The Biggest Adventure of All

"This Little Piggy" on the steps of the Sydney Opera House

The Milla Milla moment

This time two years ago, I was on my way to the airport with an enormous rucksack, a changing bag, a buggy, a carseat on wheels and a 20 month old child who I’d just discovered had nits. We were going to Australia and taking the most ridiculously long route to get there. This was a mission. Four flights and almost 36 hours of a mission (sorry environmentalists.) This was a mission to prove that, despite having had a baby, I could still travel. This was a mission to prove wrong the people around me who thought I would turn into a miserable, downtrodden shell if I went ahead with my pregnancy. This was a mission to prove to myself that I could still do all that I needed and wanted to, because I believed more than anyone that I would become that spent shadow of my former self.

I was lucky enough to have one friend living in Tropical North Queensland and another with an apartment in the centre of Sydney. All we needed was to get there, which I paid for with the money my Nan left me when she died earlier that year (I have to put this in because otherwise I get criticised and accused of being rich.)

Only when I had to take my sleeping boy out of his pushchair for a security scan did the enormity of what I was doing hit me, but instead of feeling fear, I felt exhilaration. Absolute exhilaration, I’ve got goose pimples just writing about it. When we began our descent into Sydney (three flights down, one to go), I welled up. I said “Look baby we did it, we’re here, we made it to Ozzy” and I’ve still got the photograph of him sitting next to me on the plane, beaming at me in that moment.

Looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I was to experience such a magnificent adventure with my son in tow. People said he wouldn’t remember but he learnt so much about the wildlife in that trip and still loves looking at the photographs. We went on road trips, Tom slept in his buggy in the corner of rainforest lodges, we frolicked on the beach, I went on the Barrier Reef, we took a cable car over the jungle, we fed kangaroos and cuddled koalas, it was just magical. The best moment was when my friend was driving us over the stunning Atherton Tablelands and I had a migraine. She kept shouting at me to open my eyes and look at the breathtaking scenery. Then she pulled over at Milla Milla falls, in the heart of the rainforest and persuaded me to get out of the car. I felt like I’d walked in on one of my own dreams. There was this hazy pool with water cascading into it, gargantuan electric blue dragon flies, turtles basking on the rocks, plants and flowers that didn’t even look real. Tom sat on my knee and dipped his toes in the water, looked in front of him and said “Aah wow!”

It doesn’t matter how far in the past our voyage to Australia gets, I will always remmeber that moment so clearly, as a pinnacle not just of our trip but of the biggest adventure of all. I thought Australia would set a precedent for amazing trips, but my overdraft won’t allow it. It seems insane to me now that I could ever afford it. And anyway, how could we ever compete with that? For now, Easyjet flights to Marrakech are obscenely cheap and I am on the lookout for a family-friendly Riad. Mountains and markets by day, then just me, sleeping Tom and a notebook in the evenings. “You can’t take him to Marrakech on your own!” a few people have said. Oh yes I can and oh yes I will.

(The head lice survived the epic journey, which means that all the lovely Korean people on our Korean Air flight who passed him round the plane like a giggly parcel will have probably caught them. I still feel guilty about that.)

Our home in the jungle, Kookaburra Lodge

Mummy Pulls Funny Faces

'Mummy Pulls Funny Faces' - Tom's first portrait of me on the wall at school.

A couple of weeks ago, I won two prizes at the Manchester Blog Awards. I can’t make html work so I won’t make a mess writing about all of the other wonderful winners, readers and runners-up, I’ll just tell you to go to http://www.manchesterblogawards.com and see the results. I have written about blogs in Manchester before, but I honestly don’t think I would have been so inspired to keep up this blog if I didn’t live in this beautiful city. It was a wonderful evening with friends, my reading went well and I only managed to spill one pint on a table full of people. I also screeched “Whaaaaat!” when my second win was announced.

It was a busy week, Blog Awards Week. The following morning, I was up at five. I had to speak at a conference in Warwickshire and as two of my friends were flying from Birmingham Airport that morning, it seemed silly not to get a lift with them. I stuffed my blog award books and my sparkly dress into my overnight bag and lay on the back seat of my friend’s Punto, not sleeping as we careered down the motorway, the tinny sounds of The Greatest Hits of 1994 in my ear. Then I waved my friends off at the airport and had a much-needed coffee, staring out of the window at the planes on the tarmac and thinking about how strange it felt to be in an airport but not be jetting off somewhere. Still, I had enough excitement of my own happening in England.

“I can do this, I can do everything that I want to do,” I thought to myself as I climbed into a cab to the train station after my speech. I was exhausted, it was all surreal, I couldn’t wait to get home and write this blog post.

Then at Stoke on Trent my phone rang and I had a voicemail.

“Hello this is Tom’s school. He’s ill, you neeed to collect him immediately.”

But I’m in Stoke on Trent I thought.

Luckily, by a complete miracle, one of my friends is between jobs and doesn’t start her new one until Monday so she was able to help.

After I had arranged that, the exhaustion and the realisation that perhaps I can’t do all of the things I want to do hit me and I had a little cry on the train. The following day, someone important was coming to see me from London about my writing. The meeting had been arranged for weeks, we were going to have lunch in a really good restaurant. There was no way I could cancel, but there was no way I could send Tom to school when he had a stomach bug and there was absolutely no way on earth I could bring him to the meeting. I felt defeated, defeated and deflated. Then I got that feeling when we glided into Piccadilly, the one I used to get when I lived in London and came back to visit, the warm feeling that I was home. Something told me that it would all sort itself out. The same friend saved the day and looked after Tom, enabling me to attend the (very successful) meeting.

So, I won two awards for writing a blog called My Shitty Twenties and then spent the weekend looking after a child with diarrhoea (which also happens to be one of the only words in the English language that I cannot spell.) Shortly afterwards, I got poorly too and we were both prescribed Tamiflu, trapped in the house with nothing to eat but a Warby’s toasty loaf. Then my Blog Awards win was in the local paper and I got all paranoid abolut Tom’s privacy and closed the blog for a little while. It’s been a funny old time but we’re back on track. If everything ran smoothly though, I would have anything to write about. If everything ran smoothly, I wouldn’t have an (award-winning) blog.

Something to Write About

I won two Manchester Blog Awards last Wednesday. Thank you to those who nominated me and those who have congratulated me. I have been meaning to write about the ceremony and the other good bloggers who won and / or read but I have been ill ever since and so has Tom. Now we’re waiting for our friend to bring the Tamiflu from the collection point. Even last night I thought swine flu was overhyped to excite Daily Mail readers. Today I can confirm that swine flu exists. I can’t really type anymore so I promise to write a proper post when I am on the mend. At least I’ll have something to write about.

My Boy Lollipop

Since Tom started school, we have made new friends in the Lollipop People (much to the amusement of transatlantic readers, who thought I was writing about sweet retailers.) There is a man and a lady, each stationed at different crossings on the way to school. The lady is the sweetest, because she remembers Tom’s name, but pretends not to if other children are crossing at the same time as us, in case she offends their parents.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call him by his name this morning,” she whispered to me one afternoon, “but I can’t remember all their names and I didn’t want to offend the other lady behind you.”

She’s lovely but she has sort of befriended me the last few times I have dropped Tom off. She puts her lollipop in a house near the school and sets off walking in the same direction as me. Today, we saw her briefly as I dragged a whinging, snotty Tom past her on the way in, then she started walking next to me as I headed home.

“Are you off to work now?” she said this morning.

“Well, I’ve got two jobs. One’s from home and I have got a bit of work to do on it. Soon I will just be working from home though, which makes it easier with Tom at school.”

“Oh, you’re not on your own are you?”

“Yeah.”

“What, you haven’t got a husband?”

“No.”

“Oh dear.”

I thought she was going to cry.

“It’s fine,” I said, “We’re fine.”

“Yes, yes,” she said “I never would have thought it and Tom seems so happy.”

“Yes he is. We both are.”

Some people are horrible about single parents but some people just feel sorry for us. There really isn’t any need. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I would much rather raise my son alone than in a dysfunctional, loveless relationship. The lollipop lady made me realise that people who can’t see that aren’t always malicious, they just don’t realise that convention isn’t necessarily the best way. Her comments will seem to some patronising but I realise that she is just a sweet lady with a very different outlook. And, as she pointed out, we’re both happy, thank you very much.

Crackberry Rehab

Ever had a week so good that something just has to go wrong? Reclaim was an amazing experience and I think I came away from it more inspired than the girls I worked with. Then on Friday, I had some very good news.  I skipped into the off licence and bought a bottle of wine to take round to a friend’s house. When I arrived, I realised that my Blackberry was missing. The Blackberry I had been slating all day. I didn’t like its tiny keys. How could men with chunky fingers use them when I pressed two keys at once with my slender(ish), talon-tipped digits? It had been six weeks and I was still making typos left, right and centre. And I was sick of it beeping every time I received an email from someone whose rich relative had died and needed my bank details to transfer millions of pounds into my account. It was useful to have my emails delivered to my phone though. Only when I ran out on to the street and saw my Blackberry lying in the road did I realise just how much I loved it.

It might not be as bad as it looks I thought to myself, as I stooped under the street lamp collecting bits of plastic from the damp tarmac. I fixed it back together but the screen was blank. It had been run over by a car. How was I going to conduct my forthcoming birthday weekend with no camera and no phone? I went round to my neighbour’s house to finish the wine and Blackberry adverts kept coming on the telly. I used her laptop to check my emails and a Blackberry promotion flashed on the screen.

I couldn’t dwell on it for long though, I had plans to make. Despite the fact that by complete coincidence, four of my friends were spending the weekend in London (separately), I managed to pull together the remaining few that were in Manchester for a really good night. On Sunday, I blasted away my hangover with the fresh air on a trip to Edale with my Mum and Tom. I love The Peak District and forgot how beautiful it is in Autumn and how close it is to home. We enjoyed a great pub lunch at the Rambler Inn, which to Tom’s delight has a little animal farm attached. I had my knackered phone with me, which has no signal and keeps switching itself off. It was nice to escape the constant beeping of viagra ads though. Apart from last week, it was the most sensible weekend I’ve had in ages.

Another birthday flown by. Time speeds up when children come along. I have only got three years of my twenties left. (In answer to the question everybody asks, if I am still writing this blog when I am thirty, I will not be changing it to My Shitty Thirties.) For a long time, Tom has insisted that I am his ‘favourite girl’ (always in a scouse accent, despite the fact that everything else he says sounds Manc.) Last night, I thanked him for a happy birthday and told him he was my favourite boy.

“You’re my favourite lady Mum.”

Finally, I’m a lady. I suppose 27 is properly grown-up.

Friends and I will be at Band on the Wall on Wednesday night for the Manchester Blog Awards (http://www.manchesterblogawards.com) Please check out the shortlist as Manchester has some excellent blogs and many of them are in the running. I thought it was going to be an unruly do but I have to deliver a speech in Birmingham the following day and will be leaving at 6am so it will be an early night for me. And I’m getting used to life without the Blackberry. It isn’t easy but worse things happen than runover phones. Gosh, aren’t I getting sensible in my old age?

After Dinner in The Rambler

Young Minds

Yesterday began badly. Tom had been coughing all night. I needed to get to town but couldn’t send my snotty, sleepy child to school. Luckily, my wonderful friend stepped in and agreed to come over from the other side of Manchester to babysit. She knocked at the door and as I unlocked it, I could hear her shouting:

“Oh you silly man! Get a life!”

The friendly self-sppointed bin warden had come out of his house waving his stick at her and telling her to tell me to put my bins in my yard. She had also been accosted by another old man further down the street, who told her off for parking her car on ‘his’ pavement.

All of this put me in a bad mood, which wasn’t ideal, because I had a speech to deliver. I was asked by the amazing Ruth Ibegbuna, Manchester Peace Activist of the Year, to be a keynote speaker at the launch of the latest Reclaim project at Urbis. Reclaim works with young people from Manchester’s most deprived neighbourhoods to help improve their areas and their aspirations. Apparently, I could inspire a group of twelve year old girls to find strength and determination in negative situations. It was a tall order and I felt that my story was irrelevant compared to the other speakers’, who included Helen Newlove (Gary Newlove’s incredibly brave wife.) I was absolutely petrified and really quite weak during my pregnancy but now things have turned out the way they have, it’s hard to remember that they ever looked so bleak. Anyway, I am not sure if I managed to inspire the girls, but they certainly inspired me: Many of them had been raised by single parents and were aware of the stereotypes that exist about them, but thought that they were inspirational and strong. One girl said that she was proud of her Mum for always working to provide a good home for her and her siblings, which was lovely. All of the girls have their own talents and strengths, but so many of them are mature and articulate beyond their years. Some have a negative view of men, but perhaps I would have benefitted from being as cautious as them when I was younger. It was an amazing, exhausting day, but I think I came away more inspired than the girls. And I liked being called ‘Miss’.

Today, Tom was off sick again. He has been driving me mad all day and I haven’t done any of the things I set out to do when I woke up this morning, but his imagination is flourishing despite his cold and it is brilliant to witness. Today, he was looking for his Ice Age DVD. I knew I’d put it in a Rolling Stones CD case when I was tidying up.

“Have you seen that grown-ups CD that was on the coffee table Tom? I put it in that case.”

“What, you mean The Rolling Stones Mum?”

At dinnertime, he asked me if he could have a beagle to dip in his soup. When I reminded him what a beagle is, he was in hysterics. I love Tom’s humour and imagination and I love the way he reminds me what it was like to be a child. The evening skies over Salford are beautiful at the moment. Below is a crocodile that Tom spotted in the clouds last week.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Urbis again to be inspired by young minds some more. I have been finding it hard to write lately, but between them, Tom and the Reclaim girls just might have got me going again…

Priorities Right

“How wonderful to be able to combine my social life with motherhood,” I gushed over the summer. And it is easy in the summer, because in a barbecue scenario, you can put the child to sleep in the house and carry on the party outside. Then summer finishes.

I’ve had a lot of celebrating to do recently, which means I have had a few wild nights out. Last weekend, I took Tom to the first autumn birthday party. Apparently, there was to be a fire pit in the garden. Then it rained, but it was OK, because someone had a tarpaulin. The thing is that when it gets dark early, dragging a child through Piccadilly Gardens in the pitch black feels wrong. Sitting on the bus to Didsbury, an old lady asked Tom if he was going home to bed.

 “No!” he exclaimed, to her and everyone else on the bus, “I’M GOING TO A GROWN-UPS’ PARTY!”

 The grown-ups party was smoky and the smoke wasn’t coming from a fire pit. Evidently, the tarpaulin hadn’t materialised and the outdoor gathering had become a bog standard house party. We had to leave.

“I want to stay at the GROWN-UP’S PAAARRRTY!” whinged Tom, as I dragged him and all of his paraphenalia round to a friend’s flat. Luckily, her housemate is a trainee teacher and has loads of children’s books, so we had a cosy Friday night on the sofa reading stories. I managed to get my dose of weekend revelry the following night, finding myself at a really good party in the middle of nowhere.

This weekend, I had no babysitter. I reasoned that it was OK because I am still recovering from my virus and need a rest. Tom and I went over to my friends’ house and drank milk and wine respectively. Having had an afternoon nap, Tom was on top form and kept us entertained to the point where we had to beg him to go to bed because we were more tired than him. 

Today we had a wonderfully lazy Sunday strolling round a very autumnal Chorlton and meeting my Mum and my sister for dinner. During the meal, my friend texted me offering me a free ticket to a gig I really wanted to go to tonight. At first, I declined (I can’t go out on a Sunday night.) Then, I got that feeling again, the feeling of not wanting to miss out, the why not feeling. Soon, Mum was driving me home to collect Tom’s school uniform and my dancing shoes. She was going to drive us back to Chorlton, where I was going to put Tom to sleep in my friend’s bed, where her housemates, who were staying in, were going to keep an eye on him, then I was going to go into town to the gig and no doubt roll in at stupid o’clock. I was going to pre-book a taxi for 8am the following morning and take Tom to school before dashing to work myself. A mad rush of text messages and phone calls ensued as the logistics of the complicated plan came together. I was excited. Tom was excited. Mum didn’t look so sure.

“It’s fine! It’s fine. You love sleeping there don’t you Tom?”

Silence.

I looked behind me and he was fast asleep in his car seat.

Then it dawned on me: I was sleepy. I’ve got workshops to plan, a cough to nurse, papers to read, emails to send. I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t really want to go out, I just didn’t want to miss out.

Now, here I am on the sofa in my pyjamas. My boy’s tucked up snug in his own bed. The central heating’s chugging away, the lights are low, I’ve got my laptop and the weekend papers. It’s a perfect Sunday evening. And, as my friend said as we put Tom to bed last night

 ”That was the best Saturday night I’ve had in ages.”

It’s Like That and That’s the Way it Is

Children get fixated on the tiniest of mundane details. It gets to the point where they have you wondering about their small concerns, leaving you feeling a bit nutty.

Take our bathroom fan. The whirring was annoying me, so I switched it off. The following morning, Tom stood at the sink squeezing half a tube of toothpaste on to his brush then stopped, looked around and frowned.

“Where’s that noise?”

“What noise?”

“You know, this one: Mmmmmmmmmm.”

“Oh, the fan. I switched it off.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to hear that noise constantly.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“Because it is really annoying.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the same noise, all the time, a bit like you constantly asking why.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s just the way it is.”

Silence, save for the trickle of the tap and the sound of a toothbrush flicking across tiny teeth.

“But why do we have a fan?”

“Because we haven’t got a window in the bathroom?”

“Why?”

“Because the upstairs of this house is badly designed.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Next door have got a bathroom window.”

“Why can’t we have a house with a bathroom window?”

“Because we have got this one.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t afford to move.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s expensive to move.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s just the way it is.”

I have always been proud of Tom’s independence – his ability to separate from me with the minimum of fuss, the fact he would fall asleep all on his own when he was a baby, the way he moved so smoothly from sleeping in my room at Mum’s house to having a room of his own. Last week, however, he ended up plonking himself in my bed in the middle of the night. My friend had bought him a large pop-up Dalek and had taken great pains to erect it, as had I to pin it to Tom’s bedroom wall.

“I’m frightened of the Dalek!” he wailed.

When Tom arrived in my bed at five o’clock on Monday morning, I pulled down the Dalek, folded it up and hid it in the cupboard. It seemed the Dalek wasn’t the problem though, as Tom made another appearance the following night.

“I’m thirsty,” he croaked.

“Ugh! I’m ill,” I groaned.

“I know Mum, you go downstairs and get me some milk, then you can bring it upstairs and you can have a sip then you’ll feel much better. Is that a deal?”

No, that’s a rubbish deal.

And so, again, last night and the night before that, Tom has tumbled into my bed, woken me and wriggled about a lot in the very early hours of the morning. And I am tired and ill. I have had a few crazy weekends, I’m run down and I have a chest infection. I love Tom so much, but I don’t want to share my bed with him. Today was my day off, my day to get important things done, but while Tom was at school, all I could do was crawl back into bed, cough and sleep.

This morning, in between coughs, I managed to splutter out “Tom, why do you keep getting in bed with me?”

“BECAUSE… That’s just the way it is Mum…”

(If any parent readers can tell me how to nip this in the bud, I would really appreciate it. Short of setting up a booby trap outside the door or a Rube Goldberg machine to turn on the lights and make him an early breakfast, I don’t know what to do.)

Catching Up

I have been ill. Busy and ill. The last week or so has been surreal. So much has happened all at once and a lot of it I can’t write about on my blog. Most of it is good though.

I can write here about the fact that I am shortlisted in two categories for The Manchester Blog Awards (http://www.manchesterblogawards.com): Best Personal Blog and Best Writing on a Blog. All will be revealed at Band on the Wall on 21st October. I must remember not to go overboard that night, as Tom’s first Parents Evening is the following day. (Also, I have got to read, which means I have to get the balance right between being able to stand on the stage and do it and not swaying and slurring.)

I don’t have an awful lot else to write about, because Tom gives me my best material and I haven’t seen much of him lately. He is in school every day and I have to go to work on Saturdays. It’s starting to sink in now that I can’t just decide to take him to town on my day off. I am going to spend as much time as I can with him over the next few weeks so hopefully he will give me something to write about.

For now, thank you for reading and thanks to anyone who nominated me for the Blog Awards.

Alright Mum

Male Family Members.

 

Last week, Tom’s teacher told me that I am a bad mother.

I own an apron, a mug, a teddy bear, a fridge magnet and possibly a pen with ‘Best Mum’ emblazoned upon them. They were all bought by my mother, who wrapped them up and told me they were from Tom on various birthdays / Christmases / Mother’s Days. I have got a strong suspicion that I am not the sole winner of the ‘Best Mum’ accolade and that other mothers may own mugs, aprons, pens, fridge magnets and teddy bears bearing the same slogan. I don’t think anyone has ever bought their mother a ‘Crap Mum’ mug, but maybe they should.

When Tom started school, we had to fill in a booklet about his home life. We were supposed to stick a photograph on the family page. I had a few photographs of the two of us together, but it all looked a bit pathetic. I could have included pictures of my Mum and my sister, but there was a distinct lack of a male role model. I have male friends who spend time with Tom, but I wouldn’t class them as family. The only males in our immediate family are Duncan and Gandhi, the gerbils. I took a photograph of them on my mobile but wondered how bonkers it would make us look if I stuck them to the family page. Luckily, my printer broke late on the night before Tom started school, so I had an excuse.

“My printer isn’t working,” I told the teacher,”I’ll bring in some photographs soon.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said, making me think I’d got away with it completely.

Last week, when I was putting Tom to bed, he said “We maked pictures of our house in school and everybody had pictures of the people who live in their house but I didn’t have any.”

I tucked him up then went downstairs. There were tears. From me, not Tom. I felt sorry for him, sitting there while his little classmates showed off photographs of their family with nothing to show for himself. The next morning when I dropped him off for school (late again), I spoke to his teacher.

“Was he the only one without a family photograph in his booklet?”

“No, a few of them didn’t have one, but Tom did keep asking why his Mummy didn’t send one in.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry, my printer’s broken and I have so much on, I always forget to get pictures printed, it’s the digital age and there’s only me and him and the gerbils so we haven’t really got a family photograph and I thought-”

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me.”

“Sorry,” I looked at the floor.

“Ooh you’re such a bad Mum,” she said. And because of the smile on her face when she said and because a teacher just wouldn’t come out with it if it was true, I knew that she didn’t mean it. It was the best thing she could have said to me.

I don’t think I will ever be a brilliant mother. I still sent Tom to school in odd socks this morning. And forgot his dinner money. And his money for the nursery fund. I’m not a bad Mum though. It’s my birthday next month and I want a mug with Alright Mum on it.