Sleep deprivation parenting—it’s a thing

Tired eye

This is not my eye, btw. Stock photo tired eye.

People who have children who sleep well should thank their lucky stars. My daughter is now three and a half years old, and in those three and a half years, my partner and I have not made it through a single straight week without a night of broken sleep, and that’s in very, very good weeks. The truth is, most nights we get, at the most, about four hours of unbroken sleep before we’re woken up by the sound of our daughter’s calls, cries, and sometimes screams.

There will be those reading this who will immediately roll their eyes and make assumptions that we are those soft, weak parents who “allow” our child to act this way by the way we react to the sleep problems. To those I say a) we’ve already tried just about every method of controlling this you can throw at us, b) you’re measuring this against a different child/children, and c) shut up.

When I was pregnant, my partner’s mother laughingly told me that he didn’t sleep well until he was four. I laughed too, thinking I had it all in hand since I had read the Gina Ford book (NB Damn you to hell, Gina Ford). Now I silently, stupidly count the days until her fourth birthday and wonder if we can be lucky enough for her to follow the same pattern. Yeah, lucky. But at the same time, it has become a part of our lives. We are tired. All the time. Because life. Because child.

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How do you explain…

RRH slideshow_0081…death to a three-year-old? A week or so ago, my mum was visiting from Australia and overheard me trying to explain to my daughter why the fly on the windowsill couldn’t fly away. I said it got old, had finished living and now it was dead.

My bubble frowned, then looked suspicious.”What dead?”

“It went to sleep forever,” I said. “It lived as long as it could, and then it got so tired that it went to sleep. Now it’s gone and it can’t wake up anymore.”

Bubble didn’t understand. “Why did it dive, Mummy?” she asked.

“No, sweetie, not dive, die.” Continue reading »

What is your problem, 2013?

Unlucky 13I am not a superstitious person. I don’t feel the need to throw salt over my shoulder, I don’t avoid walking under ladders, I like black cats, and I think the best way to dry an umbrella is to open it inside the house. But after the number of terrible things that have happened to me, my friends and my family so far this year, I am just about ready to turn around my thinking on the whole number thirteen thing.

At the end of last year, I wrote a blog post about how grateful I was for the state of my life at the time. Things were going so well I could hardly believe my luck. Then we took a Christmas trip to Australia, which was fantastic – we even managed to drag our two and a half year old to the other side of the world and back without so much as a single airport tantrum or piece of luggage lost. But when we got back, well that was when it all started turning to crap.

Without going into too much detail about each thing (there are so many stories, and not all of them are ones I’m ready to share here), the following happened over the course of the next six months:

  • My company was downsized and I lost my job (okay, not an entirely unwelcome situation, but still scary)
  • A friend from work took her own life
  • A nasty falling out with a colleague in the new business I had been involved with outside my regular job caused me to consider walking away from the entire thing (I didn’t)
  • One of the cats I had to leave behind in Australia wandered away from her foster home and is presumed dead (she was eighteen years old)
  • We were unjustifiably sued over the handover of our apartment after we sold it
  • We had to pay for our daughter’s daycare place through July even though she would be leaving in March
  • We got a new daycare place for August, meaning we had to hire a nanny for the interim, which costs double what one normally pays for daycare (so now we’re effectively pay three times what we normally would)
  • In renovating the kitchen in our new house, the electrician found faulty wiring all over the place and we had to replace the entire electrical system
  • A further falling out with the aforementioned colleague left the business in ruins (this time I did walk away)
  • My boyfriend’s business was subjected to an audit by the tax authorities (luckily everything was fine – he’s the least dodgy person I know)
  • My daughter was mistakenly given a peanut and was rushed to hospital with anaphylactic shock
  • I was swindled by a logo designer who, it turns out, stole the design I paid him to create
  • My website was deleted with no backup
  • The other cat I left behind in Australia also passed away
  • A family member was diagnosed with cancer

And that’s just the stuff that happened to us! Everywhere else this year I’m hearing about long-term relationship breakups, money problems, depression, loss of jobs… it goes on and on. Without wanting to sound whiny and petulant, it’s just not fair! These are good people – WE are good people – and we don’t deserve all this crap.

Fighting back

In ten days 2013 will be halfway over, and I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to take this rubbish anymore. Okay, 2013, I get it. You’re a badass. You’re the devil’s year and you’re out to prove it. Seriously, get over yourself! You want to push me? Then you get to find out what happens when I get pushed too far: I start pushing back. And you know how I’m going to do it? I’m going to kick some ass of my own. By the end of this miserable, cursed year, I will have finished the two novels I’m concurrently writing, I will get that damn publishing contract, my new businesses will be thriving, and you can go flex your big, fat, unlucky muscles somewhere else. And while you’re at it, think about this: you’re only going to survive another six months – is this how you want us to remember you? As a mean bitch who can’t let people live their lives and be happy? Get a life, 2013, and back up off mine.

Thank you, Networked Blogs!

Sunshine through the cloudsLast week I discovered something unbelievably sucky: I went to post a new blog, and I discovered that my blog had disappeared. I checked my host account and not only were all the files gone, but the database had been emptied as well. I immediately contacted my hosting company, but unfortunately this problem had occurred more than a month prior, so they had no backup to offer me (that’ll teach me to visit my own site more often!). I was devastated. Six years of posts, gone. I tried various internet archives, but no luck.

I was so depressed I considered just forgetting the whole site. I have another blog I use for my writing career, maybe I should just use that one. But no, it wasn’t enough! I might not post to this site very often anymore, but when I do it’s usually for cathartic purposes; I use this site to rant, complain, express joy, share news about my personal life… I didn’t want to lose it! But the idea of starting over from scratch just depressed me. So I left it.

Just this morning, I logged into a tool called Networked Blogs, which I use for disseminating posts from my various websites via Facebook and Twitter, to remove this site from my dashboard. I almost did a double-take when I realised that I could see some of my old posts. But I feared that these cached posts would be in the same situation as the archives: only the first few lines of each post and nothing more. But no, when I clicked, there were the last two years of posts in their entirety, images and all! Never has anyone copied and pasted so fast! Within minutes I’d copied all the text and saved it to my hard drive with cloud backup.

So today I’ve resurrected the last two years of posts. I do still have an old backup with the older ones, but the ones that matter to me today are here and that’s enough for me. And all those who were devastated to lose my zucchini slice and rogan josh recipes, those little gems are here too. Thank you, Networked Blogs. You saved my site.

Goodbye IT career, hello literary world!

Team Jaunty

Today is my last day at Opera Software, and also the last day of a fourteen year IT career. I am leaving the safe haven of employeehood and am off to become a full time author, editor, publisher and book producer, a career in which I’ve been dabbling on the sidelines for a couple of years and have been dreaming about since the day I first picked up a book. I am finally ready to tackle it head-on. (And don’t worry, I won’t use the word employeehood again.)

When I started at Opera back in 2008, I was thrown into the Nintendo team head first, right before the release of the DSi. I found myself in the intimidating, yet privileged, position of working with some of the best minds at Opera, not to mention some of the strange and wonderful wizards at Nintendo. Working with those teams was the high point of my IT career, and I will forever be thankful to Opera for the opportunity to take part in those projects. Alf Bjørn and Tsukasa deserve special recognition for their support while I learned the ropes.

I’ve also probably been the busiest employee rep in Opera history, helping staff through “right-sizing”, the office move, and the recent rounds of goodbyes that sent us all reeling. I have been humbled at the strength and integrity shown by those in very intense and strained situations, and it has only shown me further the quality of the people I’ve been surrounded by these past four years.

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Manners

Dancing feetIt’s only natural to start thinking more about manners and their importance when you’re responsible for shaping and guiding a young life. Now that my daughter is old enough to express herself verbally, as well as through body language and facial expressions, I find I’m becoming ever more aware of the differences between the way I was brought up, and the way my friends, peers and I are bringing up our children.

Some of what I’m noticing is a cultural difference, given that I was brought up in Australia and I am raising my daughter in Norway, but much of it is the inevitable generation gap; probably every generation feels that the next one is cruder, less considerate, with worse manners. But I can’t help wondering, in this age of obsessing about whether our children are well-adjusted, confident and happy above all else, are we actually ensuring they will be less polite?

I was brought up in an age of social change; it was the 70s and parents were, perhaps for the first time, beginning to be mindful of how their parenting impacted on the feelings of the child, rather than only how their child impacted on the lives of those around them. I probably felt some of this more acutely, given that my father is a psychologist and was then a guidance counselor in the education sector.  He was also a very hands-on father, which was a fairly new attitude at the time. However, I was still taught to be considerate of others, to say “excuse me” when I was inconveniencing someone, whether it was my fault or not, and to say “please”, “thank you” and to call adults by their last name (Mrs Smith, Mr Jones, etc.).

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Perpetuating lies

FrustrationI am increasingly concerned about the sorts of things some of my Facebook friends are sharing and circulating – not because I disagree with them (though I often do), but because they seem so willing to perpetuate blatantly untrue statements, quotes and news pieces just because they grab onto the emotive nature of the item, which, frankly, is the intention of the originator.

I’m sad to say, that it is most often my Australian friends who are guilty of this practice. It could be a result of living in a culture that feeds on and actively encourages sensationalist journalism – my recent trip home to Australia reminded me of how true this is – but it’s concerning to see people I care about and respect irresponsibly spreading lies and perpetuating the wider world view that Australia is a country full of racists.

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Grateful

 This year, for the first time, I’ve been invited to a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Audrey’s house. She and her husband are spending their first holiday season in Norway, and wanted to share a little piece of their home traditions with us, and we are really looking forward to it.

But it got me thinking generally about how much I have to be grateful for this year, perhaps more than ever before in my life. It’s easy to get caught feeling blue as the days get ever shorter and darker, with sunrise after nine a.m. and the daylight only lasting until a little after three in the afternoon. The first thing I think of when I see the last shreds of half-light disappear a couple of hours after lunch time: this year I am lucky enough to be escaping the dark. This year I’m spending my first Christmas at home with my family in seven years. Seven cold, dark Christmases in a row, and now I get to take my little girl home for a hot, sunny Christmas just like the ones I used to know… ♪ ♫ ♬

Which brings me to my daughter. How could I not be grateful for her? All parents are grateful for their children. But I feel she deserves special thanks for being almost freakishly well-behaved and easy-going. Who else has a two-year-old who asks if she can open a drawer to get a toy out, and then puts it back when she’s done playing with it? Who else has a two-year-old who says please and thank you mid-tantrum? I may be eating my words if and when the so-called terrible twos finally hit, but so far life with my toddler is impossibly sweet.

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Overload

Tenebris Books Logo

Tenebris Books

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged here. Why? Because I’ve been writing everywhere else lately. Over the past year I have completed my first novel, come more than halfway through my second, written 9 short stories and started a writing blog. So you can understand how my little personal blog might get lost in the shuffle.

But that is not all. Though I recently signed with a literary agent, I had also been thinking for a while about taking further steps into the literary career track outside of merely writing. After discussing this with the person, now a good friend, who edited my first book, I discovered he had been in the process of setting up his own indie publishing house for literary fiction for some time. The woman who introduced us was already on board to run her own fantasy/sci-fi imprint under this house, and he would also run a further imprint for crime fiction. At the time I was considering self-publishing my own novel, if I didn’t have any success with agents. The trouble was, my book didn’t really fit into a specific genre that we could use an imprint for; it is a Young Adult novel, but I wasn’t interested in running a purely YA imprint. Partly because, to me, YA is a marketing demographic more than a genre, but also because I had a new idea. I wanted my imprint to cross marketing demographics and genre, and focus on that almost indefinable thing so many books I love have: darkness. Enter Tenebris Books.

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Why Being a Working Mother is Like Eating Tapas

Baby and me

Baby and me

How many times have you been told that the modern woman can “have it all”? I’m here to tell you, you can’t. Anyone who says you can is either kidding herself or has a very different definition of “all” than I do. You know what I’m talking about; it’s one of the most common dilemmas for women today: career vs children.

Feminism and the women’s liberation movement have given us so many options that I sometimes feel like it would be easier to go back to being oppressed. At least when women had so few rights, they didn’t have to put unrealistic expectations on themselves. In many cases, they simply accepted that their lot in life was to raise children and look after their husband and household. Sounds gleefully uncomplicated, doesn’t it? (Note: I didn’t say easy.)

I being facetious; I don’t actually want to be a post-war housewife. But I never expected to feel so conflicted about motherhood.

My pregnancy was unplanned and came as quite a shock, even though in the back of my mind I’d always believed I’d eventually find the right time to have children. And in retrospect, it was probably for the best that it happened of its own accord, because there never was a “right time”.

So, despite being unsure I was ready, I took a deep breath and stared into the face of impending motherhood. For the most part, I was excited and looked forward to life with our new family member, but there was a niggle in the back of my mind that I really wished wasn’t there: the one that told me I was “giving up” and turning my back on my career, which I worked hard to develop.

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