Old friends

One of my good friends suggested on the telephone last night that his experiences of being the only dad at playgroups were much more positive than those I’ve recounted here. Admittedly those particular child rearing days were a few years ago now, and they took place in London – which I guess you might expect, perhaps wrongly, to be more liberal in its attitudes than the semi-rural area I live in.

But I’m glad he bought it up, partly because I have been re-evaluating things a little bit recently and partly [ok, quite a bit] because it’s good to know that people have been looking at this blog.

I conceded some ground, actually. ‘S’pose it can be a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy,’ I said. ‘If you stand around looking glum because no-one’s talking to you then they’re less likely to come over for a chat.’

I’ve alluded to this circle of gloom a couple of times previously – for eg, here and here.

What I wanted to add is perhaps what I’ve been trying to communicate in these posts all along: that the superficial things – the hello’s and goodbye’s, the weekly meetings in neutral venues, the small shopping trips to the local post office where everybody knows you by sight – generally go fine, give or take the occasional cold shoulder.

It’s moving beyond the superficiality to building relationships which is proving more difficult. The ‘quotidian’ stuff – the lonely afternoons with a tired child, the endless journeys in the car, the constant demands for attention even when she’s at her happiest – is actually what gets you down: it’s in dealing with the humdrum that you most need the ‘deeper’ support of a proper peer group.

A formulaic chat with people at a playgroup or activity is frustrating precisely because that is as far as it can go.

Actually this morning I came to the conclusion that I have been feeling a bit down, although not exactly for the reasons mentioned above.

I’ve talked about selflessness before, and I want to say more in a future post. But I guess I’ve been pining for my own personal space a bit. Like most blokes, I like to have a project on the go, and that’s nigh-on impossible with an active, demanding toddler and a fistful of housework in your life.

The odd thing is that I didn’t know I had the blues. Looking back, it was as though something was worrying away at me below the surface, and I just didn’t realise.

We were sitting talking just after her afternoon nap when the light broke through. S- was encouraging me to sing ‘Baa baa black sheep’ over and over, joining in herself at the beginning of each of the first two lines [not quite getting the timing or the vowel sounds right, but probably a little more in tune than I was]. We were having fun: I was absorbed in the moment, forgetting to worry about the jobs that needed doing, the little goals I’d set myself for the day.

‘Ahh, so this is what I’ve been missing,’ I suddenly thought.

Message in a bottle

So I’m 1, 2, 3, 4, 4-and-a-half months in and counting as a stay-at-home dad [though G- and I have been parents by adoption for almost a year now]. What have I learned in that time?

Here are my top tips [in no particular order]:

1. Always have a Plan B. It’s no good turning up at the swimming pool and finding it closed due to the presence of some contagious disease or because the roof has fallen in [yes, this really happened to our local pool], and then just turning back for home. You need to think fast and on your feet. Usually retail therapy is not a good option – unless it’s the Early Learning Centre. Small kids love Early Learning Centres
2. Develop a personality. One that doesn’t frighten people. It may have been ok in an earlier life to stand around in rooms looking like a bored adolescent, and maybe your friends even expect it of you now, but your child needs to see that you can at least pretend to be a normal person. The type of guy who can indulge in pleasant small talk while balancing a plate of half-eaten biscuits in one hand and using the other to prevent his daughter from devouring the contents of a pack of crayons, for example
3. Put your child first in and above all things. This is much, much harder than it sounds. I cannot tell you anything about this: it must be experienced to be properly understood
4. Learn to multitask, as best you can. Granted, it’s not easy for a dad to keep more than one train of thought on the tracks of reality, but if you don’t/can’t/won’t then you’ll need to be prepared for the consequences. These may include potentially expensive and embarrassing pratfalls such as filling your car’s petrol engine with diesel, or walking away from the cashpoint machine without the money that’s just popped out of the slot, because you’re thinking about whether you should have changed that juice-covered top she’s wearing after all
5. Don’t use reins. Not because they’re dangerous, or politically incorrect or any other reason that you might have heard. Because your child will quickly learn that reins give them all sorts of opportunities for spectator sport, like sitting down on the floor in supermarkets and refusing to get up for ages, while a small crowd gathers round to comment on your pathetic efforts to persuade her otherwise
6. Get out of the house for a meal/drink/film/run/shopping expedition/concert/squash game [tick the box that lights, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, your candle,] as often as you can. Definitely more than once a year, anyway

Jealous guy

Just reinserted my link on the blogroll to the Reluctant blogger, a blogstar of the first order who’s had more than her fair share of Internet troubles recently.

To be frank I can’t imagine the sort of insecurity and/or plain nastiness that makes a person threaten the health not only of a kind and gentle person such as RB but also that of her children.

Read the story here. Or visit RB’s site at her main address, as above. I often do.

What’s going on?

For reasons too elaborate to explain I have to lie down on the floor and make like a starfish when I turn the radiator off in S-’s room. I had forgotten this random fact until recently when I noticed S- lying on the floor on her tummy, kicking her legs in the air, as she peered with keen interest under the radiator cover.

I guess sometimes we forget just how much our kids are watching us parents and how much they pick up from their observations.

While we were waiting for S- we did lots of reading about parenting. I remember writing in my notebook: ‘it’s all about language – you’ve got to give your child a language’.

Now I see it slightly differently. Watching S- I’m beginning to think that children have language innately: they would pick up some form of communication whoever they were with.

What we parents give them is the all-important vocabulary and the equally vital mode of expression. In other words, both the way and the manner in which they can transmit their desires, feelings and needs.

9 to 5

The plan was always that I would be the stay-at-home dad and that in our family mother would be the breadwinner. This is what we said when S- was being matched by the adoption panel with us.

However, I think M-, our social worker, was disappointed when all these things came to pass and, after our time off work building the bond with S-, G- put on her suit and got back on the treadmill.

G-, being the steadfast person she is, didn’t rave or moan or whine. She just got on with it: ‘life is how it is and we’ve got to do these things,’ she said.

To her credit M- choked it back, and has been a rock since. At Christmas, she bought S- a book called Owl bables to help S- cope with her mother’s absence during the day. The symbolism of the story may seem overdone to us adults – the owl babies huddle on a branch all night and call for mummy, who turns up at the end of the book – but S- loves it.

‘Mummy,’ she yells 2 or 3 times a day now, racing across the lounge to point at the TV. So on goes the DVD that came with the book, again. Sometimes we even read the story, too, or at least turn the pages.

Much of this blog seems to be about birds, but S- also now has a picture of an owlet on her bedroom wall: a photograph we brought on a recent week away in the Cotswolds and shoved in a clip frame.

When we see G- pull up in her car at the end of the working day S- wriggles and giggles with excitement, but all this energy seems to vanish when G- actually gets into the house. Suddenly there’s a ton of other stuff to be interested in: books, hairbrush, toys… And when it comes to bedtime it’s always ‘dada’, ‘dada’, although we make sure G- tucks her up at least a few times a week.

It’s the same in the morning: S- is getting increasingly reluctant to say bye-bye to her mother, even though I know we’ll later spend quite a bit of the day calling G- up on the toy telephone.

G- won’t thank me for this but I really admire her for the way she copes with S-’s apparent disinterest. I know it would be tearing me up and I wouldn’t be able to help getting depressed about it. Yet G- stays so calm and positive, and interested. And uncomplaining.

But that, as I said, is the sort of person my wife is.

From me to you

The nice woman at Option adoption tagged me with the 7 random facts meme. As it so subtly suggests in the name I guess it means that we have to reveal 7 facts about ourselves before passing the fun onto someone else.

The rules are:

• Link to the person who tagged you
• Post the rules here
• Share 7 random or weird facts about yourself
• Tag 7 random people at the end of the post, linking to them
• Leave a comment on their blog so that they know they’ve been tagged (not anonymously!!)

I’ve found this difficult but here are 7 random facts few people know about me:

1. I’ve never played a round of golf [and don't intend to start anytime soon]
2. I was once involved in a bar-room brawl. It really was like an old Western with tables going over and drinks flying everywhere. And yes, you guessed it: I was the guy heading for safety behind the bar
3. The most uncomfortable places I’ve ever slept have been a field next to a railway line [the stones dug into my back something terrible] and a roundabout at the end of a dual carriageway [highway]
4. The worst job I ever had involved using a box cutter knife to cut out the handles of plastic 5-litre bottles like those used for oil or petrol as they came out of massive, broiling moulding machines
5. The best job involved a weekend in Venice at the Hotel Danieli, which often finds itself listed in the world’s top 10
6. I once mistook the actress Joanna Lumley for a friend of mine and confused her by asking how Paul Smith was these days
7. Some people say they can’t sing. I truly can’t. My vocalisations were once described as the ’song of the blue whale on its last legs’ [not to mix a metaphor or anything]

I’m tagging Reluctant blogger and Dayzofrain. I would tag more people but I’m new at this and don’t have too many friends yet.

It’s my life

These days, I find I’m getting rather used to the reversal of roles in our family. So I’m quite happy to do some of the creative thinking around how we bring up our daughter, about S-’s routines, welfare and happiness.

I’m still pretty rubbish at shopping, but I am getting used to the more spontaneous things about parenting: like snatching sleep where and when you can and having to think on your feet when you’ve nothing in the fridge for lunch.

One thing I found very difficult at first is the strange language of parenthood. And it has taken me a little while, but I’m now scarily fluent in Motherese, that strange tongue where you have conversations with people in your immediate vicinity – whom you may or may not know – though to all intents and purposes you’re actually talking to your child.

Search me out on a typical day and you’ll find me on the edge of groups of women speaking in a bizarre, descriptive language that requires a loud voice and an irritating over-reliance on the third person:

‘Yes, S-, the boy is climbing on the table. Yes, he’s very clever, but I hope he doesn’t fall off. Can his mummy see him? Oh no. Ouch… It’s ok. It’s ok, look, there’s the boy’s mummy, running over.’

In the evenings I relax by practicing grown up conversations with my wife. Luckily, she often tolerates my stumbling and sometimes rather juvenile efforts.

Alone again or

Am I allowed to say I’ve just deleted two links from my blogroll? Well, I’m going to anyway.

Oh, you know how it it is: these were not relationships that were going to go anywhere! It was always take take take, as far as I could see.

One guy couldn’t even raise himself to despam me, so everytime I tried to post a comment on his site it just bounced back. The other seems to have run out of ideas, and anyway didn’t even have the courtesy to read what I sent him properly.

I’m probably flouting every known rule of international, not to say personal relations, but stuff ‘em.

This isn’t special pleading but everytime I look around I realise that I am in a unique situation: a stay-at-home dad and a parent by adoption. So I’m always on the look out for friends.

I have actually been on a play date where I met a bloke in a similar situation – but I don’t know what happened. He never writes, he never calls!

Joking aside, it would be good to know if there’s anybody else like me out there in the blogosphere.

Stormy weather

S- had her first real tantrum yesterday. It started around lunchtime when we got back from the shops. Actually the warning signs had been there for a while – check out repeatedly lying down on the floor in the supermarket for a good example – but I hadn’t read them correctly.

When we got home and I lifted her out of the car seat she first resisted and then tried to get back in to the car. At which point, loaded down with shopping and simmering with exasperation, I had to pick her up and carry her into the house.

In the kitchen I needed to put her down again to deal with the stuff I’d bought as well as some housework. I also had to make lunch.

As soon as her feet touched the floor she went apeshit, running from one side of the room to the other, banging on the walls and wailing. Then she tried to open the doors to the cupboard where the knives are kept.

Needless to say this was a little alarming.

When I got her away from the cupboards, she threw herself down on the floor and held her arms up, her sign that she wanted to be picked up. But to be honest I didn’t respond straight away: perhaps wrongly a) I reasoned that she needed to calm herself and b) my hands were full.

She was pretty soon in torrents of tears and it took ages for her to finally choke them back. I suppose it started to get back to normal only when I put her in her high chair and moved it so that we sat side by side, rather than at our normal right angles, to have lunch.

I remembered Penelope Leach’s books and her assertion that toddlers constantly see-saw between their overwhelming desire for independence and the fear that their emotions will drive their parents away.

One of the lessons we picked up from our adoption classes is that adopted kids have that extra terror of abandonment. Yet they spend much of their young lives trying to get you to turn your backs on them, trying to test you out. This is why adoptive parents can’t always react in ways that birth parents might [they shouldn't, for example, use the Naughty Step with their kids]: because it’s important not to reinforce the child’s inner belief that they’re not wanted and are unreformedly bad.

It seems to me that children, adopted or otherwise, need to be as close as possible to their parents [though maybe not always in their arms] when they’re having these emotional meltdowns. It’s not just about physical safety but also about psychological support: ‘I still love you,’ you’re telling them, ‘and it’s ok to feel like you do’.

‘Though possibly not to throw your yoghurt in my face!’

Crossroads blues

This blog and I have had a bit of a distant relationship lately. The family has been away a lot, first with friends and then with my parents. Sometimes writing needs to take second place to life!

I’ve also reached a point where it’s difficult to decide what to do next. The blog has grown beyond what it was originally meant to be – the simple diary of a [simple] stay-at-home dad – to cover a lot of other subjects. Now there are almost too many ways to go, eg:

• More cute stories about S- [the straight ahead road]
• More about adoption and perhaps even on the potential relationship G-, I and S- herself may have with S-’s birth parents [the torturous route]
• Something more serious, eg on child development or adoption politics [the right fork], or more comedic [the left-hand turn]

For the straight ahead road I think most people already get the picture: how many more times can you say something before it becomes a turn off?

For the torturous route I’m not sure I have the right to talk about people I don’t know and whom S- is likely to come to have strong feelings about. And anyway mining recent history is hardly going to be of interest to anyone other than G- and I – and possibly S- in the future.

The other options seem to require a significant change to my approach and committment – a re-think, if you like, of my on-line identity.

Hmmm.

Actually I’ve also been getting through quite a few books recently. I’ve just finished reading Born on a blue day, the memoir of a guy growing up with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s a fascinating book and I found it personally relevant in a number of interesting and surprising ways [no, I'm not claiming to have an An extraordinary mind!].

Now I’m just about to start re-reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, a book I first read in my early teens.

When I picked up Zen in the bookshop last week I got the strong sense that here was a book with a function. There was something within the pages that demanded to be said, and for reasons other than simple authorial cartharsis.