Friday 22nd February – The self fulfilling Caucus Race

I am a little tired.  I know this because it has taken me four attempts to spell the word Friday in the title of the blog.  Not only that but I impressed myself by doing it the same way all four times (that could be classed as a skill.  I might look that up.  There may even be a technical term for such idiocy).  Apparently my subconscious mind thinks that it’s really important that I type the word Frudhay.  It sounds quite convincing as a word I have to say.  It sounds slightly Swedish, or possibly Anglo Saxon, Frudhay – the day on which we harvest the hay using ‘fruds’.  Fruds are large wooden rake type objects.  They fell out of use because the teeth were too wide apart and it made everything too wispy to manage properly.  I think I may have been accidentally brushing my hair with some spare fruds that someone forgot to destroy in the great frud persecution of 1458 because my hair just won’t behave itself at the moment, and wispy is just not the word for what is going on with my barnet.

When I say that Amy Winehouse’s hair looks better behaved than mine you will have some idea of the hair induced madness that I am carrying around with me at the moment.  It’s terrible.  I spent fifteen pounds on hair calming products in an emergency run to Sainsbury’s today, and I’m still not convinced that it’s going to work.  It’s a worry.

So, there you have it.  My descent into madness typed up and ready for anyone to take a peek at.  Lucky, lucky me.  Actually,  I expect that if I ever do go properly mad I will be very rubbish and just sit rocking in the purgatorial twilight a la Wilfred Owen, rather than donning wacky clothes and coming up with cute sayings.  Knowing me, I will probably cry a lot.  It’s pretty much a given with me to be honest.  Two things I am extremely gifted at are crying and vomiting.  I’ve had the talent since the earliest weeks of life and I just seem to get better and better at them as the years roll by.

My mother tells me that as a baby I used to cry because I was hungry.  I would do this until I was hysterical and shaking.  She would feed me.  I would drink the milk down in next to no time, because clearly I was starving hungry and could be denied no longer.  I would then vomit, because I had drunk the milk too quickly, and the whole process would start again.  I’m sure she was thrilled that of all the babies in all the world, she ended up with me.  Still, I expect she’ll go straight to heaven.

My friend, who has just had a baby, tells me that she is worried about the deleterious effects her urges to cry are having on her baby.  I pointed out that seeing her cry and being cool with it as a normal part of human behaviour wouldn’t have half as much a deleterious effect on her as the poor kid getting to the age of seven and thinking the sky had fallen in when she finally let it all out, after years of pent up blubbering finally make their way to the surface.  This, I might add, is what happened to me.  Plus, babies are there to reduce their parents to tears.  It’s what babies do.  If you don’t cry, they don’t think they’re doing their job properly and grow up stunted and evil.  That’s a biological fact that is…

My mother was of the old school of parenting, i.e. never show fear, never admit you are wrong about anything and never cry in front of your children even if someone is chainsawing your leg off whilst unleashing a wild hornet’s nest into your vest.  Stoic isn’t really an adequate word with which to describe it.  Emotions were rather messy and unseemly.  I also suspect there was quite a lot of ‘why bloody bother’ involved when parenting me, as she was forever wading around knee deep in vomit, tears and snot and couldn’t get a weep in edgeways.

So, the day I did see her finally give in and cry it was completely and utterly traumatic to the point where I thought she might actually be on the verge of turning her toes up and dying on the spot.  It was compounded by the fact that she was incredibly annoyed about showing her weakness, and so in between great roaring sobs she shouted at us and waved her hands around like a deranged muppet in a vain attempt to get us to go away and leave her alone. 

Of course this totally failed, as we were absolutely convinced that if we as much as turned our backs on her, she would take her last gasp and it would all be our fault.  Consequently we sat round staring at her, while the poor woman writhed in mortal agonies of humiliation.  We then burst into tears ourselves because it was all too much, at which point she became absolutely incensed and demanded to know what the bloody hell we thought we were crying about, because compared to her we didn’t have anything to cry about.  As we thought that the world was ending, and she was convinced that we were crying over nothing, this only decided us that she must have something to cry about which was worse than the world ending, and which made us cry even harder.  It was hideous.  My dad came home to find us all lying around the lounge, exhausted and gasping like fish on a path.  He had no idea what was going on.  We couldn’t tell him because we didn’t either, and by then my mother had gathered together some of her dignity and refused to talk about it.  We were traumatised for years…

Because of this I made the executive decision that I would never, ever be stoic in front of my children unless I needed to be brave for them in hospital or some such malarkey.  If it was just me being my usual weepy self I would just let it all out and weep away.   Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t so much of a decision as a necessity.  It’s a miracle when I stop crying, so I was never likely to be able to pen it up without exploding after a week. Consequently my kids think that roaring like a freshly discovered spring over everything from the Andrex puppy to the fact that my sponge cake has collapsed is perfectly acceptable.  They just pat me on the head and bring me the ubiquitous glass of water.

Tallulah understood the nature of the power of tears from an early age and would point at people and shout ‘Cry!’, in the hope that they would crumble at her feet.  I feel that this is because every time she did it at me I was already crying about something and she was just convinced of her power all the more.  As I said in an earlier blog, we are reading Alice in Wonderland, and she was fascinated by Alice crying and creating a lake.  Maybe she identifies her with me.  I’m glad we live on a slight hill.

I do draw the line at crying at some things though.  When I had to take Tallulah to hospital last year and they wanted to take a blood test I was very brave and stalwart because the last thing she needed was me leaping around shrieking and dripping everywhere.  I was proved victorious when we got the blood samples first time with only minor shrieking on Tallulah’s part.  The woman in the next cubicle had an eight year old who also had to have a blood test.  The kid had hysterics and then the mother had hysterics in sympathy with the kid.  At this point the kid decided that there really was something to be frightened of and redoubled her efforts forthwith.  After this they had to put her in a private room and it took eight people to hold her down to take one small vial of blood.  Nightmare.  I have mentioned this before, but it is relevant and pertinent and stuff, so tough…

On the vomiting front I seem to be doing a bit better these days.  I think it has something to do with my stopping drinking and my stopping getting pregnant, both of which disagreed quite violently with my digestive system.  While pregnant I was one of the world’s best vomiters.  With Tilly I once vomited so hard in a distinctly smelly underpass on my way home from work that I wet my pants, thus contributing massively to the already pungent aroma on offer.  I had to walk home with a wet chest and squelchy shoes, looking like a lady tramp and feeling about as mortified as my mother when she finally broke down in front of me and my brother.  It was a challenging journey and not one I’d like to repeat.

I’ve just had an interesting thought.  What if it’s not drunken revellers and tramps that make that hideous smell in car park stair wells and underpasses after all? What if it’s respectable ladies like me, pregnant, hormonally challenged and ready to vomit/wee her pants at the drop of a hat?  We could have been blaming society’s ills on the wrong group of people for years.  I feel that someone needs to do some research on this.  Possibly with a clipboard.  Definitely with a nose peg.