Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along, in between nap breaks

Slowly, slowly, with big breaks in between, things are getting done. Administrative things, physical things. Today I got a start on baby laundry. I know that's a little crazy given it's possibly two whole months pre-emptive (they won't let me go past 40 weeks, my midwife thinks, given my blood pressure) but my energy levels are so uneven that I can only do things as I have the energy for, in short bursts, and in between naps and just sitting here enjoying feeling Ren moving around and being two weeks too big for his/her age.

And there are so many cloth diapers to wash. We have a bigger range of gifted cloth diapers than I had any idea existed eight months ago. I reckon we've got one of everything - enough to start a museum. I already have a pretty good idea which kind is going to be my favourite - we'll see if I'm right. And indeed, we'll see if we can keep our balls together to keep using them instead of switching to disposables. The money difference is just so huge (especially given that we didn't pay for any of the diapers in the first place) that I'll feel like a bit of a shitheel if we don't.

Among the administrative things getting done, I found someone who would insure me at a reasonable price - the same big old bank we have our mortgage, etc. with. It turns out the two other places I'd applied to were too fly-by-night to actually have a consultative nurse in on the process who could work out exemptions (that is, the F-word and the baby won't get a payout if I kick the bucket from something related to my high blood pressure, which is rather a shame, as it's certainly the most dangerous thing on my horizon, besides the dumbcunt way Australians drive), so it was easier for them to just say no.

Seriously. That's Australia. Somehow, it's better business for a company to employ a bunch of phone jockeys to decide the whole process by asking people a bunch of yes or no questions than it is to pick up extra clients by outsourcing some to a consultative nurse. They're too lazy to go to the trouble of taking your money here. One really does get a feeling, sometimes, of a country full of people just weighed down with all the cash in their pockets, looking for some fucking relief from having to carry it all. Anyways, I doubt it's just Australia. It's just this is the first place I've had to go through these sorts of processes.

Anyways again, I really would like to get as much done, even ridiculously pre-emptively, as I can in the next week and a half. Before my brain turns to utter mush and during a week of work downtime for the Chinese national holiday, I want to take care of two assignments for my uni class in Chinese politics. The exam I've deferred for half a year or so - can't do that with the assignments. And I think they'll be fun. Certainly more fun than pre-washing three or four dozen diapers.

Anyways a third time, this pretty much describes my mental and working rhythm at the moment:

Kinshasa . . . shit.

This weekend was nice. We had lots of social time, which (although I probably would have physically preferred to sleep through it) I made myself enjoy on the principle that it will be hard to have it and enjoy it before two months are up. But the highlight was watching Apocalypse Now at a local cinema that has a one-a-month classic movie night.

Apocalypse Now has the distinction of being the only film adaptation that I like of a book I love. It also has the related distinction of being my favourite war movie. I've complained in the past was coherently as I'm able about how I'm fucking sick of being subjected to the narrative of the loser as pertains to the Vietnam War, and even mentioned Apocalypse Now in that regard. Good God, Vietnam movies where the war is treated as some sort of American coming-of-age story are a whole fuckin' sub-genre. They got their asses kicked despite killing about a kabillion people in three different countries and engaging in an incredibly expensive military strategy - what I'm interested in is how the winners managed that, not in how that made the losers feel. Maybe if there'd been a better social focus on that in the years since the war, Americans would be better at wars these days. Or at least better at picking'em. (Here's an interesting doco more along those lines.)

And don't give me that shit about how the Americans lost in Vietnam, rather than the Vietnamese having won there, because the war was unpopular in America. Just about all wars are won or lost depending on how popular they are back at home, and if they "end" while they're still popular enough, they haven't really ended (see World War II and the whole fuckin' Middle East). Americans and Vietnam aren't some magical unicorn exception to that. 

Nonetheless I love Apocalypse Now as a war movie above all others because it captures the utter chaos and ridiculousness of anonymous organized conflict and how people die in the same way Heart of Darkness captured the utter chaos and ridiculousness of how people died in the organized exploitation of the Congo under Leopold The Fuckwitted Cunt of a Belgian (see elsewhere for me going on and on about that). For me it isn't a movie about Vietnam so much as a movie about the chaos and ridiculousness of unchained brutality overseen by an administration - about how administration, how the professional maintenance of some sort of predictable status quo, doesn't equate with less brutality and inhumanity. This shared illustration, more than the plot, is what makes it a successful adaptation of Heart of Darkness.

One step closer to finally being Australian

Just got my Australian permanent residency. When they first give you a spouse visa here, it's "provisional permanent" or something like that, and then you have to apply for the second, for-realsies stage. I guess they've had enough doe-eyed romantics arrive here and then turn tail after a few weeks when they realize how fucking awful the food and people and cost of living are.  Good weather only gets Britain so far, especially when it's stuck in the 1950s and there aren't enough Asians in it.

It's taken longer than it might have because I'd forgotten to do it because, well, it made about zero difference to my life. I wouldn't have been eligible for welfare, which I haven't needed, but I was already eligible for mat leave payouts, which I'd already arranged, and I figured if I was fired and in a position where I'd potentially need welfare, I could just insist we fuck off, finally. As the t-shirt suggests.

But I did it nonetheless, for two reasons.

1. Another passport. You can get Australian citizenship after just four years residency*. One of those years has to be with the permanent visa I just got. I'm just coming up on two years in November, and even in my wildest dreams we'll be stuck here for another two years after that. The F-word wants some more schooling here, and I want more high wages and low taxes and for both of our planned children to be born somewhere I can speak to the medical staff in English, and while we're leaning toward having the next one sooner than we'd been thinking before (the F-word is feeling his oats, I suppose) I'm not pulling a oops-I'm-pregnant-at-the-six-week-checkup stunt.

Anyhoo, I've always been a firm believer in having the maximum number of passports possible. You just never know when you'll need them in this naughty world full of things being unexpected and violent. I'd like four, eventually. Four is my goal. It's surprisingly doable - fewer and fewer countries forbid multiple nationalities (although I understand that people generally ignore it in the ones that do).

 And it means eventually you will be able to make fun of me for being an Australian, after I spend a few more years viciously mocking them. Lucky you.

2. Getting a cellphone contract. In Australia I'm eligible to get free health care, family assistance, buy a house, and any number of other useful things. However, I'm not eligible to get a cellphone contract. Sigh. Once you're dealing with a private institution instead of a government institution here, suddenly everything goes to shit.

Whatever. I'll do it after the mat leave.

*It's somewhat ironic, I think, that the country where I've heard the most jingoistic xenophobia I've witnessed anywhere except Italy is also THE country with the easiest and fastest routes to residency, either through family class visas or work visas, as well as to citizenship.

The pregnant sasquatch

Pregnancy continues apace. I'm not as worried as usual these days because the midwife has been reassuring and Ren has been increasingly acrobatic, pretty much all the time, and is starting to give the impression of responding to things going on outside the lovely big receptacle that is myself. I write that now, and no doubt tomorrow I'll be worried about something again. But all seems to be going well.

The midwife is pretty sure now I'll be carrying to term, and isn't too concerned about pre-eclampsia. And now that I've hit week 31, I'm a little less concerned about pre-eclampsia and an attendant early delivery too. If I make it one more week to 32, the kid can stay in this little shitburg's hospital until it's ready to go home, instead of heading off to Brisbane. Although there would be worse things than us having to go off to Brisbane,which is the good thing about not being poor. (How do people who are poor survive the worries attendant on pregnancy without going totally batshit? I have a new awe of them.) I could just stay there until it was ready to come home, and so could the F-word. But it looks unlikely to happen now.

One aspect of pregnancy I'm finding interesting is the massive sasquatch poos. I'm not suffering from the constipation most women complain about, and it's not as though I'm having to make an effort, but certainly the pooing is a rather more impressive experience than it used to be. For more or less the first time in my life I'm finding it sort of wrong to just be flushing these progiduous daily evacuations down the toilet without celebrating them somehow. I've had to restrain myself from calling over the F-word to take a look. Some physical mystique must be maintained somehow, or else what will remain to be absolutely and traumatically shattered forever when I go into active labour?

Cpl. Punishment

All in other people's business at the moment. Usually these days I sleep like a heavy, heavy brick but last night spent a good couple of hours lying there worrying, and almost all of that mostly about other people (Ren had had a fucking acrobatic day, which always reassures me - the kid's a good mover most of the time but when the wiggles are non-stop it's the only thing that makes me think everything's gonna be fine). One family in particular, who we'd had cake with that afternoon, with two young kids. There'd just been a conflagration that finished with the dad smacking the boy, and we arrived when all was calm again.

I don't really have two minds about smacking kids. I don't know if I'm going to do it, but if I do it, there's no way I'll be able to see it as anything but a failure on my part. I was smacked a lot as a child - well, not a lot, but as a fairly normal part of my existence as a fathered person - my brothers even more, and while we turned out magnificently I don't think it did us any good at all, and I still feel angry and resentful when I remember it. And as an adult, remembering it and remembering what brought it on, it was never something that I can see excusing it as proportionate - never when I was hurting somebody else and needed to be stopped all of sudden, never when something shockingly dangerous had nearly just happened and I needed to be taught never, ever to let something dangerous like that nearly happen again, or never for whatever big horrible things it is children do, some of which I certainly did. It was when my father was pissed off. And while I respect my father a lot, I don't respect that at all. It was a form of incontinence. And with this family, it's the same. It's when the father is pissed off.

Nonetheless, while not having two minds, I'm finding all this a little confusing at the moment. He's a good man, a good friend, his marriage is always semi-on the rocks, and this is exactly the sort of thing that'll get him stripped of custody if his wife chose, because even he admits that when he smacks, it's because he's flown off the handle, not because he calmly and coolly reckons it's a good idea. And at the same time, I don't know what would make things better. I don't have children; I've never had to emotionally go to the edge the way a pissed-off parent does. I think he's making a big mistake making smacking his kids part of his parenting strategy, in terms of his future relationship with his kids and wife, but it's not as though I have a range of tried-and-tested techniques to offer as alternatives.

You know, I think i don't mind being in other people's business at the moment because it distracts me from dwelling too much on my own semi-imaginary problems. I'm starting to understand gossip a little better.

Middle class orgasms

There are watersheds in everybody's life and one of mine came this morning when I managed to get the price of the huge new air-con and its installation under $2000 and felt pretty ecstatic about it. This sort of combined with another absurdly low tax bill for the last financial year, which I got yesterday, and pushed me into some sort of state of rapture. In the past, I could only get that sort of joy from drugs or sex with someone I'd wanted to have sex with for awhile. I think in a key way our standards for happiness get lower as we age. Or less exciting. I don't know. Maybe it's just that all the woppy bartering and tax dodging instincts previously fairly latent in me have now come to the fore, as monogamy and sobriety cut me off from other vaguely naughty thrills.

I shocked my accountant yesterday - when he showed me what I'd have to pay I burst into joyful laughter and possibly let out a whoop; the expression on his face when he handed the figure over had looked like he was bracing himself for a fist to the face. It is incredible how low income tax is here, for the self-employed, anyways. I'm coming to understand you get screwed in other ways - standard ways like high property taxes and capital gains taxes, and also in ways far more offensive to my pinko sensbilities, like sales taxes, expensive "optional" medical services like dental and eye-whatever that aren't optional at all, and really high rego, etc. costs for running cars on absolutely execrable roads (which is a fundamental economic necessity anywhere rural in Australia, and in any Australian city that's not Melbourne). Nonetheless it absolutely gives me a financial boner every time I realize how little income tax I'm paying.

Anyhoo. Apparently it will be a stinking hot summer here. I've heard people forecasting that the last two summers and they've both been pretty bearable, although when we've had guests from northern climes they've acted like they were in some sort of humid version of hell. Probably a lot of that has to do with times of year and the 60 degree spread you get coming here from the north in the winter. That's why I'm blowing a retarded amount of money on the new heating/cooling unit - my mother is coming out after Ren's born and I'm sure I'll be preoccupied enough staring at the baby to not want to be thinking about whether or not she's melting.

The selfishness comes in the fact that I find the winters here fucking unbearably cold. We have this twee little fireplace, recessed in the wall, fucking good for nothing besides heating the chimney, I expect. Why in heaven's name people think they're a nice design feature . . . don't get me wrong, a pop-out fireplace is lovely, a Quebec heater is lovely, even a non-recessed fireplace does fucking something to the air temperature around it, but when I look at our fucking recessed fireplace, instead of seeing a nice domestic blaze, all I see is an emblem of fucking Oceanic design stupidity.

Asiatica

We took off to Brisbane this weekend past. I needed a little, I don't know. Gallery time, I suppose. Something for me before the baby comes. Galleries and restaurants and hotel sex, like the last 13 years, which are about to come to a crashing, shrieking, uterus-clenching, insomniac, impoverished end. Of course we'll try to break the baby into galleries and restaurants and we'll see how that all goes. My hopes aren't high.

But this weekend was rather lovely, even though I felt like a whale and huffed and puffed my way up stairs and had to have naps and things. We went to GOMA, which is my favourite modern art gallery, as far as modern art galleries go, because it tends to have a lot of Asian modern art in it, which tends toward - at least what makes it to Australia tends toward - the representational and communicative and therefore not the wankery. Here's an excerpt from what was the highlight for me. And of course it's not just the communicativeness, it's communication from a poorly-known other. I spent a good 31 years being a pure Europhile with vague ideas of everything east of the Urals being the place Marco Polo discovered spaghetti.

Asia is making Australia bearable for me in other ways. I've started my contemporary Chinese politics course - the one whose exam I'm deferring until sometime next year as it'll overlap with Ren getting born - and it's fascinating. There's no doubt the terrorism course I did earlier this year was a poor offering, but it was even poorer for me because of its overlap with my graduate studies. But these - as far as Mistress La Spliffe is concerned, these are uncharted and fascinating waters. It's more my job than Australia which has got me into all of it, of course, but Australia and my job aren't really separable at the moment, and it is rather fantastic to have cheap school in English again.

The constant search for the meaning of old-fashioneds

Very odd dream last night. Jean Claude Van Damme was systematically banging his way through every woman in the city, and when it was my turn (whilst still massively pregnant BTW) I punked out at the last minute when I heard the F-word's voice outside of the motel room and Jean Claude Van Damme asked if I wanted to punk out. But then I felt so bad for leaving Jean Claude Van Damme with blue balls that I gave him a handjob. I'm trying to work out what all that means. I mean, giving someone a handjob is still cheating, right, so why did I think that was a great solution to the awkward social situation? And what was I doing wanting to bang Jean Claude Van Damme in the first place? What messages is my subconscious trying to send me here?

Life is baffling me a little bit today in more serious ways. Family medical situation that is going not at all satisfactorily. I know so many fucking useless or downright lousy people who just keep on metabolizing and reproducing without much problem, and now the person who I, personally, consider probably the most socially useful person I've ever even known is facing serious health challenges and life changes. It disconcerts me, not only emotionally, but to understand once more that good fortune is exactly that - good fortune - and virtue is rarely rewarded and vice punished as clearly as an ethnic Catholic like me would like to see.

Gina Rinehart caused a flap here yesterday by saying Australians should stop, I don't know, being critical and get down to working harder instead of drinking all the time so they could be rich. To me it's wonderfully emblematic of what I mean: the woman is among the world's richest because of who happened to fertilize her momma's eggs, but I'm sure within herself she's absolutely certain her own good fortune is down to hard work, rather than a massive amount of good fortune combined with not being an absolute ass. Everyone who's happy and well off is, I suspect, guilty of this sort of thing to some degree. I know I am, when I don't think things through. What I find interesting about right-wing people is how dedicated they are to maintaining the fiction in policy and in their own heads that a good life isn't down to good luck, and a bad life is just down to vice or some sort of sub-humanity. 

Still pregnant

Anybody here watched Art Attack in their youth and needs their childhood ruined/enhanced?

Week 29 today, and the baby is moving a lot. Not just kicking. I suppose it's running out of room, so I can really feel it moving - turning, doing things with its limbs. The F-word can feel from the outside too. It's lovely . . . and really timely given that I'm otherwise really sick of being pregnant - huge and tired and hungry and cranky and sickly in the morning. And at the same time rather desperately wishing to stay pregnant for the maximum time - hoping and hoping to not have to have too early a delivery - applauding each day it stays up there as a gift and a victory.

I daresay the worry about my blood pressure is making things rather worse than they could be, but I'm tempted to say that in the pantheon of "complicated" pregnancies this is a relatively uncomplicated one, so I don't know how people with actually complicated pregnancies manage.  I don't know how women who work really intense full time hours manage. And I don't know God's excuse for letting men's biological contribution to this process be an orgasm. Which, since it was with me, was obviously a really terrific one.

Anyways, my point is this week the baby has got to feeling like a real baby, which is thrilling, and frightening. And makes me really, really miss my family. Understanding now why favourite-sister-in-law suggested I have the baby in Canada. But for all my complaints during the week of panic a couple of weeks back, I'm actually quite pleased with the level of care I'm getting here, and the outlook of my midwife. And while it would be nice to have a lot of family nearby during these times, I'm quite sure the F-word will be a terrific push-partner. Depending on how things go, I'm less committed to the idea of not having my next baby here. We'll see.

Sewing and mulling

My hunch is this baby will come early. Probably "hunch" is the wrong word since there are a lot of very good clues it'll come early, like it being the first, and it being huge for its gestational age and the fact that I will be induced if my blood pressure goes doolally. But as of Monday I've suddenly leapt into the nesting action everybody told me was the feature of the last month of pregnancy, and I've juuuuuust hit month seven. In fact, I think today is the 28 week mark precisely.

I'm still fucking exhausted, mind you. It's a little bit like a slow version of being on meth - my body knows it's very, very tired, but it's about as restful to launder, sew, clean and prepare as it is to have a nap. Some friends here gave us a shitload (hah!) of decent quality diapers - not quite enough so I sat down and made 10 more using Rita's Rump Pocket design. I've made them for friends before, and they got good reviews, so I'll see how they go for myself. Having saved all that money I felt justified in blowing about a hundred bucks on fancy Japanese merino and "waterproof cotton" diaper covers which I will name and shame, or else name and praise, depending on their ultimate performance, and then on getting some cheap eBay Marimekko oil cloth for a portable changing pad, which by "cheap" I only mean cheap for Marimekko, and not cheap for oil cloth.

I guess this means that I've committed to the cloth diaper route. Hubris? Maybe. And I won't beat myself up too much if we can't hold to it. But considering I switched successfully some years ago to cloth menstrual pads without hiccoughs I'm hoping for the best.We have friends here who did elimination communication. The F-word and I had a brief conversation about that, which went like this:

"Do you want to try that?"

"Er, okay."

"Let's not try too hard."

"Fine."

(We'd just been to their house, where their two-year-old girl had solemnly announced "pee", and then peed on the F-word's foot.)

Besides that, making mattress covers, blankets and wipes. All in super-soft flannelette. I happened to have metres and metres and metres of it lying around because of my boss who disappeared in Central America. Just before he disappeared I'd hit a good enough work/life balance in Belgium that I was sewing a lot, especially for friends who had just had babies. Of course when he disappeared everything went apeshit. So here I am now with about 30 metres of different sorts of super-soft flannelette on my hands, from the best fabric stores in Europe and Canada, which is lucky, given the fabric stores are rather crap here. Sometimes I think Australia is the planet's slight-damage seconds outlet mall without the low prices.

Anyways, just one more thing to thank my disappeared boss for, I guess. I still miss him. A lot. It all seems so unreal now that he was ever not missing - he's been missing, I think, for longer than I knew him. I suppose this happens with loss? That eventually the person who has died (for it's quite certain he's dead) isn't just the person that you loved, or the person that you miss, but is actually a hole in your existence - and that hole, that lack, becomes almost as real to you as the real person was. Then once in awhile a circumstance or a memory - less and less frequently as time goes by - calls them back to mind almost as they were. What a life. 

The miracle that is fat people

I understand, now, why people get so excited about how great the second trimester is relative to the third, which I believe I'm now officially in, though it's hard to tell, since there seem to be subjective goalposts seperating trimesters which I'd always assumed would be split evenly - the fucking mysteries of this pregnancy cult.

Now that the tests have come back pretty clear and I'm relaxing a bit, probably the most provoking thing at the moment is that I'm enormous. I walk up a hill I could run up without blinking seven months ago, and my knees and ankles hurt, and I need a rest. Turning over in bed at night is suddenly a massive physical and mental effort. My flatulence is no longer amusing even to me. How the fuck do fat people do it? How do they manage being this heavy, year in and year out? Don't get me wrong - I'm 100% gourmande and I fucking love to eat. I'll never be a skinny girl. But at this point I'm topping out 200 pounds, and I'm damn uncomfortable. Even sitting on a comfy chair for longer than 15 minutes is uncomfortable because your ass goes all funny.

The F-word explained that most people don't put on massive amounts of weight in seven months when they get fat, so I suppose their bodies and muscles have more time to get used to it, but there is NO WAY being this heavy can be comfortable for anybody, unless they're massively boned and super-tall, and even then I bet their backs fucking kill them. My back is still okay - I mean, I don't have chronic soreness, probably because I'm keeping up with 90 minutes of gentle exercise a day and pre-natal yoga. But once in awhile it threatens to not be okay anymore, and I'm full of sympathy for the men in my life who are, as the French say, bien baraqué. I really love that expression.

Speaking of, the other day we watched Les Intouchables. Usually I don't like my movies inspiring, but I'd seen a few moments of it on some flight or other during my second trimester peregrinations (man alive, now that I feel like a massive fat growth, and I ever glad I did all that tripping around!) and it looked like it would have some good slang. Which it did. It was quite good, I would say, certainly miles and miles better than the other massively overrated French blockbuster of the year, The Artist, which I also watched on one of the flights. And Omar Sy is hawt. Goodness gracious.   

Fjord every streeeeeeeeeeam

Well. The midwife just called, and one thing I don't have is diabetes. No diabetes and no pre-eclampsia. Here's my favourite thing on the internet, again, to celebrate.

The liver tests that were worrisome are coming back fine too, and the ultrasounds very very promising, as pertains to both me and Ren - Ren looked bloody magnificent, with eyes that open and close, and a face like a person. More blood testing tomorrow. Between all the blood testing over the last week (for the formal GTT test, they take three samples within two hours) and the acupuncture session yesterday, I feel like a fucking pincushion. I'd always visualized getting this many needles stuck into me as the onset of the heroin addiction I'm planning for my twilight years, but I guess having a baby is pretty cool too.

On a less positive note, getting some perspective from the fact that a lady in the family close to my age has an ovarian cyst the size of Ren, which is probably not cancerous, but isn't really the sort of thing that helps you sleep at night, is it? I need to shut the fuck up more. Mind you, I do rather shut the fuck up a lot, which is part of the reason I have a blog. Somewhere I don't feel the need to shut the fuck up. And it's cheaper than my analyst in Toronto was.

Yeah okay Australian healthcare

As of this afternoon's ultrasounds, will have paid more out of pocket for this pregnancy than a full-blown preemie caesaerian crisis in Taiwan. I think the F-word and I might have to accelerate our Australian plan. I don't necessarily want to have Ren's little brother or sister here - language barriers might be the least of my overall worries.

First of all an update - I don't have pre-eclampsia. The panic from Friday seems to be mostly unwarrranted though the rest of this week will see an ongoing barrage of tests, associated with liver function and an slightly irregular outcome to my GTT test which seems to be down to me having a huge lunch with dessert (even during this pregnancy, not something I usually do) with some desirable elements of the F-word's family who are up for a visit. Pretty stupid I know, but in my defense, nobody warned me not to be stupid. We'll see how the testing this week goes.

Dead Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes died last week. I spent a lot of time with his work, and loved some of it even to the point of wading through his lousy work, like his execrable autobiography. He was somebody I think I actually expected to meet and have a chat with someday because my first reaction to his death was suprise, even though he was enormously fat, not young, and obviously in very poor health for many years.

I read his most recent book most recently - Rome - just before I went to Rome in July. Of course the mental comparison was made with Barcelona, which I read just before going to Barcelona yonks ago. It wasn't nearly as good. I thought, reading it, "you can tell he's tired." Even too tired to remember. Hi most bookish book, in the sense of most academic. I mean, it's a good book - I didn't give up on it 3/4 of the way through like The Fatal Shore (at which point I also started getting the feeling he was tired). But Barcelona was a fucking great book.

Anyways, I'm sort of pissed off he's dead, even if he didn't really have any great books left in him and even if we weren't going to meet and have a chat. I've never seen Damien Hirst so ably bashed by someone people listened to.

I'll give you something to whine about

I feel fine, and the baby feels fine, but the tests don't agree. My blood pressure has crept back up, and my liver was doing creepy things last week. The sort of things that made my midwife/doctor worry about this. For fuck's sake. Obviously I'm worried but mostly I'm just annoyed. I think in a normal pregnancy there's enough to worry about, and I'm feeling put-upon and victimized that - short of week 27 - I get to worry about extra shit too.

Especially given that I don't really have any associated symptoms - just some funny test results. Baby's kicking, heart ticking merrily away, etc., etc., everything looks to be fine, and I still get to fucking worry every time I wake up with a headache from the heating that I'm having to blast because Australia's so fucking cold at night during the winter, every time I feel a twinge everywhere - staring at my extremeties and waiting for them to swell up - pissing in interminable cups for protein tests, and answering the same fucking questions over and over because I'm too much of a fucking pinko to pay for my health care and hence to avoid the endless round of fucking student doctors and midwives on top of a roster of nurses, midwives and doctors who only seem to talk to each other once a day, getting my fucking veins punctured by said student midwives who haven't quite figured out how to take blood yet . . .

Fuck. And all this happened before the weekend, too. I had a three-hour wait on Friday while they decided whether or not to keep me in hospital for the weekend. They aren't, but I get to go back for fuck knows how long on Monday, doing the same shit again, with another fucking cunt of a glucose test on top of it.

I don't give a fuck. It's fine if I get sick, I'm just pissing myself over the idea of the baby being delivered very prematurely, which is what's done if pre-eclampsia or HELLP rear up. If I can just hold it in until week 36, that's fine. Even week 34. I'll put up with any pain or liver failure or whatever, as long as the baby gets to be healthy. Week 26 and a half, for fuck's sake. I'm reasonably nice to my body, so why is this happening now? Two months from now and I'd be easy. Whatever. Hopefully nothing's actually happening. Every day the baby stays in there is a little victory - every second, every minute.

Buggered and bewildered

Holy fuck, I am tired. I don't think abnormally, but still tireder than I've been in forever. To think seven months ago I could go kayaking for a couple of hours, eat a little breakfast, hit the garden, go for a 10 km run on the beach, and still be social late into the evenings . . . yesterday I had a very gentle kayak for an hour and nearly fell asleep on my feet during the half hour walk home - today I went out for a 90 minute walk to keep my calves stretched (they cramp up at night otherwise) and was absolutely buggered. I must have slept for eleven hours last night and napped yesterday, and napped again today, and each time the only thing that got me out of bed was hunger. It's like being depressed, except I'm not depressed. I'm rather happy. Just absolutely sodomized with tiredness.

I really don't think that's untypical for this stage of the game, though I will ask the midwife about iron supplements next time I see her, but what's boggling my mind is how the fuck pregnant women do this when they're working fulltime and have an older kid to take care of and a husband who's not supportive/no husband. I literally cannot fucking imagine. I know most pregnant women can have a couple of cups of coffee a day, which I suspect would be helping me no end, but coffee can't go too far against a pervasive exhaustion like this.

At least with the older kid thing there's a good chance I'll find out. The F-word, who has a few years on me, is feeling his age and wants to make a baby brother or sister for Ren sooner rather than later. And like all the preconceptions I've ever had about anything baby-related, my prior iron certainty that a four-year age gap is best is sliding out the window, and I'm starting to think half that might be more appropriate. One of those things that we won't be deciding on until well after Ren's born, of course. Just in case, the massive and beautiful Emmaljunga monstrosity Mum bought for us by proxy does have a toddler seat attachment. That means we're ready, right? Hah. Hah hah hah ha.

Shhhh . . . but I'm starting to have a fairly strong hunch the reason I'm sort of psyched by the Taiwan possibility is us being able to afford a housekeeper.  Not sure I can do this with two kids without some sort of staff backing me up. I've already pretty much decided we'll be getting cleaners in here, too, where we can less well afford it.

Thinking big thoughts

I wonder a lot too, baby. But not about you. I don't have any doubts about you at all.

One of the things I wonder: where are you going to live, my dear little creature? The F-word has just been conditionally accepted for the awesome new job he applied for. His ultimate acceptance depends on student numbers next year. That makes it still very, very conditional. Being one of those awful people who think adult education courses are fun, I've signed up for several here, just to get knocked back when no one else signs up for them. So still very conditional for the F-word. But much less conditional than it was earlier this week. 

And if it's only for one year, by Christmas of 2013 we'll probably be looking for a new home, somewhere in Asia. Singapore, Taiwan, one of those clean places that won't give my child asthma or melamine poisoning. (Sorry, China. I like you a lot, but I've spoken to too many of your worried parents to trust you with my kid.)

So another thing I wonder: baby, how am I going to give you stability? How am I going to stop you from turning into the bourgeois equivalent of an army brat?

The only answer I keep coming back to is that I'll need to keep spending long trips in Canada. I would need to do that anyways; if we do stay in Australia four more years and I rip the kid from this, its incubator of a country, probably not to return for years if ever (it's really fucking far), the kid needs to feel some sort of base in Canada, and its extended family there. My memories of childhood are memories of love, of people AND of place, and in a sense of some people who were place. Looks like, however far I've run from north Ontario, that will be the best I can give my baby. Helpless, helpless, helpless. I didn't mean to still be shifting around like this in my mid-thirties. And since the F-word only gets a couple of weeks of holiday at a time, the price of that is gaps in Daddytime. He says he understands. I'll understand if he doesn't understand later. But what then?

What a mess. Sorry, baby. But there are benefits. I don't know what sort of mother I'm going to be to you, but I do know I've set things up so you get three passports waiting for you as soon as you're out of me. And they're good passports, too. Not the sort where you need a visa to go fucking everywhere. I do know that, whether you end up wanting it or not, I seem to be in a position that only a tiny percentage of the world's parents are in - and an even tinier percentage who aren't in the classes of the parasitically rich: I can give you the world, or something close to it.

Kicky little number

Kick, Ren, kick. I think Ren is enjoying the discovery I've just made that you can make pudding out of bananas if you blend them with cacao, condensed milk and boiling water. I certainly am. But a little provoked to be sitting here. This afternoon I have to settle down to a tedious session of reciept counting in a bid to keep my taxes ridiculously tiny, and I want a nice walk in the sun first to warm up a bit first. The weather is good here - the houses are fucking COLD. And, in the winter, full of mildew. It's important to max out the fresh air as much as possible.

Instead I'm waiting around to see if this new insurance company is going to cover me, and the F-word, and fucking tired of it already. They were meant to check with the underwriter and send the quote last week. There is some tedium involved in being a grownup. But when I remember with honesty, it's a fuck sight less tedious being a grownup than a kid. How poor Ren is gonna deal with school . . . I mean, I liked it well enough, but it was pretty much shit. Waking up early, sitting through mandatory classes, suffering teachers . . . Still, you don't know when you're a kid how much better everything is going to get when you have some money and self-determination and can use your words to negotiate.

Thinking more seriously about a move to Taipei. My boss wants it, and I could save retarded amounts of money in a couple of years. Wasn't really on my radar until realizing the awesome new job the F-word's going for might only last for a year, and since it's in arts education there's a healthy chance he'll be out on his ass again in a year.  There's no work in this area - it took him ages to find his present contract, which he'll be happy enough to leave - and the supply teacher existence isn't one that particularly agrees with him. But if we upped sticks to Taipei, he could slip back into ESL work in a manageable sort of way. And did I mention I'd be making retarded amounts of money there? Hmm.

Mustn't let my thoughts get away with me like this. Just because I fucking hate Australia these days. I do like money though. 

Ren update

Saw the midwife, doctor, OB etc in a flurry last week to get told I'm not as high risk as they'd thought. Well, hurrah and surprise sur-fucking-prise. Same thing the OB in Shanghai told me. Fucking small towns and their small town doctors. Tonnes of chicks get mildly high blood pressure when they get pregnant and push their critters out no problem. And my blood pressure's not that high. Maybe it's all that pre-natal yoga, who knows. Anyways, I get to continue in the midwife programme, which is good. The OB seemed pretty decent but there's just one of her in a region with 60,000 people in it, who get pregnant a lot because there's fuck-all else to do.

(The depression is mostly gone. Being pissed off to be back is still here.)

The midwife told me to make sure Ren's kicking or punching or whatever ten times a day. Ren kicks or punches ten times before I get out of bed in the morning, and has been doing so since Spain masterfully trounced Italy in the Eurocup finals (I was in Rome that night and you could have heard a pin drop. Lovely.) Maybe Ren is a damn considerate kid. It means the rest of the day, I can just sort of enjoy it without having to remember to count. Once in awhile my ribs feel a bit crowded, but it's no big deal.

So far I'm not disappointed by the level of care I've been getting and my go at Midwife Roulette - it's a public service so you have no say in who gets to midwife you - has worked out, all my friends who have birthed here tell me. My midwife does seem pretty nice, and a bit more sensitive than sis-in-law ("early term high blood pressure? Maybe it's a molar pregnancy!" from SIL, versus "oh, your tummy and tits were covered in a rash during the heatwave in Italy? It cleared up? Your palms weren't itchy? Nah, you don't have toxoplasmosis" from Midwife). But I've lost any hestitancy I've had about birthing in Europe for the next one. Too many good stories of good care there, and less out-of-pocket for expenses, even in the case of some friends of ours who moved to Brussels a couple of months or so before the delivery (hey guys).

Bore that in mind when I bought a stroller Mum provided for, gently suggesting our sex life stands a greater degree of recovery chances if I sleep Ren in a bassinet stroller for the first sex months and wheel it out of the room when we get intimate. She gave us $500, the exact cost of a gently used Emmaljunga pram that retails for around $2000. First "deal" I got in Australia. Nobody wants them here. They're too big and clunky for a society so absolutely dominated by the Car - give yourself a hernia getting one of those fuckers in and out of a trunk. But I'm mostly foot-moved myself, working at home and running my small-town errands, and they look like the most comfortable things I've ever seen, and the reviews say they go over snow like it's fucking nothing, which will be important for trips home (poor airlines and their naive promise to transport full-size strollers for free) and important if my lobbying for Berlin works out and we move there in a few years, and if we have the next baby when we expect. A lot of "ifs" for $500, but it's a fucking nice pram. It's actually probably our most attractive material possession. Anyways, I'll let you know in a few months if it's a turkey or not.

Oh, fuck.

It could be jet lag; it could be my body adjusting to a baby growth spurt/hormones; it could be that I'm monumentally pissed off to be back in Australia, it could be any number of things. My pet theory is that it's going from the middle of the summer, light-wise, to the middle of winter. Whatever the case is, I'm fucking down. Right down. Crashed.

It's freaking me out a little, because of course, while it's here, you don't know when it's going to end. Though for many years now this has just been a passing thing that's cleared up in days or weeks at most, you just don't know when it will lift. It freaks me out more than usual at the moment, when I think of the F-word, so kind and loving, and then think of my grandmother and my grandfather - another kind, loving man, who really sacrificed a lot of his happiness on the altar of Her. On one side I'm petrified of similarly dragging him down with my depression. On the other I'm petrified of him leaving me, as I expect I would have done to my grandmother if I was my grandfather. I don't know which prospect is more utterly petrifying. They're both bloody awful.

Freaking me out even more because now I've got a kicky little baby inside me and I've had enough friends who've had post-partum depression to be petrified of that prospect, too. They all got through; they all bonded with their kids, and love them, and are happy now. They all did a good job. Could I, in that situation? It's hard to imagine not bonding with Ren; the little thing is already filling me with a new kind of love and every little kick and punch is an intense pleasure. When I was in Europe I had all these visions of how I'm going to be, if not a great mum, a mum who tries to be great, and since getting back here I've got so full of inertia and sadness that I just can't kick things into gear.

I'm gonna calm down, eat some SAD appropriate food, and go for a walk in the sun. Mercifully, whatever else Australia's failings are, it does often have sun in the winter.