Reconnecting

“Mum, can you please play Lego with me?”

“No, I’m too busy,” came my standard stressed-out answer.

I am noticing many stressed-out mummies around me lately and I am also noticing a lot of the stress seems to be brought on by ourselves. We take on too much and it’s ultimately our kids who suffer.

You know, all they want is a present mummy, not her retreating back and half a listening ear to their chitter-chatter. They also, unselfishly, want the best for their mummy, which is to be happy and healthy.

Until recently, my own stress culminated in a big life change. I was running myself ragged and then wondering why I couldn’t sleep. Adrenaline had a lot to do with this and four hours sleep over a 24-hour period night after night cannot be good for you. Sleeping pills and Panadol featured regularly where exercise had long gone out the window. I hadn’t seen my friends for months, despite their proximity to me, and found myself shunting the kids off to bed at the earliest possible moment without spending any quality time with them. Where did the two most important things - whanau and health - fit in?

We think we’re invincible but my body began telling me otherwise. Strange things were happening and, after no longer being able to ignore it, I finally listened to the signals and, making the mistake of Googling extensively, was convinced I had a serious illness.

With this in mind, my life flashed before my eyes. A series of tests and a few hundred dollars later, and after a tormenting wait, the answer turned up: stress.

Well I could do something about stress. I felt like I’d been given a second chance and so began my new life.

This meant the hard decision of leaving my job. I explained to the kids that we were going to be very poor from now on but that mummy would have a lot more time for them and wouldn’t be so grumpy. They voted unanimously for a stay-at-home non-grumpy, albeit poor, mum.

The first thing I did was write a list of all the things I love doing. I was shocked to find not a single item featured in my life.

As a result, I now make the time to exercise, attend the kids’ events, re-establish idle friendships, make future plans, write, keep on top of my home and gardens and am averaging five or six hours sleep. That one’s still a work in progress. But more importantly, every day I make a point of spending one-on-one time with my kids. It may mean dinner is an hour late but the look in their eyes and change in behaviour is worth it.

I now refer to this list every day to keep myself on track and remind myself why I did this.

Christmas this year will be far from extravagant and the kids have been forewarned. They seemed fine with it. And someone reminded me the other day that it’s not the materialistic things they will look back on, but the experiences.

So any stressed out mummies reading this, I recommend writing a similar list and see if the items feature in your life. If so, well done – I’ve re-joined your club. 

Now I must be off, I have a date to play Lego with my son.

Spring Cleaning and Birthday Parties

As the sun slows its decent below the horizon, evaporating the chill of winter, many of us are gripped by the urge to spring clean.

Usually this would begin around September but, if you’re a little OCD like me in the house cleaning department, by the time the annual spring clean rolls around, it’s far too late. Therefore, the first following year, I did it in August, the next, July until, heck, I was spring cleaning in June when there was nothing springy about it.

This year, however, I was snowed under with other stuff and had to watch my house transform before my eyes. Entering the ensuite would send a small shudder of horror at the site of the rapidly darkening ceiling as something grew across it.

Finally, around rolled the holidays and I pushed up my sleeves and got stuck in. The warm weather enabled the entire family’s bedding, including duvet and pillow inners, to be washed and dried in one day. I was on such a roll one day, I ran out of washing powder and Googled if using dish washing detergent would suffice. (It does, although check if it contains bleach first).

It’s a good feeling ticking off each room but, in order to achieve this – especially in the kids’ rooms, I needed to cheat a little. You see my kids are like magpies and accumulate a lot of things.

This year, Master Nine was ruthless and decided he’d outgrown most of his toys, much to the twin’s delight but there was no space in their room for new things – it took a whole six hours in itself to tidy and sort all the tiny bits and pieces that a little girl, especially, likes to collect. It was during this, I had the idea of recycling these small toys as prizes at their approaching birthday party so I put two bags aside. But there was a whole heap more.

Imagine a flurry of surplus ‘stuff’ being thrown out of each room into a rapidly growing pile in the hall and snow balling its way up (with great force) the stairs, culminating in a grand heap in the lounge. The idea was to spend my evenings sorting through this pile while watching tv. However, such was my cleaning frenzy still taking place elsewhere, this didn’t happen. The lounge had become a treasure trove and my deadline had arrived.

Games of statues, pass the parcel and musical cushions needed to be carried out here and, after I tucked my excited soon-to-be seven-year-olds into bed, I stood looking at the chaos before me in despair. I may have had a sparkling clean junk-free house but the lounge was a tip.

There was nothing for it but to transfer the pile to the garage. I loaded up the washing basket, filled rubbish sacks and made the trip down three flights of stairs, dumped it and returned. Up-down, up-down. Finally after around 15 trips and giving the lounge a jolly good hoover, I was done.

The next day the guests descended and my pristine house was soon turned upside-down. When it came to the game prizes, I wasn’t sure how it would go down but, judging by the kids’ reactions as they rifled through the selection, they thought it was Christmas. In fact their enthusiasm must’ve been contagious for I had to stop my two from reclaiming their own toys.

It’s hard to keep an eye on what everyone is up to and it wasn’t until after they’d left and I’d followed the trail of chips to the twin’s room, I discovered the Fanta spilt through Miss Seven’s bed. By then I was totally over spring cleaning and not at all enthused about re-washing the bedding, albeit with proper washing powder this time.

They may’ve trashed my house but the ceilings were still white and, hey, I recon I’ve got the family’s entire Christmas shopping in my garage just waiting to be sorted and re-gifted.

Big Brother is Watching You

I was reading recently about a local gp’s observations of the contents of residents’ recycling bins and the astonishing insight it gave into our culture’s drinking habits.

While disturbed, yet not surprised by her revelation of what goes on behind closed doors, it brought a relief from my own guilty pleasures of old. And I’m not talking about my own overflowing recycling bin.

As I’ve mentioned previously, motherhood opens up a whole new world – not only to the sleepless nights and endless feeding and washing etc – but to the daily goings-on in your own neibourhood when one would otherwise have been unawares at work.

The pace, compared to after-hours, is a whole lot slower – the people, unlike the workers, haggard after an eight-hour day, racing home to cook dinner, have a glass of wine and put their feet up, are friendly. Other than the roll-your-eyes ‘Thank god it’s Friday’ relieved small-talk, that comes out in a week’s worth of pent-up gush, interaction regularly happens.

And it’s at this slower pace that a stay-at-home mother has the time to go for strolls up the street, inhale the fresh air, smell the roses and get to know their neighbours. These include the the elderly - usually on-hand to cluck at the contents of your stroller - and the fellow stay-at-home mums, who greet each other on passing, while checking out the contents of each other’s strollers. These parents will likely get to know each other better years later when said contents end up friends in the same class.

Then there are the closed doors of the workers’ houses, the residents of whom you are never likely to lay eyes on, until you re-join the work force and come face-to-face with at the fish n chip shop on the way home. Until then, with one’s over-active imagination in overdrive from mind-numbingly mundane routines, one can only imagine what they are like.

And this is where the recycling bins come in. Dodging the bins on a Thursday morning with a double-stroller whilst taking the same well-trod route, it would be impossible not to, albeit slightly ashamedly, note their fillings.

Thoughts like “Gosh that person enjoys a good tipple after work”, or “Gee, they sure like their Coca Cola – I wonder if they know how bad it is for them” flit through the mind before anyone can say “Big Brother is Watching You”.

I’m sure, had I not lived at the end of a street, another stroller-manoeuvring mother with nothing better to think about, happening  upon my own recycling bin, might have noted the couple of ‘Thank God It’s Friday’ WoodStock cans and concluded that: either a boy racer lived within or, more correctly, a mother who doesn’t like beer, having posted to Facebook on a Friday afternoon asking: “Is it too early to crack a Woody?”

Long gone are the days where I have this luxury of voyeuristic observation and long gone are the days where I feel the need to drain a Woody to celebrate surviving the week. My own recycling bin is, in fact completely boring – more of the yogurt pot and milk bottle variety. Apart from the odd occasion where the family get together and the younger cousins and siblings manage to fill up two bins-full, much to my amused chagrin on a Thursday morning while carting the beer bottle (and odd Woodstock)-laden bins up the hill undercover.

So when you’re discarding the remnants of your week at the front gate, take note of what you are putting on show – and perhaps your consumption for that matter - for it’s not Big Brother who is watching you – it’s bored housewives, rubbish collectors and the family doctor, it would seem.