On having "sold your soul to Satan".

This is a feeling I get quite a lot.

I've worked hard to achieve certain things, only to discover that those things are ultimately a bit meaningless.  Swapping terrible business platitudes (that I was poor at doing anyway - I've wrestled the "Haway man, you *pause* are *pause* talking *pause* *emphasis* SHITE!" monster more often than I can count) is something I'm bad at.

I've offended a few people along the way, let's be honest. And I'm pretty diplomatic.

I have a kid now, and while I relish the head space of going to work, I also miss the little blighter so much at times that it hurts. I'm also aware that having structure through having a reasonably challenging job keeps me sharp, focused, and most importantly, not depressed which is a gift that means at the end of the day that I'm being as good a parent as I can be. So what...I don't spend 24/7 with him, but I don't take him for granted either, and have the patience when it counts.

But...that's the deal that you make with fate to a certain degree. We have to make a deal with the devil to ensure that we can keep ourselves fed and watered, with a something that resembles a roof over our heads. If you can do that solely by doing the things you love the most, that's brilliant, but for the vast majority of us that isn't the case, and we're not going to be rescued. We aren't going to win the lottery, we aren't going to invent something awesome and we probably aren't secretly the heir of Potloadsofcashrutania either.

There is nothing wrong with making a living, but you've got to assert where that stops and your *actual* life starts. The one where you get enough sleep, the one where you have enough energy to be loving towards those that you love, where you can exercise, where you can eat, drink and be merry and not feel like someone has their foot on the back of your neck. It's all about head space, and it's all about getting your head around what you *believe* you should be doing, and what you actually should be doing.

If you've got to do something that is intrinsically boring, for chuffs sake, don't let it eat your life. You aren't doing yourself any good, draw a line around your hours, say "no" and do some fun shit. Or just eat a random sandwich on a park bench somewhere pretty. Honestly, you'll feel better. And you'll realise that the world is not going to pitch off the mantelpiece because you decided to take your foot off the accelerator.

If you want to do something creative, do it, but accept the fact that this other thing (i.e. work) will prevent you at times. But when you do get to do it, do it well, do it freely and with joy.

You haven't sold your soul to the devil, you've just done what needed to be done.

Read, write, draw, play, rest, run, eat...the rules don't change because you're an adult. x

Duffed no more: The problem with raw (ish) census data and the mookswho write about it....

I made the error of stumbling across this rather judgemental pile of shite earlier and had to share:

Census reveals that fewer women are staying at home to raise children.

Official figures show that there are now 300,000 fewer mothers at home that previously estimated.
Experts said that those who decide to sacrifice their career in order to look after their children at home are now considered in the minority.
According to returns in the 2011 census, there are almost 1.6 million women who do not work because they are looking after their home and family.
This is about 298,000 fewer than estimates previously, the Office for National Statistics said.

Well, whoopy-chuffing-do. I would like to say that I'm not dissing Stay-at-home parents here, and if I'm honest, I'd have liked to have gone back to work later...those of you who get to stay home with your kids, you're doing a grand and frequently hard job and I salute you....however as a parent with a ("career") job, I find the underlying assumption that I'm gadding about pursuing a career for entirely my own ends at the expense of my kid rather galling.

1. I love the fact that this study starts with a rather wrong estimate regarding how many women were actually at home looking after their kids, which clearly meant sweet Fanny Adams and wasn't actually based on any kind of cogent facts. 300,000, even in a population of 60+ million is still a hefty margin of error, given the demographic profile..woman, child bearing age etc.
2. "Those who decide to sacrifice their career....". Last time I looked, it wasn't 1954, and sometimes people (i.e. women - because the last time I looked, we were people too - or did I just miss a meeting?) may have worked very hard to achieve something and don't see the benefit in just kicking it all in when they pup. 
3. Positive financially responsible female role models and all that - if I had a daughter, I'd prefer it if she didn't think getting duffed by a Premiership footballer was a reasonable way to make a living.
4. Also having a kid doesn't automatically make you Joan of Arc...sacrifice?...*really*?
5. As we're in the middle of/end of/wherever point in the whole-time-space continuum of the worst recession since the Great Depression, strangely enough some people/couples would prefer to spread the risk, especially in light of the fact that the Coalition have just cut the 90 day waiting period for large scale redundancies by half.........Um, making the people who are propping up the economy easier to sack, that'll help. So....reducing the help they receive while in work, *and* cutting them off at the knees when they do lose their jobs is frankly a right bag of old wank. In order for women (or men ffs) to spend more time at home with the kids, there needs to be the resources to do it....and to use a food based metaphor, if the familial eggs aren't going to get scrambled, it's best that they aren't all in one basket.
6. Houses - we like to live in them and they cost a bomb.
7. Bloody Nora, why am I still having to have this conversation? Necessity is the mother of invention...and graft, unfortunately.

Honestly, do these people think we live in a perfumed floral 50's cloud where Daddy has a job for life that'll support everyone? Balancing work and families has been the reality for women for centuries...just deal with it. It'll make life easier for everyone.

Duffed no more: Fancy a (another) spoonful of boob related guilt?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20406743

I actually don't object to the thrust of the research behind this article and breastfeeding (when it goes well) is great and a lovely experience for mother and baby as well as all the health benefits is something of a no-brainer. Yada, yada, yada...Though for quite a lot of new mothers, it's utterly crap.  I was lucky for a bit and then I wasn't. Funnily enough though, Mini D strangely got healthier after a little formula came on board.  Also for the record, I think we've already established that I belong to the "Whatever works for you" school of parenting so be kind enough not to start wibbling on about "Breast is best". Yes, we know. However as I've said in the past, formula is not arse trimmings, brick dust and raw sewage in lard either.

HOWEVER what creates involuntary bladder frothing (and clearly not in a good way) is this:

Common reasons for stopping breastfeeding were problems with the baby rejecting the breast or not latching on properly, having painful breasts or nipples and feeling that they had 'insufficient milk'.

It's the "feeling that they had 'insufficient milk'" comment is the one that troubles me.

Sometimes it's not just a feeling. Insufficient milk is a fact. It happened to me and Mini Chunk. If I'd persisted, he'd have been Mini Twig.  The primary and most natural way to get your milk back is to spend several days doing skin-to-skin contact (which is lovely stuff but not always entirely practical) and if you're tired, depressed, achy or in big pain and with a child who is screaming their metaphorical bollocks off because they are slowing starving, being sequestered semi-naked in a theoretically 'calm' environment might actually be the thing that drives you finally and irrevocably around the fucking twist.

Being a new parent is hard enough without being encouraged into a situation that's going to send you all The Yellow Wallpaper.

Being a new parent is also hard enough without having the media telling the world that you are/you have been a shirker or a let down. Remember that this stuff is all "ideal world" and you've done your best x

So...Mr Rhyming Slang...and your tragically ill-informed mates

The case of Savita Halappanavar has highlighted why I will never, ever stop banging on about this. Since becoming a parent, I've become actually more pro-choice than I was before. I didn't actually believe that was possible.

So....Mr Rhyming Slang....

Yes, that's you, Mr.Hunt, oh and you, Dorries, you fame-chasing-right-wing-press-baiting-blogger-harassing-half-wit, now hopefully up to your nipples in rats, spiders, centipedes and soap stars who are approaching the brick wall of the end of their careers like a stampeding bull on whizz. Oh, and you too, Cameron, Romney, Ryan, Bachman and Palin.

I hope you're feeling suitably scared by my teeny blog with a teeny audience.

Right, hat in the ring.

The stuff that goes on the wombs and love tunnels of the world (and that corner of the world that you exercise a degree of influence over) has *nothing* to do with you.

If you're going to take a role like "Secretary of State for Health", a tiny bit of medical knowledge is generally useful. Also, as a very recent parent (I'm looking at YOU, Mr Hunt), one would hope that a tiny bit of attention *might* have been paid to little things like when certain scans occurred on ye-olde-up-the-duff time line that tell you whether or not your kid is likely to, oh, live....and stuff.

What these halfwits don't seem to realise is that, if they erode the rights as they currently exist, they run the risk of ending up killing a woman because the fading heartbeat of the baby she's losing is more important. That is what happened here, all because some people believe that Sky Dad says no. They also seem to have convincingly ignored that by doing this, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that this could bite them on the arse, personally.

I like that fact that our fine and admirable medical profession in the UK (especially obstetrics and gynaecology because they are the ones I've had more to do with recently) are focused on trying to ensure the best outcomes for everybody. Delaying life saving treatment (because that's what Savita would have really been getting because that miscarriage could not have been prevented) cost a woman her life.

Not good enough, not acceptable, please let birth and pregnancy be dealt with appropriately...and political types.....shhhhh, before you make more of a fool of yourselves.

Duffed no more - Trying to be good...

When pregnant, I realised something awful.  Women are using a very big stick to beat ourselves with (in addition to The Daily Mail doing it for us) in our constant desire to be seen to be "good" when it's all total bollocks. This isn't news, so why the hell do I feel compelled to say it again?

I, for one, didn't sign up for that crap. I also wish I could have believed (I did in my brain, but not really in my gut for quite a while) my friends who said "Trust your own judgement, it's probably pretty sound." about the whole parenting mularky so let's tell the Moaning Minnies and Judgy Joans to do one. I was a child of the 70's and I turned out ok etc etc etc.....obsessive parenting and feeling guilty gets you nowhere and at the end of the day, "good" also doesn't actually mean "perfect".

I declare today (and tomorrow and the day after) to be the time that we try, for a whole 10 minutes at least per day, to not feel fking guilty about something we're doing that *might* tenuously, possibly affect your baby and their development and/or future emotional well-being.

Be loving, be kind, talk, sing about as well as the sad deluded people on X factor,  dance like someone is electrocuting your feet, read to them a bit, remember that cbeebies/formula/playpens are not the work of Satan, say no to everybody once in a while and look after yourself and be kind - to yourself. Happy parents are good parents as a rule - and the chances are that you probably are great at it, and you're a beautiful person. Shut the voices out and tell every negative Nelly to foxtrot oscar for a while - go on, you know you'll enjoy it. x

P.S. everyone benefits...bugger...I'm being positive..."tsk *eye roll*...children"...

Duffers Diary No Longer!

It should be clear by now that I am quite definitely no longer in a duffed state. Nope, it's safe to say that I have proved empirically that I definitely don't have the gestation period of a Manatee. (It's 13 months FYI).

Mini Badger made an appearance mid January and, as is traditional, I've been engulfed by a maelstrom of nappies, boobs, bottles, crying and cooing like the soft sh*te I have discovered myself to be. Suddenly (just as I am on the brink of returning to work, which is a bit of a scunner) I have a baby who has naps and is consistently jolly pleasant whilst awake so I've got a teeny bit of head space. That I'm going to use whittering inconsequentially on the internet. Go me.

Duffed - Paranoia

One of the problems with being the kind of person that likes to keep themselves well informed, is that becomes apparent that when it comes to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting, there is such a thing as being *too* well informed. I know anecdotally, that just about everyone I know has had a wobble where they have thought that something they've done might cause a problem, and that they are/will be a craptacular parent as a result. While the support that you can get from certain on-line and NHS resources can be brilliant and there's a lot of good useful information out there, there's also a lot of opinion masquerading as advice that serves no useful purpose apart from making you feel bad and pissing on your chips. The disparity between the opinions of the midwives on the ward was quite startling so once the rest of the world wades in, it's fair to say that there'll be a period when you won't know whether you're Arthur or Martha.

Filtering this tripe (when you're knackered) is an onerous task...so it's hardly a surprise that quite a lot of new mothers have a wee bout of paranoia...

Duffed - Caffeine

Health Guidelines 1
Consuming over 200mg of caffeine a day increases risk of miscarriage.

I don't normally do more caffeine than this in a day normally because large quantities make me ill.  However since becoming pregnant, this chemical has become quite essential. The judicious use of said stimulant allowance since getting up the duff is what's preventing me from sending out work e-mails to people that contain the following content......or going through life with the delicate imprint of the middle section of my keyboard on my face because I've succumbed to fatigue:

Dear Stupid Person,


Why aren't you doing this yourself? 


I've told you already and under the circumstances it's pretty obvious that you have functioning eyes and a brain that works well enough to allow you send e-mails that have sentences in them. This leads me to believe that a) it isn't just the case of someone has fed your Blackberry to a Shire horse, or b) you've been inadvertently sending bum mail because you've put your phone in your back pocket, forgotten about it and then sat on it. 


Look into it yourself, quarter wit. Who am I, your mother?


Kind Regards,
Blah, blah, blah....

Sheesh!!

I like to think of caffeine as the last barrier between the world and my barely restrained inner misanthrope...