Every January, one of my many new year resolutions is a combination of the themes ‘Lose weight’, ‘Get fit’, ‘Exercise more’ or ‘Lose weight, get fit, exercise less and eat more chocolate covered macadamia nuts’. What? Macadamia nuts are good for you.
Except 2008, which I rang in pregnant. That year my motto was ‘Eat now and worry later’.
This year has been no different, with the small exception that unlike previous attempts at fitness where my enthusiasm for ab crunches disappear quicker than Prada bags on sale, I have managed to stick to my plan — for an entire month. No thanks to my son though.
Every morning the toddler shaped alarm in our room goes off at the unearthly hour of 5am. Our human clock raises both arms and begins to beep non-stop till he is removed from his crib and deposited on the ground to begin to wreak havoc.
In the time it takes me to heat his milk, groggily change in to my exercise clothes and slip the DVD in to the player my son has amassed enough energy to begin laying siege to a small country.
Yes, that’s right. Work out DVD. I have a phobia of gyms, taut women running endlessly on treadmills like lithe hamsters and little boys accompanying their mothers in to the changing rooms and sniggering at all my wobbly bits. Plus at home the succour of my sofa is but a sidelunge away.
As I unfurl my workout mat on to the floor, the boy settles himself on the sofa, drink in hand, waiting. Watching. He knows what or rather who is going
to jump on to our screens. It’s not the colours or the upbeat music that gets this boy going but the parade of spandex clad beauties butt crunching their way across the screen.
As the workout progresses so does my son’s enthusiasm. From the sofa he slowly inches towards the television so that very soon his eye balls are stuck to the screen, mouth wide, drool escaping from the side. This spectacle of male willpower is followed by high octane shouts of glee and clapping. I guess they never really do grow up do they?
In an attempt to dislodge this obstruction from my view, I once made the mistake of coaxing my son to join me on the mat. As I pitifully completed one ab crunch after another I felt a crushing weight on my chest.
No, I wasn’t having an exercise induced heart attack, but a 15-kilo load had been added to my workout in the form of my son. Sitting astride my bulk, he proceeded to jump, rock and wriggle atop me as though he was on of those spring based horses at the park. To make matters worse, he soon found one of my hand weights on the floor and before I knew it, he had deposited it on my head.
When people said labour pains paled in comparison to the pain of raising a child, I didn’t know they meant it literally. I’m contemplating taking up a more gentle form of exercise. Tai chi or yoga or pilates. Something weight-free. Or may be I should just join my son on the sofa and ogle at the women. I might just be able to will myself fit.
The Guardian has a new series of podcasts about family presented by Miranda Sawyer.
You can listen to the first in the series here.
It’s interesting how much of our reading, listening (i mean podcasts) and viewing material changes after children. Before my podcast library was Mark Kermode’s film reviews and the New Yorker’s fiction podcast. I’ve added The Guardian’s new podcast to the list now. I read Motherlode, Mumsnet and far more parenting blogs and sites than I did before, and not always for pure advice or information, but because I enjoy them too.
Not much else to this post really. Just the link. And some rambling.
1. My provisional license has arrived and I start classes this thursday. If you live in the HA1 area I suggest you stay indoors.
2. I have started writing a short story. There. I have gone and jinxed it.
3. I am thinking of writing a play. Only because Mslexia has a six part play writing tutorial thing-a-ma-bob in the magazine. And I have an idea that might be a play. Do you think Chekov used words like Thingamabob?
You’ve got to love a mother who says “I brought you a tuna sandwich. They say it’s brain food. I guess because there’s so much dolphin in it, and you know how smart they are.”
On the fourteenth of January, television’s pre-eminent family, The Simpsons, celebrated their 20th anniversary on air. While Bart and Simpson have been the show’s big draw for many, I’ve always loved the long suffering, blue beehive sporting matriarch Marge. It is a fondness that has only grown since becoming a mother myself.
As a ‘happy homemaker and mother of three’ Marge Simpson is the epitome of a good mother and wife. She is supportive, sensitive and loving to a fault. A good neighbour, daughter-in-law and sister. Her patience with her donut eating husband Homer and son Bart alone should be enough to have her canonised. And she is the moral compass not only of her own family but often serves as one for the entire town of Springfield. She’s perfect. Almost. And that’s why I love her.
Marge is as flawed and human as the rest of us and that’s what saves her from being just another utopian television mom.
Whether she is at the threshold of infidelity with a devilish French bowling instructor (though I wish she’s just gone ahead and had that fling) or wrestling with her gambling addiction, Marge shows that even the most boring suburban life can have its fair share of spice and secret. The pressures of having to raise three children with little help from Homer gets to her too, so much so that in one episode her frustration erupts in road rage, captured by the local news station with the bulletin: “An overworked and under-appreciated housewife has snapped.” How many of us can relate to that? I know I can.
Like many of us struggling to decide whether to stay at home or return to work, Marge has often echoed the voice in our head. Though Marge has been a stay at home mother for most of the last twenty years, and has never really expressed discontent with her role as a homemaker, she has become bored with it and has had a number of episode long careers that are dazzling in their variety. From working as a nuclear technician alongside Homer at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, to owning her own pretzel business and working at an erotic bakery in “Sex, Pies and Idiot Scrapes”, Marge can also add actor, waitress, teacher, estate agent, marriage counsellor, carpenter and police office to her resume. In October of last year she even made it to the cover of Playboy, though I wonder what feminist daughter Lisa had to say about that.
And as a mother struggling to find a look that is stylish and practical, one has to commend Marge on her hairstyle and sartorial look. Her retro beehive, strapless sheath dress and classic string of pearls may not be a look out of Vogue, but then it’s a look that hasn’t dated since she first debuted it two decades ago.
I can see why Marge is a regular fixture on ‘TV’s Best Moms’ lists time after time. Here’s to another twenty years as good mother, forgiving wife, helpful neighbour, zealous police officer and who knows what next?
I finally sent my driving license app off today! yay! I’ve been running… ok i ran once but that counts ok… and have been picking my pen up and doodling. I’m sure a story is going to pop out one of these days.
My very bright and lovely new header is up! The talented Megha who blogs at Arth and Nitya designed it for me and I couldn’t be happier. Thanks Megha!
So this is the year I turn 30. It’s a little depressing when I think of all the things I could have done and should have done and would have done if not for all the excuses I made along the way. But it’s never too late. Or at least that’s what everyone else says. I’m going to try and get everything on my list done this year. Hopefully before October 16th. So far, the get in shape thing seems to be doing quite well. Read about it here on Running Ranis, a collablog I’m contributing to. And, thanks to Surnotes’ comment here, I feel like I’m going to be picking up my pen again this year. There are some stories that have been sitting in my head for the last six months but for some reason I haven’t done anything about them. Or I tried and failed.
But as Chryselle’s post says… THIS IS MY YEAR.
I hope it’s yours too!
Hope this one surpasses 2009 for you in every way possible!
Last week, two-year-old Bryson Ross drowned in the swimming pool in his family home in Florida. Bryson’s mother, Shelley Ross, has a twitter account with over 5,000 followers. In the days since her son’s death, the mother of four has found herself in the midst of a media and twitter storm. The reason? Shelley Ross tweeted about the tragedy.
At 17:32 local time from her Florida home, Ross’ elder son called 911 to report that his two-year-old brother was floating unconscious in the pool.
The paramedics arrived at the house at 17:38. At 18:12, Ross tweeted again, “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.” Tragically, five hours later, he was declared dead. At 23:08, Ross returned to Twitter to update her 5,400-plus readers. “Remembering my million dollar baby.”
Detractors have called Ross a callous, negligent parent with one blogger stating, “A child is dead because (of) his mother’s infatuation with Twitter”. Friends and well wishers have supported the mother of four as a loving, caring parent who was reaching out in her time of need.
There have been plenty of other storm in twitter cups, the most recent being the row over Penelope Trunk, a 42-year-old mother of two who runs a social networking site for managing careers, and has a blog with more than half a million visitors a month.
In September, Trunk tweeted the following: “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a f***ed-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.” Television, blogs and newspapers around the world reported Trunk’s tweet, forcing her to defend her decision. Trunk said that if she could tweet about her sex life, period, and even run-ins with the police why not about a miscarriage.
So how much should one share with the online world? Is there such a thing as ‘too personal’? Where does one draw the line? And should one? Critics say that Ross and Trunk’s decisions to tweet about such intensely personal topics trivialise the issues, but to me that seems an unfair judgement.
Fifty years ago, our support networks consisted of our families, friends and neighbours we grew up with. Today, few of us live in the same country, let alone the city that we were raised in. And so, we choose to share our romances, break ups, marriages, frustrations, politics and lives with an unseen, often unknown online audience whose presence we feel only on our stat counters.
And perhaps no online group is as tightly knit (and fiercely divided) as mothers. Mommy blogs may be derided and ridiculed as a group of women bemoaning their post partum waistlines and potty training dilemmas but it is much more than that. There are few experiences as isolating as motherhood, especially if you do not have the comfort of an extended family. It is to these other ‘dot moms’ and ‘dads’ that parents are turning to for advice, friendship and a cyber shoulder to cry on.
To me, it is not Ross’s decision to turn to her online family for solace that is shocking, but the backlash, the prejudice and the unkindness she has received in return. Terrible things can happen to the best parents. May be we should all try and remember that.
