I slept for four hours this afternoon and I still feel like I’ve been hit by a bus. When my brain is not dripping out of my nose, I’m busy hovering around my very unwell son, who has a double ear infection, with a possible chest infection and is spending all of his time sleeping and refusing food/liquids.

I’m sure I’ll be back Internet, just not right now.

I was awoken this morning by the screeching of Elmo coming from the other room. Somewhere around 1am, my son had climbed into bed with me, leaving Nathan to sleep on the couch and my daughter alone in her room.

Considering Nathan doesn’t watch Elmo and my son still had his toenails jammed firmly into my stomach, I only had one suspect. A certain five year old girl.

Of course, knowing that my daughter was awake, I panicked that my alarm hadn’t gone off because my phone was plugged into the charger. She never wakes up before me on a school morning. Of a weekend, yes, but a school morning? Never.

A quick glance at my alarm fixed my panic, but by then Elmo had woken my son, who climbed out of bed and promptly overflowed his nappy, leaking urine all down his legs and the floor. Despite being an hour before get up time, it appeared that we were all awake.

This is the problem with small children. They are unpredictable and make you panic over missed alarms.

I suppose I should be thankful, for the urine and the demands that dragged me out of bed, because I’m sitting here now, realising that my alarm never did go off.

Huh.

I guess that was lucky afterall.

It’s not that we’ve run out of food – we haven’t. It’s that we’ve run out of easy food. No bread, no ham, no sandwich meat. No tortillas, no tomatoes, or cucumbers, or carrots.

This is what I tell myself as I wander around the house aimlessly, looking for something for breakfast. My stomach is flip flopping between hungry and don’t you dare eat or you’ll vomit (again) and all I can think about is avocado on toast, or tomato salad – neither of which I can currently make.

Obviously this would all be easier if the supermarket wasn’t so far away and if I could actually be bothered to go food shopping today.

Which I can’t.

+++

This is real life. Not prettied up for public consumption, with sparkling skirting boards and perfectly dressed children. My daughter has wildly tangled hair and dirt under her fingernails and my son refuses to eat anything. My fridge is empty looking and the mayonaise is past its use by date. I just found a dead tomato, weeping liquid into a drip tray.

+++

There is a pantry full of things to make and eat. Beans, pasta, noodles, rice, canned tomatoes. Staples that we never run low on. There is a freezer containing meat and I have two kilos of chicken feet, that I keep forgetting to make into stock.

I count my blessings every time I complain that we’ve run out of ham, or there is no swiss cheese left.

I am so lucky, to be able to complain about this.

I had a baby at seventeen, which contrary to popular belief did not ruin my life, or destroy my future. You’d be surprised at how many people will console you on a pregnancy if they feel that you are younger than the “perfect” age to be a mother. You would also be surprised at the treatment that young mothers receive from people in positions of authority, but I digress.

I could list all of my reasons for falling pregnant, but I’ve written them down so many times before that they sound trite. Needless to say, it was the right decision for me and my family and here we are, six years later.

When I was pregnant, and then a new mother, no one asked me what I “did”. Which suited me, because I didn’t know at that point. I was a mother, but my daughter was too screamy for me to think about what else I could do. My entire life was wrapped up in keeping the baby happy, feeding the baby, stopping the baby biting my nipple. While my friends were heading off to Uni, I was changing nappies and discovering just how in love you can fall with something you’ve created.

Two years after my daughter was born, I was pregnant again, with my son. When you’re pregnant, no one asks you what you “do”. You’re just a gestating vessel, the means to an end, a giant egg waiting to crack. Men avoid your eye (is pregnancy catching?) and women ask strange questions about your internal organs. Pregnancy is the only time it is deemed socially acceptable to ask a woman about her cervix.

As is the usual course of events when everything goes well, my son was born, cried some, grew some and eventually got to the age where I could leave him with his Daddy to go and DO things – which is when the inevitable questions start.

I was at an exhibition opening and someone asked me “what do you do?” and instead of saying “I’m a mother” I found myself saying the (only slightly practised in front of a mirror) line: “I am a writer.”

Which then leads to the inevitable questions about what do you write and where and so on. It took a few more months in front of the mirror to get those coming out smoothly.

You see, no one really cares what you DO, it’s just a way to start conversation.

I write things and I publish them on the Internet and 90% of society thinks that I’m a bit weird because of it – but I can ignore them. Anyone can be a writer, that is the beauty of it. Just like anyone can be an artist, or a musician, or a sculptor.

No one cares what you do to earn money – they care about what you DO because you love it. People aren’t interested in how you pay the bills (unless you might be helpful to them), they are interested in passion.

This is what I do. I am a writer and when people ask what I write, I tell them: I write a blog. It’s quite popular now and I really enjoy it.

Try it. The next time someone asks what you do, tell them what you love to do, rather than where you work. They might surprise you.

When my daughter was a baby and I was eighteen, I was visiting my parents.

My daughter was a screamy baby, prone to jagged fits of wailing that sometimes lasted hours, but we had discovered on a previous visit that she loved the baby swing. Yellow and plastic, my parents had picked it up second hand and hung it with some rope from the veranda. No electronic swinging baby devices here, this swing had a piece of rope tied to the back, so that I could sit back comfortably and still swing the baby.

That day, it was too cold to sit outside and eventually my mother and I convinced Dad that he should put some nails in the roof beams in his shed, so that we could move the swing inside and I could actually put the baby down.

Grumbling slightly (he grumbles about everything – I suspect it’s so that my mother and I don’t get complacent and take him and his amazing building and making skills for granted), he went to get the six inch nails and his hammer.

As he started to hammer, I moved to the other side of the eight ball table, jiggling and rocking Amy as I went.

Suddenly, Dad hit the nail wrong and it jumped out of the beam, flew across the room and hit me just above the eye.

All of this happened so fast, that my father was still looking around to see where the nail had fallen, and no one else was quite sure what they’d seen.

To my credit, while I was shocked, I didn’t drop the baby, or burst into tears, choosing instead to yell “YOU JUST HIT ME IN THE HEAD WITH A NAIL!”

Luckily (and I do mean luckily – because if you’ve just been hit in the head with a nail, you have to look for some positives) it flew end over end and hit me with the head of the nail, rather than the sharp end.

Dad was suitably apologetic, Mum produced an ice-pack, while Nathan jiggled Amy and I prodded at my eyebrow to make sure it was still there.

I developed a pretty bruise just above my eyebrow and a hefty worry about standing near someone hammering nails into wood. Nails are unpredictable.

And that is how my father tried to take out my eye with a nail.

There is silence in the house and I am still bleary eyed, but I have made the effort to get out of bed 40 minutes early so that I can start writing here. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that I am so busy today that I won’t have time later. Hello November. You’ve sort of snuck up there, haven’t you?

***

There is a psych appointment scheduled today. It’s been cathartic to go along each fortnight and just talk. Like every other mother however, last week I found myself dicussing my children. My fears and my stresses and the frustration I feel when I walk into the bedroom to find my daughter perched on top of my closet, eating my chocolate. She’s the perfect candidate for “owling” except for the screaming when she realises that she can’t get down.

Real owls have wings daughter, if you’re going to climb up, you have to learn how to get down. Just don’t break anything.

I spent an hour talking about my children last time, before the therapist gently mentioned that maybe we ought to talk more about me?

Silly girl. She’s not worked with many (any?) mothers, I would put money on it. The children are me and I am them. The fears for their future are not things I can separate from my personal anxiety and the frustration I feel at untriggered meltdowns is just as real as frustration with other adults. Tempered with a lot more love, of course.

I shouldn’t call her silly, in fact she is lovely – even if it is a bit disconcerting to be discussing the tangled web inside my brain with someone my own age.

But that is okay.

The main question is: Do you think she will help me work out how to get a cat into the roof, to eat the baby starlings that have hatched right above my desk? Because it’s hard enough to write a blog post half asleep, without adding shouting babies to the mix.

Writing requires that I lose myself inside my own head. I need to sink into the spaces between the thoughts and drift there for a while.

Mothering requires that I remain in the moment, that I watch and listen and respond, immediately. A litany of cascading thoughts; we need butter, do we have any bread, baby needs a bottle, laundry needs hanging, what’s for dinner? My brain shoots ahead of me and I’m wiping benches, bums and noses in equal measure and not writing a thing.

This too shall pass. They’re only little, they’ll only be little for a short amount of time. One day I’ll be begging for them to snuggle me and tell me about the flowers.

I remind myself these things, as I keep myself busy and don’t think about the words sitting inside my soul, bubbling away from behind the dam in there.

One day, one day I will write and it will flow and I won’t feel like I’m being torn in half every time I drag myself back to reality.

One day, I won’t feel guilty for spending long moments inside my own mind, tasting the words and playing with them.

It’s a balancing act, knowing what to write about on the internet. An intricate dance of stories and perspectives, making sure you don’t put words in someone’s mouth and side-stepping the issue of privacy invasion. Knowing when to speak and when to hold your tongue, when to write and when to walk away.

It’s about more than not wanting to damage your own brand with drama.

It’s about knowing that truth can be fluid sometimes and not wanting it to be; wanting truth to be truth and lies to remain unspoken.

It’s a fine line.

***

My son is sad and his warm mass draped on my lap and snuggled to my chest brings to the fore all my maternal feelings. It doesn’t matter than he is dribbling in my cleavage or that I am not able to move, he is warm and sad and I am his mother and I can fix this, this time. When he is older and I cannot surround him with my arms, then he will be sad and my heart will break at how useless magic kisses have become.

I put him to bed with a warm bottle, knowing that he is tired and listen to him cry anyway. This is hard. This breaks my heart. This is probably best for all of us, that he sleeps now.

***

I send my daughter outside, to play fortheloveofgod go and play. She lies on the trampoline for an hour, not moving and I watch her as I wander around the house. She is tired and miserable and sad and bendy. She comes back inside and we lay together on the couch and I feel the heat of her. A temperature rising, her joints aching. I thank everything that I have panadol handy and I dose her up and lay her in bed. She is limp and miserable and I lay with her for a time.

Motherhood is hard.

Motherhood is beautiful.

***

The truth is hard.

The truth is beautiful.

With all this talk of authenticity, I can only be myself and this is how I am in real life too. I might not talk about all of it, but I’m honest at the core.

There are things happening and things brewing and at this point, I’m not sure I’m content to sit back and say nothing, but the drama and the angst, I don’t want it.

So I’m saying: Watch and listen and see what happens. Sit here alongside me and we’ll eat popcorn and wait for the fallout. Because it’s coming and it’s not going to be pretty.

Writing is cathartic for me and sometimes, I need to write things out before my head explodes from the words and the hurt going around and around and around.

Sometimes though, once I’ve written them and gotten some feedback, it’s better. The words stop and the insanity stops and I can shake off the hurt and move forward again.

This time, I don’t need to leave the post up. I’ve got no real need to sit and wait for the vitriolic emails to appear in my inbox. And don’t doubt me here, I know they’d appear. This is the Internet and I’ve always known my writing could be found by everybody.

My family is difficult and nuanced and complicated. They are annoying and forgetful and biased. Even when I don’t like them very much, I still love them. I suspect they’re very much like every other family out there.

The people who need to know how I feel already do and the people who made me feel that way in the first place, well, I’m doubting that a shitfest will make me feel better.

I suspect my twitter stream has more spies than Russia and I am fine with that. My twitter stream is not private, in any way shape or form. If my highschool principal was so inclined, he could read what I was up to. In real life, I am intensely introverted. My blog and writing help to combat that and keep me balanced.

So really, this is just me saying that while I don’t feel better as such, I’m not letting it hurt anymore and I’m walking away.

‘That must be so hard’ they say, when I talk about daily life for us. The meltdowns, the screaming, the sensory overloads.

It must be hard.

And I think about it and well, maybe it is a little. But hard is relative and what’s hard for you, isn’t hard for me. This is daily life and I’m drawing on a wealth of experience and it’s not so bad.

Hard for me, is death and grief.

Not life.

My body falls apart and we add yet another diagnosis to my long string of them. A diagnosis that is ‘broken’ when all is said and done.

Maybe this is a little bit hard.

Maybe not. Maybe I’m just overwhelmed right now.

I created life. I gestated it and felt my body swell under my hands. When the time came, I panted and strained and gave birth to life, to a small human being who may just grow up to rule the world. We don’t know yet, life is full of infinite possibility.

I am God for these lives I created and expelled out into the world, the lives that makes mine so infinitely complicated. If I gave birth to them, I know that I am strong enough to mother them and bring them to adulthood.

This is not hard. This is a privilege.