Ma Wa Gray

I've always been a little bit 'hard of hearing'. My mom used to think that I just daydream too much. If you are driving a car with the radio on and I am sitting in the back behind you there is 100% guarantee that I won't hear you. I am prone to be away with the fairies in noisy environments. And I'm also very loud. A few years ago in my early 20s I went for a hearing test and was told that I was battling to hear higher sound frequencies. I said 'cool' and moved on with my life. I got degrees, directed plays, found a soft spoken guy, settled down... And started teaching. And this was when my hearing loss became more difficult. I couldn't work out where sounds were coming from in my classroom and found that I was spending more and more time watching people's mouths and body language to see what they were saying. This became crushingly obvious when I watched a play which was about a group of people in a room when the lights go out. Most of the pl...

The country is in crisis. One too many horrific stories about the shameless disregard for the bodies and lives of our women and children. And in my little microcosm a little boy builds Duplo houses for racing cars which he has to continually move around the carpet because his podgy bottomed seven month old sister has somehow found a way to maneuver her way across the floor, demolishing all signs of construction with fat crab fingers. And the little boy doesn't know that he will have to walk through the quagmire that is gender politics as he is still just dreaming the dreams of knights and horses named 'Jackson'. And the little girl doesn't know that I am going to devote my entire being to making sure that she doesn't feel like she's a victim of her gender. But for now I make 'dippy egg' for supper served with a slice of white bread for 'bessert' and I mash bananas with my fingers and feed them to my open mouthed song bird. All the while ...

There's a moment in the delightful movie 'Sing', which most children have watched on average 683 times, where the tired, overworked mommy pig strips off her pastel mommy blouse and turns into a ravishing she-pig. She then groves down to Taylor Swift's 'Shake it off.' First of all, I am that pig. The urban legend that 'you lose weight when breastfeeding' is a myth. Specially when your philosophy towards breastfeeding is - 'Right, I've just eaten a huge supper. But I'm  breastfeeding so... best I eat several rusks just before bedtime... you know... milk supply and all that.' Your tiny baby with her tiny stomach then wakes up for one feed during the night, she drinks her measly 100mls and then goes back to sleep. In the meantime those rusks discover that there is a lot of room of late in the stomach area of your body and so you start growing your next baby, a food baby. And this causes havoc for people who don't know if you've giv...

I've just finished wrapping Gray's birthday presents. I wrapped them in left over Christmas wrapping paper, newspaper and masking tape. Rudolph is making his rounds twice this year. Luckily Stephen is into gift giving and has done most of the shopping because this year if it was left up to me Gray would be getting a pair of thermal pj's bought online because I was able to buy them from my bed. Last night I manged to be by myself for ten whole minutes. It was amazing. We needed milk. I jumped at the opportunity. After shoving a boob into Eva's mouth to make 100% sure she wasn't hungry and prying a screaming Gray off my legs I headed for the hills. Well, the petrol station down the road. Unencumbered by a pram, Baby Bjorn or small child asking for a treat I walked up and down all four aisles of the petrol station shop simply because I could despite the fact that I knew exactly where the milk was. And then when I got back to the car I repeatedly tried to switch the ...

Stephen posted a picture on our family group yesterday. It is a picture of the aftermath of the fire in Notre Dame. In the foreground is the wreckage of burnt history and in the background is a beautiful  perfect gold cross. I couldn't help but smile at what I perceive to be God's humour. A lot of people are angry about the response to the burning of this iconic cathedral and feel that rather than mourn the burning of a decrepit old building we should be focusing our energy on things that actually need saving. Like our planet. I have a similar response to these people but for entirely different reasons. I want to know if people are devastated because a national treasure has burnt down (one which the church battled to raise money to fix) or are they mourning the loss of a place of worship? My gut goes with the former. And this idea of places of worship then got me thinking about 'church'. Last week we tried to go to church for the first time since Eva's birt...

When Stephen and I met and decided that we rather 'fancied each other' - his exact words - we jokingly decided that our theme song would be 'Two less lonely people in the world'. But actually it couldn't have been more apt and in the last 24 hours I have been reminded again of how grateful I am to have a life with people in it. This may seem like an obvious statement - everyone lives lives with people in them but seeing people and being in daily relationships with them are two very different things. When I was living in Oman eight years ago (how delightfully time flies) I came to know loneliness in a very real and painful way. Fortunately it was only for 6 months but it was long enough for me to have a taste of some people's constant reality. I was lonely because I lived alone in a huge apartment in a completely alien country and I worked at night. This meant that I was not able to be part of any of the socializing that would normally happen in the evenin...

I had a friend. I use past tense because I haven't heard from him in over three years. He was my best friend. We went through a great deal as we battled through our formative adult years together. I tried desperately for about two years to stay in touch, to try and see him, to introduce him to my first baby. But there was no effort made from his side. I now have two children and I wonder if he even knows. I tore myself up wondering what might have changed his heart - was it me? My choice of spouse? My lifestyle choices? My diet? My faith? In the end I gave up my attempts at keeping the friendship going, I grieved, and I moved on. And do you know how I know that he really is no longer my friend? Facebook. He gave up Facebook several years ago and so there has been no way for either of us to keep track of each other's lives. There's no invisible internet calculator adding up the number of times we 'like' each other. There has been no way to half heartedly comment...

The following is the internal monologue that goes on in my mind every day. I choose to keep it to myself mostly... Ok so Miss Rabbit literally runs every business in town, she's everywhere, all the time. Her sister, on the other hand, stays at home and has children. So we're telling our daughters - you get to run the grocery store, the ice cream shop and the fire station but only if you don't have children. And why does everyone live on a hill? Oh wait, there was that one episode of the big flood. Hill living did come in handy then. And why does Blaze need a driver when everyone else can drive themselves? And can someone tell Pickle that Crusher is a doosh? Seriously. And how is it that in every race Pickle manages to keep up with all the monster machines and yet they are always the winners? For me Pickle's sunny disposition is the highlight of every episode. So Max and Ruby... Where the hell are their parents? Reminds me of a movie we had to watch in first...

When I was pregnant with Gray I could sleep at any given moment of the day, instantly. The school I was teaching at at the time (which will remain unnamed to protect the identify of a colleague who will be given an alias anyway) had a very peculiar little room that was attached to the ladies toilets. In it was a chaise lounge. And the door could lock. And it was dark. And I spent very spare moment I could in there either holding down the morning sickness or sleeping. The only downer of this very cozy arrangement is that I got very familiar with the toilet habits of my colleagues. The acoustics in there were remarkable. Let's just say I know why we went through so much toilet spray - spraying before, during and after a movement won't fool us into thinking we're walking through a field of summer potpourri Sharon. Anyway my point is that during my pregnancy with Gray I was willing to snatch every spare moment, laced with eau de Sharon, to try and pull myself towards myself....

Two nights ago Stephen and I sat down on the couch and let out a collective relieved sigh. Both children had been bathed, fed and put to sleep. And I'm going to throw this word out there, the word that describes the feeling just before a fall - smug. The smugness lasted all of a literal minute because at that moment the noise of a seal auditioning to become part of the Ushaka Seal Show came resonating from Grays bedroom. To be honest I didn't know seals could waddle this far inland. When I say I could mainly see the whites of Stephen's eyes I am not over exaggerating. We froze. And then the bark again. The croup bark. The bark to end all barks. The bark that launched a thousand ships in the opposite direction. Shit. Having recently unpacked our medicine cabinet - it is literally the only thing I unpacked in our entire move I made a beeline for the aspelone as fast as my bruised nether regions would allow. Within seconds our poor little sleeping boy was pinned dow...

So I'm now Ma Wa Gray and Eva. I have a daughter. A raven haired beauty weighing in at 4kgs. And I managed to push her out. I am shattered. Literally. Shattered. The thing about having a daughter is that, for me at least, I have a very deep sense of knowing with her. She is familiar. She's like that person I've always known but never met face to face. She is a part of me that now happens to be in another body. When we give birth to daughters there is generally a slight note of panic in people's responses to the news. The old 'dad needs to take out his shotgun' fart nugget comes to mind. And dads often go into overwind because they understand how vulnerable their daughters are. After all - 'men believe in premarital sex before daughters are born'. Very few people's responses to the news of the birth of a boy are ones of immediate vulnerability and protection. Are males not vulnerable too? So I'm not going to go into a whole gender deb...

It's that horrific time of year. The time between Christmas and the start of the new year. If you're South African it's also the time when even the strongest start googling aircon specials. The gammon is starting to look a bit iffy but you are buggered if you're actually going to cook an actual meal. You've already worn your new Christmas clothes once and if you're a parent half your child's new toys are already looking a bit battle weary. This year two things happened during this no man's land time that really put things into perspective for me. The first was that a very distant relation of mine, little Kiara Mun-Gavin, was in a horrific car accident which left part of her skull fractured. The second was that I started showing some early signs of labour. Every day I have read the deeply powerful updates that Jaci (Kiara's mom) has been posting about their journey into a moment frozen in time. A moment no parent ever wants to consider. A moment ...