures that could keep far-flung relatives and friends updated
about our daily goings-on.
I found Ivy
endless comedic, and I adored her, so I scribbled away, examining my new life
as a parent, and eventually, I started exploring the blogosphere. I found other
like-minded bloggers, and they found me. My blog began to grow and change, as
blogs (and babies!) do. We added another baby, our beautiful boy Ted, and then
another, the sweet Georgette. My blog became a record of domesticity, my long
days spent inside this little house with one, two and then three small children
underfoot. I recorded the tears and the laughter and the chaos. (Ah, the
chaos.)
Ivy’s path
through toilet training (I thought of it as the Wee Wars) is there. Once she did
a poo in the hallway just to see what it looked like, and another time she
refused point blank to go to the toilet at the park, and then crawled into my
car seat and let the rivers run. Her sudden toddler rages are recorded; her delightful,
eccentric imaginary world and her sudden and passionate embrace of all things
pink, sparkly and bedazzled (much to her mother’s dismay) is recorded too. Her
development into a bookish, funny schoolgirl is all here.
Little Teddy
is captured on these pages. A mellow, easy-going baby, he cried so little that
the first time he threw a baby tantrum, at about three months old, we put him
in the car and started driving to hospital. Luckily, he calmed down and we were
able to turn around before I had to shout in the emergency room ‘My baby is
crying, damn you all to hell! He’s been crying for twenty minutes! Run
every test you have, and screw the expense!’ Funny little Ted, with his odd
speech patterns, who insisted at two that his name was Trixie-Jeff, and loved
magazines, and evolved into a curious and meticulous person. Do houses have
skin? How do you say ‘slippery’ in Spanish? Are my little round poos really
meatballs?
Recorded,
too, is my pregnancy journey with little Georgette, which from the first
trimester was a tough one. ‘Are you finished spewing yet, Mum?’ asked
four-year-old Ivy as she watched Peppa Pig and failed to develop the skill of
empathy. ‘I want some more cheesy toast.’
The kids
were hard work, the car broke down twice a week and my body, bit by bit,
crumbled under the strain until in the third trimester, the ligament in my pelvis
separated and left me weeping and waddling through the final weeks like some
kind of deeply depressed, obese duck. I whinged and moaned and vented my
complaints onto my long-suffering blog, and my loyal and kind readers supported
and encouraged me.
Halfway
through that pregnancy, my niece Autumn was born with severe disabilities. She
died two months later, and in my blog I recorded my sorrow and the deep
admiration I felt for my brother and sister-in-law who walked that
heartbreaking road together with such grace and love.
My first
year of being a mother of three is recorded on this blog. It was a tough
season. The joy Keith and I felt in being parents gave us our steady
foundation, but everyday life was often difficult. Teds asthma was bad. Ivy
began school. My back problems worsened and Keith started his own business.
Little Georgie went about the business of growing up; one day babbling words, the next day eating mashed
pumpkin, the next running through the halls. She brought us incredible joy. I wrote about
our love for her.
Life was
busy, highly scheduled and always felt one bout of gastro away from complete
meltdown. In between vacuuming compost from the floor of the car and tackling
Mount Washmore (in a constant cycle of grow-and-shrink on the end of the lounge,
and on glorious, transcendent occasions actually disappearing altogether for full
minutes at a time), I cooked and made Play-Doh and read books about space and
drew pictures. All of this life, gloriously domestic, wonderfully happy and
heartbreakingly difficult, has been captured on this blog for five years.
Keith role
as Best Supporting Actor has run like a sub-seam through these pages. He shows
up here and there, happy to have his life mined for comedy, supportive of my
decision to write publically about our private life, and always the central
steady fact of my life: the love of my
life, without doubt. Our relationship is here: our ongoing fight against selfishness, the
work of allowing each other to grow as individuals while keeping the separate
entity of The Family – the myth of it and the actuality too - our core around
which all else revolves. In tandem we have sprouted grey hairs and wrinkles and
creaky bones; our badges of glory; the scars of battling midnight wake-ups and
baby viruses and sleep psychosis.
As for me, I
am here in neon technicolour. My faults and my virtues, laid open for the world
to see (and comment upon.) My gradual, stumbling evolution from a fiercely
independent perpetual adolescent into a middle-aged mother-of-three with a
poorly tended bikini line and a powerful commitment to optimism. From me to uterus, you might say. I hope I am wiser – at least, I realise now
how much I have to learn about myself and the world. My children have brought
me to my knees with rage and love and humility and gratitude, and writing this
blog has enabled me to reflect upon and explore that. I will always be grateful
for that, and I think the process made me a better mother.
But like any
mum-blogger, I have had to reflect over the years on notions of privacy and
independence and rights. I have always drawn a certain line in the sand about
the parts of family life I choose to write about. My personal line of
over-sharing is much further along than many, and like many bloggers, I
suspect, I am captivated by the details of the lives of others, those
intimacies that let us glimpse how alike we are, rather than how different. For
me, TMI is never TM.
Becoming a
mum, growing actual people inside your skin and feeding them from your body,
means a blurring of that line between you and others. I suspect this is why
blogging is so appealing to new mums –when you are sent through the
shape-shifting wringer of pregnancy and birth, you stagger out the other end in
a different form. Through examining the minutiae of domestic life with these
miraculous tiny creatures, we try to figure out our new identity.
But as time
passes, children become less us, and
more them. I feel that change. My
children gnaw away at my apron strings with their sharp little fangs, and shred
them bit by bit with every passing month.
I see my
role as caretaker, as minder, as an emotional bodyguard, of sorts. I want to guide and protect these kids during
their fledgling years, to help them navigate the tricky waters of adolescence
and to launch them out of the nest into adulthood with confidence, good health
and useful habits. The ability to play an instrument, to behave with kindness,
to cook a casserole, to laugh in the face of adversity. (All at once, if my
training is wildly successful.)
It’s because
I want to be mum to Ivy and Teddy and Georgette, rather than chronicler, that I
have felt increasingly torn about this blog. There are many aspects of life
that I choose not to explore here, in order to protect the privacy of my
family, and this means that this picture of life (while authentic) is not
complete. It is edited by me, seen through my own particular (comedy-tuned)
lens and so, inevitably, it is just one version of the truth. This doesn’t worry me when I think about
pre-school life. Capturing the stories of these years is like a gift to the
kids, I think, an archive of their lives pre-memory that they can keep and
share in time with their own kids. (My grandchildren. Excuse me while I put my
head between my legs for a minute and take some deep breaths. )
As my kids grow older, my relationship to this blog is not so simple. Their stories belong to them, after all. Their ideas are not the same as mine, and their perception of an incident is not the same as mine. I am raw and inappropriate and outspoken. That’s okay with me. It’s the kind of person I am, and I think sometimes it makes me a good writer. But while I’m happy to be an outrageous writer, I wish to be a thoughtful mother. I don’t want to become the mother who mined my children’s lives for comedy and drama to meet my need for validation from an audience. If for no other reason than Keith and I would rather spend our retirement funds on Mediterranean cruises than on uncomfortable therapy with angry offspring.
This is not true for every mummy-blogger, by the way. Many writers don't perhaps share so freely of themselves, they draw a line further back in the sand, and so they don't need to police their boundaries in this way. But I am pretty much an open book, and so I think it’s a good time for me to stop being the archivist of my children’s everyday life, to thank them for an early childhood full of joy and humour and wonder, and hand the reins of their stories back to them.
As my kids grow older, my relationship to this blog is not so simple. Their stories belong to them, after all. Their ideas are not the same as mine, and their perception of an incident is not the same as mine. I am raw and inappropriate and outspoken. That’s okay with me. It’s the kind of person I am, and I think sometimes it makes me a good writer. But while I’m happy to be an outrageous writer, I wish to be a thoughtful mother. I don’t want to become the mother who mined my children’s lives for comedy and drama to meet my need for validation from an audience. If for no other reason than Keith and I would rather spend our retirement funds on Mediterranean cruises than on uncomfortable therapy with angry offspring.
This is not true for every mummy-blogger, by the way. Many writers don't perhaps share so freely of themselves, they draw a line further back in the sand, and so they don't need to police their boundaries in this way. But I am pretty much an open book, and so I think it’s a good time for me to stop being the archivist of my children’s everyday life, to thank them for an early childhood full of joy and humour and wonder, and hand the reins of their stories back to them.
Yet, I love
blogging. I love the immediacy and intimacy of the form, I love the community
of bloggers, and I love to write. Plus,
I am a middle child and I need attention. To that end, I am going to start
again, recalibrating how I write and what I write about, and I am going to see
where that decision takes me. I’m happy to share (too much) information about
myself, but I am going to re-boot my boundaries around how I talk about the
kids and Keith.
I want to keep
writing, to explore the world inside the home, and look deeper into how other
people manage family life. I want to share things that have made me laugh, and
things that have made me think, and people who have interested and inspired me.
The readers of this blog have been my intimates throughout
the last five years. Thank you for reading, for commenting, for supporting and
encouraging me through these first magical, wonderful, terrible and
transformative years of motherhood. I
hope to see you over at Mogantosh for much more comedy and drama and tragedy
and curiosity and absurdity. If you move on, thanks for being a comrade as I
was fired in the oven of motherhood. In truth I might be a bit of a wonky pot
at the other end. But beauty lies in the
imperfections after all.
In the words of wise beardie Leonard Cohen: ‘Ring the
bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything:
that’s how the light gets in.’
My new blog: www.mogantosh.com.
x
