A long time between posts… again

Well, the tables have turned, and I’m not a person of leisure any more. I have bid farewell to my life as a lady who lunches, a stay-at-home-mum, a kept woman (he he he) and any other snappy little label you can think of.

That’s right, I have re-entered the corporate world. I’m a full time working mum.

So far, it hasn’t been too difficult. The one thing I absolutely hate, though, is having to bolt out of the office at 5:00pm on the dot in order to pick up Le Sproglette from day care before they shut their doors at 5:30pm. There is no room for procrastination in my working life anymore, and that was previously my modus operandi.

I am very surprised at how comfortable I am with leaving the Sproglette in full time child care. She seems to really enjoy her time there, and luckily I don’t have to drop her off (that’s Mr Moi’s job, and that’s when the tears happen). I have the occasional twitch of guilt about abandonning my child as soon as she turned one (which was just how things worked out, rather than an actual plan to do so).

But I disregard those twitchings as soon as they surface… Because I haven’t felt better than I do now, for months – even years. I never thought I was much of a career girl, but I really thrive on my work, on being a bit ballsy when required, and really stretching my intelligence (I’ve realised that when it comes to myself, I’m a bit of an intelligence snob, that I love sounding like I’m a clever clogs) on a daily basis. I love having interesting conversations with my colleagues, I love having an argument and sticking up for my work and my profession (communications = the great misunderstood).

I especially love working in an office. Freelancing, for me, just didn’t turn me on. I don’t think I could write a book, because I just couldn’t fathom those endless months of sitting in a room by myself and typing typing typing, even if an editor or mentor is at the other end of a phone line. I need the discipline of working in an office, I’m just hopeless by myself.

I wrote a comment on one of my favourite blogs, Girls Gone Child, and it sums up how I’m feeling at the moment:

Dear rebecca. I’m *sort of* having that experience. I’ve just gone back to work full time after living abroad for 2.5 years, .5 of that time with a baby, and the entire of that time being professionally stifled/frustrated/unable.

Now, at work, I’ve seemingly slipped seamlessly back into the work me – I finally feel whole again! I sort of forget that I have this whole other life involving t-shirt covered in mashed sweet potato and pasta, and dirty teething nappies at 4am.

In fact, after feeling like I was living in a haze of lethargy for the entire first post-natal year, I am working full time, sleeping less, thinking clearer and feeling wonderfully alive.

I really feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds at the moment. I hope it doesn’t come crashing down.

I found the first year of babyhood a total rollercoaster, as many mums do. I felt tired, exhausted, worried, anxious, sad, depressed, frustrated, bored, angry and hopeless on more occasions than I care to remember. I love my little Sproglette, but after a year of just me and her, I think I needed to get back to work, to do my thing, in order for me to be a better mum to her.

Now, every hug I give her feels like it counts ten time more.

Now, I never begrudge a cuddle, or a song, or a story book.

Now, I have a chance to miss her smell, and I appreciate it more when we’re together.

Now, I’m happy with myself, with what I’m doing, and feel like I’m a better mum.

And it’s all because I’ve finally figured out that I need to make myself happy in order to bring up a happy little Sproglette.

And thanks to Bex from Bex, Perplexed, for leaving such a lovely comment.

PS I wonder now that I’m back in the office environment, if I’ll stop having those crazy dreams where I’m about to graduate from high school/university, only to realise that I haven’t completed all the subjects and must start all over again. It’s a recurring nightmare.

I forgot how entertaining university toilet doors can be

Those who know me know that I am a serial language learner. I am, however, fluent in none but English, unless I am drunk, then I am totally fluent in Russian and, previously, Japanese. (But strangely, when I’m drunk, the one language I’m not fluent in, is English).

One language that I started to learn and just didn’t get, was Spanish. Don’t know why, it just didn’t really stick, so I quit before the course finished.

And the language I am currently learning is French. Classes are held at the university, and during the break in my first class, I ventured into the toilets. While I was sitting on the loo, I read the back of the toilet door. Fond memories of my five years at QUT came flooding back to me: I reminisced about how I used to go to one particular cubicle in the ladies refectory toilets, because the graffiti on the back of the door was just out of control funny. It was so memorable that I can’t remember what it actually said, but it was humorous. Or maybe I’d just drunk too much beer at the pub.

Anyhoo, my French classes have reminded me of this other type of toilet humour.

Here are some of the stickers, comments and ads on the back of the door at Charles Darwin University (not as entertaining as QUT days, but hey, there’s only about 400 people on campus up here per day, so one can’t expect much):

Can you see the ad for 'green' tampon alternatives? Ick!

We are young, we run green….

(Title borrowed from Supergrass’s “Alright”)*

On Saturday night I was very keen to get Le Sprog to bed. I was planning to go to the shops to purchase a bottle of fizz, which I had a hankering for. (No, I’m not an alcoholic. Yet).

On the dot of 7pm, I put her in the cot, all warm from her bath and full from her dinner and milk. Then I grabbed the keys and the iPod and headed out the door to the carpark.

I was exaltant. Yay! I’m Free!

Sadly, it had been a couple of weeks since I’d been anywhere without the baby. So I literally felt the shackles drop off. I was a different person: I was GOING OUT on a SATURDAY NIGHT.

In reality, of course, it was only 7pm and I was heading to Woolworths, which is about a two minute drive away, and slightly less exciting than a dental checkup. But I’m never one to let distance (or lack thereof) rule out an opportunity to listen to music, so I selected The Magic Numbers and drove to Woolworths.

Now the beauty of the iPod is that you can disconnect it from the car, plug earphones straight into it and continue your listening pleasure. Which, of course, is what I did. And music adds a spring to my step and makes me feel happy and young and carefree. So, I walked into Woolworths feeling… maybe not like a million bucks… but at least like a hundred.

Now, Woolworths is in the middle of the city, in very close proximity to backpacker and budget accommodation, so I wasn’t surprised to see it was absolutely pumping at 7:15pm on a Saturday night. There were lots of beautiful, tanned, foreign backpackers walking around buying food and alcohol, contributing to my rather misguided fantasy that I was once again young and beautiful myself.

As I was walking through the Woolies freezer section, bopping away to The Magic Numbers, feeling like one of the Young, Beautiful people, I caught my reflection in the door of the freezer, and straight away I noticed a big black mole on my leg. I stopped in my tracks.

Now, I’m pretty careful about being sun smart, so I couldn’t believe this slipped my notice. I bent down to take a closer look at the mole, and was horrified. It wasn’t a mole, after all.

It was a steamed sultana. And right next to it, smeared all over my black pants, was a huge lump of smushed up apple.

I’m sure anyone who was subscribing to the fantasy of me, the Young and Beautiful, would have seen the sultanta as a mole and the apple as a giant lump of snot. I just saw myself for what I was – a mum on a mission, free of the child for half an hour.

Now, I’ve imagined myself in a lot of exciting and romatic situations in my life, and I’ve often need a rather harsh reality check. But I never expected that reality check to come from a sultana.

So, to cut a potentially long trip short, I headed straight for the bottle shop, bought a bottle of fizz, went home and drowned my sorrows. And every hour or so, I peeked in at the cutest baby in the world. Which makes for a pretty good night out, after all.

*The Supergrass tour of early 2000 (I think) is a gig I truly regret missing.

The upside to being in one place for longer than two months at a time

The biggest positive is:

Le Sproglette has started to sleep through the night!

And the second biggest positive is:

Le Sproglette has started to sleep through the night!

As all parents who have been sleep deprived know, the kid sleeping through the night is a fucking fantastic thing.

I was talking to my mother on the phone the other day, and I mused that, perhaps had she not slept in something like 25 different beds in her first eight months (I kid you not), perhaps she’d have been the calmest baby ever in existence. And my mother, bless her for being so generous, pointed out that perhaps the reason she’s such a chilled out baby is because we did drag her from pillar to post. She learnt to be adaptable. Maybe. But she didn’t learn to sleep through the night until she got a proper cot in her own room and slept in that room for more than six consecutive weeks.

As soon as I hit publish, I’m sure I will jinx myself, and she’ll wake up 20 times tonight.

Itchy feet, wanderlust… Just get me outta here!

Mr Moi and I are already getting itchy feet*. Being back in Oz, albeit in a town that’s not ‘home’, isn’t making us as content as we thought we’d be.

Not that it’s likely we’ll travel again any time soon (when I say travel, I mean move to another country. I’m sure we’ll go abroad for a few weeks here and there in the interim).

When next we make a long haul flight, it will be for the long haul, so it’s likely we’ll be living in Darwin for the forseeable future (at least two years? I don’t know). After that, we’re not sure. There’s the UK, where we can go any time, or another expat posting, potentially in South East Asia. (Three years ago, I loved the idea of SE Asia and abhorred the mere idea of Europe. But I’ve changed my tune). An expat posting is contingent on Mr Moi finding the work, having a far more internationally adaptable profession than I do.

In the meantime, being the perennial language collector I am, I am signing up to learn my fourth language, French. I’ve searched in vain for Russian teachers in Darwin, there seem to be none, and I’m not ready to dredge my long lost Japanese to the surface just yet. I have to fall back in love with Japan first (nothing that a quick trip there won’t accomplish, I’m sure). The other choices were Indonesian, Greek (because of the ridiculously large diaspora living here), or Chinese. Chinese – meh. I’m stupid for having that attitude, but Japanese and Russian have four alphabets between them, and two languages with funny writings is enough for me to cope with.

Mr Moi is trying to convince me to holiday to East Timor. I’d love to go, but (not so?) strangely, I’m far more cautious about where we go, now that Le Sproglette will be tagging along. I want to be somewhere with a decent hospital or clinic in case of an emergency. The closest hospital to Dili is…. Darwin.

(This is totally opposite to my rather blithe attitude when we travelled to Laos after we got ‘bored’ with Thailand. Only a few months before we’d been there, tourists had been shot dead along the main highway by bandits who still though the Vietnam war was raging, or something. Oh, and the only clinic in the country was in the Australian Embassy, and they were only really equipped to evacuate people to Thailand in an ambulance. And we saw the ambulance evacuating to Thailand when we were crossing the border. Being held up for an hour, along with the rest of the traffic. Nevertheless, I loved the country and would go back for a holiday in a heartbeat).

I mentioned I need to fall back in love with Japan, and another holiday there is on the cards. We spent Christmas 2004 there. It was Mr Moi’s first visit, and my second. I’d love to take Mr Moi to Tokyo; I myself only spent four days there. I’d also love to go back to Hokkaido during the winter, especially as Le Sproglette has proved herself to be quite hardy when it comes to sub-zero temperatures.

It’s likely that our first trip will be to Ho Chi Minh City, probably early next year. Not that we’ve started planning yet. But it’s only a couple of hours flight from the Top End, and if we can’t have Europe, we’ll take VietNam, eating lots of pho along the way. yum yum.

*OK I am getting itchy feet and projecting onto Mr Moi