Motherhood and God

A while ago, when Abigail was nearly a year old, a good friend asked me what becoming a mother had taught me about God.  I had to tell him to wait for the answer, as it was going to take me several days to think about a question like that!

After a good deal of thought (and gentle nagging from my friend who wanted his answer!) I eventually replied that most of all, motherhood had taught me about how utterly uncompromising God must be, how demanding of perfection.  It was a reply that surprised even me slightly, but try as I might I couldn't truthfully say anything slushier or gentler.  My experience of motherhood so far had shown me how fiercely and instinctively protective I was of my child, to the extent that I didn't want anything bad to happen to her at all - from pain and illness right down to not quite being fed on time, my desire for her experience of life was absolute perfection.  

Of course it's something that no parent can provide, and of course in this world every negative experience is a necessary character-building mountain to scale and all the rest of it, but for the first time I fully understood why God demands the impossible - perfection - in his world, and why He was prepared to go to such extraordinary lengths to achieve it.  I really think that I would take any pain in Abigail's place if I could.  I don't feel that way about The Rev or any other of my family or friends - I can say that I hope that I would, ideally, be self-sacrificial for them, but with my daughter it's different - a deep, instinctual knowledge that yes, I would.  

At the time, I couldn't think of anything else significant that I'd learned from the great Theological College of Motherhood, but more recently Abigail has been producing plenty of sermon-filling incidents.  It must be something to do with becoming a toddler.  I don't doubt that The Rev is keeping a catalogue to bring out on future occasions (poor girl...)  One that I noticed tonight was about communication and prayer.  

Abigail was having her supper when suddenly, she started asking for the cheese grater.  No, she doesn't speak yet, but I knew she was asking for the cheese grater: she was reaching towards it and doing her "uh uh uh uh" noise with which she usually makes herself understood.  So I said, as you'd expect a responsible mother to say, "No, dear, you can't have the cheese grater".

Now, I have no idea whether Abigail understands exactly what I say, but as she continued her escalating frustrated squeals, it occurred to me that she probably has no idea whether I understand what she is saying either.  How can she tell the difference between my incomprehension of what she wants and my answer being "No"?  The only way that Abigail can be sure I've heard her is if she gets what she wants.  If she doesn't, then naturally she simply continues to ask, getting louder and more tearful all the time.  Which describes my relationship with God more or less perfectly.  Is it any wonder that a "No" or a "Not yet" from heaven simply sounds like resounding silence?  But until I know for sure that I've been heard, I'll just keep going!

Dear God, uh uh uh uh uh UH UH UH UH!!!! Amen.

Health and Safety

You know, I despair for the evolution of our species.  If it's all supposed to be about survival of the fittest, why are toddlers programmed to self-destruct?

If anything long and bendy falls into Abigail's hands - a skipping rope, a pair of my tights, a pair of her tights, a headband - it goes straight around her neck.  A bag of any description gets put over her head.  Anything exactly the right size and shape to be choked on gets put into her mouth.  Anything climbable gets climbed, even though she can't yet walk on her own; but once she's on a high surface, her instinct tells her to get off it head first (though we have had some success in teaching her to wiggle backwards off the sofa).  Given a room full of fascinating toys, she will make a beeline for the one dangerous thing I've overlooked, and she makes original and innovative use of the most innocuous-looking objects: this morning, she used our tall wheeled vegetable rack as a walker, and when it fell over, instead of letting go she kept hold of the shelf she was clutching and ended up balanced precariously on top of its narrow side, her legs kicking into space as she hung on for dear life.

Everybody knows that this is completely normal for a 16 month old, (although why it should be I have no idea.  Do mother gazelles have to tell their babies not to play with lions?  Do baby zebras have to be taught how to drink from a lake without drowning themselves in it?)  And yet, I have to confess, I haven't really babyproofed my house.

We have a stairgate - it's just not attached to the wall yet.  Neither is any of the furniture, not even bookcases.  Our electric plugs aren't filled in with little bits of plastic and our toilet seat is not locked down.

This is partly because I'm still living in hope.  I'm hoping that it is possible, through a simple strategy of closed doors and constant supervision, to bring up a toddler safely with a healthy respect for the word 'No' and a basic understanding of what not to touch - one that will serve her as well in toddler-free friends' houses as it does in ours.  Another part of it is realism.  In a house as cluttered and disorganised as ours, there will always be something to worry about, especially given that creative use of everyday objects I mentioned earlier.  Probably having an enormous clear-out of excess junk and furniture would do more for Abigail's safety than fixing a stair-gate to the bottom of the stairs in case she manages to climb a significant number of stairs in the ten seconds it takes us to follow her from the kitchen to the front hall.

I do wonder whether any of this will change as Abigail gets more independent and able; already she is happy to spend far longer than you'd expect playing in a room by herself, and I don't want to have my back turned the first time she works out how to remove a screw cap from a bottle of bleach, for example.  It may yet transpire that we have to move into a padded cell until she's 25.  In the meantime, I shall be answering her apparent death wishes with a firm belief that it will take longer for her to do herself damage than it will take for me to work out where she's gone and chase her there.

Sensible girl

Determined not to follow in her mother's footsteps, Abi Jane is getting acquainted with the driving seat nice and early.

A Slice in the Life of The Rev's Wife

Mothering Sunday, 7.40am.  I am standing in a cloud of icing sugar, trying to create buttercream icing for 10:30 club.  This is more than usually difficult since I don't have any butter, having only decided to ice cakes for the children's mums the night before, when I finally abandoned all the complicated origami flowers I found on the internet.  I am hoping that Tesco Olive Spread will do the job.
Abigail is sitting at the kitchen table consuming Weetos.  She has them in her hair, up her sleeves and stuck to her lap.  Thankfully she is still wearing her pyjamas.  I have icing sugar in my hair, down my front and streaked across one eye.  I am not wearing my pyjamas.  I can hear the Rev moving about upstairs.  He probably still is wearing his pyjamas, although he has an 8:30 service to get to, because he has the astonishing ability to go from bed to presentable in under three seconds and he flaunts it mercilessly.
I taste the OliveSpreadCream icing.  It tastes of olive oil.  I add more icing sugar, humming the song I've just written and am now trying to learn in time to sing it with the 10:30 club kids.  I mentally run through the props and items I need to take to church with me: apart from coloured icing pens and sprinkles, I need one floppy fabric doll, two metres of shiny blue fabric, an old stained t-shirt of The Rev's, a spangly white blouse of mine and a basket.  Can you guess the Bible story?!
I taste the icing, which is now horrendously sweet with traces of olive oil.  I have a brainwave and fetch vanilla flavouring.  Abigail sticks her hand in her cereal bowl and spills sticky chocolate milk all over the table.  The Rev appears in the doorway buttoning his shirt and asking whether I've seen a dog collar.  I tell him to try the nursery (Abigail likes to remove his dog collars and chew the ends of them.)
I taste the icing.  It tastes absolutely foul, of very sweet vanilla flavoured olive oil, but I have a suspicion that the children will pile the cakes so high with sprinkles and sweets that nobody will notice; I give up and pack the bowl into a bag with the icing.  It's time to de-Weeto the baby, dress her in something decent, remove as much sugar as I can from my hair, clothes and face, collect together my props, remember all the silly animal actions in my song and go to church.
What better way to celebrate Mothering Sunday?

Not Me Monday

Not Me Mondays are the brainchild of the marvelous MckMama, veteran Mummy blogger.

Ummm...I did NOT completely forget Not Me Monday last week, did I?

Well, over the last two weeks then...

I did NOT attempt to babyproof the kitchen cupboards with the cunning use of elastic bands looping the handles together.  I did NOT fail to point this out to The Rev, who does NOT still have visible bruising on his thumb from where the elastic band snapped.  I did NOT subsequently buy some real cupboard locks, which are NOT still sitting uninstalled on the kitchen counter.

I did NOT buy Abigail yet another pair of baby shoes without her actually being there in the shop with me, just because they were pretty.  They were NOT too small, again.  I do NOT have absolutely no idea what size her feet actually are.  I am NOT putting off having them measured until she starts walking on them, for fear of being coerced into buying unnecessary shoes like the 'crawlers' which are constantly being advertised in my email inbox.

I did NOT resort to Heinz toddler food after another week of Abigail's refusing to eat anything I cooked.  She did NOT eat every last spoonful of it, smacking her lips.  I am NOT seriously considering just feeding her on it until she is no longer a toddler.  I do NOT want to cause injury to health visitors for their insistence that a baby won't do this if you never feed them jar food.  It's not true, people.  They just like the jar food better whether they are used to it or not.

And in non-baby related news, I did NOT take on very enjoyable storytelling job that involved my hiding in bushes and lying down in the mud in a nature reserve for a whole morning, and I do NOT consequently have the worst cold in the history of ever.

What have you all NOT been doing this week?

Stuff My Baby Can Do

Generally, blog posts with titles like this one send mothers like me running for cover, reluctant to read another list of things that other peoples' tiny geniuses (genii?) have accomplished.  Abigail seems to have set out from the very beginning to be unremarkable in terms of development.  Rolling over at five months, sitting up and eating solids on the dot of six months, she particularly enjoys teasing us by doing something once - just to show us that she can - and then not repeating it for several more months.
Take her laughing, for example.  She gave us one laugh,  really very late - I think she was nearly five months when she first really giggled properly - and then practised an astonishing variety of facial expressions, from bemused to sardonic, over the next few weeks as we tried everything in our power to get her to do it again.  Even now, there are no guaranteed ways to make Abigail laugh.  Everything works once, and after that it isn't funny any more.
However, in the face of constant emails from companies like Bounty, which arrive in my inbox with the title "FIFTEEN MONTHS!!!" and inform me that my daughter must be walking, talking and attempting basic Quantum physics by now, I thought I would indulge and celebrate some of the things that she can, very suddenly and somehow unexpectedly, do.
You see, I've noticed a fascinating change in her over the past week, and it has to do with how she treats her surroundings and her toys.  She suddenly seems to know what everything is for.  Where only a month ago she would have picked up a baby doll only to chew its hand, she now says "Baba!" holds it the right way up and tries to clean its face and hands with a baby wipe.  She can drive her sit-on car (which, before, only went backwards) around the kitchen, making a "Brrrrm!" noise and beeping the horn.  If she finds a sock, she tries to put in on her foot (she succeeds in draping it over her toes) and when she picks up a soft toy, especially one of her bears, she gives it a cuddle.
Puzzles and Duplo blocks have suddenly come into their own.  Abigail has, as if someone had flicked a switch in her head, stopped wanting to destroy things and started wanting to put them together.  Skittles that she used to delight in knocking down are now carefully stood up.  Towers are shakily constructed.  She's got the hang of her stacking rings and tries putting them together in lots of different combinations, often getting them nearly right; although she won't be persuaded that the big green one goes on the bottom, but prefers to balance it right on top of the finished cone like a sombrero.  And the shape sorter!  She knows what to do with that, too, and we can have actual games of Abi-get-a-shape, Mummy-find-the-hole, Abi-put-it-in that go on for at least twenty minutes of undivided concentration - and even the occasional giggle.

What, no TV?!

Last Sunday, we gave a pancake party for the congregation of our church, and the 10:30 club (that's my little children's group) were there in force.  They arrived, looked around for a bit, went off to the sitting room where I had left some games and so on for them, and sent a spokesperson within about two minutes with the question:

"Whereabouts is your TV?"

"We don't have one" I replied, and enjoyed the resulting expression on the boy's face.

Now, this was a little bit of a lie.  In fact we do have not one, but two televisions.  One of them is situated in the room we call the 'snug', which also contains either a sofa or a large pile of washing, depending on how organised we've been recently.  That television is not connected to an aerial, however, mainly because it didn't work when we tried, and so it's purely for DVD/VHS watching.  The other television is in our bedroom.  It's a teeny one that receives four fuzzy channels, but a friend lent it to us when Abigail was going through a phase of very early waking and it proved to be a Godsend that bought us a few extra minutes of sleep while Pingu was on.  We don't use it quite so often now.

We chose not to have a television downstairs when we moved, mainly because of our experience of having one in the sitting room of our previous house.  The thing consumed activity, time and conversation like a voracious beast.  The main problem was, in a tiny house such as it was, that it was far too easy to leave the TV on in the background all the time.  You could hear it from the kitchen.  You only had to think "I'll just see what's on to liven up the ironing" and suddenly, it was three hours later and you'd channel-flicked your way through the morning, doing all the chores at half speed with one eye on the screen watching something that wasn't even remotely interesting.

These days, if we want to watch something, we use the internet.  It's impossible to flick the channel and 'just see' what else is on when the programme ends, and we can get back to our lives instead.

I'm very tempted to get rid of even our little TV as Abigail gets older.  On the other hand, I grew up not watching television and ended up in a sort of contemporary cultural vacuum, which came to a head when The Rev nearly threw the Articulate board at me for not knowing who Arnold Schwarzenegger was.  I don't want Abigail's future husband lobbing board games around, so perhaps the television should stay.

Or perhaps the solution is to watch children's television on the internet too, in which case I can be very pick-and-choosy.  Something Special is in.  Pingu: in.  Pokoyo: in.  Waybuloo: out.  Definitely way out.  And the jury is still out on In The Night Garden.  I can stomach most of it, but I just can't stand knowing that it's narrated by the wonderful Derek Jacobi, Shakesperean actor and forever Cadfael in my heart, who just should not ever be made to say something like, "But Tombly-boo Oo, that's Tombly-boo Un's pinky-ponk juice!"