Not My Mother

This was our second really busy weekend in a row. I don’t think I had my computer on at all over either of them, that’s how busy I was. Too busy to check blogs, it really doesn’t get any busier than that.

The reason we’ve been so busy is that my baby shower was on Sunday, and we wanted to get the baby’s room finished beforehand. So we worked hard sorting that out, and then we did a whole bunch of other little jobs we’d been procrastinating on like unpacking all the books in the family room (or rather, putting the piles of unpacked books on the shelves); putting up shelves in the study and sorting out all the papers etc which had exploded in there. Seriously, it was our dumping ground and it was disgusting. I would have taken a before photo to show you, but I couldn’t find the camera. That’s how bad it was.

Anyway, it all got done and now the house looks awesome. It’s amazing how much nicer a place looks when it’s tidy and all the half-unpacked boxes are removed. And I’m amazed at how much we can achieve if we stop procrastinating and just do stuff. Dave’s moaning about not having had a proper weekend for ages but I don’t care, the house is lovely and he can play computer games every night this week if he wants.

So the baby shower was wonderful. Dave’s sisters G and C did a great job. I was so touched when they offered to organise it, and also that everybody came. There were about 20 of us altogether and I was a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing. I’m not all that comfortable being the centre of attention, I never feel I deserve it so I get all shy. But I looked around the room and it was filled with my friends, women that I love, who were all excited for me. And I got teary. And the baby got some wonderful gifts and I feel so loved and blessed by everyone.

Oh and get this – three of the people at the party were my mum and two of my aunts. My mum came. Given that our last big fight started (she’s not one to stay on topic in a fight) because she didn’t want to come down to visit after the baby was born and because I was a horrible person for saying I wasn’t sure I’d be comfortable bringing a newborn on a four-hour round trip to visit her so she might have to wait a month or so before that happened, I really didn’t expect her to come. I mean, she barely made it to my wedding for fuck’s sake, why would she show for a couple of hours of afternoon tea? So when we were organising this six or eight weeks ago I told her she’d be getting an invite because it would look odd if she didn’t but not to worry about it. And there she was, they came down on the train and she’d arranged with Cath to be collected at our local station.

I do not understand her.

Oh, and there was absolutely no mention of our argument. She just phoned a week or so ago, out of the blue, and asked me what I still needed for the baby, so she could tell my aunts what to get me. And that some of them were coming down, and they were all put out because they hadn’t gotten invites to the shower, but she’d “smoothed it over” (my mother has no internal editor; everything you tell her will be repeated to everyone she knows without thinking about whether it’s appropriate or not, so beware). I told her honestly that since none of them came to our wedding and that had been far more important to me I hadn’t even thought of inviting them to this (it’s not like the baby’s here yet) and she said that they still liked to have the opportunity to say no. And I didn’t know what to say to that.

Sometimes I think I’m a changeling.

We are very blessed, here in Australia, with the ability to take extended maternity leave. We have the right to take up to a year without risk of losing our position, and some (most? many? mine anyway) employers may extend that to 2 years if you request it. They even – shock! – let the father take paternity leave for the same period, although the rule usually is you can’t both be off at the same time. None of that enjoying time off as a family business, thank you very much.

So I’ve been spending the last couple of months deciphering the policies of both of our employers, trying to work out what we can do. It’s not helped that neither of our jobs has a visible HR presence anymore. There’s got to be someone, outside of the outsourced helplines*, but neither of our “people leaders” (bosses) could give us any names. So we do our best to follow the procedures, and convince our bosses that we’re doing what we need. All fun.

So anyway, this is what I’ve discovered for our situation:

• we don’t qualify for the Baby Bonus, or any governmental child assistance. No surprise there, Comrade Rudd’s policies are well known.
• both employers say we can have up to 52 weeks parental leave. Dave’s says we can overlap and be off at the same time, but mine does not (apart from a week after the birth) so no overlapping it is.
• when I go back to work, I have the option to request “parental part time” work; that is, to switch to part time for one or more periods up to when the baby is school aged. It means I have extra flexibility but don’t have to permanently switch to part time. But, my employer does not have to approve it and I do not necessarily get to stay the same grade as I am now, whereas if I return as full time, my grade and position must stay the same.
• I get 12 weeks paid leave, which I can take as 24 weeks at half pay. This is better for tax, so I’ll be doing it that way. (This is not standard across all companies in Australia, but I know many do it.)
• even better, Dave can also take 12 weeks fully paid parental leave, as long as I have gone back to work and he is the primary carer. (This is absolutely not standard, so they must be applauded for getting at least one thing right in a sea of wrong.) All he needs is a letter from my employer saying I will be returning to work when he is on leave.

I want Dave to be able to take the time to be with the baby if he can, so many men don’t get that chance and anyway, it’s free paid holiday (as far as he thinks, anyway), so why not? Good lord, if they offer it, take what you can. So it seemed pretty simple to say I’d take the first 40 weeks (with 24 paid at half pay and 16 unpaid), and then return in December as parental part time, while Dave did the final 12 weeks.

But we hit a snag: in Dave’s policy there’s no definition of what “primary carer” means. Is it enough for me to have returned to work part time, or must I be full time? What if I’d returned for 3 days/week, proportionally that makes Dave the primary carer. Finally Dave tracked down an HR person (in Australia) who said, no, it meant full time. Dave pointed out it didn’t SAY that and she said it didn’t matter, that’s how she would interpret it and that’s what counted. Which… okay. This is what they do at his work. You’d think it’d be easier to write a watertight policy, but no.

The problem with this is it’s not clear if my work will let me come back full time and then switch to part time after 3 months. In which case, bugger. We need a new plan. Luckily, our policies are a bit better written and say I can request it at any time. I just may not get it. That was also when I discovered I wouldn’t necessarily get to be the same grade or position. Okay, that’s a whole new layer of things to worry about.

Finally I wrote my boss a rambly email about this, and the next day when he was in he sat down and sketched out a timeline of what I’d like to do. And he said he’d never had to deal with parental leave stuff in his short time as a team leader but if the policy said he could do it, he had no problem with it and he’d be able to plan around it as long as he knew it was coming.

I guess I’m really lucky that I have a boss who’s got kids and a wife who worked part time. And that he’s not a stickler for policy and things are pretty relaxed around here right now. And hopefully that I’m seen as a reasonably good resource.

So right now, all we’re waiting for is for him to write a letter saying that he is my line manager and that I’m coming back to work full time on 6th December, so Dave can request his parental leave for the end of the year. Then once I’m back we start the process to switch to parental part time.

On the one hand, I’m a little disappointed about coming back full time rather than part time. I’m worried that all my carefully crafted routines will go out the window when Dave’s in charge of the little one. Which is silly because, these routines? They don’t even exist yet. Who’s to say I’ll get them done anyway when there’s so many infomercials to watch every day?

On the other hand, it will be nice to effectively get a little extra cash injection from us both being on full-time pay for those 12 weeks. It will make up for any shortfall we’ll have while I’m not working. And, who knows? Maybe Dave will love not-working so much it will help get him more on board with my frugality push!

Who knew it would be so difficult to sort all this out? I know I should be grateful that my work is so flexible, and I am really. But at the same time I feel like I’m trying to line up two pieces of snaky hose without holding either of them still, and I could really do with someone saying to me definitively, “Yes, that works. We agree we’ll do it that way.” Because even though there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t agree, I’m still a little bit nervous about it.

* (Yes, both our employers have outsourced most HR functions overseas. And no, I don’t blame the workers there for not being able to interpret the finer points of the policy for us. It’s tempting, but that’s not what they’ve been employed to do. When companies do this, they do it to move the grunt work, the data entry, the fixing of easy problems, and the workers have specific procedures and targets judged by metrics and are absolutely NOT encouraged to think creatively. They don’t know the business enough or get paid enough to make the calls. (Neither, for that matter, did the grunts who did the same job here before it was outsourced.) It was done in an area which I have to work with regularly and I don’t deny it has its frustrations for everyone involved but please let’s not get sidetracked into debating offshoring jobs. The invisible HR people we both needed to talk to are still in Australia.)

The last few weeks have been All Baby, All the Time. Now I’m 31 weeks and my feet are getting further away it’s getting hard to ignore that there will be an actual baby at the end of this. And not just as a hazy something that might happen in 2 years, like I’ve always thought, but in, like, two months. The way I procrastinate, that will be here next weekend.

So there’s been a fair amount of lying awake in the middle of the night fretting about things while someone does star jumps in my belly and tries to get her feet up over my ribs.

Things are moving. The nursery has been painted and we’ve been researching and getting the list together of things we need. We did our hypnobirthing course over the last couple of weekends, and it was brilliant. Beforehand all I really knew was that I’d learn techniques to stay calm and relax during labour so the fear was removed, and Dave would learn things he could do to help me, and things he could say so he didn’t piss me off. But it was so much better. We learned what actually happens physically during labour, which helps to understand the sensations you are feeling, and also how fear and tension interrupt that process, and therefore why relaxation is so beneficial. And then we spent the rest of the time learning relaxation techniques and visualisations to help. And Dave is instrumental in the whole thing. Far from just learning how to pat my back in a way that won’t make me want to rip his head off, he learned how to put me in a state of deep relaxation very quickly, and how to keep me there with gentle massage and affirmations. Then we watched some videos of some hypnobirths, which just underscored how different the birth process is to what you get from media and people’s horror stories, and talked about the kind of things that are useful to put in our birth plans.

I think it’s really easy to be sceptical about this sort of thing. I still feel a bit embarrassed and hippyish talking about “hypnobirth” because it sounds all sorts of flakey. There’s another system called Calmbirth which comes from the same theory and is very similar, but with slightly different techniques. Our instructor is currently studying to become qualified and even she said she was looking forward to it because the name doesn’t have the same connotations of swinging watches and clucking like a chicken.

But it really does feel effective. And really “hypnotism” is really only putting your brain into a deeply relaxed state, like meditation. Anyway, I’m really glad we did it. It’s a really great technique for helping me relax, and like Dave told our instructor, “everything’s better when Nicky’s relaxed.” And if nothing else, the classes and our regular practise sessions are helping us get closer and for me to trust Dave. I don’t feel like birth is a great unknown thing I’ll be enduring on my own, I feel confident that I can do this, and probably very well. In fact, I’m almost excited about doing it, and about the baby that we’ll have afterwards.

*

Here’s something I’ve not told many people: I’ve been dreading being a mother. It’s not something I ever really yearned for. Well, maybe in my early 20s, but back then it was because that was sort of what everyone expected you to do, not necessarily what I wanted to do for myself. When I first married back in my mid 20s I’d have little fantasies about having a family, but I soon realised that the me I was picturing in those happy little fantasies wasn’t me at all. I was controlling, and unhappy, and prone to deep pits of depression. Plus all those times mum would spit, “you’re just like you’re father,” to end an argument, they stuck. How often do you need to hear that before you believe it? He was a horrible man. I still have nightmares. And my mum, well, she’s not exactly the best parent either. I’m bound to be like one or the other, so why the hell would I want to perpetuate that?

Then I got divorced and moved overseas, and then a few years later I met Dave. And I told him I didn’t want kids and he was fine about it. Then one day he said, “I think I’d make a good dad,” and I knew he was right. And then I realised that in my journey I’d changed. I was happy, I was at peace. I was in a situation where I could see myself being a good mother, and so I agreed in theory that having a family would be good. You know, in a couple of years.

And then I got pregnant, and it was really exciting, but it still seemed unreal that there’d be a baby. But like I said, suddenly it’s dawned on me that everything is changing and I suddenly thought, what the hell am I doing? I’m 38 years old. I love our life. What if I’m a shitty parent? What if I’m stressed and disorganised and everything is a struggle? What if all the sleep deprivation puts me back into depression, what if I do end up like my mother? What if every day is a financial struggle and we end up miserable? This is for years and years and years, it’s not like I can back out of it, everything is changing forever. What if we break what is good about us?

So yeah. It’s not been good. Not all the time, just occasionally, and it’s not something I’ve wanted to talk to Dave about because I don’t want him to feel like he’s pushed me into this. But enough that it’s been sitting at the back of my mind and taking any excitement away.

But now, I don’t know. After doing the hypnobirthing class, I feel calm inside. Serene. I feel like I can give birth, and that I will have a connection with this little one who is currently connecting vigorously with my kidney. If I think about having a toddler or a 7 year old or god help me a teenager I have palpitations again so now I just pull it right back to newborn, which I can pretty much cope with, and trust the rest of it to luck and positive visualisations.

Maybe it’s just because I’m doing affirmations and listening to my relaxation tracks, but hey. If that’s all they do for me, then I think they are a success.

Ah, New Year’s Eve 1999. You whippersnappers are too young to remember the Y2K bug but we thought it was a big deal. I worked in IT for a bank and we were all rostered on to work overnight and through the next day, just in case. The people who worked from 10pm to 6am got $6000 for their efforts. I only had to work from 6am to 2pm on January 1, so I just got $4500. I used it to put air conditioning in my old house. It was good.

(The guys who had to work overnight had it better as everything was laid on for them and they had a prime spot on the floor to watch all the fireworks. One of them told me that at about 5 minutes to midnight there was a power surge in the city and all the lights went out. “We thought, oh crap, we’re in for a long night.” Heh, heh, heh.)

Anyway, I was also on call just in case there was a problem, so I had to stay home (I don’t know why, we theoretically could log in from home but it was on shitty 56K dialup and anyway how would that work if everything had turned to shit?), so me and my then-husband Andrew stayed home, ordered pizza, and watched videos. Yeah, partying like it’s 1999 is really quite lame. At 10pm we turned over to watch midnight celebrations in Wellington, New Zealand. I always thought they really missed a great joke by not turning off all their lights on the stroke of 12. Seriously, how funny would that have been? The first major place to tick over and it all goes black. Hee!

So eventually it got to midnight and I poured a naughty half glass of wine (I wasn’t supposed to drink on call) and we went out into the backyard to watch the fireworks. I was overcome with emotion, and the booze (this was also before I discovered wine; now it takes a full glass to get me drunk). Here we were, the clocks were all ticking over to zeroes, it was a brand new start. I love new beginnings. I was going to be a better person from now on, nicer, kinder, everything good. I could just tell this was it.

“Happy new millennium, world,” I whispered to the night sky.

“Happy new millennium,” Andrew replied. “… Of course, it’s not really the new millennium yet…”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, will you JUST LET IT GO?” I snarled. And thus ended the shortest resolution attempt ever.

We split up a year and a half later, are you surprised?

*

And now here we are, ten years later. I’m back in the same city, married again, once again not doing anything for New Year’s Eve. And yet in the meantime I’ve been all around the world, fallen in debt, fallen in love, got out of debt, got married, got pregnant. I’ve travelled so far. It might look like I’m in the same sort of place I was that night, but really I’m a completely different person.

I wonder where I’ll be ten years from now?

Still, it’s a lovely surprise, even if my statement says I’ve got unpresented cheques (unlikely, since I’ve always had direct deposits done), and that Dave’s dividends are supposed to go to the account that he closed a couple of months ago. Oops.

*

Christmas was a great success. Everyone had a lovely time (or at least lied and said they did), and I got by with the minimum of screaming matches with my mum. We got some lovely pressies too. My favorite was the complete boxed set of Friends DVDs from Dave. When we lived in London Friends was on about 4 times a day on various channels, and during my 2004 Summer of Despair before I met him, I got in the habit of watching every single showing. So after that it was a joke that Friends was always on. But here, it isn’t! So he bought me the DVDs so I can watch them while nursing the baby, and I cried because really, he is the most thoughtful person. I got him a book on forbidden Lego models and half a Crumpler bag for work (the other half was his family Kris Kringle gift) and he was happy too.

Mum stayed with us from Christmas Eve through to Sunday when we drove her back to my home town, and it was mostly okay. Our relationship is… frustrating, is the best word I can come up with to describe it. Frustrating, for many different reasons and for faults on both our sides. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. It’s hard to explain without giving you the full story but the full story would probably take up the whole internet so it will have to wait. Anyway, we had a few issues on Christmas day, but afterwards we were mostly okay and Saturday was actually successful. And then she went home :-)

Yesterday (Monday) was Boxing Day holiday here and we went to see Avatar in 3D, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, and then we went to Myer and bought a Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner. I have been lusting after one of these for ages, we really need one because of the budgie and the new baby and I just don’t want to have to haul the big vacuum out every day. It has a power head! Myer only had it 15% off, but we also had a bunch of reward gift cards that have been hanging around for months, so we ended up getting it for $200 instead of $349. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant as well.

And then Dave’s sister and her boyfriend came over and we had a BBQ and played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride until midnight, and now I’m exhausted and I don’t want to see a single other person for a week at least.

I hope your weekend was as successful!

A lot of my blogs have been setting their goals for next year, so I’ve been trying to come up with mine. It’s hard because I have no idea how next year will go. I could say that about every one of the last 6 years, but this one will definitely be different. I’ll become a mother. I’ll be moving to a part-time salary, and although I’ve worked out a tentative budget that shows we can do things quite comfortably, I have no idea how out of pocket we’ll end up with the birth, or how much the baby will cost (although Mum’s gone a bit mad buying stuff and friends have been very generous, so that helps out.) Hell, I have no idea at all what being a mother will do to me or my life, so it really is all up in the air right now.

I’ve not really tried setting goals before. Resolutions, sure, I make a billion of those, and promptly forget them. One year I had 13. How many did I achieve? Your guess is as good as mine. So for the last few years I’ve not bothered making them. Best to avoid the sense of failure. But I can see the point of setting goals, especially financial ones, otherwise you drip through the year with no focus. But how to do it? Goals should be achievable and measurable and everything else that makes them SMART. Also, I don’t want to have a goal for each aspect of my life (too much to focus on), but neither do I want just one financial one (an area that IS measurable) that I’ll get obsessive about, I’m obsessive enough about that already. So what to do?

I was talking to Dave about it and he gently pointed out that I am a knucklehead and next year WILL have one main focus, and it won’t be finances. We are becoming parents, everything is going to change. Thus, 2010’s goal should be to adjust to parenthood.

Spend the first three months preparing for the baby, then recover from the birth and adjust to being a mother. Look, I have no idea how I’ll go with that, other than it will change everything for ever (thanks, friends with helpful comments). I’ll probably be overwhelmed by it all and I’ll likely get postnatal depression. So he says I need to forget everything else and concentrate on that, get settled into being mum, get healthy and well, get our routines going and so on. And he’s right. I know he’s right. It’s really important and it doesn’t come at all naturally to me, I need to give it all my focus.

But I’ll need some sub-projects to keep me going, right? You know, for when it all that parenting gets too easy? So here are a few more I came up with.

Finance

1. Get emergency fund up to $20,000.My ultimate goal is $30,000 (6 months full expenses including mortgages for rental properties), but I’ll aim for $20,000 by the end of next year. It is currently sitting at $9,500, so we can comfortably make $20k by adding about $1000 a month.
2. Work out exact financial position. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t really know where we stand at the moment. I’ve lost track of how many shares we have (we get some as part of our end of year bonuses, usually held in trust for a year or more, and I’ve not kept the records of what’s vested and what’s not, up to date), and some of our old superannuation funds have old addresses so I haven’t got up to date statements from them. Plus, Dave tends to be a bit slack with some stuff like managing the account for paying one of the investment mortgages, which makes it hard for me to know how the budget’s going, so I’d rather just get it all under my control.

   This one also means making sure we’ve got everything covered that we should, like life insurance and wills, and to start getting educated on our superannuation options.

3. Grow net worth by $50,000. Again, I don’t know what the current year will bring so I don’t know how realistic I’m being, but if we include superannuation contributions (as we must) this should be easily achievable. It will be hard to definitely assess our success because a lot would depend on property valuations and I can’t see us paying for new ones again next year, but we’ll do what we can. For the record, I did some sums and I estimate our current net worth as being somewhere around the $490-500,000 mark, so $50k would be a nice round 10% increase. (See why I need the exact financial position? $500k would be such a nice milestone to hit and I don’t know if we’ve made it yet!)

Organisation – get home life in order

This one ties into the main goal of adjusting to parenthood, and just getting our lives working smoothly so things don’t fall apart when I go back to work. One of my most common freakouts is that I don’t feel like I’m coping now, so how will I manage when there’s a baby to wrangle as well? So this is all about setting up routines and systems, like meal plans and filling the freezer so we have food, and getting housework and admin down to a quick art. It bugs me that I always have a big list of things hanging over my head that should be done, so I want to make a concerted effort to work through them all and get them sorted out once and for all.

(And before you point and laugh at me for thinking I can do that with a baby around, she won’t be here for a few months yet and hopefully will sleep a lot at first. I could be kidding myself, but leave me my illusions for now, okay?)

Health and wellbeing

Dave says he wants to get down to 85kg (um, about 187lb) by the end of the year. He’s 6 feet tall with a chunky muscular build anda bit of a belly and probably weighs about 104kg (229lb) at the moment. I can’t imagine him that light but he thinks he can do it, and it will help with his cycling. I was 85.9kg (189lb) when we got married and am 94kg (207lb) right now, so I figure I’ll target that too. Ideally I’d like to get under 76kg (168lb) which would get me out of the obese range for my height, but I honestly don’t know how I’ll go. I’d rather have a modest goal I have a hope of achieving than something I don’t believe I can do.

Really though, I’d just like to finish the year feeling fitter and healthier, with better food and exercise habits and a body that doesn’t hurt. This will be part of establishing our new routines. Details still to be worked out.

So that’s it. Of course I’m most interested in the financial ones right now because I’m comfortable in that area. I’m actually quite excited about what next year will bring,

What do you think of these goals? What are your goals for the coming year?

Woah, sorry, didn’t mean to disappear like that. We’ve had an interesting couple of weeks over here at Chez NMM. The Sunday after that last entry Dave had an accident on his bike. He was happily riding along the bike path when he went round a blind corner and ran smack into a group of four riders coming the other way. They were spread right across the path even though it’s a two-way path with the lanes clearly marked… anyway, they were right there at the corner and Dave had no time and nowhere to go, so he couldn’t do anything but run into them.

He was so lucky. His helmet was shattered and his bike written off, and we spent eight hours in Emergency waiting for the results of xrays and CT scans but all the ended up with was scrapes and bruises, massive back cramps from lying in one position for eight hours, and a mild concussion. They let him go home that night. The girl he hit wasn’t so lucky, she’d thought hr cheekbone was broken but we don’t know anything more because she went to another hospital.

I suppose the lesson here is if you’re out cycling ALWAYS wear your helmet (they are mandatory in Australia), and if you must run head on into someone try to hit them with the helmetted part of your head rather than your face.

I don’t really know how to react to this. I mean, he’s FINE. No broken bones, no brain bleeds or scull fractures, everything was clear. He was very lucky and it could have been so much worse. To be honest, apart from a pang when I first saw him in the hospital (and for a second thought the blanket was up over his face) I wasn’t all that concerned. I thought if the scans were clear then he would be perfectly fine, and the week off work was nice but he’d just spend it playing computer games and having a grand time. But he wasn’t. He was sick and sore and for most of that first week he couldn’t concentrate at all. The most he could do was lie onthe couch and watch DVDs, and even that wore him out after an hour. Everyone who spoke to him in that week has told me how vague and not-Dave he sounded. I took him to see our wonderful osteopath and she said she could sense the trauma in his body and head so I guess that’s understandable but still, this was him being lucky and getting off lightly, what if it had been worse?

But, he’s fine. He will be fine. He’s feeling more like himself but this whole thing has been a sobering experience. I’ve been hearing an awful lot of stories from other people and it makes me shiver, how very fragile are these little shells we keep ourselves in.

*

So all that happened, what, two and a half weeks ago? It seems a lot longer. Needless to say, my FLYlady routines went right out the window. I worked from home most of that first week so I could take Dave to appointments and with the two of us being home the whole house turned into a war zone. My sink was definitely not shiny! But that’s also coming good. I gave the house a really good clean the following weekend and am sort of back where I began, and nearly ready to start tackling things which is good because a few things have come up. For a start, we don’t have income insurance, and we should have. Must get that organised. Also insurance for the new bike. The old one wasn’t insured, because when we looked no one would insure it for damage while in use, but I’ve since found out that you can do that now. Ironically the way I found out was through an ad that popped up on Facebook next to Dave’s pictures of his poor broken bike, which I suppose proves Google Ads work… And of course there’s FLYlady. So much for my month of FLYlady in May! We’re what, three whole weeks behind now? Oh well, never mind. I’m sure the mess will wait!