The New Wet Patch

Most mornings, my colleagues and I who have kids have the "how was night" conversation. It is characterised by both jocularity and a certain amount of one-upmanship.

P: Morning all. I'm shattered. Bloody kid woke me at 5am.

B: That's nothing. Suzy weed in our bed and we all had to decant to the kids' bunk beds.

Me: Aah, kid's urine in your bed. The new wet patch. (Howls of laughter from entire office). That's nothing. Mine poohed in our bed last night. Lucky it was firm and his Spider-Man pyjamas held it in.

The new wet patch. I think that says it all. Everything changes when you become a parent. Everything is now relative to the fact that you have children. Some of it is great. Some of it is quite simply tragic. Trying to sleep with your feet in cold kid's wee is tragic. More tragic though is the fact that that as long as your kid is in your bed, that's the only wet patch you're gonna experience.

I have recently made another change and returned to work full time. I wasn't managing trying to be a mum in the afternoons whilst I had clients calling me up on the phone. I know women are supposed to be able to multi-task but I just couldn't deal with a language challenged (can't say mum yet) but certainly not vocally challenged (instead of talking she screams long high and loud) 18 month-old daughter, a four year old son who simply had to show me how his parasaurolophus could hang from his pirate ship, AND offer my client considered advice on their current crisis. Dear client, I often wanted to shriek, I am having my own crisis. It may not be costing me millions, but it may well cost me my sanity.

So sanity now prevails in my home. It's not easy. I feel guilty a lot about how much time I spend with my kids but they seem to be adjusting just fabulously. Now we just have to make some changes to our current sleeping arrangements and ensure the wet patch is the one we all remember from before we had kids.

Literary Meme

In a last ditch attempt to get myself back in the blog, I am attempting a Meme. Here goes.

1. Who is your favourite hero of fiction?
It started out with Nancy Drew, and graduated to Zooey

2. What is your most treasured possession?
I truly would mourn the loss of none (except my R30 sunglasses - that's about US$5! I love them.) As for my kids, didn't someone clever and wise whose name I cannot remember say we don't own them.

3. Which living person do you most dislike?
Smug ones

4. What is your greatest fear?
Fear itself

5. Who or what has been the greatest love of your life?
Reading (and duh, my family of course)

6. What is your greatest regret?
Being intimidated into not marching on campus against apartheid

7. If you could choose to be a character in a book, who would it be?
Dorothea from Middlemarch

8. Which book have you read the most in your lifetime?
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

9. What is your favourite journey?
Over Sir Lowry's Pass with Cape Town below, and driving up into the Drakensberg mountains from Pietermaritzburg

10. What do you most value in a friend?
A good laugh

11. What quality do you most admire in a woman?
Humour, strength, honesty, insight

12. What are your favourite names?Franny and Zooey, but my husband won in naming our kids Joseph and Ella. He says I have appalling taste in names and he may be right; I once liked the name Ptolemy.

13. What do you do as a hobby?
Read, ceramics (the new pottery)

14. What are your top 3 books?
Anna Karenina
A Suitable Boy
Almost any Russian novel

15. Where do you get your greatest ideas for writing?
On my pillow

The Mother's Christmas Wish List

There is a very clever very funny woman on the web down here. Her name is Sam Wilson and she edits www.women24.com. I have laughed at everything she has ever written. Her latest missive - The Mother's Christmas Wish List had me cackling - see below.

It is that time of year again, when we mothers pull out our best 'oh, you shouldn't have!' smiles and glue then on our faces while we unwrap yet another round of bath bubbles, cheap perfume, and indescribably ugly clay things handed to us by our nearest and dearest.

And I am not even talking about the ridiculous gifts we get from our children.

Well, not this year. This year, I am writing a list of all the things a mother really wants and I am sticking it on the fridge. Hell, and as my Christmas present to other mothers, I will stick it on the pre-school notice board as well.

The thing is, even though I am a mother, I still like nice stuff. You know, lovely things a la Absolutely Fabulous that come in happy, glossy spreads on magazine pages – things like exotic handbags, interestingly pointy shoes, perfectly designed and deceptively heavy little bowls for holding, well, nothing... you know the kind of stuff I mean.

There is this horrid idea that once you become a mother, all your heart now desires is gift-wrapped up with your child and your new role as Mom.

We all know this isn't true, so the first caveat to any mother's Christmas wish list would be that those around us remember that we are still, well, open for business on the general gift front.
That said of course, there are some gift ideas which are a little more mother specific. Here are a few, some large and some not so large...

• A bigger bed. I don't care what size you already have, if you have children, it isn't big enough.
• Knock out drops that actually work. Preferably with 'Homeopathic' emblazoned in huge letters on the side, to sidestep that nasty guilt issue.
• And when I say work, I don't mean make your kid woozy enough to start knocking into furniture, I mean actually make them sleep an eight-hour stretch with one application.
• A totally waterproof, completely indestructible portable phone. If it can't survive a night in the toilet, it doesn't count.
• A truly sexy nightie, that is clingy enough to make you feel good, without, god forbid, actually being clingy. And (this is the tricky bit) in a breast-milk resistant fabric that can be machine-washed. Black is good.
• A weekend for two in a nice quiet B & B, far from home. Enough with the promises... I want confirmed reservations accompanied by written and notarised commitments from properly vetted babysitters.
• A day pass to the movies, for one, with all the popcorn money manageable. (Remember the MOVIES? Remember being ALONE?)
• A fabulous full body massage. Preferably from someone who doesn't have small, sticky hands.
• A deadbolt for the bathroom door.
  A small laminated list of phone numbers. Not doctors and stuff... but the other important ones: a birthday cake woman who delivers for example, or a fancy dress person who can sew a hump a jumpsuit overnight (what is it with preschools and their complicated concerts? Anyone out there these days who can sew well enough to make a CAMEL costume? I ask you.)
• An Internet grocery-shopping list, already laboriously entered into your computer, covering all the basics, so that you can just press 'bing', and get the whole lot delivered.
• A useful wodge of boarding school brochures, which can be used not only as light, escapist reading of an evening, but can also (if you kids are a little older) be scattered around the home in a pleasingly little people behaviour-enhancing way.
• A huge stack of the latest and greatest novels. I don't care if I don't have time to read them now, I just want to know that other people also believe that I can and will... in the not too distant future.
• Seriously good jewellery. I have built other people, almost completely by myself... and as such, have garnered the brownie points required for some really fabulous shiny stuff.
• A Government Proclamation banning the practice of barricading all supermarket checkouts with sweets.
• And lastly, a better bottle of Scotch. I don't care what kind of scotch you are drinking now, if you are a mother, it isn’t good enough.

Happy Christmas Sam - I hope your wishes come true.

Porn or erotica: does it matter if you're 4?

A strange question, and not one I anticipated having to grapple with on behalf of my 4-year old son quite yet. I have been mulling over this one over for a few weeks, wondering whether this is actually a problem or not.

I went to collect my beloved innocent boy from a friend where he'd been to play for the afternoon. His mum welcomed me into the house and took me through to her bedroom where the boys were watching a dvd. While listening to her natter away about her renovation, I chanced to look up at the pictures on her wall...and choked.

On the walls were six large framed photographs of very naked women. They were not Rubens-like old fashioned black and whites. Nor were they culturally interesting and beautifully rendered drawings of couples shagging a la Karma Sutra. Nope, these could not be described as art. They were full colour full frontal fully nude shots of women with NOTHING left to the imagination. They were porn. Granted they were not ugly porn, with girls called Kimberley displaying shaven air-brushed pudenda and captions underneath saying things like: Kim likes to ride horses and read poetry. She also likes her men hard and ready!

These did have a certain appealing aesthetic. Some might argue that the pictures constitute erotica. The liberal in me demanded they be classified as erotica. Indeed I may have argued that until I had to think about my baby boy looking at them whilst watching Monsters Inc with his little friend one quiet Friday afternoon.

What do mothers do in such cases? They phone another mother. Early the next morning I rang the mum who is my arbiter of all things parental.
Me: "Has L been to play at T's house?"
Her: "Yes."
Me: "Did you go inside?"
Her: "Yes."
Me: "Did you go into the main bedroom?"
Her: "Oh, you're calling about the pictures?"
Me: "Yes."
Her: "Of course. T's mother showed them to me specifically. Said that's her and her husband's thing."
Me: "Oh. Nice for them. Do you think it's OK for our 4-year olds to see them?"
Her: "Yes."
Me: Oh, OK."
Her: "Did he mention it to you?
Me: "No."

So I dropped it. Then I took the coward's route. I invited the son of the sexy mummy to play at our house rather.

Not even organic slugs taste good

For years I have avoided the green thing. As an issue I actively engaged with I mean. When the New Yorker ran long pieces on global warming or the melting of permafrost I simply skipped them. That's a big one for me cos I usually read everything in the New Yorker - OK maybe not all the theatre pieces, but I did read the one on Monty Python's Spam premiering on Broadway.

Then my interest began to be piqued.

First the New Yorker ran a piece on organic farming, specifically lettuce. It was a long investigative piece on the growth of the organic food market, and how it was becoming mainstream and run by conglomerates and how that ran counter to the spirit of organic farming. Fine I thought, but why all this effort and money going into organic growing of lettuce. Could it be that much better than what I buy at my local overpriced deli supermarket?

A while afterwards I had lunch at Marianne's in Stanford. This tiny restaurant up the coast from Cape Town had developed what can only be described as a cult following. While waiting for our table I ambled through the enormous kitchen garden. Sage, spinach, tomatoes, basil, butternut, celery, cilantro, lemons, rosemary, chives, dozens of lettuces - radicchio, frisee, cos, butter . Rows of beautiful food. And then overlooking the garden I ate the most delicious salad ever. Each lettuce leaf tasted of something yummy.

A taste memory of that salad remained with me over the months. It began to resurrect memories of some of the truly great food moments I've had. Eating asparagus we'd just picked from a friend's farm in the Drakensberg mountains; I am not sure if it tasted better raw or cooked as both were sublime. Earthy and fresh. Bloody hell, it tasted like asparagus. A dessert of gooseberries straight from a garden in Franschoek. Sweet and tart and that earthy thing again. A bowl of meaty tomatoes and bitter herbs tossed in balsamic to accompany lunch and dinner picked from the garden of the guest house we were staying in in Corsica.

Even now, months and years later I can recall the taste of these and other fresh organic produce I have been privileged to eat straight someone's garden.

As with blogging I began to plan a kitchen garden in bed. My visions tended to Versailles. A long elegantly laid out formal potager. Me tending it in gloves and a wide brimmed panama hat. I bought books on kitchen gardens around the world and drooled over square, circular and crescent shaped raised beds dripping with tomotoes and fennell, edged with perfectly tended box hedges and canopied over with sweet smelling roses. But the visions proved overwhelming. I had garden block. I was no closer to picking my own salad.

One hot Sunday morning after another tasteless frisee and cos combination I woke up and raced into the garden. I annexed a rectangle of 3x3 metres from my kids' grassy knoll, sped to the nursery, and gathered some helpers who could dig. By 4pm that afternoon we had a kitchen rectangle. Not very big. Edged with rather unattractive left over yellow bricks. We quartered the space and planted our seedlings.

Six weeks later it really is beautiful although not quite Versailles. So far we've only eaten herbs, lettuce and spinach but the tomato plants are vigorous and ascending their stake nicely. The only bug busters I've used have been crushed egg shells which have worked well and planting some marigolds and onions.

Only hitch is no one in our house except me will eat the spinach. My husband will grudgingly eat some lettuce, and my son says its all green and yucky. Not as yucky as the organic lettuce stuffed slug I ate by mistake. My son says he is waiting for the tomatoes. I can only hope they live up to his expectations. My kitchen rectangle has exceeded mine.

The Perfect Friday Night


The perfect Friday night. What is it? Well tonight I had two options (sort of.)

The opportunity was there to glam up, and swan off to dinner with mates - sans husband who is at a work thang - at the gorgeous and yummy restaurant, 95 Keerom St. I would engage in witty conversation with my book scout friend; have intense - and edifying let me tell you - discussions with my other old friend about her the reconstruction and development she has done on herself in Greyton this week; get the lowdown on SA's hot hot hot music scene from the scout's husband; all while I ate delectable carpaccio of linefish, probably cob, perfectly offset by an excellent Springfield Sauvignon Blanc. All this and I get to watch the whose who air kissing as they meet and greet. This would be followed by some serious dancing at a concert being held in a seriously cool small venue (the only way to do it) that the music guru would slide us into.

Unfortunately no babysitter was forthcoming so plan number two is in operation. Open a bottle of icy cold Chardonnay whilst bathing children. Glug down first glass. Bath kids, storytime, bed kids all by 7.10pm. Ding dong, Asian takeaways at the door. Wolf 'em down watching some crappy TV, then into bed with a September edition of the New Yorker (life is getting a little on top of me I confess), and then to sleep. Bliss.The doorbell just rang. Dinner's here. Good night.

Censored in cyberspace: Confrontation and technology can be a fabulous combination

Sometimes it's quite tiring living down here on the southern tip. Emotionally tiring I mean. Maybe I just need a holiday. But my Pollyanna sensibility left me briefly today when a new client wrote a one paragraph fax stating that they were unhappy about the demographics of our client service team. Despite us having won the pitch, and the client having met the entire team during that pitch. The client even announced our winning the account in the business media - and then the letter.

While Black Economic Empowerment in its local form is a uniquely South African phenomenon, affirmative action is not, and has been used to some good effect all over the globe. But it got me thinking and I realised that my problem was not with the client's request for us to address the demographics of our team, but the WAY it was communicated to us. I couldn't engage with them over it, we couldn't discuss it, there was no back and forth. It left me feeling powerless, a bit angry and a little confused.

And as new tools for communicating hit the market, it is getting easier and easier to avoid confrontation, and that ostensible good thing: the face to face which allows for a back and forth discussion.

But I realised this is not always a bad thing. Take the sms for example. As I was leaving work the other day my cellphone beeped. A message from my 8 month old daughter's nanny to say: "We have to talk. I thought I was 6 weeks pregnant but actually it is 32 weeks." Well, as it was the first I'd even heard of her being pregnant I almost gave birth for her right then and there in my open plan office.

We talked when I got home and once I was over the shock, I realised that the sms had actually helped. My nanny had been terrified to tell me that she was pregnant and the sms broke the ice. By the time I had got home I already had four contingency plans swimming around in my pond of a brain.

Not that I am scary, and confrontation is certainly not my own strong point. I naturally shy away from it. But I am her employer and there is that eternal unavoidable unequal power dynamic inherent in such a relationship which always makes confrontation hard. In this case, the sms gave us both time to think before we spoke.

And then there is the blog. I got booted off a group blog the other day. I was quite shocked. I was even a little hurt. Actually I wasn't booted, but the moderator would not post my comment until I rewrote it to change my tone which was considered too personal. So I bailed.

I began blogging for a many reasons, but chief amongst those was the opportunity to rant, to comment freely on whatever I felt like. I was euphoric after my first two posts. Even more excited when I was invited to join this group blog. But then I got censored. Censored in cyberspace, I didn't realise it could happen. But of course it does. I am censoring myself as I write this. BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE READ IT. It satisfies another reason behind my need to blog: not only to be published, but also to be read.

Cyberspace, emails, blogs and chatrooms are a blessing for those of us who have opinions, want to engage and confront, but aren't great at doing it face to face. Call me a coward but technology has created some space for those of us with difficult, sassy or downright slanderous things to say.

As with everything there's a limit though. Getting dumped by sms must be a real bummer - you can't even throw a drink in the bastard's face!