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.

Going outback blues

Has it only been a week since the last entry? Paris feels a world away, which of course it is, me now being in Singapore, lounging in the business class lounge and waiting to flat-bed my way to Australia. Fuck, do I love being upper middle class. I'm enjoying the last few months of that; once the baby comes out I don't anticipate spoiling myself much anymore, or spending accrued airmiles on anything except trips to Canada to socialize my poor Australian infant with some people who can say two syllables in a row without their voices going like thiiiis?

At some point in the last week or so, probably because Singapore's a big old shopping mall and now that I'm enormous most of my tropical perambulating is in air conditioned places like shopping malls, I hit some sort of wall with how shitty quality things are aggressively sold to expectant parents and have decided to treat the kid's early infancy as an experiment in simultaneous luxury and parsimoniousness. Which isn't really going to be a stretch, I don't think. It's how I've lived my own life to date. I'll let you know how it goes.

So . . . this second trimester last-kick-at-the-carefree-(almost because pregnant so not smoking or drinking)-travel is just about over. It's not the travelling being over that distresses me, it's the going back to Australia. For years. And years. And years. In the last two months, I've spent no time alone, and during the time in Europe I was always with people I had a deep affection or love for, train travel time excepted. Dozens of them. Now I'm heading back to Australia where the people I love and have a deep affection for are not nearly so numerous. Obviously one of them is my old man and he takes precedence. But he doesn't really want to be there either once his studies are over. Another will be my child, and my child is portable. I've been porting it all over Asia and Europe for the last two months.

My boss was trying to think of ways out for us and his favourite idea was us moving to Taipei. Actually, that doesn't sound like it'd be too bad. I think the next time we go to Europe we'll take a few days transferring and adjusting in Taipei, feeling it out. Give me a chance to learn Chinese for real, give the kid a chance to learn Chinese, it's not as dirty as Shanghai, and you know - once you're in Asia, you're back in the world. You're back where things happen and people know about each other. I also have a particular soft spot for Taiwan because of all its unorthodox economists. Well, we'll see. 

Tu detestes Paris, Paris

Leaving Europe, which sucks. You know what makes that easier? Leaving it from Paris. This place is a dump and Charles de Gaulle aeroport is a worse dump. It makes Heathrow look like Changi. I don't think I'll come back unless business or transit calls as the one good friend I have still living here is happy to meet me elsewhere and as everything vaunted as awesome about this place is much more awesome elsewhere. Its cultural life is over and its natives are a passel of miserable, angry, ugly, dead-eyed, bored and boring people. Also it smells really bad.

Oh well - on to Singapore and finally home. It's been great, but I suspect I've been partly wasting my second trimester by not spending more of it banging my old man. I shudder to think what will become of our bedroom life after I squeeze a baby out and then as we take care of it. Will have to hope for the best. 

Can't tell me anything sometimes

If I want advice, I have a mother, Google, a midwife, pre-natal yoga and how-not-to-kill-the-baby classes, parents who I know well and admire, and the ability to ask specific questions in search of a specific answer. If I wanted to sign on to a predetermined philosophy of parenting, I would have specialized in babies at school, instead of the best way to invade other people's countries.

Absolutely flabbergasted at how spontaneous advisors feel like their experiences or abstract notions of parenthood are universalizable to all parents. Already bloody sick of it and not quite at month six. To all my friend with babies who read this blog, if I've ever done this to you, I apologize whole-heartedly and thank you for not slapping me, as you were no doubt sorely tempted to do. Please enjoy some schadenfreude as compensation. 

Rant over. I need to get out of France. The advice here is handed out almost as liberally as the second-hand smoke. And Paris is a fucking dump. Snarl.

First we'll make a shitload of money, then we'll take Berlin

Well, Baden Wuttemberg or whatever was nice, especially the trip to Metzingen where I bought a leather duffel bag for less than half its recommended retail price - my shopping aversion does not extend to medieval Swabian towns refitted as outlet malls during a euro crash, though luckily my blossoming, ever-expanding female form prevented me from buying any more clothes, which I need like a hole in my head. The damage was limited to that fucking beautiful bag and some baby clothes.

But the trip to Germany negatively convinced me of one thing: I really think we should move to Berlin, which I consciously decided to skip this year in favour of checking out the south. I love Berlin, and nowhere else is Berlin. Certainly not the south. I think we'd be as ill-suited to life in Swabia and Bavaria as we are, fundamentally, to life in Australia, for reasons that overlap a bit in terms of provincialism. A big part of the problem with Australia is feeling like I've fallen off the face of the planet and I suspect that part of me believes Berlin and cities like it is the face of the planet. Berlin's special aptitudes, of course, being that we can afford it, people aren't eating each other there much, it's a crossroad and theatre of all sorts of staggering and awful recent history, excellent green spaces and nature reserves in the surrounds, and that it's extra fucking awesome. Also the playgrounds there, from memory, are really good, though I was high almost all of the time I test-ran them.

Anyhoo, we'll probably make a return trip to Germany next year with the infant and think about it a little harder. One stickler is that the weather in southern Germany is a fuck sight better than the weather in Berlin and I suspect that is something I'll have to nurse the F-word, not to mention myself through - him through the idea of all that cold, me through the idea of all that dark. For now I'm in Paris, and not really noticing since I actually have to work today, and since I'm also mentally preoccupied with finding the perfect pram/bassinet for under $500.

Javanese fantasies

I spend, I would say, a minimal amount of time fantasizing about what life would be like if I was fabulously wealthy. Especially these days, when by no stretch of the imagination can I complain about my lifestyle relative to 98% of humanity. On Sunday I indulged a little bit, though. After a quick breakfast wherein Elvis and I managed to overlap in Amsterdam - a real treat since after the week in Rome I didn't think I'd see him again until my next visit to Canada - I had a couple of hours free before catching my train on to here (southern Germany). Being hugely pregnant, I didn't spend them high. Novel.

Instead I went for a great big walk to Java Eiland and had my little "If I were a rich man" fantasy. I couldn't live in Amsterdam for the same reason I couldn't live in Brussels - shitty, shitty weather - but if I were a rich man I'd have a pied-a-terre there, and that pied-a-terre would be on Java Eiland. So close to Amsterdam, close enough to walk your luggage to and from the station, but so far. On a fucking island. Full of modern architecture and imposed green spaces. With all the damn boats.

Oh fuck, do I ever wish the F-word would just come here, where people give a bit of a fuck about things being nice, and that I didn't have to go back to Australia. The experiment has run its course. Australia is too far away. Fine. I get it. I understand. And yet here we are, with my ticket un-traded-in, because I make a lot of money there and because we bought a house. I need to quit fucking whining about this because everything is rolling out with the efficiency of a model German automobile factory but when I'm here I'm so much closer to my family - even the fucking West Coasters, what with the Pacific being so big - and . . . and . . . I need to go eat. Second trimester hunger overwhelms all angst.

La pénombre des Pays-Bas

God, this place. The opposite of a dump in so many ways, which you see in stark relief arriving fairly fresh from southern Italy. I don't think I could live here though. I guess I need a bit of dump in my life. Maybe I could live in Rotterdam, if I decided that I didn't value my life enough to protect it from seasonal depression. And if I really stepped up the weed. Thinking back, I do believe this is the first time on the money side of 20 years I've been in the Netherlands without getting snaked. Thanks a lot, Ren.

One city ruled out

I flatter myself, readers, that if there's one thing I know, it's when a place is a dump. And Reggio di Calabria is a dump.

I honestly can't even begin to visualize a parallel universe wherein I'd live there. I could manage something like a visualization of what life would be like if I lived in Delhi, for example, though I'm sure it's highly unrealistic. In a place like that if you're poor you're too poor to have options and too Indian to get a visa and go live somewhere else. And I could visualize what life would be like if I lived in northern England, for example. You can make an effort and make life livable there. Probably. Although I'd probably have shot myself by now due to the seasonal depression.

But Reggio? Sweltering in the summer, no insulation in the winter, the water only working when it wants to . . . the only civic differences between Delhi and Reggio is that Delhi's got more people in it. It's practically identical, down to the crumbling buildings and rubbish-fire air and stray dogs rooting through the garbage-strewn streets and colonial-era water and sewerage infrastructure. If there were as many people in Reggio as in Delhi they'd all be dead. That's it. It wouldn't be like trying to crowd the population of Australia into Shanghai, whereby society would descend into some sort of 28 Days Later-style gore flick with some possibility of survival. No. Whatever the mob wouldn't get, cholera would.

And if I grew up there - gosh. That is one parallel universe that feels, if not beyond my imagination, like something that I'd have to struggle really, really hard to imagine. I can't imagine a Jessica who'd lack the nous on her eighteenth birthday to pack up and get the fuck out of there. Who'd lack the nous to learn the language of a functioning economy, and go function in it. But there are thousands of women my age, who look frighteningly like me, who are there and who are staying there. European passports notwithstanding, language skills notwithstanding. There they are and there they stay.

Since it's a bit of an inside job for me, I understand why they stay when they don't need to professionally or visa-ly or linguistically. to a certain point. It's family. Family ties. Family fucking bondage. And it's not just the women; it's any halfway gentle and retiring personality; they get tied into the family in a way that I can only see and not understand. It's the women who bug me a little more though, me being one and all, and seeing those women my age who look frighteningly like me etc. deferring to some dumb-ass husband who wouldn't even count as "slumming" in developed countries or to male relatives who as good as they are at some things are just very fallible people themselves - women who aren't making their own mistakes and whose lives I just don't get - holy shit.

This is the first place I've been with Ren in my tummy where I've thought seriously to myself that I really, really don't want Ren growing up. Boy or girl. Or fuckin' dinosaur. Not here.

Sleeping with your ex, continued

Oh dear. Brussels only has two and a half more days to piss me off. It feels so damn comfortable to be back. Hopefully my bank appointments tomorrow will be so shatteringly annoying that I'll be able to leave ungrudgingly on Sunday. The weather has been co-operative too. Not actively nice or anything, but not pissing down rain constantly. I think part of the problem is coming here so fresh from Shanghai and England - two salutary reminders that other cities are simply much, much worse than this one in terms of filth, stink, conspicuous consumption and human misery.

And I'm so comfortable here. I was here for so long - three years - and I know where everything is. And it's full of restaurants. I ate my weight at Mamma Roma's at lunch today - sort of stocking up for all those long future years in Australia without slab-style, greasy pizza with truffle sauce - and couldn't help remembering the days when, if I couldn't be fucked to cook, I'd bring us home big slices of that instead. Last night I feasted on stoemp and cheese and foie gras and creme brule - all things I can't get good in Australia.

And, you know, there are my people here. People who read books and serious newspapers and go to concerts that are good. Meow - yes - I know. My people in Australia might read books and newspapers and go to concerts that are good if they didn't have children and didn't live away to hell and gone, and no doubt in five short months I won't read books or serious newspapers either . . .

I think the trippy thing pushing everything into nostalgic hallucination territory is that my replacement is on vacation this week, so I've been working from her desk, which is my old desk. Taking calls on her phone, which is my old phone. Lunching with my colleagues, who are all the same, sitting in the same places, laughing about the same genre of things. Working at home rocks - but so did this office. I didn't have animosity with anyone, and there is lots of affection.

All this while falling back into old habits super-fast - eyes darting rapidly between the sidewalk checking for dogshit and the handsome Art Nouveau buildings as I walk around - making eye contact with drivers before using the pedestrian crossings - absorbing the admiring glances of socially uncastrated men, who seem to find the pregnant female form charming in a way I thought was the preserve of southern cultural Catholics (like, thankfully, my old man) - buying kefir at the grocery store and mixing it with an obscene amount of chocolate powder -

Good lord! I actually don't want to leave. 

I know the weather is about to get lousy. I know Belgium is on track to not have a summer for the fifth year in a row. I know all that. But I really don't want to leave here and go back to Australia. There you are. This is Bridges of Madison County and I want to drive off with Clint Eastwood in his crappy old truck.

I haven't had this sensation since I was in Paris defending my thesis, deciding I'd move back to Europe. I didn't move back to Paris, and I'm glad - even on my worst days I understood Brussels was a few steps up. And when we move, we won't move back to Brussels, and I'm glad of that too. I'm not an absolute sentimentalist. I can remember the weather made me want to shoot myself and everyone else, and I can't risk that degree of seasonal depression when I'm a mother. And I know doing ANYTHING that involved either public or private organizations was a Kafkaesque nightmare, certainly relative to the ease of operating in Australia. I don't just remember that - I KNOW it. We've been away for almost two years and we're still experiencing it. I still haven't got my 2010 tax refund yet. The F-word's bank account has been locked for a year. And my darling Lexie lives on the other side of the planet from me because of the fucking, fucking Belgian ministry of agriculture. 

But not only do I feel a deep yearning to be back in this part of the world - I'm starting to get this horrible guilty feeling that I'd be doing my child a serious disservice not having him or her in this part of the world. So much closer to my family - with so many more opportunities for human and cultural interaction - and so much more wholesome food - and so much more, let it be said, beauty.

Well. That settles that.

Love Brussel Sprouts Afresh

In Brussels . . . and happy about it. It's kind of like fucking an ex. You know all the old shit is there just waiting for you, but it's okay for the moment, because you've just got laid by someone who knows how to lay you after a few years of banging incompetents who let stubble grow on their shaved balls.

Or less figuratively, you've just ate a lot of good cheese while you're pregnant and you've been craving good cheese and you haven't had good cheese since 2010. When you were in Brussels.

Naming

Yorkshire is what it is, and is a lot nicer when the sun comes out. My grandmother, who is being moved from her house into a residential home in a couple of days, is going to turn 100 in September if she makes it. I expect she will because she just keeps going, although it's hard to see what enjoyment she's getting out of life at this point. A woman with every ingredient for happiness - relatively good health, a loving husband, attentive children, a circle of concerned friends - and yet wth so little happiness. I was named after her. I choose to take that as a pointed warning rather than a legacy.  Her daughters tried hard - naming me was part of that trying.

We've already chosen names for Ren. None of them are family names. That wasn't on purpose - it's just there's no appropriate name from my family that doesn't have fascist associations that isn't the name of someone really awful from the F-word's family. I mean, really awful. Not just aggro-depressive grandmother awful, but should have spent their lives rotting in prison awful. So it wasn't on purpose. But now I'm glad.

In better news, kippers are fucking delicious. Why haven't I been eating them all my life? 33 and never ate a kipper before. And I blame my granny for wasting her life . . .

More Shanghai

Up in Yorkshire with a lot to focus on . . . so not focusing on it here.

So, instead. This past month in China. It would have been better to do it whilst not pregnant, of course. Particularly food-wise, as I was in Shanghai, where  the cuisine is sweet, greasy, and the exact opposite of what I wanted, which can basically be summed up as super-spicy stodge. Think roast beef and curried fries with a side of Cheez Whiz. Not readily available in Shanghai. Also, the air stank, I mean just *stank*. Sewers too close to the surface, 70% of the males smoking in my fucking face, and the saucy sweetness of the Shanghaiese food. It wasn't a New Delhi stink; if I wasn't pregnant, I probably would have got used to it in a couple of days. But I *
am* pregnant, and that means I don't get used to smells anymore. The stink  of my own farts, shit and armpits are some of the most repellent things in the world to me at the moment after I'd previously enjoyed them for the last 33 years or so, so there was no chance of me getting used to Shanghai in a month.

Nonetheless I'm glad I went, and I'm even glad I went while I'm pregnant, or at least I will be glad once the baby is born and I ensure that my four  and a half week exposure to some of the worst urban air quality in the world hasn't hurt it. I had a nice time, especially as the F-word was with me most of the time, having a vacation and being enthusiastic and all that.

It was a fascinating cultural experience deepened by having some small grasp of the language this time, and we saw some beautiful things. And I have to say, I like the people in Shanghai. Such a big town, but really safe (besides the traffic), and decently friendly. Shockingly friendly really, when you consider the population of the town is greater than that of Australia. Although I suppose you can't have so many people in such a small space without them learning how to deal with each other. I like the way Shanghaiese people grift. It's really above-board. It's less like a rip-off and more transactional, somehow, which means I didn't get grifted at all - that I'm aware of anyways. I like the way the men don't hassle you and I like the way people just sort of stare at the big pregnant foreigner without any concerning intention. It'd be nice if they gave up subway seats
more, mind you.

Being pregnant there was exciting. We had an earlyish ultrasound, around 16 weeks, so the F-word could see the kid (he left Shanghai a week ahead of me and he's not with me in Europe now - I won't be back in Trogstralia until the middle of July). I tried to express to the technician that we didn't want to know the baby's gender, or rather I did but the F-word didn't. I suspect she understood but decided it wasn't important that the F-word didn't want to know, because she just blurted it out excitedly. That was interesting, because - while out of necessity I was having the prenatal checkup at a VIP clinic - my Chinese colleagues who have had babies, even those who used VIP clinics themselves, were not told their baby's gender as a matter of policy. China's not India but there are millions of "missing girls" here too, so now you can't find out what you're having - but apparently only if you're Chinese.

In a Shanghaiese context that gets even more interesting, as parents in the city prefer to have girls, because if they have a boy, they have to buy him an apartment - outright, no mortgage - or else no girl will marry him. That's probably partly traditional economics, partly there not being enough women in the current generation, and partly Shanghai - Shanghaiese women have a reputation in China for being rather dominant and more important than men. There's a saying that boys in Shanghai are a construction bank, because you're sinking lots of money into building their future, and girls are a merchant bank, because they bring money to the family.

Gender relations spent a lot of time fascinating me there and I suspect  they always will. I love the F-word with a fairly overwhelming romantic emotion that hasn't got any less obsessive after having lived with him for six years or whatever it's been now. Nonetheless I find a lot that makes sense about the practical approach to marriage in China. I remember one lunch where a Chinese colleague and I both rounded on a Taiwanese colleague for having an overly-romantic view of marriage - one where he expected to not be irritated by his spouse and felt bad if he did. But irritation is part of the package, we argued. A partnership isn't a partnership if you're
never allowed to be irritated or never allowed to irritate. It's a
fairy-story, and a tedious one at that. Marriage is a decision you make every day - "this is the person that I want irritating me." That's love, surely. If the person always pleases you, aren't you just sticking around because you're pleased, and not because you love them, and why wouldn't things just end when they stopped pleasing you? Out of my Chinese circle of acquaintance, the only woman whose marriage I think is in real trouble is the one who goes strangely silent when a big chatfest about how irritating husbands are gets going.

The other interesting thing about being pregnant in China is the advice you get, a lot of which was new to me. That includes raising your arms above your head - apparently if you do that, the baby can strangle itself on the umbilical cord. Yeah, that didn't make sense to me either, and really poses a challenge to the whole pre-natal yoga industry. Another was not being allowed to eat crab meat. That made more sense. Crabs are sort of the pigs of the ocean, right? They'll eat any old disgusting shit and then let it accumulate in your system when you eat them in turn. The ban on crab will be PAINFUL when I get back to Singapore for a few days in July. Fuck, the crab is good there. No more painful than the ban on beer and unpasteurized cheese is gonna be in Europe though.

Probably the most remarkable piece of advice, or rather heavily flogged product that was new to me was the anti-radiation maternity dress. Ren and I had a growth spurt on the plane to China, apparently, and I had to go maternity clothes shopping almost as soon as I arrived (luckily Shanghai's far enough north that the people are more Western-sized and there was a lot available - would have been harder in the south, I bet). In the maternity store there were racks and racks of stiffish dresses that my colleague explained had some sort of metal weave in them to protect fetuses from cellphone and computer radiation. They used to be the absolute norm, at least for female office workers, but there's been something of a turn against them. I still saw a pile of women wearing them, though. (I don't know if it was because I was pregnant so I was noticing more, or because the year of the Dragon is an auspicious one for a baby, but Shanghai seemed absolutely stuffed with pregnant chicks. In my office, there were at least four.)

Great big scam, right? I thought so too, but I nearly bought one anyways. It would have been for the flights, which I'm taking a lot of before I get back to Australia. You can sell anything to mothers. Even against our better judgement. Still, it cost about a quarter of a "normal" maternity dress in a western country, where you can sell mothers the ugliest shit imaginable for hundreds of dollars if you play fuckin' Enya in the store and have a shopkeeper who can have mini-orgasms about natural fabrics. Jesus, what fucking cash cows we get treated as. It's fucking opportunistic and infuriating and I'm glad I did most of my maternity shopping in what still counts as a developing country price-wise. As for Ren, we're going to rely on hand-me-downs, second-hands and home-mades as far as we can,
certainly in the beginning. I really resent the money that one is expected to spend for a new little thing that just wants boobies, to be warm, cuddled and loved, and to have its excrement cleaned off in good time.

Over the next five weeks I'm going to be spending chunks of time in
England, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and France. If you're counting, yes - it does mean Ren will have gone to more countries as a fetus than most people go to in their entire lives (we've already been in Canada, Australia, Singapore and China). I wish I could install a viewing window in my tummy for his or her benefit (yes we know the gender, no we're not telling, although no doubt a pronoun or two will slip over the months since it feels wrong to call it "it". I can't remember if anybody who could be expected to send new-baby presents still reads this blog, and what we absolutely do not want are gender influenced presents. I don't want a baby
princess or truck driver). Anyways, I'm very curious about the advice that comes my way in these countries and will happily continue my highly unscientific social research by flaunting my belly and seeing what happens.

Spliffe uncensored

Your side of the great firewall again, dears, in London to be specific, in Pain Quotidien to be specific, on my way up to Yorkshire and pregnantly overstuffed on pretentious baked goods after five weeks of Shanghaiese food. By the time I left Shanghai some, oh, 24 hours ago, it was really time to leave Shanghai . . . the air was so dirty I was worried about long-term damage to Ren (who's blooming, by the way), the traffic was so bad that I was risking pulling a Falling Down, and I did not get fluent in the language all of a sudden. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that everything is going to seem pretty bland and colourless and odourless for awhile after those five weeks in Shanghai. Fuck me, what a city.

You get to appreciate there - or at least I did, but that could be because it's the core experience of people my age, who I was spending all my time with - that they had something like a year zero that didn't quite stick 40 years ago, but still did a vast amount of damage. There's this sort of dislocated older generation being taken care of/being unpaid nannies for their professional children who've got no time for anything except paying the way of their kids and parents at once. Even so, that place is so . . . so fucking Chinese. There you go. Adjectives fail me. Shanghai looks and smells and sounds like Shanghai and not like anything else. It's doing things Shanghai's way - not anybody else's. And since there are more people in the city than there are in Australia, it is so alive. I've never looked out a window, looked at any view in front of me there that didn't have a shitload of people in it. And that didn't smell like 14 or 15 things. Which was as disgusting as it was interesting at this stage of my pregnancy.

Anyhoo, more about Shanghai later, but now I'm back in Europe, and exhaustion notwithstanding very interested in the sensation of being back in Europe. Okay, I'm not really in Europe, I'm in London. But interested in it. I wonder how much I've been romanticizing my memories of the continent because of not liking Australia. Time to find out, I guess. I've only been here about an hour and a half and I've already spent a good 20 minutes of that cursing how the Tube is so fucking backwards in terms of disabled access (or in my case pregnant with two suitcases access) and how nobody gives me and my enormous belly seats on trains. They didn't in Shanghai either to be fair, but I assumed that was because people there didn't realize I was pregnant and thought I was just another fat foreigner. That excuse doesn't work here in the land of lager and pot noodles.

Another flame in the wall

Well gosh, guys. Tomorrow I'm heading to the other side of the Great Firewall and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to blog here for about a month. Nor will I be able to idly flip to the blogs on the sidebar whenever I start getting the feeling I'd rather not be working. Since I started working at home, you all have really taken the place of colleagues who I waste time with in offices, with less drinking and staplegun fights, and I'm going to miss you.

So obviously, either my productivity is about to fucking skyrocket with this trip, or I'm going to come out of this speaking fluent Mandarin.

Speaking of the Great Firewall, tonight is a last scramble before I go behind it to get all my source material together for some bullshit essay I have to write for a bullshit course for a bullshit Australian university (that'll remain nameless for the moment) that I'm doing because, since I was doing the Mandarin stuff already, I can pick up another certificate if I do a couple of bullshit arts courses as well. It's a correspondence course. You may have heard that Australians are world leaders when it comes to correspondence education, which in my experience of this course (not the Mandarin courses, which were actually fantastically delivered, taught, and supported) is the same sort of perspective that'd say Indians are the world's best lovers just because there's a fuckload of babies there.

I can't tell you how fucking dimestore this course is. There are no lectures - just semi-literate notes that are meant to be "written" lectures - and no professorial support besides someone who's not quite a TA, has no meaningful perspective or background on any issues covered in the course, and whose role seems limited to congratulating people when they make contributions to the message board, which I suppose is a measure in place to stand in for seminars, but which were already in use alongside seminars in FUCKIN' 1997 WHEN I DID MY FUCKING UNDERGRAD AND THE INTERNET HARDLY EXISTED.

Oh yeah - the TA also spends a lot of time on the message boards inviting people to contact him directly by email if a specific question comes up, and then not answering emails. A man after my own heart, truly. Lazy fucking cunt that he is. He and I are probably peas in a fuckin' pod. And me being this sort of person was one of the reasons I decided not to be a TA or professor. The private sector deserves the full brunt of my epic laziness - university students are already getting screwed every other way, and they can't pay me as much.

Anyhoo. The class is a fucking gyp.  I'll probably continue with the Asian Studies certificate if the baby's not too colicky and I don't lose my mind, but it'll just be pure Mandarin classes now as far as possible - no more wasting money on these pisashit arts courses.

Taking it easy, hardcore

I'm taking my relaxation seriously. Today I started with an hour-long qi gong class, three hours of yoga, and then an hour of acupuncture which stretched into 90 minutes when I fell asleep on the table and the therapist didn't have the heart to wake me. I was snoring, he said. Well. Thanks, acupuncturist. I needed it.

My brain is tangling with the complex but pleasant puzzle of how to stay perfectly nourished and perfectly relaxed over the next six months, whilst travelling in Asia and Europe. I'm not actually going anywhere I haven't been before, unless you count a new city or two in countries I already know pretty well, so I have it pretty much mapped out in my mind. I'm always a pretty relaxed traveller, so really it's my normal routine with a lot more first-class tickets and massages thrown in. It's a write-off . . . and anyways, this is probably my last chance to travel first-class for awhile . . . soon I'll have children, which means I'll be poor. That's how it works, right? Anyways, when you book this far ahead, the price difference between coach class and business class is about 20 bucks.

Today's yoga class was a scream. I was really out of place there, like by asking what simple exercises I could do on a series of eight long-haul flights over the next month while everybody else had questions about the utility of homeopathy and raspberry leaf tea, but that was fine. Everybody else was white but had names like Indra. What was interesting in that context was that at the conversation bit toward the end, when people started sharing their snuff flicks birthing stories, was even these absolute hippie types had no problem reaching straight for the pain killers and C-sections as soon as they started feeling it was necessary.  Nobody had managed shit without nitrous, which was encouraging.

I guess I've been inculcated with the idea that I really have to do everything naturally or else I'm somehow a failure as a woman, and I've had to come to deal with the fact that there's a fairly high chance for me in particular that things are not going to happen naturally in the least, if I want Ren and I to live, anyways. That's made me sad, or testy, or something, but the more fucking horror stories birthing stories I hear, the more it's coming home to me that childbirth really has been to women what war has been to men in martial societies - something that just happens, and back in the day you couldn't go into it confidently expecting to survive, unless you were a bloody fool.

But Ren and I happen to be happening now, when childbirth just isn't as awful as it used to be for people of our income bracket and nationality, just as war isn't as awful as it used to be for all those guys flying around other people's countries and dropping bombs on them without getting too close. But I'll probably still make a good and thriving baby, and you won't find too many aerial campaigns that have made a good and thriving war. So. I guess my point is, if I have one, that thank fuck things are as they are.

Spoiling away the worry

My slide into champagne socialism continues. I've just cashed in most of my airmiles upgrading all my overnight flights during this big China/Europe/Singapore trip to business class. That's right . . . business class. On purpose, not because of getting bumped up, which has happened to me a big fat once in my fairly airborne life, and that was on a two-hour flight before my drinking days started, so I think basically I got some nicer orange juice out of it. And it's Singapore Airlines business class. I'd be lying if I wrote I wasn't excited. I have a feeling being able to actually lie down and sleep is going to make long-haul air travel a totally different and much more pleasant experience.

I'm spoiling myself. Having moderately high blood pressure whilst pregnant has pitfalls, like being advised to dial back the running to half an hour of lighter cardio every day (today I ran in the grocery store to get some eggs while the F-word was already lining up at the cash and realized how much I missed it), and like worrying about the baby and I both dying in a big pre-eclampsia storm, or wondering if I'm going to get a stroke or dead kidneys, or wondering if the theoretical possibility of fucking Ren up forever by taking drugs for my high blood pressure is outweighed in terms of his or her well-being by me not dropping dead all of a sudden.

All of these, besides missing running, are nonsense thoughts. My blood pressure really isn't that high, the drugs really aren't dangerous - especially at the tiny doses prescribed - and the risks really aren't that big. But for the first time I'm dealing with my health and my choices having an impact on someone else who doesn't have a choice about them, or a choice about their relationship with me, but to whom they're as important as they are for me. Frankly, it's a little stressful. And so, spoiling myself. Giving up on the Asian Studies certificate for now, besides finishing this joke of an international terrorism class, and eating whatever I want that's reasonably sensible, and cashing in a few years worth of air miles so that I can sleep while I travel. Spoiling myself helps. At least half the mental space I was spending worrying I'm now spending looking forward to about 22 hours of business class flight.

Super Ren

Feeling rather less grim today because we had our 11-week ultrasound yesterday, which turned out to be a 13 week ultrasound. WTF? Every time we check on the due date it seems to move up a week. I don't know how that's possible. I mean it's not like we weren't doing the deed at that point but - well, just more evidence against the rhythm method meaning a damn thing. Ren is growing by leaps and bounds and moving around like he or she knows what she's doing in there. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

And Ren - so far, Ren is normal. Ren is unfrightening. Ren isn't posing any difficult moral questions. Ren waved at us. I'm 100% relief - and relieved Ren's development has progressed this far, so that if I do have to start blood pressure medication, I'm going to worry a little less about things going wrong. I'd really rather hold off until the third trimester, though. We'll see.

Also less grim because I met my midwife. Or a midwife, anyways, who'll be tracking me and who'll take care of the delivery if it turns out to be a normal delivery. And she was great. It was the first time in this whole cunt of a thing that I've seen a medical professional who inspired me with more confidence than doubt. Even sister-in-law buggered me up bad for no reason by pulling out the molar pregnancy card, a really statistically negligible possibility for someone of my age and ethnic group, when I first found out about the high blood pressure. I mean, fuck.

The meaning of joy

Feeling a little grim. My blood pressure is back up a bit this week and yesterday hit absurd levels at the doctor's before falling back. The doctor and I will be having a little confrontation this week, I think. They seem to be leaning toward putting me on medication, but thanks to a little privileged access to obstetric literature via the sister in law I know where my blood pressure is at the moment - even with the spike at the office - definitely wouldn't call for that if I was in Canada or if I was going to be staying here for the next two months. They've said that themselves. And it's not as though on my travels I'll be heading to darkest Africa - I'll be going to a series of cities bigger and with better medical resources than this one. So we will have to have a frank discussion about that, I think, when I go back there Friday.

The other reason I'm feeling grim about all this is that I can't get life insurance now. I've checked, and having this blood pressure while pregnant disqualifies me. Fuck, I should have got it before I got knocked up, but the F-word was just shooting too straight. Obviously that's grim. I'm not horribly worried but I know that my risk of pre-eclampsia is way higher than other women's, and that makes it quite a bit more likely I'll die and leave a baby for the F-word to fend for on his own. It's still a pretty unlikely prospect. Just more likely. I should have thought about it before. Oh well, it's done now. 

A symptom of how grim I'm feeling: yesterday morning was a bit of a freak-out. I had, basically, two hours of deja vu. It was quite pleasant, but being familiar with the mechanisms of seizures and brain problems through Lexie's mum it was also a bit unsettling. There've been no other signs of problems - no blank-outs, no dizziness, no smell or sounds hallucinations - just a very odd morning. But then, three times over the course of the morning, I experienced the most overwhelming feelings of joy, well-being, contentment with my life, and profound awareness of my love for the people in it - joy of that sublime degree where you feel it's not so bad if you die now, because everything's been really great and it's a really great universe you can trust.

And my reactions to these moments of unmitigated joy? "I'm having a stroke." For fuck's sake. So few moments of perfect happiness in life, I get three in one morning, and I have to react to them by thinking I'm having a fucking stroke.  I told the F-word about it when he got home, and he pointed out that I finally may be benefiting from the happy hormones now that I'm reaching the end of the first trimester, instead of getting my ass kicked all the time by the pukey tired ones. That honestly hadn't occurred to me. Somehow the idea that I was having a stroke made so much more sense. 

All rather shocking

Week 11. Oh my god. That means I'm nearly a third of the way through this gestation, and given my blood pressure and the likelihood I'll pop some weeks early, more than a third the way through. What. The. Fuck.

Children have already made me aware that time operates differently. When I was herding Niece and Nephew around Europe, it got clear really fast the only way it was going to be nice was if I accepted Child-Time, and the fact that less gets done in more time when people are that age. At the same time the weeks with them whizzed by like a cheetah on meth.

And here we are - puking notwithstanding (I forgot to have a midnight snack last night so I was revisiting my misspent youth in the toilet again this morning), feeling like cancer notwithstanding (which I don't anymore), time has once more whizzed by and I'm for-realsies showing now. And soon - soon! - despite the worries, the preoccupations, the blood pressure - the odds are soon Ren won't just be a lovely little twitching white shadow on the ultrasound anymore, but will be a person who I'm holding in my arms. And soon after that, a person who's too big to hold in my arms. And soon after that, I'll be an old person who dies and leaves Ren without his or her mother. That's the optimistic projection, anyways. What a fucking world it is. I'm not complaining. It's just all rather shocking when you think about it.

On an only slightly lighter note. I have a lot more perspective in the BP issue now, BTW, since I got back in touch with Lexie's old mum, who is herself battling through the first trimester now. One of the reasons she had to give up Lexie was because she had a bit of a brain problem. Now she's got it all in control with medication. The problem, of course, is that the medication is contraindicated for pregnancy. Not just a little contraindicated, like the blood pressure medication I might have to go on if mine doesn't keep dropping, but quite contraindicated - like, won't-let-you-absorb-folate-and-it-is-quite-likely-there-will-be-problems contraindicated. However, if she starts having grand mal siezures again - well, that's not so hot either. Babies are well padded in there, I know, but having a grand mal siezure whilst driving or walking across something hard your head would make a jolly smash on - that's really not the way one would want to get through a pregnancy, to say the least.

I'm not facing any dilemnas or choices like that - my BP is too low right at the moment for me to need drugs, and since I'm almost out of the first trimester Ren's almost out of range for when BP medication has been suggested to occasionally cause problems. As generally futile as it is to make comparisons between people's problems, I understand - and draw some selfish comfort from - the fact that whatever choices I have to make about this matter are just not in the same league as the choices Lexie's old mum is going to have to make, or the choices women with chronic hypertension they've been on drugs for a long time for have to make, or the choices diabetic women have to make, or . . . well, most things, really. Perspective, Jessica, you fool. 

The perils of responsibility

I miss grass. A lot. It took awhile for it to really kick in - I haven't got high since I was in Belgium - but here it is. I think it's the blood pressure thing. I've always tested normal or low for blood pressure, and thinking back the main difference between all those tests and now - aside from the obvious little Ren in my belly - is that I don't smoke anymore. When all the breastfeeding is through - and since I'm hoping for long nursing followed by Ren's little brother or sister and more nursing that could be fucking aeons - I think I'll start smoking again. Or during business trips when I can pump and dump to make sure I'm not contaminating my offspring before they're ready to start contaminating themselves.

Of course, if my blood pressure goes back to normal after I pop, I won't have an excuse. Nor will I need one. I'm a big girl and I'll do what I like. Except I won't, of course. The deal I'll make with the devil inside, or the angel, or whatever the fuck my sociopathic excuse for a conscience amounts to, is that if I manage to keep not drinking coffee, I'll reintroduce the grass. One recreational carcinogen at a time's enough. And at the moment I miss grass far more than I miss coffee. At that, my dears, is a sentiment I never expected. I've always loved weed but I've loved coffee more. No interest at the moment, though.

Another part of it is the Great European Trip will be through the Netherlands for about a week, and I'll be stopping in towards its tail end with some people I used to do a lot of getting high with. And then Berlin. Most of this trip will be spent with friends and family but in aid of my blood pressure and just out of self-regard, I've decided to treat myself to three days on my own in a forest outside of Berlin. Not a spirit quest or anything. It'll be in a really nice B&B with awesome restaurants nearby. But I've always really, really loved being high in Berlin. I've loved being anything in Berlin, really. And gosh, going there for a few days in July is not gonna help with my nostalgia for it in the long term.

But that's fine. I just want to chill for a few days by myself in a forest in Berlin. This could be my last chance to do that for 22 years. And yes, a little weed would be nice with that. Oh well. The things I don't do for love.