You’re walking, your long adult legs eating up the distance, and she’s jogging alongside you as fast as she can, holding your hand, making little noises of pain and urgency. You tell her to hold on, the house is just around the corner, we’ll be at the toilet soon, just hold on a little longer, but she can’t so you bend down and she climbs on your back but a few steps and you learn your knees are too sore for that. She can’t hold it anymore and it’s been so long since she’s had an accident, you can’t bring yourself to do that to her, so you take her across the road to the empty plot of land that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone and she squats in the knee high grass and in seconds she’s done a poo right there on the suburban street next to your own. You pull up her pants and now what do you do? You didn’t have time to dig a hole and the poo is just sitting there on the grass. It looks like a paw print doesn’t it mama, she says. You look around but there’s nothing to bury it with. It’s the shape of a paw print look that bit is mama that bit right there. Maybe you could cover it up with something? Look mama she says again it looks just like a paw print and this time you remember to say yes, yes, it really does, and then you kick some grass over it but it’s still a very visible turd. Don’t worry, you tell her. Anyone who comes along will just think it’s dog poo. And then you walk away.
Controversial confessional…a feelings dump.
Worst things I have worried over:
3. That the children might trip over and impale themselves on the bamboo shoots currently growing in our backyard.
2. That I might be in pain all the time but be so used to it that I don’t notice it anymore.
- That the weasel which hangs out in our garden some nights might break into the house while we’re sleeping, come up on the bed, and bite me on the toe.
(I lost sleep over that extremely specific fantasy)
Silliest plants:
3. Air plants
2. Mint
- Venus Fly Traps
So Venus Fly Traps predate on insects, right? But they also need to be pollinated. The solution they have evolved really makes me laugh.
Controversial-est opinions:
3. Most food-fad foods are actually nice and people are correct to be excited about them
2. Breastfeeding is great and all but the current over-emphasis of exclusive breastfeeding in public health spaces harms many parent’s mental and physical health in a way that is disproportionate to how beneficial it is for their child
- It’s fine to be chubby. Really, I promise you it is.
Most moronic things I have seen on Pinterest:
3. Half-dipped frames
2. I know this is low-hanging fruit, but here it is anyway.
- How is this helpful for anyone?
Reasons I am writing this post:
3. I am moving house this week and my to-do list is distressing.
2. We’re moving because we sold the house to a developer and I want to confess to everything because the guilt is eating me up inside. They are going to put a bulldozer through the whole lot of it – the house that has done its best to shelter us, and the garden that has delighted us. I’m sorry, gentle trees. I’m sorry, chirping birds and buzzing bees and clever brown spiders. I’m sorry, blooming flowers. I’m sorry, sweet old broken house. We couldn’t save you and I’m so sorry.
- Because my parents are moving in with us, I’m losing two homes at once.
Wildest things we saw while house-hunting:
4. House where they built the new kitchen next to the old kitchen and just like, had two kitchens! They just kept the door to the old kitchen closed.
3. Room that an incredulous fellow participant in the open home described as an “indoor barbecue room”. Yes, it was a gas barbecue.
2. I wish I’d taken pictures of some of this stuff, honestly. One place had a garden feature that comprised of a large pentagram painstakingly inscribed in the lawn with river pebbles, several meters in diameter, with a plinth in the centre that also had a pentagram on it.
- The winner though was the house where some of the walls didn’t go all the way up. Like, you know in a public toilet stall? How the cubicle wall does not meet the ceiling? Like that except the wall between bedrooms, and also the wall between the living room and the bedroom. In a house, in an actual house, that we were expected to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for. The walls didn’t meet the ceiling. In an actual house.
Let’s end on a positive note. Things I’m most looking forward to about the new house:
3. I will have a dishwasher for the first time in my life.
2. It’s in a fantastic location for weekend markets with my mum, going for walks with my dad, taking Nora to the mall for a milkshake, letting Juney to get grubby in the sand, and sneaking off with Barns for a stroll along the beach.
- Some day soon I’ll be sitting on the deck with my family on a Sunday completely free of open homes or packing, while someone else makes me a cup of tea and the Kapiti Coast sunshine pours over us like honey.
Library
Content warning: Poos. Like really, so much poos.
There’s a wonderland just five minutes walk from our house, a special place of reading and quiet, where the kiddie section often has a slide set up or a few ride-on toys bumping around, just because. A place with kindly people, chilled drinking water, comfy sofas, a toy collection, jigsaw puzzles. A sanctuary. A library.
Pity I can never go there again.
On Friday Juney and I were leaving the library when I realised I needed to pee.
“Hold on Lovey, can we just go to the toilet before we go?”
“No,” she said, unapologetically. “We can’t.”
I wasn’t prepared for this. “But….I have to go”, I gibbered lamely, taking her hand and leading her to the toilet.
“But I don’t want to”
This, I realised, is what I get for trying to be polite and phrasing it as a request. Phrasing a demand as a request isn’t really fair, is it?
“Well, I have to, so can we just go? You don’t want mummy to piddle herself, do you?”
“I don’t mind. You can hold it, mummy.”
We usually use the big disabled toilet because I can’t fit both of the kids and myself in a stall in the ladies’ loo, and so we headed there out of force of habit. I managed to get her inside but she was feeling stubborn by this point and wouldn’t stop fiddling with the door. I tried appealing to her better nature with “if I can’t go, it’s bad for my body” before remembering that toddlers don’t have a better nature. I put the heavy bag of books by the door and she pushed it aside. I got a little cross. Then eventually I got down on her level and we talked it out. We smiled at each other and had a hug and, feeling proud of myself, I finally went to pee.
I lifted up the toilet lid and recoiled. The seat was smeared in poo. I looked closer. The lid also had streaks on it. It had the exact look about it that a loo gets if someone has tried to clean up poo with only dry toilet paper and has given up when, for some incomprehensible reason, that completely fails to work. Hastily withdrawing, I noticed that the floor I’d been standing next to had a huge smear of wiped poo on it. There were little blobs of it that hadn’t been cleaned in a shockingly wide radius. It was even on the walls.
Some one had just had a really shit time.
I hustled us out of the toilet as quickly as I could, appalled to think that we’d been breathing in there for so long, and was about to go to the ladies when some sense of civic duty nagged at me. Maybe other people don’t look as carefully as I do. What if someone sat on it?
The Covid-19 library sign-in monitoring desk thingy was right next to the disabled toilet so I approached the young man presiding over it.
“Excuse me. Sorry to bother you…someone’s… had a little accident in the disabled toilet. There’s poo all over it. Sorry”.
“Oh,” he said, sympathetically, peeping at Juney “that’s alright”.
He motioned like he was leaving to deal with it so I apologised again and walked away before the horrible truth dawned on me.
He thought it was us.
He was right next to the loo, he’d seen us go in, and we’d been arguing in there for almost ten entire minutes. Why would anyone spend ten minutes in a toilet covered in poo if they were not the people who had made it that way?
He thought we’d gone in there and one of us had done a huge sloshy gushing poo and I hadn’t even cleaned it up properly and instead I had just shamelessly gone and told some poor librarian about it and then walked away and left other people to deal with it. And there was nothing at all I could say to convince him otherwise.
We went to the ladies and I finally did my piddle and when we came out I found him and one of the main librarians, a lady we interact with multiple times a week, peering into the disabled toilet from the safety of the hallway.
“Is it really that bad?” she was asking him.
“Whoever it was did try to clean up” I informed her earnestly, “but they didn’t get it all. You can still see splatters all over the place”.
She blue-tacked an out-of-order sign to the door. I tried to maintain the aura of a helpful bystander (this should have been easier considering it is exactly what I was) but I caught the look the young man gave me as we left. So I guess we’re never going back to the library.
Worms
Once you notice the worms you can’t un-notice them. After every rain they’re there, glistening, flesh-pink and naked, crawling with great determination towards drowning in an overflowing gutter, as blind and vulnerable thing as has ever existed. And once you’ve helped one, picked it up with the stem of a nearby leaf and popped it back on the grass, once you’ve realised that it’s easy, it is impossible to justify not helping the others, even though your friends become exasperated with you and threaten to leave you behind, too afraid of being late for school to care about a few stupid worms.
Eventually you become an adult and although office workers don’t go out in the rain as often as kids, you still help worms if you happen to see them on your way to the bus stop, tucking your skirt into the fold of your legs when you crouch down and carefully keeping the mud off your shoes.
You’ve grown up into someone with paper-thin skin. You’re almost farcically lacking in resilience. Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of the kids who stop to rescue worms. You don’t follow current events and you never watch the news. It upsets you too much. But you can’t avoid everything and at times all the grief and pain and fear in the world presses down on you, suffocates, haunts you. A coworker tells you about a documentary she saw about eating dogs. Many years later remembering her words still roots you to the spot, sucks the air out of you. Is it any wonder you’d rather read manga?
You don’t give to charity. Which charity would you give to? There’s so much need. Elephants and orphans. Abused women and cancer sufferers. Ambulances and stray dogs and autistic kids and sea turtles and homeless people and earthquake victims and climate change and underfunded classrooms and endangered birds and the list goes on and on. You tell yourself you’re too poor, that you’ll do it when you’re older.
You grow up some more and you get married. You go on honeymoon to Rarotonga. You and your new husband walk down the beach, paddles in hand, toward where the kayaks are waiting, and you notice that the receding tide has marooned a sea cucumber on the sand. Can sea cucumbers survive out of water? It looks pathetic in the hot sun. You scoop it up with your paddle and put it back where it belongs. A few meters later there’s another one. A step beyond that there’s three of them. You scoop and scoop.
“Lovey…” your husband says. His voice is gentle. “Look up.”
You realise the beach is covered in sea cucumbers. There are hundreds. Maybe more. It’s your worst nightmare. Saving all of them would take hours. You force yourself to walk on and leave them to die. The kayaking is not as fun after that.
Time passes again. You’ve had a couple of kids and moved house twice. Your husband has a decent job and you finally donate money regularly to charity, but it’s almost comedic in how blinkered it is, in how firmly it keeps you in your lane. It is only this: you anonymously donate fresh fruit and vegetables through your local co-op to poor families in your neighbourhood. It is a good thing to do, you are sure of this, but it is nowhere near enough.
You believe passionately in many things but never do anything about any of them. You don’t write to politicians or march on parliament. You don’t volunteer your time anywhere. You don’t even share political memes on Facebook. You know that you’re insulated by your privilege, that others care so much because they don’t have a choice. They must fight for their rights or perish. You’re ashamed of it. And still you can’t shut out the world. You worry endlessly about climate change and covid and you ache for victims everywhere. Sometimes you look down at your two hands and know that there’s so much more they could do, there are places that they could make a difference, but it seems impossible. You barely have time to shower as it is. And the children are watching.
They don’t mind when you stop for worms even as they sit in the pram and wait for you, pouring rain chilling their little hands. They have a natural sympathy with tiny and fragile things. They only want to know that you succeeded.
Sometimes you wonder if you’re doing them a terrible disservice when you pick up worms in front of them. Because of you, they know the names of all the types of bird that visit your garden and they stop to look at pretty flowers and they pick up interesting leaves and they are fond of sunsets. It all sounds idyllic but you know where it leads. It ends up with you being the only person in Waterloo station watching the sky for a second flash of lightning in a storm, while everyone around you smokes and talks and looks at their phones.
“Did you help the worm, Mama?” they ask every time, and you hesitate. Even in this you are unsure. You know the worm left the sodden earth for a reason, but surely it is better for them to brave an unknown future on the damp grass than to face certain doom at the feet of your fellow pedestrians. And this is all you can do, now, today.
“…yes”, you say. “I helped”.
Balloons
I watch my mother tie the end of the balloon shut in a practiced movement of her small, strong fingers. She wants to teach me how but I am too scared to try. The other kids in the school holiday program that she runs in the pink community centre perched on the side of the hill, they all pick it up quickly. But what if it pops in my hands? I couldn’t stand the noise, the failure. I slide away. I’ll find another way to help set up for the party.
*
We take the babies to meet my Aunty Lyn and she showers them with gifts. A pop-up tent. Bubbles. Marshmallows. A packet of balloons. While I thank her and really am grateful, I privately scratch my head. Balloons are kind of a weird present, aren’t they?
Sometimes I just have no idea. Lyn adored children. She knew what would make them happy.
Eventually, anyway.
*
Time passes and our babies are about to have their first birthday. The kids don’t understand what’s happening but I’m excited about the party. Keeping two whole infants not just alive but thriving for an entire year is by far the greatest achievement of my life. We absolutely must celebrate.
The day before the party, I reach for Lyn’s packet of balloons.
It’s really a moment. I am stepping into proper grown-up territory now. The carefree years of my early adulthood were not a balloon-filled time. It’s been a long time since I’ve even touched one. The babies haven’t encountered one before. How exciting. Kids love balloons, right? They’ll be delighted. I call them over and they watch as I blow it up, interest quickly becoming fear as the strange new object just keeps growing.
Okay, time to tie it up. It looked pretty easy when mum did it, so long ago. You just stretch it out and…no, do you make the loop first? Don’t worry kids, everything is fine…okay, now my finger is stuck…I just need to…
PPPBBBBBBBBbbbbbbpppppppbbsssssssss
WAAAAAAAAH!
The balloon flies off over the dining table and the children are absolutely terrified. They cling to their father like he’s their only hope of survival. They are not yet coordinated enough to flee and so settle for screaming.
Being a grown-up always turns out to be harder than you expected.
*
I eagerly squeeze through the chicken coop door and stand still for a moment, savouring it. It’s an odd thing to savour, I suppose, the stink of chicken shit and the irate clucking of hens who wish I’d get on with their breakfast, but it’s my favourite part of the day in the current phase of our mad rush around Spain, volunteering on a tiny organic farm in Basque country. Barnaby is certainly bewildered by it. Hard to explain, but it ties into one of my earliest memories. I remember being very small. I remember a big room, warm and dark, and the gentle rustlings and clucking of chickens. I felt safe there. But this memory makes no sense in the context of my suburban New Zealand childhood.
We skype my mum and I ask her about it. She’s as confused as the rest of us, and then suddenly her face clears. “Ah! Lyn worked on a chicken farm”.
I was only 18 months old when my brother was born, so I was still practically a baby myself when a dairy allergy sent him, a tiny infant, into hospital. With dad working full-time, my parents did the only thing they could do – they packed me up and sent me away. I can’t imagine how hard it was for them.
I was fine, of course. They sent me to Aunty Lyn.
*
Now, I am a grown-up, and I am determined. They’re balloons. I’m supposed to be a mother. I have to give my children the joy of balloons.
With a lot of soothing and coaxing we persuade them to watch as I attempt it again, albeit from a distance this time. They peek at me from their father’s safe arms. I blow up the balloon, go to tie it, look up at the kid’s worried little faces with their big round eyes, and I do something terrible. I just can’t help it. I know I shouldn’t have done it. It was just too funny. Even now, I’m not ashamed like I should be.
I let the balloon go….deliberately.
PPPPPPPBBBBBBBBBbbbbbbbsssssssssssssssssss
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!
It flies around in the air, the kids scream, I bend over double laughing, and Barnaby, well, he’s not impressed.
The children are spirited away by their better parent and I’m left to blow the balloons up by myself. At least with the pressure off I finally work out how to tie them.
The damage is done, at any rate. The babies have realised the truth. The balloons cannot be trusted. When my friend comes for dinner that evening they lead her to where I have tied bunches of the offending objects to the curtain rails and they point, over and over again. They have almost no language so we’re not sure whether they are telling her to watch out for the flying menaces or asking her to save them from the balloons as their parents apparently won’t, but they successfully convey that they are unhappy with the continued balloon presence.
I leave them up anyway and they eventually get used to them. And a few months later I try again, blow a few up just to see what’ll happen.
The kids seem to have forgotten the earlier debacle because they are thrilled, laughing and racing around the room like children from an advert for life insurance. I take a video for Aunty Lyn. She deserves to see the joy she’s brought.
I spend a long time meaning to send that video to her and then a few months ago, suddenly, there was no-one to send it to.
Being a grown-up sometimes means learning lessons the hard way.
*
I’m in the supermarket when mum calls. Mum’s a texter, so I know something’s wrong before I even answer.
After she tells me that Lyn’s gone I’m shaky but not crying, vague and distracted. I lug the shopping around the aisles, staring at the shelves but choosing nothing, for quite some time before it occurs to me that I had best call Barns. He is waiting in the car with the toddlers and will be wondering what’s taking me so long.
We were going to facetime her but never worked out how.
I’m still in a daze when my little family run up to where I’m waiting. Nora and June positively fling themselves upon me. They embrace me with all the strength their tiny arms possess.
We said we were going to visit last year but we got busy moving house and we didn’t.
“There you go, Mumma!” Juney smiles up at me. “Now you’re not sad anymore!”
I never sent her the video.
*
It’s a big packet of balloons. We tied some to the letterbox for Nora and June’s second birthday party, as is the tradition of our people.
We had their third birthday party in a park. We thought it would be helpful to tie some balloons to a tree to show our families where to find us. They popped in the wind and the kids were so sad that well-meaning relatives blew up some more.
Those popped, too.
The relatives were determined to fix things. Were they not grandparents / uncles? Fixing things is their job. They had a brainwave. They would tie the balloons to the toddlers! That would keep them off of the prickly ground. Children never lower their arms.
So, when a balloon next popped, it was attached to a child. She screamed in abject terror. Her sister realised something. The balloon tied around her very own wrist might also pop at any second. She tried to run but the balloon followed her. She started screaming. We all gave chase. The balloon popped before we could undo the knot.
That was the last straw for both of them. They haven’t touched a balloon since. If I suggest they might like one, June will turn to me with enormous eyes. “But what if it pops?” she asks, and I have no answer for that. Accepting the truth that all things end is also the work of grown-ups.
I miss balloons though, and hope they will be over this current phase soon. I liked always having a few bumping around on the floor. I can’t seem to pass one by without picking it up and batting it around a bit. I like to see how long I can keep it in the air before it escapes me and drifts back down to the floor. It’s a game I’ve been playing for as long as I remember.
Who was it who said we don’t grow up, we just get old?
Aunty Lyn understood that better than anyone. She loved things with openness, innocence. She collected salt and pepper shakers. In the last years of her life, she was learning to play the ukulele. She was obsessed with elephants, and getting to touch one in Australia was the greatest thrill of her life. And she adored children, all of them, even through all the years of raising her own and helping with the nieces and nephews and grandkids, the stress and the toil of it. She made you feel special.
I hope I grow up to be someone like her.
*
To be completely honest, this piece has sat unfinished for months. I’m still learning to write, and while the above, the original end of the piece, is true, it’s not all the way true. I write, in large part, to explain things to myself. Perhaps here I’m reaching for the heart of something that doesn’t exist. There’s no pat summation or smooth conclusion when you lose someone. This stuff, the people you care about, what you think and feel about them, grief, family, love, it’s messy. So I’m just going to let this post be a bit messy.
Here’s what I do know. I don’t believe in life after death. That’s why it’s important that we send those emails and make those phone calls while we still can. We can’t do anything for the dead but remember them, and they can’t do anything for us at all.
But if that’s really true, why do chicken coops still feel like home? Why was I so determined to take the kids to see their first elephant this summer? There’s still a few balloons in the packet in the cupboard. If I hide it away, keep it safe, there’ll be just enough left for one more birthday party.
Country review: Spain
The world seems to be slowly opening up again but it’ll still be a long time before I can go travelling. At least I can travel…in my memories. In this series, I enlighten you with wisdom from my travelling past by reviewing – not just a hotel, not just a restaurant, oh no! I am more ambitious and shockingly hubristic than that. I will review… an entire country!
OVERVIEW
On paper, Spain has it all: History! Architecture! Culture! Cuisine! Art! Nature! Beaches! But the reality is curiously subdued. I spent almost six months there and I did not love it.
EASE OF TRAVEL: 7 / 10.
Spain is easy enough to travel in. It’s affordable and has good public transport. It’s safe enough if you’re more cautious than you would be at home. We fell victim to a pick-pocket but the wallet really shouldn’t have been in an accessible pocket whilst we rode the subway. Lesson: things that are okay in New Zealand are not safe overseas.
A common complaint when travelling in Spain is that you will, not often but sometimes, be frustrated by the siesta thing. Now, I am not opposed to siestas. Contrary to what some people believe, the Spanish really do earn their siestas. They get up at the crack of dawn and labour all morning, putting in hours of work before most office workers have even sat down at their desks. I have volunteered on a farm in Spain and in that context siestas make perfect sense. You can’t be out doing manual labour in the hot afternoon sunshine. It’s not just disagreeable, it’s unsafe. But I still wonder how on earth it makes sense in the context of, say, a museum? Are the museum staff really going all the way home between 1pm and 4pm? Doesn’t it just mean commuting twice a day instead of once? Isn’t it very annoying to close everything and open it all up again? Wouldn’t they rather just finish their day earlier? I don’t know. Perhaps it works for them. Perhaps they love it. At any rate, the logistics of it are not my problem but I wanted to note that it certainly doesn’t lend itself to the style of travel when you show up in a town with not much of a plan and just a day or two to try and check off all the major attractions. You can find yourself at a loose end in the afternoon. It can be frustrating but you can’t change things in the slightest so (and now we come to the actual point of this paragraph) I urge you to research attraction opening times in advance.
Moving on, there is also a definite language barrier but – okay, listen, now I want to say something about language barriers. I don’t really think they are a problem. Oh, they can be a problem, of course, it’s not like I haven’t been served a plate of sliced pig ear in a restaurant when I meant to order something else, anything, anything at all really. But at its core a language barrier isn’t a problem in any given place, it’s a feature. If you’re one of those people who sees a language barrier as a terrifying and insurmountable thing, I’m sorry but I just don’t get it. I’ve always gotten more enjoyment out of travelling somewhere noticeably different from home. I want to go to countries where I don’t speak the language! It’s much more exciting. You get by. You should of course pick up a bit of the language before you travel, not just to make your life easier (this goes double if you’re leaving the main tourist routes) but also because it’s courteous to at least thank people in their native tongue. But I like travelling a lot so I’m not one of those types who thinks you need to properly learn a language in order to earn the right to visit a country. There are too many places I want to go, I do not have the time for that and I don’t expect you to, either.
Now, I know you’re yelling “colonialist privilege!” at your monitor and I hear you, I really do. It’s unfair that we English speakers get to arrogantly traipse around the world, expecting people to cater to our linguistic ineptitude in their quest for our tourist dollar while we reap the benefits of a history of oppression and economic imperialism. It’s very unfair. I’m sorry about it. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Having said all that, there’s a definite language barrier once you’re off the beaten path, so that’s something to be aware of.
ACTIVITIES AND ATTRACTIONS: 10/10.
Not only does Spain have heaps of cool stuff, it has cool stuff you can’t see anywhere else in the world. There’s literally nothing else on earth like La Sagarada Familia or the Cordoba mosque-cathedral or Guernica. Or the Alhambra. Or Casa Batlló. You get the idea. Forget about beaches, go to Spain for art! The art galleries are astonishingly good, especially in Madrid. Go for architecture. You take the exuberant Gaudi buildings of Barcelona and add in the solemn churches, cobbled old streets and stately town squares of the rest of Spain and it’s a real feast for the eyes. It helps that the scenery is mostly very lovely as well, especially along the Northern coast which is all rugged cliffs and golden beaches and little towns draped in foliage. To be honest there is a chunk of Spain right in the middle that is all super blah looking countryside but they do make up for it by strewing pretty little churches around.
Okay, but beaches are also rad, you say? I do happen to agree with you, as a matter of fact. I thought the rugged beaches of Northern Spain were more interesting than in the South. Go to San Sebastian! The best town in the world counts as an attraction, right? If anyone knows of anywhere else as perfect as San Sebastian then please tell me immediately so I can start saving up money. San Sebastian boasts a gleaming expanse of golden sand, lovely old buildings, a quirky island to explore, a million ice cream shops, a fireworks festival, lively pintxo (Basque tapas) bars, and a long promenade on which to stroll arm in arm with your sweetie. It’s old-fashioned in the best possible way. I can’t think of a more perfect spot for a vacation.
Honestly, Spain is festooned with excellent little towns. I’m talking dozens (hundreds?) of places where the old town has survived intact and you can literally step into another century. What a feeling, to be surrounded by golden stone, lit up in the late afternoon sun. Salamanca, guys. Toledo! And even the mediocre or modern places all seem to have a square or an old church or an ancient bridge, something beautiful to raise them up. You won’t lack things to do in Spain.
SHOPPING: 7/10.
As far as I can tell the shopping is good but I was broke when I was in Spain so I can’t say for sure. The funnest shopping though is if you go in the weeks before Christmas and go to a Christmas market in a square somewhere and look at all the goods they have for sale for nativity scenes. Spanish people apparently love nativity scenes and we’re not just talking about like, the stable and a few figures, on no, we’re talking recreating the whole of Bethlehem, so the Christmas markets are full of stalls where they sell individual miniature eggs and tiny baskets and pots and bottles and little buildings and mini plastic pigeons and anything you could imagine to give a nativity scene a sense of life and place. It’s wonderful window shopping.
FOOD: 4/10.
It’s hard to know how to score this. When you eat out in New Zealand the food is almost always decent but rarely either fantastic or dreadful. Spain has the exact opposite problem – it was seldom merely mediocre – sometimes the meals were absolutely amazing and a lot of the time the food was just plain bad.
I think some of the fault lies with us – we were in Spain for around six months and so we weren’t exactly going to research where to eat every meal. We had mixed results on the occasions we chose a restaurant based on Lonely Planet or Trip Advisor recommendations but anyway we mostly just ate what at whatever place was nearby and that nearby place was mostly bad. Greasy, bland, just plain bad. Soggy pasta and frozen pizza and over-cooked chips. Blegh. Some of these places were tourist traps but we spent time off the beaten path and so a lot of them mostly catered to locals, making the poor quality of the food quite inexplicable. Perhaps the locals only go there for a drink?
The best food we ate was in people’s homes or restaurant recommendations from our Airbnb hosts. And that is the problem with eating in Spain. You know there’s good food out there. Spanish food is famous for a reason! But it all feels out of reach. It’s out of town. It’s home cooked. You have to be in the know. You needed a reservation months in advance.
When we did have good food, it was out-of-this-world unforgettable. Why do I still think about that stew with chips we got as a tapas in that pub in Grenada? It was just stew, for goodness sake. But god it was tasty. And the tomatoes at the organic farm were out of this world. The yellow cherry tomatoes grew everywhere as weeds. We ripped handfuls of the vines out of the ground, Barns cramming as many as he could eat into his mouth, unable to believe they’d all go to waste. The simple revelation of a tomato. Finally understanding what flavour is as dozens of notes unfold in your mouth and you truly see for the first time that a taste is comprised of hundreds of chemicals that interact and combine, that even a single tomato isn’t a song, it’s a symphony.
You’ll try to grow yellow cherry tomatoes at home but it’s not the same.
There is one workaround I want to mention in the very unlikely event anybody turns to this blog for advice: Don’t buy lunch. Find a supermarket and buy some decent bread and a bit of ham and pre-sliced cheese. Ta-da! It’s all you need for a slap up meal, much cheaper than buying a sandwich from a cafe while being of better quality, and the ham will be way nicer than what you get at home (if you’re from New Zealand, anyway). You’re welcome.
FRIENDLINESS: 3/10.
Truthfully, it doesn’t feel nice to write this. I know Spain has been hit incredibly hard by Covid19, and those who rely on the tourism industry are suffering terribly. It’s almost a comfort that an incredibly popular post of mine will garner maybe five page-views so no one will read this. I don’t want to harm people who are in strife but I do have to be honest with you: People in Spain are generally not very friendly to tourists. Some were, of course, I mean we were there for five months so you’d hope that some people were nice to us in a time period that long, but they were far outnumbered by the people who clearly wished we’d just fuck off.
I don’t know. When you read about Spain, it sounds very exuberant. Imagine a place where not just the bars but the streets fill up in the evenings as people make the rounds, chatting with friends, stopping here and there to pick up some gossip. It seems really lovely for them and in reality it is great people watching. But the problem is just that – you’re only watching. It’s not exactly that I expected to be included, actually I am hopelessly socially awkward and never expect that anywhere, but if you’re on your own or it’s just the two of you, Spain can feel pretty lonely. We went back to our airbnb early most nights. It was easier that way.
OVERALL SCORE: 6/10.
Obviously, we were in Spain in a pre-Covid19 world. Who knows how things have changed? Tourist dollars will now be more valuable than ever worldwide. Tourists will possibly be more welcome. I’d love to give Spain another try. This time I’d enjoy the art, plan all my meals in advance, not stay very long, and happily skip home to my people.
Meet Cute
“So…”, Mary leans in close, smiling hugely. “I’ve got a guy I want to introduce you to! I think you’re perfect for each other.”
“Uhhh”, I manage, backing away. It’s late 2012 and things aren’t going well. Mere weeks ago I left Taiwan, my home of two years, my job, and the partner I’d been with for most of a decade, when our relationship fell apart for reasons that he never actually articulated to me. I’m heart-broken, I’m suffering from jet lag and reeling from reverse culture shock. I’m unemployed. I’m staying with my parents in a house I’ve never lived in before.
To top it all off, I’m about to be Maid of Honour at a dear friend’s wedding. On the blessed day I will see friends I haven’t seen in years. When they ask me how I am, I will check that the bride is definitely out of earshot, lean in close, and inform them that love is a lie.
“I just…” I try to find the words.
“Do you need a bit more time?”
“That might be for the best.”
*
“Bad news, I’m afraid. It’s not going to happen. He’s got a girlfriend now.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Barnaby. The guy I wanted to introduce you to”.
I am mooning over a much younger and entirely unsuitable man, who I will soon learn doesn’t fancy me in the slightest.
“Well, that’s okay. I wish him all the best. Let me tell you about this guy I met at a party last week!”
*
“It’s just so boring being single”, I gripe. “You can’t do anything fun. I just want someone to go to the movies with”.
“Well, guess what? I think Barnaby broke up with his girlfriend!”
“Who?”
Mary’s exasperated. “The guy, you know, the guy I’ve been telling you about for months! Barnaby! I work with him and he’s really nice. I think you’d be perfect for each other. Let me feel him out, see if I can set something up.”
An actual blind date? Do people still go on those?
Am I really that desperate?
I think of my lonely bed in my parent’s spare room. Yes, yes I am that desperate.
“Um…okay. Yup, sure, sure. Thank you”.
“I’ll come along, too, and I’ll bring my boyfriend so we’ll help you out a bit. And in the meantime, let’s make a plan of attack. It’ll take the pressure off if you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. You’re going to sign up for a dating website. The most popular one is…”
A few days later I get a text. We’re going to meet up a week from Sunday.
*
*
“Oh, I know Barnaby!” says Emma. “I met him at a party one time. He’s nice…but…” She trails off and frowns at me for a moment, assessing. Is this bad news? Is he dreadful in some way? It does not worry me, anyway. I have followed Mary’s instructions to the letter (she’s that sort of a person) and have been talking with a few guys on the dating website she recommended. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.
So, you see, I’m not worried. I refuse to be worried. There are lots of men out there.
I am persistently…wondering…about something, though. What does one wear to a blind date? My mum says a dress, my red dress to be exact, and while I do look good in that, I wonder if it’s the wrong tone for an afternoon coffee date. Too formal, surely?
Emma finally finishes her thought. “He was wearing a polyprop. To a party”.
I decide on jeans instead.
*
“Sorry I’m late. Nice to meet you.”
Here’s Barnaby at last, reaching out a hand. I take it but then visibly recoil. “Your hands are freezing!” I exclaim. I don’t think the poor guy expected the first words out of my mouth to be a criticism. He fumbles an apology and stumbles off to the counter to order.
I’m a bit discombobulated myself. Besides the unfortunate zombie hands, Barnaby’s first impression is that he smiles easily, is nice to look at, and is just as nervous as I am. Recent events have left me with all the self esteem of a box of Christmas chocolates still sitting on a supermarket discount shelf in March. I am not convinced that a normal man will want anything to do with me. And I can’t have made much of a first impression.
He does come back to the table so it can’t have been that bad. Still, even with Mary and Matt’s help, the conversation gets off to a rocky start. We have both lived overseas so we chat about that, and this is how I learn that Barnaby was the “friend who lived in India” who gave Mary the advice on the Indian railway system that saw us kicked off our train at 2 in the morning in a very small town, right as the giardia hit me. He is extremely sheepish about it. I try to reassure him that it was all for the best. Harder to shit and vomit at the same time on a moving locomotive, after all.
We gamely move on but things are stilted and so I complain way too much about the brownie I ordered (what gives, Fidel’s Cafe? You’re usually so reliable) which could be used to exfoliate dry skin cells off the feet. We try to talk about films but despite having a degree in that area I have worse taste in movies than the average 12-year-old while Barnaby is a proper grown-up so we don’t have much overlap. Also, he doesn’t go tramping and is scared of the ocean. I don’t like sports and Twitter bewilders me. Despite all this, I get the astonishing impression that he might actually fancy me. This seems too good to be true. As we have attempted to converse, I’ve noticed that Barnaby is sincere, intelligent, a good listener, and I definitely fancy him.
We say goodbye at the door, both trying not to seem too keen. I think we just managed to admit that it was, in fact, nice to meet each other. Then Mary and Matt start a round of goodbye hugs so Barnaby and I hug, too, and he leans down and kisses me on the cheek.
If Barnaby sat down before we met and studied my history and tastes, planned the perfect first date, he couldn’t have come up with a better parting shot than that kiss. An adult’s way of saying goodbye. A wordless expression of his interest, without being scary or overly forward. Hinted intimacy in the intriguing sensation of beard on soft cheek. I am a nerd and most of my friends are, too, and this means that all the experience I have with men, as friends or boyfriends or flirty acquaintances, has all been with nerds. And my ex loved me, I think, but he didn’t treasure me. I’ve never experienced a move like that before. In fact, my life has hitherto been completely devoid of tall, kind, handsome men giving me kisses on the cheek. I might be working as a temp, I might be living with my parents, but things are suddenly looking up.
“He is so cute”, I tell Mary and Matt as we walk away, “that I’m going to die”.
Less than an hour after we part, he texts me.
*
These days, in the day-to-day hubbub of marriage and raising kids, I will admit I sometimes forget Barnaby wasn’t always in my life. It’s scarily easy to take someone for granted. To forget how much it means to have met someone, how much it gave. To forget that without one friend’s act of kindness, and one choice to go along with it, I would have missed out on so much.
And then I’ll notice him across the room, and sometimes he’ll notice me back and smile, or sometimes he won’t and he’ll just keep right on making dinner. Either way, it’s okay.
I remember.
Birth Story
So I finally wrote up the story of Nora and Juney’s birth. It’s long but I make no apology for this – lots of things happened.
Content warning: This post talks about the death of a child.
A woman’s body may be designed for birth and pregnancy but we’re not built to carry twins. The last trimester of pregnancy was not kind to me. The babies just took and took until I felt like a half-person at best. I was absolutely enormous. I was exhausted all the time. I had to give up my job earlier than I wanted, at only six months pregnant, as I could no longer make the five minute walk between the bus stop and work without sitting down for a rest halfway. After that I was home alone most of the time and played a lot of video games.
I couldn’t do anything – by 30 weeks pregnant I couldn’t even make it all the way around the supermarket. I had the usual nesting urges but couldn’t bend to vacuum or dust. I spent half of every day lying in bed, too nauseous to get up, and the other half eating, insatiable. One of my most vivid memories of late pregnancy is listening to music in the shower and crying because I realised that the song was beautiful. (Nigel Kennedy – Solitude (For Yehudi Menuhin)). I know, I know, super melodramatic, but it was the first time in days that I’d felt any pleasure. So it wasn’t much of a life and I was relieved when the time was upon us. And I was booked in for a elective c-section, so once it was time, it was really time.
I was glad to be scheduled for a c-section. I mean, I wasn’t only glad. There aren’t many straightforward emotions about childbirth. I was scared of the surgery, dreading the pain. I was irritated that this choice was made for me, although I wouldn’t have chosen differently. But I was mostly glad. A year and a half before Nora and June were born, my infant niece died from brain trauma caused by lack of oxygen while my cousin was in labour with her. It is a long story, but she was the victim of a series of bad decisions and mistakes made by hospital staff. Losing Ellie was incredibly painful for the whole family. Her poor parents have suffered unimaginably. A well-timed c-section would have saved her life.
So, obviously, I was never going to romanticise vaginal birth. It seems to me that there are no “good” birthing options, any way you do it entails risk and pain, but at least an elective c-section pretty much guarantees that you get to take your baby home. I’m no longer able to see anything else as being important.
And anyway it’s not like I had a choice. The lead twin (the twin closest to the cervix) was transverse/breech for the entire pregnancy. She just got stuck that way. Nobody wanted to risk vaginal birth. My midwife went from “when they change position then we’ll talk about a birth plan” to, “so, I’ve booked your c-section with the hospital”. I feel lucky to live in a country where access to such a vital and life-saving surgery is a given (and free!).
And I liked that it was simple, straightforward. Like making a dinner reservation. I’m highly-strung and not great with uncertainty at the best of times. So there’s me in the past, all too aware of how things can go wrong during birth, nodding to herself. Yes. Good. It’s all sorted. I really liked that. “Book a flight down for the birth” I told my father-in-law. “Even if you can only manage a few days, it’ll be fine. It’s all booked in like theatre tickets”.
Oh, how fate must have laughed.
I got a steroid shot in the bottom at t-minus two days. The next day I went out for lunch with my cousin to celebrate my last day as a non-parent. I had a lemonade at lunch and the kids got all worked up from the sugar. This is deeply uncomfortable with two full-sized babies inside you. I was seriously ready to not be pregnant anymore.
After dinner that night I took a pill for the surgery then went nil-by-mouth. On Friday we woke at five, I fought through the morning sickness that still plagued me at 38 weeks pregnant to take a shower, and we got in the car and drove to Wellington hospital. We listened to our favourite songs and debated what would be the first song we played to our children once they were finally out in the world. (Barnaby – Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkle vs Me – To the Great Unknown by Cloud Cult). I was so excited I was close to tears the whole trip.
We got to the hospital and we waited. Our midwife Julie arrived, my parents arrived. We’d asked them to be there to support us. Someone took us all through to a delivery room and we waited a whole lot more. We did a crossword and everyone but me had tea and biscuits. Time wore on and by mid-morning it was clear there was a problem. To make a long story shorter, I did not have the children that day. There was absolutely no room in the hospital for us, not in the operating theatre or in the delivery ward, not in the maternity ward. They’d had an unusually large number of emergencies come in and they had to take priority.
The consulting obstetrician sat us down to discuss other options. They were having trouble re-booking us. It was November third, a Friday. Wellington hospital doesn’t do elective c-sections on the weekend. Monday and Tuesday were already booked solid. Leaving it until Wednesday was too risky: 38 weeks is considered “full term” for twins because after that point the incidence of placental failure increases daily. But despite all this, the obstetrician was pleased. He’d found a way to have the c-section that day. The other hospital in our area had room for us and the consultant there was willing. We just had to agree and they’d transfer us.
The other hospital was the hospital where the mistakes were made that caused the death of my little niece. I still kept an open mind. We were kind of desperate, after all. “Remember, what happened to your cousin was very different circumstances” said Julie. True. I prepared myself to be even further from home and to be without our excellent midwife, who was not licensed to work in that hospital. But then we found out the name of the consultant who was to perform my operation. It was the consultant who was on call the night my niece was born. The person who made the worst of the bad decisions. The person who bears the brunt of the blame.
The very same doctor.
As worried as I was for our children, as aware as I was that they were at risk, I couldn’t possibly go through with that. I didn’t even trust myself to be in the same room as that person. The consultant in Wellington was very kind through the million tears it took me to explain all this. He respected that this was a case of trauma (interestingly, I’d never thought of it that way until he said that word) and he made a note in my file to ensure that medical staff on other shifts wouldn’t raise this as an option with me again.
It was an awful discussion, but it’s funny how the brain works in these peak moments. I remember very clearly having a wee moment of levity, sitting in my hospital bed and looking at all the faces that surrounded me as we talked it through, the doctors and midwives grave, my husband serious, my father pale, my mother weeping. Oh my god! I thought. I’m living in a medieval tableau!
But what to do? “You might just have to go into labour”, joked Julie. “Then they’ll have to make room for you”. She’d previously told me that if I went into labour it was a medical emergency of the call-an-ambulance kind, so this wasn’t exactly reassuring. (Given the position of the babies and how fast twin labour can progress, there was a chance that Nora’s umbilical cord would fall out my cervix and then be squashed by her bottom as she tried to follow it, cutting off her oxygen)
Anyway, the only thing left to do was try and get it done the next day. Through no fault of my own, I’d become a Special Case and Exceptions would have to be made. In other words, I was a problem. At least, that was the attitude of the hospital midwife the next morning when we returned for our elective c-section – on a Saturday, of all days!
We once again waited around for half a day. I was shaved for surgery and put in a hospital gown. But the hospital was still at capacity and we never even spoke to that day’s obstetrician before they sent us away again. Starving, we went out for lunch with my parents, my mother-in-law, and my poor father-in-law, who had to get on a flight back to Auckland immediately afterwards, his grandchildren still unmet. The heavy atmosphere of that awful meal is burned irrevocably into my brain. I mean, I went out for one last brunch with my ex-boyfriend the day before I was to board a plane back to New Zealand from Taiwan and leave him forever, and that meal was waaaaay less heavy with unspoken sorrow and tension.
After we left the cafe a woman called me a “fat cow” because I held up her car for milliseconds while I waddled across the road. The world seemed a cold and uncaring place that day. Also, and this still annoys me because I’m pedantic, I was not fat but like the most pregnant a person could possibly be. I was visibly the world’s most pregnant person. Was she an idiot?
As we parted I forbade my parents from coming to the hospital the next day unless the children had actually been born. They had gone all grey and limp like old dish rags after two full days of waiting in the family room, worrying, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. Mum was… not thrilled. Poor mum. She so desperately wanted to be of use to us.
With another day ticking past the risk to our children was growing. Trying to keep our spirits up, Barns and I decided that we’d go see Thor: Ragnarok the next day after the hospital sent us away again, and then for the third day running I went nil-by-mouth after dinner. I slept poorly that night, kept awake by the wheezing sound of my own breathing, kids by that point so enormous my lungs were constricted when I lay down. I wound up sleeping semi-upright in a chair. Barns left the bed to be near me on our sofa. That was a nice thing about pregnancy. No matter how hard it got or how much more he had to take on (cutting my toenails was just the start of it), Barnaby supported me every step of the way and never complained.
At least we were allowed an hour’s extra sleep that morning. “Never mind the usual reporting time, just come in at 8am”, we were told. “We know you’re coming”. Oh, so comforting. We couldn’t manage music on the drive that time.
The atmosphere in Wellington Hospital was rather different on Sunday. “This is ridiculous!” raged that day’s consulting obstetrician (the third, if you’re keeping count). “I can’t believe they’re doing this to you! Well, I’m going to make them sort it out. I’ll get the head of NICU to come and explain things to you. You just wait here”.
While we were grateful that someone had taken up our cause, he left without explaining what the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) had to do with anything and we were bewildered – as far as we knew, our babies were full-term and perfectly healthy. But the head of NICU, who, astonishingly, did come in for us, explained that twins are statistically more likely to need help after birth and despite the risk to the placenta, the babies were safer inside than out unless the NICU had two free incubators. There was finally room in the operating theatre, Delivery and Maternity, but the NICU was chokka.
“I’m going to see what I can do. They have room in the SCBU (Special Care Baby Unit) at Hutt Hospital so if I can transfer some of our patients out there then there’ll be room for your babies here. But this is over my level so I’ve got to get the head of Wellington Hospital to call the head of Hutt Hospital. It all takes a bit longer because it’s Sunday but I’ll know by 2pm at the latest”.
Goodness! All this bother for us! I felt a little guilty – I’ve heard that the SCBU is a lot less comfortable for parents than the NICU. If the parents who had to move because of us ever read this, I’m sorry!
I was still nil-by-mouth so they hooked me up to a drip to stave off dehydration and left us alone for hours. The only things I remember doing in that time is taking photos of my feet, one of which had puffed up like a balloon.
And getting into a hospital gown, yet again.
At around 2:15pm, a midwife burst into the room.
“Let’s move. We’ve got a spot for you but we’ve got to do it right now”.
And just like that, we were off. I couldn’t believe I had to go start my life as a parent in the state I was in. For one I was shell-shocked from the stress. Worse, as I hadn’t been allowed to eat or drink anything for the majority of the last three days whilst heavily pregnant and travelling back and forth to the hospital, I was already utterly exhausted. I wasn’t capable of feeling excited about meeting the babies or nervous about the surgery or relieved things were finally sorted out. I did however manage a brief pang of regret that I wouldn’t get to go see Thor: Ragnarok, so make of that what you will.
The operating theatre was startlingly unlike the ones you see on telly – I literally walked to the operating table and it had a curtain instead of a door. The anaesthesiologists did their thing and soon I was shaking uncontrollably (which is apparently normal) while the surgeon sliced me open. I couldn’t cope with looking in the direction of my stomach at that point so I watched Barnaby’s face as our children were carefully lifted into the world. I wish I could write more profoundly about this stuff but I am only able to say that he looked really happy.
June flipped over as soon as her sister was out of the way (poor kids had been squashed for months) and so they both came into the world bum-first. They were checked and pronounced perfectly healthy. After all that trouble, the beds in NICU were not needed, and thank goodness for that. They were weighed and then weighed again because they were the exact same weight and that confused everyone. They were placed on my chest while I was stitched up. I could see one face with the lovely dark eyes of all newborns but I could only see the top of the other child’s head.
“I can’t see her face,” I told Barnaby. He patted my hand.
“The baby. I can’t see her face”, I told Julie. She gave me a sympathetic look. I understood this to mean that seeing my child for the first time was lesser in importance to not disturbing the surgeon while he was trying to sew my guts back together but I was still a bit sad about it.
Eventually the kids went off with their father and I was wheeled into recovery where five or six people gathered around the bed to stare at (brace yourselves) my vagina. Honestly I wasn’t thrilled about this but they all seemed really worried about me so I decided not to mention it.
“She’s trickling”, one of them said. Trickling was obviously bad. The solution to trickling turned out to be massaging my stomach to get my womb to contract, and when this didn’t work, pounding me on the abdomen so firmly that it was disturbing not to be able to feel it. Once that was sorted the gaggle of doctors was replaced with a bundle of midwives and my vagina swapped with my boobs, at least in terms of being out for the whole world to see. I needed quite a lot of help (literally five people) but soon I was breastfeeding! Actually breastfeeding! Me! Astonishing. The midwives left me to it and I finally had a peaceful moment with my little ones. I could even see their dear faces. They were skinny wee things with only a bit of fluff on their heads. Long fingers. They were so sleepy.
I wish I could leave it there, a small and cosy scene, but sadly I have more difficult events to process through this free form of therapy.
As we were snuggling I became worried that I was going to drop the kids. It seemed difficult to get my arms to do what I wanted them to do. This…didn’t seem… to be a normal worry… so I thought about it for a while…but my thoughts were moving… very slowly. Oh dear… I think…this is bad…and shouldn’t be happening… I should… tell someone.
“Excuse me. Can somebody come take the babies? I don’t feel right”.
The nurse’s face when she glanced at my vital signs was enough to tell me I’d been correct to call out. The babies were rushed away.
The next five hours are a bit blurry so I’m not sure what order any of this happened in, but anyway: My heart rate was well below normal. The medication to fix this put me into atrial fibrillation. My blood pressure fluctuated wildly. My blood oxygen saturation dropped. None of the medical staff seemed overly worried but I was mildly concerned that I was about to die. I would have appreciated it if my husband was holding my hand but he was nowhere to be seen. I later found out that the midwives were keeping him busy – and out of the way – by teaching him how to put on nappies and dress the babies.
At some point the morphine wore off and I was in terrible pain. Apparently it was worse than the usual post-cesarean pain because of the surgeon slamming my stomach when he was trying to get my womb to contract. I wasn’t allowed more morphine. They give you two doses of morphine, an instant one and a slow-release one, and the slow-release one was in my body, it just hadn’t kicked in yet. So they gave me…paracetamol. As you may guess, it didn’t do shit. Also my blood sugar tanked, which was actually brilliant: they gave me two lemonade popsicles, the first things I’d consumed in 24 hours. I can’t imagine enjoying anything more than I enjoyed those popsicles. This is when Barns reappeared – while I was scoffing ice blocks – so it took a while for him to fully comprehend that scary things were happening.
This all sounds very urgent but actually it happened over several hours while I mostly just lay around and felt dreadful. The kids considerately napped in the corner. At some point the head of NICU dropped by to congratulate us (I swear, the doctors, nurses and midwives in this story do all have names but I can’t remember a single one of them). I remember apologising to her because Nora and June didn’t need to go to the NICU after all her efforts, and she just laughed. She pointed out that doctors do actually hope for good outcomes for patients, but said it kindly and didn’t make me feel like an idiot at all.
We had texted my parents and my mother-in-law when I went into the surgery and they diligently jumped in their cars and sped to the hospital so they were sitting in the family room waiting all the time I was not dying. The hospital staff felt so sorry for them that they convinced Barnaby, over my objections, to take the kids out to meet them. I like to imagine that they were happy to meet their grand kids but I get the feeling my parents were so worried about me that they were rather distracted.
Eventually everything was sorted out but the blood oxygen. Barns and I were actually talking about this recently and we had both been thinking, oxygen saturation is at 91%, right? That is quite a lot, what’s the big deal? And then Barns read an article about Covid19 which mentioned how Covid patients would show up at the hospital with similar stats and the doctors would freak out, so I suppose it was pretty low after all.
The anaesthesiologist explained that she must have given me a bit too much juice in my epidural and so my lungs were probably a bit crumpled or something. I don’t know. We had to wait for an x-ray but it could probably all be fixed by my taking a few big breaths. That was all they were asking and I was incapable of it. The second round of morphine still hadn’t kicked in and I couldn’t bear the pain of deep breathing. If she’d upped my painkillers I might have tried but she wouldn’t and so we were at a stalemate. Still, she must have been feeling guilty about it because she decided to let my parents come into Recovery to see me. This seems to be a big hospital no-no. The head midwife was deeply opposed and the anaesthesiologist just straight-out stated that she was a higher rank and so it was happening. Barns and I pretended very hard not to watch the ensuing argument.
I don’t know how bad I looked but my parents looked like the walking dead. They’ve never coped well with worry for me. I sent them home again.
Finally, after 5 hours, they decided 98% saturation was good enough and it would fix itself overnight once my morphine kicked in (it did!). I was released to the delivery ward on oxygen. It was past 8pm. I ate something – a sandwich? yogurt? – and a trundle bed was set up for Barnaby, and then sleep took me and wouldn’t let me go until the next morning. I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons they usually do elective c-sections at 8 in the morning is to avoid this exact scenario. I was in no fit state to tend to the babies. Somebody – Barns tells me it was him and a couple of midwives – looked after the kids overnight and I’ll forever be grateful for that because I just couldn’t. I had nothing left.
So, the birth of my kids isn’t a super happy story. I know things could have been much worse, please believe me that I know this. I am aware that we have a lot to be grateful for. But honestly it was the most stressful thing I’ve ever experienced by a large margin. I in no way blame the hospital staff for how things played out. One common thread of the experience was that everyone was doing their absolute best for us. They were in a difficult situation, too, although they tried a lot harder to hide it.
It also wasn’t much of a bonding experience. In fact, you have probably noticed that the children are barely in this story. I remember though having the sense that I loved them greatly when they were very small, in fact being sure of it, because nobody could put up with all the newborn tribulations if they didn’t truly love their kids. And now we’re healthily close so it all seems like so much water under the bridge these days.
We spent five days in the hospital which was such a shit show that it would need a whole other blog post, except I was exhausted and on morphine for most of it so I don’t think I could put it in chronological order. I do have a few things I want to say about it, though:
- Please, somebody, please give our health system more money. These poor doctors and nurses and midwives are working so hard with so little. I know we were in the hospital at an unusually busy time but there has to, has to, be a better way of doing things than putting babies’ lives at risk by postponing a c-section because there’s literally no space in hospital. And surely we can do better than having scared new parents wait forty minutes at 3 in the morning for a nurse to be available to bring some formula for a crying newborn. Or not having enough staff to keep track of when patients need painkillers, which resulted in me having to go back on morphine 3 days after my surgery and Barns, who frankly already had quite a lot on his plate, having to monitor all my medication for the rest of my stay. Surely, New Zealand, we can do better than that.
- I told my dad that the shadows on the tap were moving and I wasn’t sure if it was morphine or ghosts and he was obviously the wrong person to ask because he told me in earnest that it was probably both. “Lots of ghosts in a hospital”.
- If you have a c-section then remember I told you to start on the Kiwi Crush early. Don’t wait until you have a problem.
- Not surprisingly, it took a while for me to piece myself back together after the surgery. Barnaby rose to the occasion magnificently. Once we got home from the hospital he had to teach me how to change nappies and make formula because he’d done it all up until that point. He is a truly wonderful dad and I was awfully proud of him.
- I got my first lesson in trusting myself as a parent watching a midwife try to work out why my baby was still crying after she’d just had a feed.
“Maybe she’s still hungry?” I ventured.
“She shouldn’t be still hungry! Her stomach is the size of a pea. Her nappy is fine…maybe she wants her glove back on, it fell off. Or do you want a blanket, bubba?”
I didn’t like to argue with the professional but I wasn’t convinced. I mean, I’m her mother and I’m always hungry. I was quickly proven right, and this was a useful thing to learn early on.
- On around day two or three of my children’s lives, I was lying in bed in the quiet of the morning and I felt eyes on me. I looked up to see Nora watching me through the Plexiglas of her bassinet. She just lay there calmly and I locked eyes with her, caught up in, I like to imagine, similar wonder. Oh wow, I thought. I’m her mum!
Having twins
“What’s it like, having twins?” she asks and then, while I am still working on an answer, she laughs to herself. “Well, I suppose you wouldn’t know any different, would you?” This isn’t the first time it’s happened and I wish they’d give me a chance to speak. I’d like to give an answer even though I’m not sure what it would be. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot.
*
“Do twins run in your family?” asks the ultrasound technician out of the blue. He barely gives us time to shake our heads before finishing with a practised “…because they do now!”
We laugh all the way home, only slightly hysterical. We’re thrilled. We’re not just having a baby, we’re getting a whole family.
*
It’s early in the morning and I’m awake because both babies are moving inside me. Are they having a party in there? More likely fighting. We watched them do it on the sonogram once, kicking each other through the membrane that divided them. Not yet born and already making each other cross.
*
The babies are a few weeks old and it’s late in the evening. I’m cradling one to sleep and my husband is rocking her sister. He smiles across the room at me.
“We’re so lucky. Isn’t it wonderful, having twins?”
I glance at the baby he holds. Even though I’m busy with her sister, she’s my baby and I long for her. It’s really hard, always putting one baby down so I can pick the other one up, when everything in me is telling me I need my newborns in my arms all the time.
For you, maybe, I think.
*
The babies have just learned to crawl. The play peek-a-boo with each other in the curtains and they laugh and laugh.
“Isn’t it wonderful, having twins?” I ask Barnaby as we watch the video together for the tenth time. “We’re so lucky!”
*
The babies love to watch each other be played with, danced with or swung around. They smile and laugh like it’s happening to them instead of their sister.
“Isn’t that amazing?” says my mum. “You’d think they’d be jealous”.
*
If one of the toddlers wakes in the night she usually winds up in our bed. We have to transfer her veeeeery quietly – if her sister hears then we’ve got two screaming kids on our hands and neither of them want Barnaby. They can’t stand the thought of their sister getting to be with me while they stay in their own cot. Both toddlers are implacable in their jealousy, miles beyond reason. Lately we’ve had to give in, unable to endure another hour of screaming when we should be sleeping.
We try the three of us at the head of the bed. Juney tells me to move the arm I am cuddling her with. There’s nowhere else to put it. I can’t exactly detach it. So we sleep top-and-tail. Another night we try width-wise, me in the middle, stretching my legs out under Nora. Barns sleeps on the sofa. I google king-size beds that we can’t afford. I’m appalled when I work out that they’re only 15 cm bigger, anyway.
*
There’s a bird shit on the window. A huge one. It’s been there for weeks, a foul streak of pestilence besmearing the ranch slider that opens off of the living room, the window I happen to look out of the most. A poor repayment, I think, for the half-chewed crackers and sandwich crusts I pop out on the lawn for the feathery gits.
I’m not a cleaning obsessive but I’m itching to do something about it. I’m sure it’d only take five minutes. If I could only get five minutes. Maybe when Barns gets home, I think, turning away to change a nappy.
*
I’m making lunch and I hear the scream. I know the scream in my bones. It’s the one that means one of them is hurting the other. I’m already running.
The need to protect my kids is primal. Although I try for gentleness in these moments, try to lead by example, the truth is that someone is hurting the person I love the most. But it’s the other person I love the most. I freeze, I panic, I yell, I put kids in time out just so I can calm down. I never get used to it.
*
The kids are ratty. It’s nearly bedtime. One of them won’t share. Her sister swings her arm back and I’m already moving to intervene when she hesitates, puts it down again, whatever violence she’d been contemplating left unfinished. I blink tears back as I praise her.
*
*
We’re running late. Really late. Blame yet another bad night. I stuff the lunch boxes into the pram, hoping we’ll get to playgroup at least in time for morning tea. I go to round up the children. Nora stinks. Never mind, a quick bum change and we’ll go.
June poos while I’m changing her sister. She’s in a mood and it takes ages to clean it up. I manage not to start crying from sheer frustration but it’s a near thing. Playgroup means a lot to me, much more than it does to the kids. For those few hours a week I’m part of a community. It’s fortifying in a way that I’ve never experienced before.
June poos again while I wash my hands.
I’m loading Nora into the pram when I notice she’s pooed again. She is absolutely furious when I unbuckle her. I have to change her in the hallway by the front door, unable to get her any further into the house. At least I’m calm again now, the zen of someone so late that they don’t have to care anymore.
We still go. The kids eat morning tea in the pram on the way.
*
“Let’s hold hands!” Nora says, reaching out her hand for June. June takes it, smiling, and they toddle off down the footpath.
“Look at us!” Nora calls over her shoulder. “We’re being sisters!”
*
It’s the first day of kindergarten and they are so overwhelmed that they don’t even wave when I leave. At least they have each other, I tell myself.
They stay all morning with no problems or tears. I never get the phone call I’ve been dreading. Later the teacher sends us some photos of their day. In one of the pictures they’re a little apart from the other kids, a little unsure, standing right next to each other and holding hands.
Being sisters.
Recipe: Nutty Caramilk Lactation Cookies
My cousin has just taken her darling baby daughter home from the hospital so I volunteered to make her some lactation cookies. She requested Caramilk flavour and since I couldn’t find a recipe, I adapted one from the delicious seeming recipe on “My kids lick the bowl”. I was stoked with the result! I’m assuming you all know what a lactation cookie is, but if not then other people have explained it better than I can. There’s not a lot of science that’s been done around lactation cookies and truthfully I’m not entirely convinced they work – I tried a few different recipes while I was breastfeeding and never experienced the notable bump in supply some people report after eating a few – but even so, I think they’re a good idea. Hungry breastfeeding mums absolutely need tasty snacks that cost them no effort. Also, lactation cookies are packed with beneficial nutrition so what’s the harm? Well, yes, this particular recipe comes with sugar too but people who are operating on three hours sleep deserve that stuff guilt-free, okay? So back off.
If you know a mum with a new bub and you’re wondering what you can do to help (and you know she’s breastfeeding) then a gift of lactation cookies is a good bet. I suggest only baking half of the batch and giving the second half of the dough frozen in ball form, ready to be defrosted and baked. I personally didn’t want like 30 cookies at once but a supply of fresh ones from frozen dough kept me really happy.
Lactation cookies can, of course, be enjoyed by anyone (except obviously women in the process of weaning). Considering that these bikkies are high in protein and contain omega 3 and B vitamins, I’m sure they’d be particularly beneficial for vegetarians. My kids liked them, too. Come to think of it, I bet they’d make great tramping snacks – must remember that if I ever get to go bush again!
My cousin hasn’t actually tried these yet, but I will update this post with her verdict when she has. You see, Barns woke up sick the morning we were going to go visit and so we stayed home and ate the cookies ourselves. PSA: if you are even slightly sick, do not go and visit people with a new baby. They might love you but there’s no way they want to see you more than they want to protect their child. Hopefully in the post-Covid world you’re all thinking, jeez, Tara, I know that already!
Eating these ourselves wasn’t exactly a hardship. They really are wonderful biscuits. Calling them cookies, at least in a New Zealand context, is a bit of a misnomer – I only hear the word “cookie” for biscuits when they’re really big, sweet, and chunky. Instead, these are incredibly moreish little mouthfuls, a bit chewy and a bit crumbly, nutty and not too sweet, with a distinct Caramilk flavour. Yum!
A few recipe notes:
I substituted nutritional yeast for brewer’s yeast because I couldn’t afford the latter. Some websites I looked at accept this substitution and others don’t think it’s the same thing at all. Like I said, we’re not working with exact science here. Oats and flax meal are the main thing anyway, the brewer’s yeast is optional and nutritional yeast is very similar, so I thought I might as well. If you do use brewer’s yeast you’ll need to look for one of the low-flavour types or possibly up the amount of chocolate in the recipe. It’s really strong tasting stuff. Nutritional yeast has a cheese flavour which doesn’t come out in the biscuits at all.
I chopped the nuts and chocolate reasonably finely to achieve a more crumbly textured cookie. This is also why I’ve used “quick” or rolled oats. The labelling in the supermarket (in Countdown, at least) isn’t very consistent, but you want the oats that are a bit broken up as opposed to whole oats.
Recipe: Nutty Caramilk Lactation Cookies.
Ingredients
- 125g butter (softened)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup quick oats
- 1/2 cup flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 cup flax meal
- 1 Tablespoon Brewers Yeast (optional)
- 1/2 cup chopped Caramilk chocolate
- 1/2 cup chopped nuts (I used a mixture of almonds and cashews)
Method:
- Line a cookie sheet with baking paper.
- Cream butter and sugar in a large bowl. Beat in egg and vanilla extract.
- Sift flour and baking powder into the bowl with the wet ingredients. Add all the remaining ingredients and stir until well-combined.
- Wet your hands and roll mixture into balls about the size of a big prune.
- Space the balls out on the baking sheet and bake for around twelve minutes or until nicely brown.
- Cool at first on the tray and then transfer them to a wire rack. (If you let them cool all the way on the tray they will stick). Enjoy!
One last note: The biscuits are very much to my taste, but if you wanted them a bit more cookie-ish, you could try this:
- At least double the size
- Increase chocolate a bit and use larger chunks
- Reduce nuts correspondingly and use larger chunks
- Use whole rolled oats instead of quick oats
Tara's thoughts 
