Tag: children

The Road Not Taken

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I was watching surfers last night. We had epic surf on Good Friday to the point there was practically no beach left at Avoca where we are spending the long weekend. It settled a bit on Saturday, waves came in clear sets and there was an occasional gleam of green in contrast to the day before when the wave tops were immediately blown off to churn white all the way to the beach. Surfers were everywhere. They get so close to the rocks it seems way too dangerous. Then one of them pops up on a wave and takes off, down the wave then up and no matter how many times I see it, I never get tired of it and it never stops being, well, magic. Witchery.

I grew up in Siberia and apart from doing ballet as a 6 year old, cross country skiing in the forest across the road from our apartment block and mandatory PE in school, I was not an athletic child. I wore glasses and I always had a book to read, long before it was known that distracting yourself from the world around you is unhealthy (but I was doing it with books not devices so I guess it was ok). And yet when I first got access to satellite TV I was mesmerised by the channel that was showing skateboarding and surfing. The persistence and skill required to do those things seemed way cooler than anything that I could do (a sad poem, anyone?). If I could transport my conscience into someone else’s body for an hour I’d choose an experienced surfer on a good surfing day, for the experience of that high of mastery over your own body and the ocean that can so easily kill you.

I did try surfing after I moved to Australia. It was way before I got into sailing and I took many lessons with a community college and got to know a few people, mostly surfing instructors. I lacked the upper body strength but my balance was fine. I had tremendous fun even in white water and I did manage to catch a few waves, mostly with the instructor’s help. It was pretty clear though that I’d have to basically live on the beach and practice every day, not once a week if I wanted to get serious about it. I would also need to either keep paying an instructor or somehow find someone who’d be ok to at least go surfing with me which seemed impossible with all the other things happening in my life.

I haven’t surfed in ages.

It’s interesting to think what could have been though if I made different choices in life and surfing is one of them. And if I was born in Australia to someone who sent me to nippers, would I be a completely different person, ripping down and up the waves, would that be something so natural and easy for me that I’d take it for granted? What would that life feel like? Somehow I am convinced I’d still find a way to be anxious and questioning my choices. There would be different worries (my friend circle? Source of income? A very vague feeling that I could’ve learned to write better? Maybe they wouldn’t be all that different after all) but I doubt I’d escape unscathed. It is a fun exercise to indulge in right before your birthday though, considering all the lives you could’ve had.

Life with three kids can be intense and sometimes James and I joke about what our lives could be like if we remained childfree (lots of spare cash, probably a seaside apartment instead of a house, much travel and delicious food and should I mention loads of uninterrupted sleep) but ultimately we both agree that it would’ve come with a sense of loss even if we didn’t exactly know what that loss was about. I’m sure there are people who don’t long for children but I struggle to imagine being one of them. It’s one of those choices in life I can’t imagine not making and it seems inevitable, just like moving from my hometown to St Petersburg and then to Australia, maybe because I imagine the kind of regret I’d have had very clearly.

And then there are choices in life that seem a bit less clear cut. Choosing one job over another (I nearly went to Ireland instead of Australia). Choosing sailing over surfing. Ending or continuing a friendship. While some of them seem more important than the other, do we really know which ones are true bifurcation points?

I am still fairly sure I’d arrive at some version of me that might be physically slightly different but fundamentally the same. Somehow I cannot imagine a version of me who doesn’t overthink or who is more confident than sensitive. I’d probably be tortured by different things. I might fight joy in different things, too. Yet it appears to me that through any circumstances my own self would inevitably crystallise and if all those versions of me ever met they would all enjoy a conversation about what it means to be me, just like I’m enjoying writing this post right now.

Then again, it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add that I could be completely wrong about all of it.

Why so serious?

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R has been going to gymnastics for over a year. She goes to a fairly small club that emphasises fun over competition which is probably the healthiest approach to children’s sport. Yet we almost didn’t rejoin this term, and the main reason was that I didn’t see much improvement in what R was doing. She also often lost interest by the end of the class and instead of practicing she’d do absolute minimum and make faces at me, in her usual monkey manner.

I talked to a few parents while sitting on the bench waiting for R to finish her classes. One girl who used to be friendly with R dropped out after Christmas because her Mum didn’t see results (and it was inconvenient for the whole family to do sports on Saturday morning). A couple of people I knew from my previous jobs brought their kids – and then I didn’t see them anymore. Both of the parents echoed my secret desire to see their kids doing perfect cartwheels and flips when we chatted. I am not sure what happened after – all I know I don’t see them at gymnastics anymore.

In the end, I was talked into continuing by another mother whose daughter has been doing gymnastics with R for a while. I look forward to talking to her every Saturday and that was probably the biggest reason why I signed R up again. That, and R actually telling me she enjoys gymnastics.

By the middle of the term R’s cartwheels suddenly improved. She now pays attention at the end of class. And come to think of it, she’s generally far less clumsy than she used to be.

Somehow she still mostly just enjoys the class, sometimes getting things right, sometimes not. I can imagine myself if I was somehow transported into a child’s body without losing the tendencies of my own age and experience – I would try to get the most value out of each class, do everything just right, constantly increase complexity and compete with myself. In other words, I would probably take all the fun out of it. I’d take it too seriously and get frustrated. I’m pretty stubborn so I as that imaginary child would probably not quit – but I probably wouldn’t get any joy out of it either, too focussed on results.

Needless to say, when I was an actual child I did not have that mindset. I did quit ballet after two years and I didn’t finish music school. The approach towards children education both in sport and in music back in Russia had nothing to do with fun and recreation – you were expected to work hard to get results. And I know that a lot of my enjoyment of music was lost in my childhood because learning music was all hard work and very little fun. Only now, many years later, I allowed myself to play the piano very casually, occasionally, for my own enjoyment – although I suspect if I didn’t have the excuse of having three children, a full time job and too many hobbies, I’d probably start trying to get more serious about improvisations and all the other skills that were not covered in my childhood education, possibly getting to the place when playing the piano is not enjoyable once again.

Yet R who can be pretty resistant to any kind of pressure somehow, almost by magic, managed to acquire skills just by sticking to weekly lessons and not taking them too seriously. Yes, it took a long time – a very long time by the standards of our impatient times. But the big plus is, she’s still enjoying it, too.

I had a dream that my children would do nippers (train to be lifesavers) – who wouldn’t enjoy running around on the beach, training to be safe in the ocean? R, that’s who. She started just before she turned 5 and she hated it then and the next term when we tried again. She hated being last while running, she hated how sand hit her bare legs when it was windy, she was clingy and miserable and so we quit. And a voice in my head told me for years and years that R didn’t enjoy anything all that much and maybe it was worth persisting despite her wishes. I know that voice is not really an enemy, it’s the same voice that urged me to practice reading and writing with R and researching the best ways to learn spelling and maths. Yet in the end what often works best with R is just giving her time and agency to decide how she engages with whatever she’s doing.

And as it often happens in parenting, I am not sure who learns more in all this – the child who acquires a skill of doing cartwheels and writing complex sentences, or the parent who learns to let go sometimes and trust the process and their child. I know I am currently trying to apply whatever I learned in my own life: hold my desires very lightly and don’t take them too seriously, invest time in following my interests and slowly build skills without fixating on it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do a cartwheel too.

Another year has flown by

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I often think about being a little numb to life; how a monumental tantrum or some unexpected mini-disaster takes over my life for an evening / a day / a week and then it’s gone and I move on very quickly, returning to my morning walk, my customer meetings, my school pickup and I have no time to mull it over, to obsess over it, to think of better way to handle certain things. I am still not sure this is what people talk about when they advice against rumination. To me, it seems like I also lost the mental space to consider and digest, not just ruminate. A friend asked me, to my delight, if I was going to write another yearly reflection and I have been writing in my head in little spurts ever since, hoping I’d be able to fit in at least another blog post before then, and yet here I am. I am still grateful for this quiet, rainy day when I can sit by myself and think about a year it has been.

It’s a year when the world felt broken again, with the continuing war in Ukraine and many civilian victims in Israel and Gaza. Interest rates are going up and everything is getting more expensive. The tech world was obsessed with AI and Chat GPT. In an attempt to control what I can I started going to the gym and managed to finish a strength training program I heard a lot about but had never done before. Then I started another one. At times going to the gym felt amazing, and sometimes it was just a pain, another thing that I had to do. I had some business travel this year and the girls were sick during winter a lot so my workout routine was interrupted quite a few times – yet I got back into it and even when it wasn’t perfect it was much, much better than not doing it at all. I probably won’t go back to the body I had pre-kids but I am determined to have strong muscles even when I am in my 60s and 70s.

Work was challenging this year, with a hard economic climate and constant changes and me finding my stride in a deeply technical field. I’ve worked, laughed and ranted with some fantastic people (some of them became good friends) and I have learned so much. And at the end of the year I am finally taking substantial time off – my parents are coming tomorrow!

Around my birthday this year I had arguably the biggest freakout about my age I’ve ever had. A friend casually dropped a comment about the importance and my lack of social life when we were catching up and it clearly resonated and awoke something dark in me as I cried on a morning walk thinking how I don’t have any friends anymore. Thankfully, another friend talked me off the ledge (in hindsight, it is a little strange to complain about lack of friends to an actual friend).

I. and W turned 3 and their personalities continue to be very different. R and I. are now in a semi-constant state of bickering mixed with sisterly love. They are now playing together more – but also fight much more. Willow mostly prefers her own path, either quietly chilling, angrily demanding something or giggling her head off. All three like playing “The floor is lava”. I remember R’s early years so vividly and it seemed like they lasted for so long – yet the twin’s first 3 years feel much more like a blur. I also remember R getting progressively easier each year – yet it sometimes seems to be the opposite with the twins. I have now braved the playground by myself with all three and everyone survived even if it wasn’t an easy (or particularly enjoyable) experience for me.

After a conversation with R’s teacher I started obsessing over helping her with writing and, to a lesser degree, maths. The education system is quite different in Australia to the one I went through and both have their strength and shortcomings. I am now reading books about better spelling / math instruction – or rather those books look at me forlornly from the overflowing bookshelves as I stare at my phone, overwhelmed. I did manage to help R improve her handwriting and some of her general writing skills but not nearly enough (she asked me how to spell “if” yesterday…). She also seems to be enjoying reading much more. Last year she attempted to sign cards to everyone in her class – but ran out of steam pretty quickly. This year she completed all of them and another one for her teacher, she’s done it in batches and 99% by herself – all I did after buying the cards was making her a list in the middle of the process so she could see who she’s done the cards for already.

It feels like I’ve done at least 300 loads of laundry this year (I am tempted to start counting and put it in a dashboard somewhere). I caught thousands of Pokemon on my phone (I installed the game to play with R but instead it made me go for walks more often – I walk more than 50 km each week including a 2 hour walk on most Saturdays). I changed loads of nappies (then the twins seemingly toilet trained themselves… at least partially). I’ve been thrown up on more times than I care for to remember. I managed to read some books. I felt awe while looking at a sleeping child almost every night (some nights I was way too exhausted). I went to Las Vegas and Auckland for the first time in my life. James and I went to a wedding in New Zealand by ourselves. I finally bought myself a piano and played the entirety of “Fur Elise” and not just the easy part. I feel like I worked hard all year in all areas of my life and I felt like little changes overtime added up to something significant if modest, even when it’s not all that noticeable from the outside.

My wish for next year is for more peace, more creativity, less sickness for the entire family (and more fishing for James). And if you got to this paragraph, I hope you have a wonderful holiday break and a great year ahead.

Adventures in the night

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The twins woke me up at midnight for a feed. It was an uncomfortably warm night and I was parched. I shook James and whispered, “Can you get me a glass of water please?”

“Yes”, he said in a very sober voice. I waited a second. He was asleep again. I kicked his shin and said, “Bring me water!”

He stumbled out of bed and as he headed towards the bedroom door I hissed “Water!” again.

I heard him open the tap in the kitchen, filling a glass of water then drinking it. Then there was silence. The twins were feeding contently while I was straining my ears.

Where was my husband? He could be in the back bathroom. He could be in our older daughter’s room where he slept while I was pregnant. Or he could be on the Moon, I thought darkly.

Time passed. The twins finished eating and went back to sleep. I seethed.

Finally, my dear husband appeared at the base of the bed, empty handed.

“Where is the glass of water I asked for half an hour ago?!” – I hissed. He looked startled and injured in the semi-darkness of our bedroom. A minute later he finally brought me a glass of water which I gulped greedily while glaring at him.

He climbed into the bed and curled on his pillow.

“I am very upset,” he said and immediately fell asleep again.

15 minutes later Riley, our older daughter, woke up sobbing “Mummmmmy!”

After some persuasion James went to see what was wrong. Nothing was wrong except Riley didn’t want Daddy, she wanted Mummy (again).

“I don’t want to sleep by myself!” – she wailed.

It’s hard for me to understand her struggle with being by herself because I would like nothing better right now than sleeping a whole night by myself. It seems like a dream that will never come true. An uninterrupted night in a big clean bed with no other hot bodies in it… any time by myself is precious but at night especially.

After some whispering and cuddles Riley went back to sleep. I realised I needed the bathroom.

As I tried to get to the bathroom door opposite our bedroom I felt the unmistakeable horror of a spider web on my face. It was a terrible déjà vu I realised as the exact same thing had happened to me the night before but I somehow blanked it out of my memory. At that moment I was far more awake and I saw the culprit, a big spider, on the wall.

Once again I woke James up and hid in the other bathroom. The offending spider wasn’t even a huntsman (which are quite common inside houses in Australia), it was an orb spider which are all over our garden. A harmless thing really, except when it’s on you at 1 am in the morning.

Last time James decided to get rid of a spider in a humane way it didn’t end well. He caught a big huntsman in a takeaway container, walked out of the gate and let it go. It scurried toward the road only to be hit by a passing car.

“It would rather be dead than captured,” I said.

“Must have been one of those Japanese spiders from World War II”, – said James.

This time James didn’t try to do the right thing, killed the orb spider with a thong and disposed of it in the rubbish bin after wrapping it in a paper towel. No spider can escape a paper towel, right?

Miraculously, all three kids slept through the commotion and I spent some time after listening to everyone’s breathing and trying not to think of spiders. Then I slept too.

Tan Lines

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A few years ago when I was sailing a lot, sometimes up to 4 harbour races a week and offshore ones when possible, I used to get very specific tan lines on my hands. My hands looked white apart from the tips of my thumbs, perfectly matching my sailing gloves. We called it the Mickey Mouse tan.

The other day I looked at my hands and I realised there was a tan pattern on them now, too, a totally different one: fingers white up to the second phalanges then tanned evenly. It took me a moment to realise that the tan lines are caused by my pushing a pram every day, sometimes more than once a day. What a great metaphor of how my life changed, I thought. I used to be a very involved sailor and now I am a mother.

Some people, including my own mother, expressed astonishment at the fact that I am now a mother of three (granted, I was as surprised as anyone when we discovered that instead of leaping from one to two we skipped a step and jumped straight to three; nobody plans for twins). Some thought I was too interested in other, non maternal things like my career (or sailing), others no doubt remembered how much I struggled adjusting to having just one child. Yet the astonishment stings a bit too, as I probably invested more in being a great mother to my first than in anything else in my life and I never had any doubt I’d do my best with more than one, too.

Having three has been chaos. The twins are two months old and have already copped a few daycare colds brought home by Riley. A congested newborn is not a happy baby. I’ve listened to my oldest child cry for me in the middle of the night as I was pinned down by a feeding pillow with two newborns on it; my child who was never left to cry, used to reliably being comforted by me, was scared in the middle of the night in her own bed alone in her room and I wasn’t able to help. Sometimes all three cry at the same time. Sometimes I join in the crying, too.

I feel like I need to write about the upside of having multiple kids at this point of my blog post. How blessed we are to have three healthy kids (despite the copious amounts of snot in every single nose in this house right now), how sweet the babies are and how cute and funny Riley is. How James turned into a great father who is confidently taking all three kids out by himself while I try to catch up on at least some sleep. Mostly though we are surviving. We keep reminding ourselves not to wish time away and maybe one day I will miss this season when I am so desperately needed by all my children but right now I just keep saying to myself that the hardest days will pass and we’ll have the reward of children who learn how to play and share with others (I am sure I will regret these words in the future), who will always have each other even when they are adults. I’m reminding myself that our Christmas will be far more magical for having multiple kids, that I will be able to watch each of them grow into their own person which is my favourite part of parenting. And then I catch myself awash with the same astonishment I find so hurtful in others: how could it be that I am a mother of three?

Some people climb mountains, going all the way to the top where they are oxygen starved, freezing and in constant danger of dying where nobody will be able to retrieve their bodies. Some do long offshore races, soaked to the bone, fighting off nausea and tethered to the sides of the boat trying not to fall out. By far more people have multiple children and while some seem to breeze through that experience, a lot of us struggle with round the clock care duties, sleep deprivation and the constant terror of doing something wrong and scarring a person fully dependent on us for life. It’s not considered special by society because it’s so common yet as a way to find meaning bringing up kids can be more relentless than an offshore sailing race, more intimidating than climbing a mountain peak. We can’t turn back and so we continue on our way, clutching on to every tiny pleasure along the way. With time the relentlessness of it somewhat eases, our kids need us a bit less until they seemingly don’t need us at all – and then we’ll have to reinvent ourselves again. Who knows what my tan line is going to be then.

I can’t say I ever fully planned my life and so far what worked for me was doing my best with what I’ve got and letting things happen. And as I look into two brand new little faces all I can do is hope everything will turn out great for them, too.