First they break your body, then they break your heart

Shell-shocked by life, currently, how painful and downright difficult and unmanageable it all can be, and how poorly one seems to manage the things that matter, and also wondering how much blame is it reasonable to apportion oneself, and how much of it all is just in the luck of the draw, chance, whatever.

I'm talking about children, of course, one's offspring, how they grow and change and become people in their own right, if you like, and sometimes it is not all a bed of roses, no. It may turn out so one can't say oh yas, my son, you know, he studies and plays football and the violin, or something, sometimes some of us have to say well you know, I am going to have to turn him to professionals, because what I have been able to do is now done, for better and worse, surely there are things that could still be done, avenues as yet unexplored blah, but as it is, I - me - I cannot do it, because my sleeve (as they say in Finnish) is empty, what I - me - could do has been done, and this is where it's got us.

(I'm here reminded of the Hollywood flick of some years ago, As Good as It Gets, it was really quite a good flick, I thought, and Jack Nicholson's character says something like "Yes well life is all yachts and sandwiches for some people but we aren't those people". Wish I could remember exactly how that line went. I bet I'll go and look for it on YouTube before I know it, and then I'll miss sauna because nipping into YouTube always seems to take hours of my life. But yes. Yachts and sandwiches and studies and interests and achievements and stuff it may be, only we aren't those people.)

I wish I could remember (something else that's coming up in my mind via some associative process) what book it was in and by whom, but there was a thing I read (years ago) where the writer posed a question, a "what if" - what if life moved backwards, and we disappeared, in the end, into the mental abyss of infancy and ultimately, back into the womb, would the final separation, the final parting, the final good-bye to those we love be any less painful. I am thinking about that now, playing with it in my mind (never really known whether I thought very highly of this particular "what if", but it has stuck on the mind, at least the skeletal framework of it), in a "yes, just think, we would live backwards, we'd come together from the various dust particles and ashes and what not, to, to - what is the opposite of the verb "to age"? Enyoungen? To enyoungen and enyoungen until finally we'd disappear up our mothers' birth canals no, better not write that, someone is bound to feel quite sick reading it, and then slowly disintegrate into cells which would become particles of her body, and all told it doesn't sound much different from the disintegration and disappearance into the ground.

The magpies have been coming in ones and twos so far this spring. Fine-looking birds they are, actually, magpies, shiny and handsome and graphically stylish. I wouldn't mind having one, and then I'd know where Sorrow would be, it would be waiting for me at home.

And now for something completely different...a non-commercial commercial break

Although naturally I hope you will all enjoy this little clippety here embedded, I am particularly aiming it for those (un)lucky enough to live in Finland (delete as you see fit). Because, you see, you Finland-dwellers can go and vote for the dude leaping about in the clip. Ramin Sohrab he is called, and he is a participant in (Finland's) Channel Four's Talent Suomi competition. More importantly, one of the pirates attacking him at around 0:45 is my younger son. Sunday's semifinal will show a completely new (even bigger, even better) choreography, not this one here, and although I am naturally sworn to total secrecy, I can tell you my son will be one of the guys in sunglasses (in this one, he's the pirate exiting alone upstage left).

Actually, while I'm here, I can inflict something truly horrible on you all. I have been a bit sombre, not to say po-faced lately (also a bit silent, I note), and I feel it is high time to inject some healthy bollocks into the proceedings here. But BE WARNED. The link contains possibly the most annoying, and to make matters worse, simultaneously strangely compelling, even addictive, brainworm known to man. I would like to point out the link was sent to me by my son, the very one swashbuckling on youtube (and here).

I am such a proud mother. I'm sure you can see why.

An attempt at flow of consciousness

Anybody remember Vick's Vaporub? My mum used to smear it onto my chest, maybe even my back, when I was little and ill. It was of an unnatural blueish hue, with a very sticky greasy consistency. I disliked it intensely and would object to, even struggle against it being spread onto my person. It sort of stung as well, I seem to recall, and the odour was sharp. I suppose the vapours were meant to ease breathing.

I bought a Blistex lip balm a few days ago. It has camphor in it, and my, does it sting your lips. I am addicted to the stuff. My lips have never been softer. It says you are allowed to smear it onto your nose as well, to stop it from getting chapped during a cold. I am really glad we haven't progressed to video blogging as yet, because I am a sight to behold.

My older son told me (not more than an hour ago) I shouldn't take revenge on him and his relationship just because my relationships all "piss up a tree" ("kusee puuhun", for those of you who understand Finnish). It has been a while since a male person has managed to upset me as much. Quite a while, in fact. I should probably just forgive and forget, though - he did go out (on my request) and buy me a thermometer earlier, and he made me the world's worst cup of coffee, too. So for the record, there was a time today when he was being a nice son as well.

Time for more lip balm.

I have smoked seven cigarettes today. I am counting them. As soon as I wrote this, I started very intensely fancying an eighth one.

Whenever I am not at the computer (and, believe it or not, it is for quite a segment of the day) I come up with my best stuff. Once I sit down, it all goes. I have a little notebook and my best posts are often ones I have managed to write there first, while the thoughts were in my head.

I am going to go and smoke another one now. Yes I am. I may write more once I'm back.

I should maybe explain myself. I "go to smoke a cigarette", because nobody in Finland smokes indoors at home anymore - I can't think of a single person who does. Everybody goes onto the balcony, if they have one, and onto the communal mattoparveke ("rug balcony" - we don't generally have fitted carpets in this country either, and taking your rugs out once a week for a lurid beating on the rug balcony is the moral duty of each Finn. Needless to say, I fail most miserably at this), if they don't. The upstairs neighbour at my parents' place is a non-smoking nazi (sorry for offence caused for other anti-smoking people and victims of nazis). She will bang her windows and balcony door shut the instant my footsteps are heard on the balcony, and she doesn't stop at that, either. She will send anonymous hate mail (with delicious lines such as "you make me lose all hope for mankind") and shout abuse, too. I detest confrontation and stay silent (but continue smoking, it's not forbidden).

I should maybe explain myself some more. My own neighbours don't seem to care so much that I smoke on my balcony. But. I am staying at my parental home, oh woe, a victim of putkiremontti (plumbing renovations, another quaint Finnish custom), have been for four months and a day today.
A putkiremontti renders your home completely unlivable in for months. The picture above shows what used to be my bathroom. This is the third summer running, for circumstancial reasons (yes, the relationships that piss up trees) I have spent crammed into my parents' place with my unruly teenagers.

This has probably been my longest post to date. I have a policy of non-deletion, so I'm stuck with it now.

Time for more lip balm. And maybe another cigarette.

Come on then if you think you're hard enough

There are times when being a parent just makes you want to shake a fist at the skies (even if you are an agnostic-atheist-unbelieving rationalist-world-view type like myself) and chant like a hard lad picking a fight.

Do anything you like to me, take from me anything and everything I hold dear, kill me, cripple me, maim me, strike me dumb, have me betrayed, ridiculed, humiliated - but lay off my fucking children, alright?!

...How little there is that can be done to protect them, how little I can do to protect mine.

"I do not will him to be exceptional.
It is the exception that interests the devil.
It is the exception that climbs the sorrowful hill
Or sits in the desert and hurts his mother's heart.
I will him to be common,
To love me as I love him,
And to marry what he wants and where he will."

I make noses for a living, sometimes

I taught the children I teach to make maple-seed noses (I mentioned this before). They loved it. Such a simple thing, yet none of them seemed to know of it. They were squealing with delight, hunting around through the still-too-small June seeds to find a bigger one, a bigger one, the biggest one. Some of them wanted to squeeze an opened-up, sticky bit of greenness onto my face, too. I would sit perfectly still and allow the little fingers to pinch my nose.

As I have become older, as my own children have grown to be in a different age group from the children I teach and as there suddenly is a distance of over a decade between me and my marriage to their father, it has become easier to allow the children-I-teach – different children, over the years, yet forming a large group of people, permanently frozen in the time of my mind into the preschool age and stage – to come closer, both in an actual physical way as well as emotionally. Meeting them face-to-face in the fundamental human way no longer brings out the acute shame of failure I have felt about the childhood of my own flesh and blood.

Much as I love slothing, I am not terribly upset about returning to work in a week, either. I like my job. I must be doing something wrong, or right.

Deeply satisfying

How to cause consternation in one's teenage offspring:

Phase 1.

Read aloud Viktor Erofeyev's short story A Portrait of the Author in an Overcoat (translation mine, from the Finnish translation):

And so I stepped in, in a cock-coloured overcoat. Clean-shaven. Barefoot.

In my hand, a wooden travel case. My arse, red. Covered in lipstick, from kisses.

Phase 2.

Paint your toenails green.

Guaranteed to cause indignancy and horror in those born in the 90s and of the perpetrators direct lineage. Particularly amusing if the said offspring claim to belong to some of the more rebellious youth subcultures (goths et cetera).

God, it's really good to be an outrageous middle-aged mum. It RULES.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility

I really hate the fact I just wrote long and hard about giving birth. If I didn't have an absolute policy of non-deletion, for reasons of shame tolerance - this is what you are, Anna MR, fucking face it, will you - it would so be gone.

Really, giving birth is nothing. Let yourselves not be fooled. It is absolutely nothing whatsoever, a mere doddle, a passing moment, a sneeze. The real job is in what comes after it, the years when you shouldn't lose track of what the hell it is you're supposed to be doing and achieving, and inevitably, you do.

At least I have. On several extended occasions which is and feels inexcusable.

As does blogging about it.

Philosophical Wankery

I have given birth twice.

This is a matter which is central and important to me, and not only for the obvious reasons (my two teenager ratbags of beloved sons). This is also something I count as formative life experience in its own right.

My first son was a loving and shy infant in the womb (yes, you can know what they are like before they are born - their nature is there, already present), reticent about coming out into the world. His feet were under the right side of my ribcage, from pretty early on till the end. I knew he didn't want to come out. He just didn't. He was two weeks overdue, I had been given a date to be induced in a day or so, when finally, slowly, things started to happen. The day before I went into hospital I spent in annoying discomfort - not pain - as he was trying to grind his head low down inside my pelvis - "engage the head" as the lingo goes - in (reluctant, I was sure) readiness to be born. That evening there was a bit of water, I wanted to go to the hospital, and the twenty-four hour labour-suiteathon began, during which

I learned I can't keep anything in when I give birth. In the long run, this results in a serious lack of blood sugars. I learned that pain in itself doesn't kill you, even if you think it will. I learned that being means being encased in a body, and that being encased in a body means supreme and utter loneliness, but that there is a comfort in this loneliness, too - the loneliness itself.

My son was born after three shifts of midwives had completed their shift, gone home to their families and lives, shopped, cooked their dinners, helped their kids with their homework, watched telly, brushed their teeth, fucked their husbands, whatever it is that midwives - being ordinary people - do in their ordinary lives, and all I'd done meanwhile was give birth. He had fluid on the lungs, his breathing was gurgly. I asked someone - a nurse, a midwife - whether he was going to die. She replied she couldn't say. When his breathing hadn't cleared after an hour, he was taken to the special care baby unit, against all my plans of utterly natural childbirth. After my son was gone, the midwives seemed to disappear as well. An orderly appeared in the room I was now alone in. My waist-long dreadlocks (and lack of child, possibly) didn't endear me to her, and she told me to get myself washed, without a hint of warmth. Am I allowed to get up, I asked, vaguely aware of the fact I had been through quite a lot in the last twenty-four hours. Go in the bath, she replied. My legs felt like worn cotton wool as I made my way to the bathroom. Afterwards, I couldn't decide whether to have the spagetti or the risotto of the vegetarian options available, and ordered both. I spent my son's first night asleep on a chair next to his incubator, with one hand inside it, touching his back. In spite of enduring the entire labour without pain killers, I felt I had failed, that I hadn't given him the non-violent entry into the world I had envisioned.

My younger son was a leprechauny clown unable to keep still, from before birth. He lay in my womb with his back against my spine - this is uncommon. He would push his arms and legs out to their full length, forcing my tummy into a distorted cube with four irregularly-peaked corners and a horrid hollow in the middle. I had to cover it with a newspaper or a blanket when I watched telly, it was too freaky-scary (not to mention uncomfortable). I used to dream of grabbing hold of an ankle or a wrist. He, too, was calculated as being a fortnight overdue (although in his case, the dates were wrong, as evidenced by his skin being covered in vernix, and him having the pot-bellied spindly-legged spider look of newborns, both of which attributes my elder lacked, being instead perfectly formed and "grown-up looking" when born, and peeling all over as one sunburnt). With him, too, I was given a date to arrive for inducing within a day of him actually being born (we induced him with the natural method, instead). I woke at three-thirty, knowing this was it, got up and ate some cereal and attempted a bath. The attempt made me realise things were going to move a lot more quickly this time. On the way to the hospital - an hour's drive down winding Welsh country lanes - we got stuck behind not one but three pre-fabricated homes being transported at a snail's pace on the back of equally many lorries. I thought I was going to end up having him in the green Vauxhall Cavalier. The car radio announced it was St George's Day. Let's call him George, their dad joked. No f*cking way, I replied, not much in a mood for joking. When I got into the labour ward,

I squatted down, swore, hung by my arms from the door frame, swore, kicked the walls, swore. I learned I swear a lot when I give birth, and take no shit from anyone. I got into the birth pool and was reminded I can't keep anything in when I give birth. I learned we are - possibly primarily - bodies, and that being a body is being strong and wise and capable beyond the individual's capabilities. I learned about pain and strength, and about the strangeness of the feeling when one's self is pushed aside and becomes an observer to events only.

My younger son was born within two hours of my arriving at the hospital, two ounces under ten pounds. For the first time in my life, I knew I had done something brilliantly, outstandingly, flawlessly. As he and I relaxed in the maternity ward that afternoon, my midwife - a wonderful woman, shaped like the Venus of Willendorf, dark, smooth hair, high cheekbones, slanty eyes, she could have been Sami rather than Welsh! - came to thank me for the experience before going home after her shift.

And this is really only what happened, not what happened to me in the process of it all happening.



(The title of this post? My one-before-latest google search hit. Yes, really. The very latest one, eerily, was actually looking for me - anna mr blogs maids. Own up, own up, whoever you are.)

For godssakes

That atrocious child of mine has now moved on to fire-blowing.

Parenthood SUCKS, dear Reader. If you haven't any children yet, keep this in mind.

Later:

Some of you have kindly expressed enthusiasm and sympathy in various degrees. I thank you for it. To show support for my home-made dork's horrible hobby, I am allowing you this chance of sharing in my misery (but thankfully, no fire-blowing - I don't know whether I'll bear to watch that) - himself doing his stuff on youtube. (Being the vain thing he is, he has edited out the times when he drops the stick, although I told him that was a bit phony.)

I would also like to dedicate this poem to him and to all the other young dorks of the world - not my own, except for the translation - it is by the touched-by-genius Arto Melleri - himself a bit of a wild child.

Nuoruus! Kaiken pitää olla sille siivekästä,
siivekästä ja veristä!
Sillä on niin kiire muuttamaan maailmaa
että se on valmis siihen heti kun on käynyt
eteisessä ja nähnyt avaimenreiästä sisään...
"Maailma! kyllä se tiedetään! se on avaimenreiän
muotoinen!" niin se huutaa, Nuoruus, kuulee
korvissaan oman sydämensä lyönnit:
"Maailman sydän lyö! ettekö te kuule?"
Kaiken pitää olla sille siivekästä!
Siivekästä ja veristä! ja se joutuu aina petetyksi
tai pettää itse itsensä, kumpaankin se on valmis,
ja kaikkeen
Kun kompastut omiin jalkoihisi älä sano sitä
Kohtaloksi, sido ensin kengännauhasi

Youth! For it everything must be winged,
winged and bloody!
It is in such a hurry to change the world
it is ready for it straightaway when it has been
in the hall and seen through the keyhole...
"The world! we know all about that! it is the shape
of a keyhole!" so it shouts, Youth, hears
in its ears the beating of its own heart:
"The heart of the world is beating! can you not hear?"
For it everything must be winged!
Winged and bloody! and it will always be deceived
or will deceive itself, it is ready for both,
and for everything
When you stumble in your own feet don't call it
Fate, tie your shoelaces first

Kids rule

The saving grace of humanity, the one thing that makes mankind worthwhile, is the children. Childhood (and possibly art).

Above, one of mine, playing with fire. I am stupid proud of him.

It is very weird indeed the way our children go ahead and make good some of our unfulfilled ambitions - firejuggling was/is something I have really wanted to learn. Although not something I would have pressurised him to take up, to be sure, or suggested, or even thought. Had I verbalised some unfulfilled ambition of mine he could've (in my view) gone to fulfill, it probably would've been something duller like grabbing a couple of PhD's or similar boring stuff.

That said, I am stupid proud of him.

PS Later: He has just given me a private fire show - do check out the photos

Ho-hum, it's called life

Cooking dinner late at night for my children who won't come home.

Dog's vomit jumper, part 2

My older son, the one with the black dress sense (am studiously avoiding saying "the goth", because he detests being labelled that way), has indicated he actually *wants* the dog's vomit jumper for himself! And I quote,

"Guess if I'm getting a bit bored with black, when I've been wearing nothing but for three years."

I am stunned. And happy. Never mind him wanting to wear something not black for a change, that's entirely his business. This means I haven't spent 50 odd € on wool for a jumper nobody can bear to wear, which is brilliant news indeed.

15, with girlfriend

Meet 15 and the strange new phenomenon, a girlfriend. Isn't he handsome? (Ok, she's nice too, but he's *my kid*)

Some random passer-by had called him, my child, a "faux-artsy young drug addict". Out of all these attributes, "young" is accurate. Not everyone is used to kids dressing in black (after all, it's been fashionable only for, um, thirty - fifty years), and bigots will be bigots.

Let me hereby announce my personal refusal to being a part of the bigoted and racist society the Western world seems to be deteriorating into. I read an article a couple of days ago by a very admirable Finnish Palestinian woman, Umayya Abu-Hanna, who is minority cultures coordinator at the Finnish Art Museum, a columnist, an author, and previously an elected Green Party representative in the Helsinki City Council, amongst other things. She has had some of her work-related email to the UK randomly filtered out - ostensibly because some instances are not allowing email from people with the syllable Abu in their name. What next? Wear a badge to show your ethnicity, at all times, so people can keep an eye on you?

Detestable.

Measuring my new time

Today, I feel rather embarrassed about the self-indulgent, over-emotional selfpity of yesterday's post. I am fully aware that many people live with debilitating illnesses, and if my first teenager is playing up, at least he isn't dying of cancer or being enlisted in a war, things that do happen to people. My trouble is I live and believe my emotions too fully. I will be thirty-nine tomorrow. One might have hoped some sort of adulthood would have exhibited by now...

I separated from the father of my children ten years ago. Rather than risk being charged with kidnapping my own children, I returned to Britain to legalise my moving to Finland with them. Although he (ex) had never actually hit me, he used to throw things at me, push me around, shove me into corners and shout into my face, etc. And this was only over minor disagreements while we were married, not over major things such as leaving him and taking the children. He had told me while I was pregnant with the younger he would kill me if I left him, so it is probably understandable I was terrified during the trip ten years ago. In fact, it did drain me so utterly that, in retrospect, it took me at least five years to recover.

On the way back from this trip, in relieved and jubilant mood, from the duty-frees on the plane I bought myself a bottle of perfume (Jean-Paul Gautier, the one shaped like a curvy female torso!) and a watch to measure my new time. I wore the watch for a few years, then forgot it in some drawer or another. Last summer, before moving to Hawai'i, I had the battery replaced and started to use it again - to measure my new time, perhaps. It stopped working in a few months and the leather strap kept going moldy. I brought it back to Finland to leave it here, as it was obvious anything made of leather was pretty useless in the tropics, particularly a stopped watch.

Last night I noticed it was ticking again. It had probably got damp inside and had now dried out. I am wearing it again. It makes me feel safer. I have managed tighter spots than this one.

(Return of the) Teenagers

There is nothing like having children to really make you experience to the bitter end how little you can do, how you always land up saying/doing what you *knew* you should not, how utterly incapable you are as a human being.

I love my sons (15 and 13) so that it hurts. But that doesn't stop me from having blazing rows about how late 15 can and cannot stay out. And worst of all, losing in the end anyway.

Ah, maybe in ten years time 15 will have grown up and possibly developed a brain. Maybe 15'll read this text then and think, my, maybe it wasn't all that easy for her either.

Teenagers

Who'd have them?

Egyptian murals and flat-pack furniture

As a child I fell in love with Egyptian history. As I recall, the obsession had already started by the time I read Mika Waltari's "Sinuhe egyptiläinen" at age twelve, but it was certainly fuelled by the book (to date the most translated ("The Egyptian") and internationally best-known Finnish novel, on the subject of – what else – historical Egypt. There is also a film version, starring Peter Ustinov, but never mind that, it's terrible by comparison). I read encyclopedias on Egyptian history, was an expert on various pharaohs and kingdoms, and was dying, dying to go and see the pyramids and the tombs for myself. Only when I grew a little older, a tv documentary more or less ruined that desire for me. The murals in the tombs, thousands of years old, were being destroyed rapidly by – you probably know this already – the condensation caused by the sweat and breath of tourists. Fat, white, Western tourists gawping, huffing and puffing, and sweating away. Eww. I can never go and add my sweat to the destruction of the heritage of our species...

This fact – that humans sweat and breathe out moisture – has become relevant to our daily lives in an unexpected (and unpleasant!) way. The black computer desk we bought for the elder boy's bedroom, of a trusty flat-pack Wal-Mart range of furniture, develops a coating of fluffy green mold, particularly but not only on the underside, in a matter of two weeks. I wipe, I clean, I scrub, I use bleachy mediums I am not normally fond of, being an environmentally-friendly "crank", to no avail. It is no more than two weeks since I gave the damn thing a proper seeing-to, and the sneaky bugger is covered in mold again. On the underside, which I have to actually check to notice, rather than at the very least having the decency to grow moldy on the work surface, where it'd be simpler to spot and wipe. Sure, everything grows moldy in this climate – remember, there was evidence of contact-lense-induced keratitis, a fungal infection of the eye, particularly in the tropics – but it is the speed at which this particular unhappy item does it. I cannot keep up. I have narrowed the reasons down to the size of his room and the colour of the desk (younger brother's mock-wood desk, of the very same make and in a larger room, has only grown moldy during the torrential month of March, when everything else in the house including picture frames, lids of toothpaste tubes, t-shirts forgotten on a bedroom surface for a day, etc. went green and fluffy too). It is driving me crazy, particularly as I am a whole lot more fond of spending my time spodding in front of the Mac, or reading a book, or pottering around in the garden, or indeed of watching paint dry and grass grow than I am of housework.

We are going home for the summer, in a week! It is time I got cranky due to travel nerves. I detest flying, not a good thing when one lives on a rock in the biggest ocean on the planet, and comes from about as far from it as is possible. I expect the fucking table to have grown a rainforest of moss and mold by the time we are back in late July.

© 2006 Anna MR

Family mathematics

I know what I was doing fifteen years ago. I was having my firstborn. It took forever even in the context of first births. I had a birth pool in the labour ward. I was in the pool and the father watched telly. Rajiv Gandhi had been murdered. MTV played that annoying song with a chorus that went "duh-duh-DEE-duh-duh-dada, duh-duh-DEE-duh-duh-dada". I was too exhausted to ask for the telly to be turned off. My son was finally born and he was heavier and warmer all over than I could have imagined. He had fluid on the lung and had to go into the special care baby unit when his breathing had not cleared up after a couple of hours. I ate something, spoke with my mum on the phone, and refused to go to bed in the ward. I spent the night asleep in a chair next to his incubator.

Fifteen years before that, I was eight years old myself. It was a Tuesday. I have checked. That means I was probably at school, counting the last four school days left before summer holidays and the annual move to the cottage on the island, my childhood paradise.

Today, I'll take birthday boy and his brother for a drive-thru McDonald's birthday lunch. Before school finishes, I'll bake him some chocolate chip cookies, he loves them. In the evening we'll go to Pizza Hut and possibly MI3. (You may note a trend of eating junk food as a celebratory thing.)

Fifteen years from now, I shall be congratulating my son on his big three-o. I will be, um, fifteen years older than I am now.

Life is a funny thing.

© 2006 Anna MR