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...