Where there are tongues, they will be fucking stilled, someday right?

Well, what the fuck is the point of talking all the time anyways? Isn't love expressed through actions, decisions, touches, mutual orgasms, presence, help and succour? What is love if it needs words piled on it to make it clear? Wouldn't that make it the province of lawyers and politicians beyond anyone else's? In that shtick in Corinthians that the blackest of atheists can generally choke out if they're asked to do a reading at a wedding, where's the bit that says you have to blah-blah-blah about your feelings all the fucking time like a fucking Jodi Picault novel about dying teenagers?

The F-word and I, this time around anyways, went about three years without trotting out the L-word, and we'd shovel shit in a shopping centre for a job if it meant being able to hang out together. I mean half the whole point of that is not having to talk about it all the time. So you can talk about other things, or have sex, or make babies, or whatever. Right? I don't know. I have a father who loves us and loves his wife and doesn't talk about his feelings more than a couple of times a year. I guess that learned me that men don't have to talk about their feelings on and on and on and on to have feelings. Nor do I.

For heaven's sake, though, isn't it obvious? I mean, if you love someone and respect them and trust them, surely you understand that they love you if they're still there with you and and doing nice things with, to and for you, and looking happy about it, right? I mean, hand-holding, for fuck's sake. Who holds your hand in public in an Anglophone country unless they love you a lot? People (usually women) complain about other people (usually men) being shitty emotional communicators, but who's the shitty emotional communicator if you can't pick up on something that fucking obvious?

So there.

Running on empty

First run in almost a year early this morning. My joints aren't pregnancy-loose anymore and mum is still here for a few more days to offer Godzilla support if he doesn't fall back to sleep after his early morning feed and the F-word wants to be a fucking diva. So it was time to start again. And it was lovely, even if I am back to being the winded maggot I was a couple of years back when I first started running, except fatter. And even though I'm being carefully unambitious so I don't hurt myself, or burn off the fat Godzilla needs to feed on exclusively for the next four months.

And even though, frankly, it's sort of painful to not spend that time cuddling with or staring at Godzilla instead of running. But health-wise there's not a choice. My environmental allergies are back in asmathic-Jewish-boy-before-coming-of-age-in-American-summer-camp-movie force and the only thing that keeps them at bay is lots of cardio, and when they're kept at bay I have a lot more energy and good mood to spend on Godzilla than I would otherwise.

Anyways, in a few more months, I'll pick up a running stroller from Luke Duke's awesome wife in Canada and start taking him with me.

And then there's needing to get in trim before I make any attempts to produce another fearsome behemoth. I really believe that getting into terrific nick is what allowed Godzilla's birth to be so comparatively untraumatic for all concerned, given my age and the gestational blood pressure problems. And I'm not getting any younger, and the countdown is on . . . I think I've decided to attempt to produce more progeny AFTER we've moved. And settled in a bit. Which means two years. Two years to get back into perfect nick, whilst juggling work, Godzilla, the next intercontinental move, getting rid of the house, the final Mandarin course in my certificate, and then German language study. I think that's possible. 

In shittier news, Elvis and his lady are splitting. At least, now, I hope they are, which I wouldn't have hoped before, given she's a pretty admirable sort of person. They've been in trouble for awhile but now it looks as though she's caught up with someone else. While they're still living together. Well, I don't judge people who can't keep it in their pants before the corpse is quite buried. I screwed my way out of my relationship with Bluebird and it worked really well. But I'm pretty disgusted all the same. It's my brother.

Sometimes I think one of the reasons I moved away is so I could go on loving my brothers as gods, and not have to see their embarassments or mistakes until they'd had time to compose themselves, and turn everything into a funny macho misadventure. I could still make fun of them for being foolish or drunks or any other manner of things, but still keep adoring them as larger than life awesome types without the frailties and vulnerabilities of normal people. But now that we're all approaching middle age I guess the facades can't stay up like that anymore. Ten years ago they were still so much older than me - not anymore. Not when we've all got such a big collection of years. 

More motherty

Mum's here, tolerating the record-breaking heat and playing with Godzilla. Godzilla has learnt how to smile, laugh, and talk and sing after his fashion, and it does my dry, cracked, bitter anarcho-syndicalist heart so much good to see her with him - and, good Lord, just to see him myself. I'd love him no matter what he was, but for him to be so lovely; the F-word is pretty great but how did we make such an awesome child together?

You may quote all that back to me in a few months or years when his sass starts doing my head in.

To illustrate parenty and the changes it's wreaked on me: we've agreed on the next destination. For now. Things can change, both in our heads and in the world. We're reckoning Cologne; it's closer to all our friends in Europe, closer to North America, and NRW will probably have better long term prospects as far as Godzilla and any possible future siblings of Godzilla are concerned than Berlin, which had been where I was determined to go. I understand if I wasn't a mother I'd certainly prefer somewhere like Berlin, or Barcelona, or Rome, or some other absolutely fucking awesome city. I also understand I don't fucking care in the least.

Suddenly what is probably best for Godzilla has 100% outweighed the fact that Berlin is cooler than Cologne and maybe I could do more cross-country skiing around there. Suddenly that seems retarded, in terms of priorities. Especially considering Cologne is a city I really, really like. And considering that basically deepest podunk Bavarian yodelling xenophobic Islamturkjudenrausrausrausappenzell is still about fifty times more effectively cosmopolitan than this white trash bogan shithole.

Convert

You know what else rocks about this iPhone? I can work while Godzilla naps like this:

Conversation the other night

F-word: How's your new iPhone?

Me: I don't know, I just turned it on.

F-word: What would it cost off contract?

Me: In Australia? $600.

F-word: Would it be worth it?

Me: Don't be silly. No smartphone is worth $600.

Five minutes pass.

Me: I would pay $600 for this phone.

Holy shit. No wonder Blackberry's in the toilet.

Nose to the lovely, lovely grindstone

So I'm back at work after just six weeks off, one of them when I was still just a big belly instead of a mum. It's not too bad, so far. We're going to have to see how we manage. I love my job, which helps, and it's easy, which helps, and it's from home, which is indispensable, as Godzilla is boob-only until May or so.

I love my job a little more than usual today because I treated myself to a subscription to the Economist a couple of weeks ago, so as to have a magazine to read while breastfeeding - I'm managing books and in fact my attention is quite manipulated by the shockingly good Wolf Hall, a Christmas present, at the moment, but magazines are easier for those hands-are-busy, grizzly times. Since I'm a student it was much cheaper than usual - is that normal for these sorts of subscriptions, that they still cut deals for students? - and when I told my boss about it he told me to invoice the company for it. Alright then, please and thank you.

And then being a contractor I get to write it off, and write off all the money theory books by heterodox economists and anarchists that I'm so fond of. I think I'm extremely lucky to have such boring tastes. But then my self-regarding cockroach brain tells me that if I liked porn better than economics I'd find a way to be able to get that for free or write it off.

Slightly more stressful, though I'm looking forward to it very much, is my mother getting here for a month or so on Sunday. I have to do some things to get ready for that, and I have to do them, or nag the F-word to do them, which is almost as much trouble, as our housecleaner is still on holiday. Mum thinks she's coming to help, of course, which would include cleaning and all the stuff that needs doing that I'm going to do, but she'll be forbidden; after the medical emergency immediately following Godzilla's conception back in February I'm going to try to restrict her role to conversational/ornamental/cuddling the baby. She's flying through Auckland to get here so in my estimation an 18 hour plane ride is quite enough exertion, please and thank you.

Motherty

Holy shit. I got eight hours of sleep last night. I'd forgotten how terrific that feels. Not in a row, mind, but this past week or so Godzilla seems to be experimenting with the idea that night time is for sleeping, and only occasionally waking up to suckle. I'm not counting on it lasting of course, but motherfuck, do I feel awesome today. For the moment, feeling human today aside, all this parenthood jazz is more or less agreeing with me, though less sleep is, I've noticed, fraying my temper. He's just so lovely. I can imagine this being very, very different if he was colicky - if his nature was different - but it isn't, so there you are.

What I'm finding observationally interesting about myself is that I've forgotten labour to the point where I can now think, to the point of planning, about doing this again. My memories of labour, up until the point where I was tearing myself open pushing Godzilla out and then staring at him, are more or less memories of memories, particularly when it comes to the pain. That's amazing to me - what a terrific capacity we have for forgetting pain - because directly afterwards, even though everything was awesome as soon as he was out (probably the main advantage to a natural birth, though one I hadn't fully appreciated before the fact), I was pretty sure I'd never fucking well do that again, given the choice.

I mean, that first night, although experiencing beautiful emotions I'd never felt before, I started thinking through the modalities of adoption, probably from China, where I think I'd be a decent candidate due to the language and trips and work associations and whatnot. Now, I'm thinking I can do this again. Maybe in two years, when I can get my body back up to scratch. I'm still loose-jointed, easily tired and fat, though my BP came back to normal pretty fast and I'm off medication.

My fatness is interesting too. It's not a LARGE fatness. It was, at first, but after almost six weeks of Godzilla sucking me dry I've shrank quite a lot - not much bigger than usual - but so soft with it. Wobbly, sort of. And my stomach is like an underinflated waterbed. Luckily no stretch marks. I guess I can thank the Mediterranean skin for that. Or maybe all the coconut butter. Dietary fat, possibly. Who knows. What a lot of trial and error all this crap is.

Amorcito

This is Godzilla's favourite lullaby, which is nice, but gives me some pause, because I suspect it's slightly less about pinko themes than poor Victor Jara's usual songs are and is actually about smoking a cigarette after getting laid. What sort of heartbreaker have I let loose on the world?


At least it's beautiful. And at least when I forget the Spanish lyrics it has that nice simplicity of a lullaby that lets you invent your own lyrics without really thinking about it, a la "I was rocking my darling son, wishing he'd go the fuck to sleep, the phone rang off the hook, while the oven went beep beep, ay ay ay, etc".

Victor Jara and Caetano Veloso are both rich sources of lullabies. Not that Godzilla needs them at the moment. He's a pretty placid kid so far. But he seems to like listening to them, and I like listening to them, or singing them, depending on the circumstances. He likes this one too, but what cunt doesn't?




 I should just look up Spanish songs with "ai ai ai" lyrics.

Excuse me while I disinfect this guy

I'd understood there is a lot of contention among parents and anti-vaccination advocates about the standard vaccination schedual for infants in most countries. It was contention I was more or less prepared to ignore.

I mean, I understand there is a risk of damage with vaccinations, which is why a few families have collected major civil awards in the US when their kids got fucked up by them, and I can give credence to the idea that most children are over-vaccinated on most normal scheduals because there's an unhealthy financial relationship between most public health services and pharmaceutical companies. Sounds like a likely story. I also understand vaccinations don't equal immunization, given that I've been vaccinated on schedual and have been tested and am immune to NOTHING - my immune system showing a disdain I can't help but admire. "You're bothering me with dead pathogens? Sister, please. Talk to me when you've got real problems."

But given Godzilla will be doing a lot of travelling starting soon - given he won't be spending all his time in this isolated little podunk town while his immune system matures - and given that I think vaccinations are a social responsibility in a crowded and transitable world - I don't have many second thoughts about him getting his jabs on schedual, the poor mite. Of course I'm worried something will go wrong a la lawsuits, and of course I've heard the horror stories about children crying for days after the jabs, and I don't buy that old chestnut that infants don't feel pain, but I'm not as worried about these things as I would be about him sitting on an airplane for 14 hours at eight months of age while hundreds of possibly filthy individuals get thier breath recycled all over him and his unvaccinated immune system. 

And not, it turns out, as worried as I would be if he hadn't had any vaccinations and was just hanging around this podunk town where it turns out our entire circle of friends has declined to have their children vaccinated against anything. This came out at a Christmas party this weekend to which I'd taken Godzilla and I was so glad I'd been too busy breastfeeding him through a growth spurt to let other people have even a modicum of success in their constant efforts to manhandle him and his cuteness. No wonder everybody gets whooping cough here every winter. Fucking hippies. They have it done homeopathically, apparently. That's where they lose me altogether. I can buy into an unhealthy financial relationship between government and pharma with more alacrity than the most paranoid hippie but the point where homeopathy becomes a viable alternative is where I step off the crazy train.

Fatherty

New lessons from motherhood: breastmilk is delicious. At least mine is. Tastes downright sugary, like a super-delicious creamy melon thing. No wonder the Godzilla goes nuts for it.

Thinking a lot about fatherhood recently, probably because of being a mother and having a nice father for the Godzilla. And realizing the degree to which I as a mother in a welfare state am supported, and the degree to which the F-word as a father isn't. The "parental leave" is meant to be transferrable - meaning both parents can assume the "primary" role in theory. In practice, the fucking noobs he spoke to at Centrelink didn't think it was possible and were shocked when he could point them to the literature, plain as day on their website, explaining it was. Also in practice, the paid leave needs to be taken in a block - I believe that's exceptional - in most of Europe it can be taken in the first three years of the kid's life - which is another obstacle to sharing it out as BOTH parents need it.

And as I deal with public health nurses and parenting groups - ah. Cabin fever and a degree of loneliness as my besties in Canada and Europe breed and remind me of our isolation here, I've had to stop going. It is fucking disgusting - I can't stand these great big hormonal clusterfucks of gender exclusivity, male or female. I mean there are no men at the parenting groups here. Just great flocks of women. I suppose partly because they're all during the day and the men can't get leave and so many women here don't work, but if I was a man and wandered into one of those things, I would be so miserably uncomfortable.

The first parenting group I went to, they gave me three publications: a magazine featuring a kazillion local retailers where I could buy baby crap, a soft'n'cuddly book about the first three years of life, and 'something for your husband' - a fucking,  a fucking manual about babies, done in the style of a car manual, ergo est breastmilk = "fuel", diapers being "under the hood", and lines like

"To make enough breast milk, mum needs rest, sleep and food. Your help is vital. Cooking, cleaning, answering the phone, entertaining guests, shopping, doing the laundry and dishes, along with all the things you did before, are a few small things that will keep the breast milk flowing."

Now I understand that a lot of you love truncheon monkies out there are pretty unreconstructed, but how the fuck is this sort of talking down to men like they're fundamentally useless plonkers supposed to be good for anybody? And I write this from Australia, where men do run toward the "fundamentally useless plonker" end of the range with astonishing regularity in families where they aren't relegated to the role of hands-off primary breadwinner.

Anyways, I don't have enough sleep to launch into a real rant about masculinity in Australia but I just wanted to point out that attentive fathers have suddenly become devastatingly sexy to me, possibly because the love of my life has just become one and my hormones haven't betrayed us. Consider this Baby Bjorn demonstration video, that I watched after buying one the other day to make sure I knew how to use it.


The "product developer" in it is an absolutely bog-standard looking Swedish male (alright, bog standard in Sweden is a few steps up from bog standard in many other places, but nonetheless, he's not that hot Swedish guy from that show about vampires that's got the little girl from The Piano in it.)  But because he's handling infants tenderly without breaking them, I just think he's marvellous.

Also I've taken to watching documentaries to pass the time while Godzilla is feeding, and I saw this one, which was interesting in bits.

The politics of the bosom

Godzilla was up all night again, attacking my bosom. Another growth spurt is due, so that's fine, and I got in enough sleep early in the morning to feel reasonably human now. I keep reminding us that this period is probably the worst period it's going to be sleep-wise, until or unless we have a second child, who could possibly be colicky (Godzilla is coming up to a month with no danger signs so I think in his case I'm starting to count my chickens, and say he is not a colicky child), and whose needs as an infant will overlap with Godzilla's needs as a toddler. Another reason to move to Europe for the next one - it'll be easier to persuade some family to come out to help out.

I'm tickled pink breastfeeding is going so well and that the behemoth is thriving on the bosom, but I've decided to forever give up on being judgey about women who don't do it. The health benefits of breastfeeding are demonstrated and unignorable, and formula is pretty gross. But breastfeeding is hard. It's tiring in terms of the waking for feeding, it's tiring in terms of the milk production, it hurts until you get it right, and it's all down to the mum. If she's not well supported by her spouse, like I am - if she doesn't have good guidance in the beginning, like I did - if she doesn't have a flexible enough schedual in terms of how she makes her money, like I've got - how the fuck is she supposed to do this?

All my Chinese colleagues breastfed, despite working crazy long hours and having retardedly horrible commutes. For a full year, at that - that seems to be the magic number there. That involved a LOT of pumping. I admire their dedication but the fact that a year is so much the norm there was something helpful for them, no doubt - nobody would be giving them funny looks for stepping out for half an hour at a time to drain their ladies, or storing the milk in the communal fridge, etc.

Bottom line, this is not easy, not at all easy. It needs a lot more support than I'd understood. All women should have the opportunity to do it for at least the six months it's been conclusively demonstrated that there are huge benefits to mother and child in terms of full-time, exclusive breastfeeding, but what that means in effect is that all jurisdictions need to be providing at least six months of maternity leave at full pay and with job security, which is the case in so few countries I think I could count them on my fingers.

And the marginalization of fatherhood, both in terms of leave opportunities and in terms of the infantilization of men . . . well, that's probably a blog post for another day, as Godzilla is stirring and my bosom is preparing for the next onslaught. But Australia being the fucking cemetery of masculinity as a useful concept that it is, I've been coming across some doozies that I'm bursting to rant about.

Night of the living shithead

He's back. I knew he'd be back, by the nature of his departure. Sex and financial scandals permanently disgracing an Italian? Please. 60% of the population of that damn peninsula finds those sorts of scandals fucking aspirational. I knew he'd draw out the court cases, I knew he'd position himself as anti-German and anti-austerity. And I'm quite sure it will work. Let's see.

Call me a cockroach but I'm fiddling a bit here while Europe burns. Our schedual has moved up and I'm hoping for a euro circling the bottom of the crapper just before we move back in a couple of years, before the world realizes Australia is an unstable open pit mine and the ass falls out of the dollar. Just hoping that a decent education system will cling on in the part we're moving to, and that the part we're moving to doesn't attract too many desperate economic migrants. Lots of unknowns in this world. One of them isn't that the only way to get Berlusconi out of politics is to get him out of Italy.

Oh well. Back to staring at Godzilla. Motherhood is such a crazy emotional and intellectual experience. Today one of the many things it's taught me is that if you want to encapsulate your own placenta, it's probably one of those things that even a frugal householder should consider outsourcing for a few hundred bucks. That was easily the most disgusting experience of my life. I had a feeling it would be, so I'd been putting it off, and had to do it today when the F-word accidentally left the chest freezer unplugged overnight - couldn't let that thing go off - not when my Chinese medicine doctor told me what it'd be worth on the open market. So now it's dehydrating, preparing to be encapsulated, after having been steamed with some ginger and pepper and pureed.

And I'm not a squeamish person, but holy fuck. I've realized I'll never be able to murder anybody, no matter to what depths of moral depravity I may one day sink, because that was just so eeeeeurgh even though (or perhaps because?) it belonged to me and I don't need it anymore. Actually I think the really gross thing was reckoning it belonged to Godzilla as well as me. But it's not as though I could wait until he reached the age of reason to ask what he wanted to do with it. The worst was looking at the wee umbilical cord and realizing it was probably his first plaything in the womb - babies do play with them, apparently. But again it's not as though I could save it for a rainy day, and there aren't any cord blood banks here, which I suspect are a massive fucking scam anyways.

Anyways, that's my advice to prospective placentophages out there. Outsource, outsource, outsource.

What's in a name?

So far, several months of negotiations and second thoughts. And, as a friend of ours pointed out this weekend in one of those sudden, shocking moments where you get to observe someone else's sadness, self-knowledge and tolerated chronic misery, the F-word and I "are one of those couples who like each other." Imagine how it goes for the ones who don't.

Anyways, I think we're more or less there now. The first name we agreed on months ago, when we found out his sex, without much problem. The middle name was harder because I wanted a hyphenated last name. Well, I didn't really, I wanted Godzilla to have MY last name, and so did the F-word, and a hyphenated last name seemed like the only option. The F-word and I both have epic last names, so having a middle name would have left Godzilla with an epic all-round name.

But I've been questioning why I'd by so keen on him having my name; as a feminist gesture, it just shows the ongoing ownership of my father instead of the new ownership of my old man, and if I wanted a real feminist gesture I'd at least go for my mother's maiden name, which I don't want to, because it's one of those uber-twee Yorkshire last names that wouldn't be twee only in the context of some sort of Wuthering Heights arm-up-your-cow's-vagina-delivering-her-young-on-a-windswept-moor scenario. The Industrial Revolution and land clearances ruined a lot of names up there.

So anyways, now I've got my way on the middle name and I'm thinking of giving up, unsolicited, on the hyphenated last name and just giving Godzilla his dad's name, and perhaps adopting his dad's name myself when we get married in preparation for moving back to a civil law country, though perhaps not if I keep working in the media.  This was really initiated by filling out the form for his birth certificate and realizing that with his first, middle and two last names, there will be very few forms with sufficient space available to get it all down.

And a lot of my resistance to using his dad's last name only was that there are a lot of undesirables in his dad's family, criminally speaking. Every Calabrian has family they're not proud of - or at least shouldn't be proud of - but there is a bumper crop on the F-word's tree. But since I seem to be getting my own way in terms of moving away from Australia sooner rather than later, where that element has thrived, I'm feeling able to back down.

Godzilla's emergence

Well, predictably enough, I'm Wiped to the Fuck Out. Happy with it, because Godzilla, if I do say so myself, is the awesomest baby to ever awesome shit up. And the F-word has taken my breath away with how good he is at being a dad. I was expecting something like it, obviously, or I wouldn't have procreated with him, but to see it in practice is fucking beautiful.

I'm not doing much in the way of sleeping anymore - Godzilla's growth started spurting on Sunday night and he's been on my boobs pretty much non-stop - has already gone from weighing just under 10 pounds at birth to just over now after losing some ground his first couple of days, when he spent the first night in the special care nursery and then ran into our breastfeeding learning curve. That means not really sleeping. Which at the moment is okay. It's fascinating what the human body can bear, especially when the payoff is a fucking supercute baby who isn't too hard to soothe and gives great cuddles.

The birth - objectively speaking I'm told it couldn't have gone much better. The F-word described it as a snuff film (though he was splendid as a helpmeet for the duration; I didn't want to kill him once). It was pretty awful while it lasted. I found it to be a true truism that as soon as the contractions are finished you can't remember what they felt like, in any except the vaguest possible terms: fucking horrible. I went into labour spontaneously the morning I was to be induced, thank god, because I've heard induced labours are worse, and I was already having a lot of James Brownsian "I can't go on!" moments.

No drugs, except a little nitrous oxide in the beginning, which I gave up on when it wasn't fun like being at the dentist; in fact it made me sick. And I didn't not take drugs to be tough or natural or because I thought it would be better for me and Godzilla; I didn't take drugs because I really didn't think they would help. The pain wasn't the problem. In fact when it really started hurting - which was the physical act of pushing Godzilla out - that's when things were easiest. The pain sort of reminded me of what I was doing, whereas up until that point I had pretty much lost the plot, and then Godzilla was out, and everything was worth it.

One thing pregnancy, childbirth, and the hospital time afterwards has convinced me of is that women should get a bit more control over how they do all this. Or at least not get judged for their choices. If they want drugs they should have them. If they don't they don't. And it was probably a mistake to put so much pressure on me to get an induction on my due date. It's true Godzilla's stay in the special care nursery for observation was probably down to him spending those extra days in the womb - he breathed in some meconium - but he was fine without intervention and the labour could have been much, much worse for us if I was induced, particularly as early as the preceding Monday. And I had what I consider a very responsibly led pregnancy, with a great midwife.

Anyways, time to get cuddling again. He's just so awesome.

Proud to announce . . .

Last Sunday night, our beautiful son - let's call him Godzilla - came into the world. He is terrific and last night he even let me sleep a couple of hours in a row. More to follow when I'm less busy staring at this miracle of awesomeness.

Travailcation

I guess I'm on holiday until the baby comes out, now that the China essay's done. It's a bit odd because I can't have the sort of holiday I think of as a holiday, which usually has kayaking and running around and other forms of movement involved. In this heat and at this stage of pregnancy a 5 km waddle is the absolute end my tether and lots and lots of sleeping is going down extremely well. Also it's a really open question when the holiday will come to a crashing, screaming, ass-ripping-open end, which has never been a marked feature of my previous holidays.

It makes me think they should market luxury cruises geared to women in the 38th week of their pregnancy and up. Confinement cruises, staffed with really good midwives and obstetricians. Pre and post natal classes, lactation consultants, fruity virgin cocktails. Last through the first six to eight weeks after the kid's born, feed the mums lots of calcium rich foods, let them lie around or go for little waddles around the decks. Spend most of the boats' time in the national waters of countries with the good kind of passports to get the kiddos the useful citizenships. I think it could be a real winner - I'd certainly be all over that idea at the moment. I guess in this liability-rotten world there's little chance of it ever happening. Maybe out of Asia? Birth is already so medicalized and confinement so institutionalized in the developed countries there it's hard to see what the legal issues could be if you just transferred that super-medicalization onto a nice boat.

Well, off to do some eating and sleeping. Have to carpe diem. The midwife is sweeping my membranes this aft so through the night and this time tomorrow I could be in the insomniac, nauseated grip of the most excruciating pain I've ever known. Happy holidays!

Five days' grace

Praise be . . . all test results have been very positive, so no more pressure from the medical team to induce until next week. Ren has at least five days to come out on his or her own, which I hope will be the case, and if it isn't, I'm pretty sure I'll be ready to be induced by Monday.

Here they jump straight onto prostoglandin gel and membrane rupturing; both intrusive and only going in one direction, basically, and certainly not without risk for the baby; not to mention it means a ward admission that can stretch into three or four days. With my sister-in-law's practice in Toronto they'll go for an at-home mechanical stretch and sweep as a first port of call - less dramatic but also less complication-prone. Apparently in a lot of England they'll give you a week of the TENS machine and Jeebus knows what else. And a dear friend who had a baby in Belgium soon after we left started off with oral medication. So there's no international consensus on the best way to do this.  It's not like "infection? Antibiotic!", "diabetic? Insulin!" sort of thing. There's not even any consensus on when or if to induce during a normal pregnancy; from one place to another it'll be one week or two weeks or not at all if the baby looks to be doing fine in there, or it will be at the mother's request if timing is important, and, indubitably, it's often done in reference to the medical staff's convenience.
And this is just one aspect of pregnancy and delivery. Expand it, and things go even more doolally. Since sister-in-law sent me the diagnostic sheets for essential hypertension during pregnancy, I've found out that I had been pushed to take more medication than would have been countenanced in Canada. In China, a friend in my situation was given no medication at all, but then hospitalized at week 36 and her baby delivered by C-section almost immediately. And the drug of choice, when it's used, varies from place to place as well; here and in Canada they'll use labetalol, elsewhere they'll use methyldopa, elsewhere other things . . .

Or, in general, ward admissions. Here, if it's a normal delivery, you go home four hours afterward. Other places, a day; other places, three days. Not to mention all the places where they let you have your baby without going into hospital at all. Huge differences. 

Things don't need to be the same everywhere. Pregnancy isn't an illness and it wouldn't make sense that dealing with it would be as straightforward as dealing with an illness. And every woman I've spoken to has experienced her pregnancy, symptomatically, in a unique way - unique from other women, and unique in terms of each of her own pregnancies.  But I don't think the range of approaches owes its diversity so much to the range of pregnant-person-experiences as it does to the vagaries of local practice. Which means it's important - really important - for pregnant women to know as much as they can about what's going on and what her options are. I'd never really appreciated that before.

That's a fairly frightening thought because most pregnant women don't have it as easy as I do and don't necessarily have the time to know as much as they can. It's like superannuation retirement savings plans. How the fuck is a person with a full time job in, say, childcare or construction going to have the time and the financial background to fully inform themselves of the best way to invest their own money while saving up for retirement? That's why all that pension money wound up in managed funds that all suddenly went down the toilet in 2008.

Anyways, I need to stop using my maternity leave to rant on the internet and start finishing that last essay for my Chinese politics class. I suspect that's the real reason I was resisting induction, you know . . . have to knock that bastard off first.

Well that's odd

Some odd things happened yesterday. The thing in itself wasn't odd - it was just the sort of standard conversation I as a massively pregnant woman (BTW today is my due date according to the twelve week ultrasound) have quite often with strangers about when the baby's due, advice about delivery - lots of walking, try to keep off your back (which sounds more like contraception advice to me) etc. The odd thing was that I realized after the conversation that it was the first time I had had a conversation with a recognizably aboriginal person, even though I've now been living in Australia for more than two years.  The other odd thing, which took awhile to register, is that at the end of the conversation, she thanked me, even though she was the one offering advice and good wishes.

Australia is really making my skin crawl. I'm no Étienne Brûlé but I've got first nations friends, family, and I'm pretty sure I've never gone anywhere close to two years in Canada without chatting with a first nations person in various contexts, and they've certainly never fucking thanked me for it. This is . . . weird. I've become casually acquainted, living here, with more Maori people for heaven's sake, and it's not like this podunk shithole is some sort of high-powered Kiwi job magnet. And there are a lot of aboriginal people about, though few that are actually from around here - there were hundreds who were relocated from Sydney during the Olympics twelve years back. (Yep. They still do that.)

Well. I don't know what the take-home from feeling weird like this is. Except that Australia's not the place for me. It's stolen country being squandered by its parasitic thieves, who somehow don't get treated as parasites by the people they stole it from. Probably because they killed too many of them. I've heard from a few different people now the same anecdote about conversations with drunk white South Africans (of which Australia is pretty full): at some point, when the conversation turns to apartheid and what shitty people white South Africans are, out will come the blurt: "you can't judge us, you just killed all your blacks." On reflection one of my South African business contacts in Belgium said something similar about Australia when I told him I was moving here, though not while drunk and not so harshly.

The refreshments of childlessness

I'm on a TENS machine today, courtesy of my Chinese doctor, trying to get this labour ball rolling. A once-hourly auto-electrocution of the back and buttock, starting early as possible and running as late as possible. Not something I ever quite pictured myself doing, I must say, but a lot of pregnancy has involved things I never pictured myself doing. I can add auto-ass-electrocution to the list of things nobody ever warned me about pregnancy, alongside heartburn, over-medicalization, sasquatch poos, and stroopwafel and cheese sandwiches suddenly being really good. 

I should have started with the machine last night but instead we went out for dinner with our only childless friends here, which was lovely. As the F-word and I were driving home we realized that we'd spent most of the night talking about politics and making the filthiest jokes possible as opposed to what we spend our time with our childed-up couple friends talking about - their houses, their children, their health, their income and, once the evening reaches a certain point, their relationship issues. It was an unsettling realization.

The fact is, and last night I had to stare this fact in the face, I get fucking bored talking about houses, children, health, income and relationships. It's just not all that interesting. Not compared to, I don't know, telling someone to sit on their hand for 15 minutes so that when they jack off they can pretend it's someone else, or Julia Gillard's misogyny speech (which was part of a masterful tradition of trashing the shit out of opposition members; she didn't get into the Paul Keating brand of colourful insults like "all tip and no iceberg", "peice of desiccated coconut" or "low altitude flyer", but she didn't need to - that poor dumb fuck Abbott having spent years of public life setting himself up. Almost no notes, and 15 minutes of pure, merciless, factually accurate trash talk. You hardly ever see anything that awesome in an an Anglo parliament or congress, but you can see it relatively routinely in Australia. These people are only good at talking when they're pissed off).

Maybe all that will change when we have children, say, tomorrow or something (WTF?). I guess the centre of gravity of the world shifts quite a lot. But somehow the realization of how things are hemming in for most of our friends here is chilling. I hope it's not inevitable. Again I have to thank goodness for my job, which in any case will force me to keep focusing on big political and macro-economic pictures beyond home renovations and how my spouse is somehow deficient of competency or understanding or things like that. Not that there's anything wrong with the personal but I don't think it can be the only thing on your mind. It puts too much pressure on your immediate environment being your only source of happiness or stimulation. I love the F-word too much to make my relationship with him the absolutely centre-point of my waking consciousness, no matter how emotionally dependent on or attached to him I am in reality. Nobody deserves that much pressure. And my kid won't either. Easier said than lived, I expect.

Fucking eye-ties

Just turned my out of office maternity notice on. Eep. Except my main preoccupation is that Ren still won't come out for two weeks and I'm squandering this expensive, expensive time where my mat leave benefits are something like a third of my big girl salary. Not that it'll happen . . . pretty sure there's no way I'll be going the standard two weeks over. I'm still getting some pressure to have an induction Tuesday, but I'm still feeling in the driver's seat about it . . . nevertheless Ren's head's engaged now and I've been having some contractions, so I'm getting a little less unamenable to the suggestion. I guess I'm hoping he or she just pops out on her own. We've made dinner plans I'm really looking forward to tonight, so hopefully that will do the trick.

Spent a vicious fuckload of time waiting to be seen by the obstetrician yesterday, which let me get most of they way through Christ Stopped at Eboli, one of those books I'd been meaning to read for ages. This morning's appointment let me knock it off. I've been reading tonnes, in part thanks to waiting around for medical people, and in part in panic, anticipating that soon I won't be reading at all . . . or that the reading I'll be doing will be kid's book to a kid for, oh, eight years or so? Anyways, I got to knock off Christ Stopped at Eboli and it was pretty great.

It didn't speak to me too directly in terms of my own cultural experience of the South. We're mountain Calabrian and I suspect have always pretty culturally distinct from how the Basilicatesi are described in the book, with the main difference being how much nicer they all seemed. Seems legit. I've met a lot of people from Basilicata, indeed one supremely unamusing weekend I spent fending off a really, really nice boy from there who'd spontaneously decided he was my new boyfriend - not in the stereotypically macho woppy way, but like something straight out of some sort of doctrinaire Catholic romance novel if such a thing exists, determined to save me from myself because I liked oral sex and smoking cigarettes - and they've all been really nice. Calabrians aren't. We're just not very nice people. Not particularly horrible, I mean not Venetians or anything, but not nice.

You can get the experience of this just by crossing the straits of Messina on a ferry in 20 minutes or so; you're no more or less likely to get your purse snatched in Messina or Reggio Calabria but people will be nicer to you in Messina. Everything cultural in Rome and south of it I've experienced in Italy has been really nice in a somewhat Spanish style, bar Calabria. I love going, of course, because I have family there, so they're nice to me, and so are the other people in the village, because I'm not a stranger. But it must be hard going for tourists.

Anyways, all that having been said, while I didn't feel at any point like I was reading a description of my cultural experience of the South, it's a terrific book that really resonated with me in political terms, in terms of my experience of the South. Carlo Levi's political incarnation was Communist, but the book is a war cry against the spiritual dominance of the nation in all its standard political forms over the region, and that rang true. Calabria is probably more violent and mafiaed up than anywhere else in the country, but I'm reasonably sure that's because of and not despite the role of the national government and the economic dominance of northern investors over the past 60 years or so.

But no time to get into that today. What I really wanted to express was how happy I am that I decided to read it in English instead of Italian. My Italian is good, maybe better than my French once it gets warmed up, but I fucking hate reading in Italian while it's safe to say that French is a damn good time to read. I hate Italian literary expression. I hate the literary verb forms and I hate the flowery fancy flouncy roundabout way Italians write when they're writing something erudite. French literary language is also artificial relative to spoken language but the literary tenses are transparent - usually resembling the present or infinitive - and French writers have been expressing themselves with perfect clarity for a good four centuries.

This real dislike of Italian literature may be a failing of aesthetic feeling on my part, but fuck, does it ever make me want to throw whatever I'm reading across the room.  I can still read the old poetry without getting pissed off; you just read it out loud, and the beauty of the sounds outweighs the opacity of expression. Indeed Petrarca and Dante have a real spareness to their expression that's beautiful. But anything from a fucking novelist - ergh and nope. I think the only exception I can think of offhand is Alberto Moravia, and all I've read of his in the Italian was The Conformist, so I don't know if that's generally true. The big tip-off was hating The Name of the Rose in Italian a few years ago and then loving it in English last year or something. Now I've just given up trying.