Family

Blink. Blink. Blink.

I’ve been watching this cursor for two days now and wondering, have I lost my ability to string pretty sentences together?

I hope not.

—

Words scream around inside my head and the longer I leave them in there, the bigger they grow and the harder they are to get out.

So let’s see how we go.

—

My son has preliminary assessments to decide whether he is possibly autistic. The gatekeepers – perfectly lovely women in their own right – appear to be there solely to decide whether I am being a hypochondriac on behalf of my son. They seem a little shocked when I am able to use their jargon and we discuss his inability to transition and his burgeoning echolalia.

His red flags are raised and waved high and we walk out knowing that he will be assessed for autism, that he is (very definitely, likely, probably) possibly on the spectrum.

After we leave, I wonder at their reaction to the language I used.

Doesn’t every parent learn how to speak medicalese when advocating for their children?

Apparently not.

—

I have immaculate conceptions, two of them and now they walk around, demanding things and shrieking at me. A doctor tells me I am very lucky to have conceived on my own without help, that my uterus is very likely broken, a desolate wasteland of stuff that isn’t babymaking friendly.

We organise to run tests and I leave, feeling like maybe I wasn’t insane after all.

At the same time, my body contracts and I realise just how badly I want a third baby and just how unlikely that is going to be without assistance.

But we’ll tread that path when it slams us in the face.

—

My plants grow and thrive and I spend a lot of time hiding in my garden – yes, the children may be outside with me, but fences separate us and my son does his whining and clinging somewhere that isn’t my leg. This leaves me space to breath as I coax a bean plant straight here and twine a pea shoot around a string. Tomatoes in seedling boxes need poking every few hours, how on earth can they be expected to grow without me checking on them?

I breath in the smells of warm dirt inside temporary hot houses and wish that summer were here. I am so sick of being cold.

I suspect my plants feel the same way.

—

My writing feels disjointed, which seems to suit my life right now. A mess of everything, being clashed together into a jumble and I’m left trying to make sense of some of it. Grief runs underneath everything, a dark tow threatening to pull me down into the dark.

Instead I make beds and wish for warmth and long hot days outside getting my hands dirty.

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There comes a point as a mother, when the days are too hard and too long and you wonder how you’re going to get through them. When you stand under the shower and dread having to get out and look at the mess that was caused while you washed your hair and scoured the dirt from your fingernails (you selfish bitch).

When you know that someone needs to take over, because if you yell anymore, you’re going to lose your voice and while the lack of yelling seems maybe preferable, then they go and do something else and TIME OUT screams out of your mouth before you can stop it and you’re left swearing at an empty room, while you clean up things, a-fucking-gain.

When you wake up to an entire tin (a new tin) of drinking chocolate tipped on the floor, and the washing has been tipped out of the baskets so that the baskets can be used for climbing on, and paint is open on your computer one hundred times and you think that maybe some emails have been deleted, but you can’t tell and you wonder – how did all this happen while I was only 10 metres away? how silently does she move, so as not to wake me?

You seriously consider putting locks on the kitchen taps, but how the fuck do you lock a tap and TURN THE GODDAMNED WATER OFF and you’re swearing and she runs away, not crying, but trying to avoid the yelling. Only she pulls all the insides out of the textas and draws on the walls with them and how many hours until bedtime?

When you’re 3 steps behind her all day, trying to maintain the chaos while your head wants to explode and you kind of wish you owned a jumping castle (with a lockable door) so you could throw her in there and leave her to bounce off the walls, somewhere that wasn’t quite so destructive.

And she sings the same 10 words over and over for 30 minutes until your head wants to explode and you snap and she screams at you BUT I AM TRYING TO SING and goes back to what she was doing and you wonder how the fuck you’re meant to get through this, why me? why us?

And you want to run away, outside, with your camera maybe, or a block of chocolate and some ear muffs, so that you can’t hear the strangled screaming from inside the house when the children notice that you’re gone and want to hang around your neck. But you can’t, because the mayhem and destruction aren’t worth it.

***

There is something I’m meant to be doing today, something nice, something that will save my sanity, by allowing me to sit with other mothers and drop the ball just a little while she fails to complete anything set in front of her. I don’t want to. I don’t want to take her out of the house because all I’ve done is yell and all she’s done is tip out drinking chocolate and upend bookshelves and hit her brother and destroy everything and send me insane.

But I will wrestle her into the shower and I will force her to get dressed and have her hair brushed and get in the car and I will ignore the screams until eventually, we will be somewhere else and yet again, I won’t be getting anything done that needs doing, but I won’t be killing my children and that’s always a bonus, right? And the other mothers will recognise that tiny piece of insanity in my eyes and smile at us, knowing that they’ve been here too.

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