finding my place on earth

There has been some debate recently on the glass ceiling in the UK getting thicker and harder for women to smash through. Frankly speaking, I had never seen any glass ceiling in my working life prior to my children in the now more than ever working life. The reason for that is less my brilliance and 'throbbing with testosterone temples', and more the simple fact that I had always been simply too low and far to notice any ceiling above my head whatsoever. I probably noticed but a few dusty cobwebs hanging over my head from the long intact glass structure, though.

Anyway, with only limited aspiration to climb high (am vertigo prone, by the way, I know- excuses, excuses, lame excuses)and simple desire to earn my own living and live,( I did much of the former e.i I paid for my clothes, food and shelter, but did very little of the latter, e.i. I barely lived) my life was lived along the key call: wake up call, work call, toss and turn call. Sometimes I managed to squeeze in socialising or mindless TV watching (with pizza) inbetween work and sleep call, but otherwise life was confined to bed or desk.

So where did I want to go from there...oh yes, children. What children? What type of working woman has time for them? Surely, you cannot blame work policies for hindering career progression of working mums? That would be just as pointless as blaming miniskirts for fat legs in some women. If you have them fat and short, you just....have them, err.. fat and short. So is NOT wearing a mini skirt an option, perhaps? Tell me now, please...Am I losing it or have I lost it already? Yeah, probably, I have Adios. And (wine)glass smashing night to all..

But I may well have been registered as such in the thick files of police monitoring the net. Yes, I stumbled across and saw naked boys on the net, and with erections at that. How coud that happen to a decent, asexual mum of two?
Yesterday, my three year old was poncing around the house naked. Some children just hate clothes. He simply hates dressing, and so do I (I mean, I hate dressing him, less so myslef, just to be clear:I like to be dressed). So while he jumped and tumbled, he must have felt some sensation in his willy. He started exploring it, with his hand. Tickle, tickle, tickle, and his three year old willy went completely stiff. I was a bit concerned, dressed him quickly in spite of my aversion to this task, and went on the net to find out how normal/abnormal such things are.
The unfortunate combination of words: erection and small boys threw up a disturbing array of pics. I glanced and panicked. And prey to God I am not taken away from my children to be locked

I hate the notion of stay at home mums getting benefits. I hate it because they are the source of heated and often misguided debates, in which many scream and cry out loud something to the effect of: do not pamper with governmental money all those women who, after all, chose to have babies and should have prepared for the cost of raising a family.
Well, to me that statement is a sign of total ignorance on the part of the screamers and cryers about what raising of a family is and what it implies. And just to be clear, having kids is not
luxury holidays you save up for and then worry about nothing for a few weeks or months.
Raising a family is a JOB, with an 18 year contract.A JOB which, if done with full support of society, and done well, can make an enormous difference to the standard of life of the society as a whole. Think of the crime, of education, of family and community ties, values, health (both mental and physical).
It is a JOB which should be rewarded with SALARIES, instead of paltry and so often begrudged benefits.

I have not intended this blog as a platform for ranting against non human third parties -institutions, businesses, governments etc...This blog is just to catch the odd thought and digitilize it for others to have a laugh or yawn, depending on predispostion and sense of humour. But when a truly infuriating thing happens, soryy, I just can't help it. And so decided to spread a bit of a malice and smear a bit of mud on the cosy logo of Mothercare. Yeah, mothercare -not
They do not give a toss about a mother and her kids once they have hooked your credit card details. So what went wrong?
I ordered a stroller. Online, of course, to cut out the hassle, even if it meant four days waiting time, as opposed to grabbing that bloody buggy straight from the store.. 4 DAYS -That's the promise, that's the aim, that's the mission which is shoved to customers' attention on Mothercare's website. Four days seemed bearable,so- in the meantime I dragged and dusted a two year old buggy, which is a bit on the deprived side (no rain cover, no tray, no umbrella, no roof). So the order went smoothly. Card details accepted, order confirmed, and at the bottom of the page: surprise, surprise. :WE AIM TO DELIVER THIS ITEM WIHTIN 25 WORKING DAYS
It's a month, with weekends included.For God's sake. And that tactic is so underhand.Bait and switch- I think it's called.
So having been baited and switched, I decided to switch my order off in return.
I called them only to find out that it's impossible, as the item had already been dispatched. Reassured, and with a temporarily restored faith in MC, I waited for the buggy to arrive any time.
After a week, I called again. The customer service rep did not even check my order number, just took my name. Then I heard the item had been shipped. Should be with me soon. I - gracious soul=sucker- gave them another 4 days. But there was No sight of that thing on wheels.

I called for the third time, I highlighted my case, and was told the item is 'en route'. They started getting French with me, so I decided to get tough. I asked them for a tracking number and the name of courier company they use. This request met with a blank stare, that is at least what I imagined at the other side of the telephone life. 'We do not tracking, it's all internal'. Whatever..to me it was all infernal treatment.
I lost patience. And a lot of time, and alot of money on taxis saving my kid from getting drenched in the recently frequent showers.But, there is a silver line. I gained some knowledge which I would be happy to share. I CRACKED THE CODE used by mother-NOT-care when they speak to you.

Here, what it really means when they say dispatch, ship, en route
DISPATCH: a stray dog pissed around the item, a warehouse manager shifted the item from one corner to the next to prevent damage (well done)
SHIP: the warehouse manager goes on holidays, on a cruiseliner with wifey, and, to pleasure himself in the idle moments,-WANKER!- took along his laptop with all the online customers' orders stored on the hard disc.
En ROUTE: the waves get high, the deck tilts, the laptop slides down into the big blue sea, the warehouse manager calls the office, saying (lying) he had a vision of a baby boom coming soon and asked the company to recruit an army of customer service reps.

An outing to the local playground in the park gave me some foul food for thought and a bit of indigestion.

I took the kiddies out. The day was rather rainy throughout, but had to snatch a few moments between the rainy spells to air the little rascals, otherwise they go mad, and I do too, but much more.

There is a new installation in the park playground. A spinning wheel, the metal sort- a bit like a plate- that is installed in the ground, with a bench on it, and barriers around. So kiddies, who are game for a spell of dizziness, jump on and spin. My children love it, and I am wondering if that may be some government-blessed way of seeking alternative states of minds. But then it could be the first step to serious stuff: Spin on a wheel when you're 3, roll a joint at 14, sort coke at 19 and so we roll down the hill. By the way, downhill rolling is another fave game of my children. Fortunately, a thorough wash is good enough to deal with the after effects.

Gosh, I am straying...anybody there still?

About the spinning wheel.
I and my kids got on it. My little girl is just too little to stay seated on her own, I need to support her and be there with her. And being on the wheel, I cannot spin it. My son is not big enough to spin it with mummy and sister on it. So we were kind of stuck on the wheel, not moving, trying to figure out how to get it going, when two big black children (brother and sister) approached and offered us a spin. Great. We were up for it. And so the grabbed the barriers, and on the outside of the wheel ran and pushed the wheel round. Quite fast. Faster than my kiddies are used to, anyway. My son screamed. With joy. My daughter shrieked, with less joy and more uncertainty. I made silly faces and 'ahhhh' noises, demonstrating I was joining in the fun. All in all, we were a bunch of human noise on a wheel.
Then I asked the kind kids to stop, which they did somewaht reluctantly. The fun was obviously mutual. I stayed for a while seated on the bench, just making sure I was steady on feet before I got up. Then I realized with amazement that a bunch of parents were watching us with expressions of clear concern and apprehension in her faces.
One guy even came by and as if in passing asked if everything was OK.
Yes, it was. Perfect. Why wouldn't it?
Then I realized that the scene of me and my children on the wheel must have looked to the others a bit suspcious, rough perhaps.
But I bet, if the children were white, there would be no concern registering on the onlookers' faces, actually I bet (what a gambler I am), the whole scene would hardly register in anyone's mind and memory.

I have not been active here for over a month. Many things happened, mostly a thick and sprawling mental block stood in the way of my will to write. Today though I logged on, glimpsed at statistics and - oh gosh- almost 300 visitors came and viewed my pages. Who are these people, and how do they stumble across something that even I have forgotten the existance of? Kind of got motivated to start writing again. After all, there are people out there who read, or simply glimpse and move on, or glimpse and yawn, I will never know. That brings me to conclude there is some room for improvement in the technological aspect of blog management, time every visitor to a blog, and publish the data regarding how long each page was viewed. In this way, I could know what was passed over in a hurry and what hooked for longer..
Yawn
Good night.

I have to confess something really terrible. I drank alcohol while pregnant. Drank it before I actually got to know I was pregnant. Yes, yes, it was unplanned, unexpected and yes..quite understandable since I had sex after having missed a pill or two. Surely my attitude of forgetfulness and negligence had for most part of my life resulted in trivial consequences such as failing to return on time books to the library or for days losing sight of house keys. But then came a moment when it resulted in another human life. Gosh, I should have had a contraceptive injection or something more permament and independent of my clogged brain. Or should I?
Well, I do not regret having my babies. They are precious to me. What I regret is that I had not given them the start that most modern mothers give to their children, and they start giving it to them before the little creatures are even conceived.
Folic acid
Trust Funds
Registration with the best private school
To name just a couple.
I had given to my babies none of the good, healthy and future oriented stuff. Instead I smoked and drank. Drank and smoked. But only Until I found out that I was growing little stupified fetuses in me.
That 'stupified' bit actually is something what I wanted to write this post about.
My little daughter-1 year old -is lovely. But since the moment of her birth I had been utterly and deeply convinced she is afflicted with Foetal Alchol Syndrome. I saw in her symptoms of mental retardation since she was about 3 months. She could not speak coherently, could not point to the objects I named, and flashcards with letters beat her black and blue.
To make things more serious, she was born with a rather peculiar look. Add to that a few odd developmental abnormalities (problems with hips, skin, eye- of of which fortunately has since cleared) and there was no doubt as to the fact that she was infused with too much alcohol . I cannot describe the agony I went through because of the FAS diagnosis which I formulated myself, with a little bit of help of online forums and medical resources. Fuelled by guilt, my anguish began to become unbearable. And so was the sight of the growing older and ever more mentally impaired being.
I almost freaked out when she showed such abnormal behaviour as failing to recognize me in the mornings when she was 6 months old.
My heart jumped with horror when my friend's babies started waving bye byes, and she only stared.
I could not sleep for weeks, when she started scratching her head with her wrist instead of her her nails.
I was brought to tears when she stuck her tough out and - drooling badly-kept it out there for hours. That surely looked stupid.
The anxiety stories can go on and on, but one turned to be just ground breaking.
My little girl, like most little girls, like to be carried. And I, like most busy mums, cannot do that all the time. So I put her down. Now, to me a reasonable child's behaviour would be to claw and tug at mum's skirt, wail, howl and cry uncontrollably until the fed up parent gives up and picks the stubborn munchkin up . That was at least what my older sensible son did. The little girl showed none of the 'sensible' perseverance , except for the perseveringly ear shattering howls and shrieking. So howling like mad, she never stayed by me, she just ran away, mostly to climb the stairs or a small coffee table made from glass. How bizarre. How unsensible. How mental. How stupid. How FAS.
NOT.
In fact, that actually turned out to me clever ploy. So clever it took me 4 months to understand it and appreciate.
That clever little girl achieved her goal (getting back into her mummy's arms)quicker and easier but doing something, she knew, I would stop her from doing immediately. Of course by picking her up.Clever. So much for FAS. Welcome sanity, and no, I won't drink to that.

What does a single girl do after a long and tiring day of hard work in the office? If not getting plastered in a pub, if not having a pseudo romatic date (only because of the candles), if not toning up her thighs in a gym, a single working girl collapses on a sofa, with a glass (bottle) of white wine and a fag. Bliss. Just letting the alcohol soothe the jumpy nerves, and smoke do the rest of the job, whatever it is (even if it's only cutting short by a few minutes the life of stress and chronic fatigue ).
Well, that is not the life of a single, working girl in the big city.
Apparently chardoney and fags are a mum's good friends.Revelation to me. I have to say. Since having babies I have found myself living the life of an Amish, well except for the very few special occasions when old and single friends come by with plenty of enthusism and wine bottles to drink their broken hearts better till small hours.
So back to mums and chardonney. A bottle at the end of a hard day filled with kids and housework seems to be the standard among mums, the stay at home type in particuler. Kids in beds, white whine out of the fridge. Kind of a treat to a woman whose biggest entertainment of the day is ...cannot really think of any, so will just leave the dots.
I tried that 'wine by the end of the day treat' yesterday. Bought the chardoneney at Tesco. Put it in a freezer. Could not wait for the moment of uncorking the bottle, opening the long started never finished book, putting my feet up...So - to fast forward my getting to the moment of bliss- I skipped the time consuming tasks of tooth brushing, nail clipping, ear cleaning, and bathing. Rushed the kiddies quickly into beds. Skipped every second page in a bed time story, well tried to do that, but the kiddies are not so stupid, they hate abridged versions of a story, so had to read the whole lot...got a bit fatigued...gave in to a bit of snooze, still smacking my lips at the thought of a chilled white.
The next morning, I found myself on the edge of the bed. With the book's pages squashed between my shoulder and head.
The first thing I thought of when I woke up was about the state of my pore clogged face, the make up of yesterday working overnight its way into the deepest realms of my skin horrified my enough to jolt me out of bed to have a good wash.
The next thing I thought was the completely unnecessary, annoying and awkward chore of the day: how the hell will I clear the broken bottle of chardonney from the freezer?

A few posts back I wrote that I was about to throw myslef in the full time frenzy of finding full time time job. You know, it's the 20 CVs per day frenzy and registering with X number of online recruitment agencies, those who spend a lot of time claiming they have the dream job for me, but after the first phone call give up delivering the dream to me. In other words, they never get back to me. Surely, I am not that stupid, or that rude, or that forgettable. Am I..am I...am I..??????Anyway, digressions aside, I started with the subject of job hunting, just to announce that there was a slack in the activity. Worry not, pick it up, I will soon. It's just some other daily life activities interfered and stole the time.And energy for that matter. And my enthusiasm dropped too. But today, I got fired up again about the whole business to get a job. I met my rich friend. A mum of a lovely, though outsized toddler. Her chief concern of the day every day is to make her life just soooo perfect for herself and her tod; she does it by hunting down for her little offspring the perfect pair of socks perfectly matching his new booties, getting dead set on finding a pair of sandals with a buckle made from pure silver, and swooping in Boots on the last pack of wipes saturated with just the perfect blend of botty soothing herbs.Then, when she accomplishes those deeds, she takes a brief break in front of the telly only to ponder how imperfect her deeds (i.e.purchases) actually were and starts heading back to the shops to have the imperfect goods replaced, refunded or repaired.
OK, so how does that tie in with my earlier statement about me getting fired up to find a job..? Well, I guess I would love to have the money to buy the silver buckle sandals, the lavender scented socks, the gold coated wipes and other fab what nots. But then, I missed one link in my chain of thought. It's not her job that pays for her extravagances, it's her husband. So where does that leave me? Well, I think I will just have to curb my desire to buy, buy, buy and serve it to my cynic mind on a plate of sour grapes. After all, those silly spenders of their rich husbands' money have lives so little, they can easily be filled with a dozen reciepts from Debenhams, John Lewis or Laura Ashley. My life takes far more. Even if it is 2356 signs worth of blog post.

Has anyone ever wondered what SAHMs go through ? Well, apart from the piles of dirty nappies and wipes after wipes after wipes...Why does any sensible, educated and enlightened by the stroke of feminism woman would choose to stay at home in the company with inarticulate, irrational, incontinent, incapable creatures? Some call it maternal instinct. Yes, there is some of that. But it does not stretch so far as to make life feel like bliss made in heaven. And when it does stop stretching, life becomes a dreary and stressful experience. How much can anyone endure hours of monotonous whinging, moaning closely followed by fits of tantrums, during which food lands on the ceiling and on a CD player. Well, no sane woman could endure that for long.Not for the 2,3,4,0r even 10 years that many women choose to stay at home with their offspring. So why do they do that? I have a theory about that, and it says that they choose full time mummying because the alternative is gruelling and gruesome. The alternative is to 'have it all': nice home and a nice career. Except that 'nice' is more often in theory than practice. Nice career often, in most cases of working women, amounts to spending 8 hours per day at the till, at the computer, at the phone, at the shelves, or at some other inanimate object with which we are asked engage to produce some not so nice money (not nice because it is never enough to comfortably cover full time child care expenses, bags of nappies, and basic essentials to keep the family alive such a case of chardonney per month). Add to that, the arsehole of a manager (what kind of recruitment system is in place in this country that it's always arseholes that get promoted?) and the choice becomes a no-brainer. Yeah, cots, snots and play blocks , give them to me any time, they just seem to be a doddle. Of, course, high flying career women have none of these concerns. But then they belong to a different breed, I guess one that should stop breeding. After all the 30 minutes of 'quality' time with their children can only ensure that their children remember what mummy looks and smells like. That's mad. But then women like it mad, in or out of the house..it's always mad. And sad.