This week, after some intense pressure from one of my tutors, who basically implied no self respecting PR wannabe would dare otherwise, I have joined that popular interface Twitter. Yes, I am now officially a tweeter or a twit or whatever the terminology is. Late to the party and feeling wholly superficial, signing up to something I have no interest in for the sake of my burgeoning profession, I have tentatively begun my career as a microblogger, one of the millions spewing forth short bursts of inconsequential social commentary into the ether.
Like any good shameless self promoter I have begun stacking the list of feeds that I follow with the names of popular opinion leaders, high brow cultural institutions, intelligent writers, satirists and credible world news purveyors. Anything that makes me look just that little bit more in-tune than I actually am, or could ever hope to be with two small children. Am I really hip enough to know who the cultural editor of the New York Times is, let alone follow him on twitter? Probably not. But isn't that the point of these social media channels? They provide us with an opportunity to construct a representation of our best selves for the world to see and hopefully accept. Forget citizen journalism, we're all doing citizen PR and boy does it make us feel important!
So here I am tweeting, retweeting, liking, sharing, pinning, blogging, posting, following. But not only that, now I can blog about my tweets and tweet about my blog, pin my blog to my board and tweet about that, share my tweets with my friends then like them and blog about the fact that I've shared my tweets with my friends, I can even follow myself if I so desire. Blog and tweet and pin and share ad infinitum. I'm a veritable what's what of connectedness.
And in amongst this frenzy of online profile constructing my two-year-old sits on the floor screaming at me because his toast is too floppy. Oh the things that make toddlers cry. If I ever start taking my ideal social self too seriously my children will no doubt ensure I remain tethered firmly to reality. #whatamIdoinghere
For what it's worth I can be found @ameliafishstar
Thursday 12 December 2013
Sunday 24 November 2013
The Vagaries of Sleep
Sleep is a funny thing. I imagine one takes it for granted until it is forcibly removed through the seismic shift that is having a baby, and then it quickly becomes a distant memory, something you think upon with longing during the succeeding months of broken nights. You operate in a kind of fog, a haze, where your memories become altered, you can no longer complete a sentence and you can and do fall asleep happily in the most unlikely places. You take what you can get.
It is in this fog I have opted to start a masters degree.
One child who didn't sleep I could handle and I would tell people how well I was coping and how you run on hormones, or maternal instinct or some such thing. But two kids who don't sleep, now that's another matter entirely. A whole new level of sleep deprivation.
To give you some idea of what I have been dealing with in the early weeks of my course I will attempt to set the scene.
It is 8.30pm on Sunday night and I have finally got both children off to sleep after a two hour bedtime routine which involves baths, books, pyjamas, cuddles, feeding (in the case of Child 2), half an hour of singing, soothing, patting, falling asleep hunched over a little bed (me), waking up to find Child 1 staring at me with what appears to be pity, more singing, an ultimatum, falling asleep again (still me, this time standing propped up in the door frame) and finally an extended period of silence and regular breathing. I withdraw stealthily into the hallway trying desperately not to stand on the creaking floorboards and sigh with relief.
Dinner, cooked by my outstandingly supportive husband, is next which takes us to 9.30pm then it's on to reading academic texts in preparation for the following day's lectures. Attempt a Habermas' paper on the Public Sphere and fall asleep after one page. Manage to rouse myself and struggle through to the end of the chapter but not without falling asleep a further six times over the course of an hour's reading. Unsurprisingly nothing sinks in. Express milk for Child 2 for nursery the next day and fall into bed exhausted at 11.30pm.
It is at this point Child 2 wakes (teething) and requires feeding. Half an hour later I am back in bed and it's midnight. At 12.30am Child 1 wakes (heavy cold) and needs comforting back to sleep which takes half an hour. When I do manage to get back to bed I am sleeping cat-like, coiled, with one eye open, ready to spring up at a moment's snuffle or cry which comes at 2am from Child 1. This time he's quite upset, so I end up remaining in his room for the next two hours, falling asleep on the wooden floorboards beside his bed when exhaustion takes over. At 4am I am back in my own bed. At 5am Child 2 awakes for another feed. As soon as she is asleep, Child 1 gets up chanting 'morning time, morning time!'. It is 5.30am and so he spends the next hour entertaining himself with the iPad beside me in bed. At 6.30am we officially get up and the day begins.
Once we're all showered, dressed, breakfasted, lunches made and dog walked (did I mention we also have a dog?), I load up the kids (one on my front and one in the pram, backpack on and school bags attached, doing my best impression of a packhorse) and walk 15 mins uphill to their nursery. En route we see a boy of about 12, in uniform, heading to school on a unicycle carrying a violin and I am unsure if I am imaging it. If he's not a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation then the alternative is that he's just a remarkably precocious child with painfully hip parents, all of which I take an instant, irrational disliking to.
I arrive at uni bleary-eyed and exhausted, keen to impart my sorry tale of the previous night to my classmates in order to illicit some sympathy and/or admiration. However, for the most part they, being decidedly younger and with far greater freedom than I, have spent the weekend in a fog of alcohol and all manner of other intoxicants, making the most of this great city of London. They too are bleary-eyed and exhausted so offer none of the sympathy I am after. I like to think my excuse for not having completed the required reading for class that morning is somewhat more noble than those of my classmates but at the end of the day both situations, albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum, are self induced. Can I really expect any pity?
It is in this fog I have opted to start a masters degree.
One child who didn't sleep I could handle and I would tell people how well I was coping and how you run on hormones, or maternal instinct or some such thing. But two kids who don't sleep, now that's another matter entirely. A whole new level of sleep deprivation.
To give you some idea of what I have been dealing with in the early weeks of my course I will attempt to set the scene.
It is 8.30pm on Sunday night and I have finally got both children off to sleep after a two hour bedtime routine which involves baths, books, pyjamas, cuddles, feeding (in the case of Child 2), half an hour of singing, soothing, patting, falling asleep hunched over a little bed (me), waking up to find Child 1 staring at me with what appears to be pity, more singing, an ultimatum, falling asleep again (still me, this time standing propped up in the door frame) and finally an extended period of silence and regular breathing. I withdraw stealthily into the hallway trying desperately not to stand on the creaking floorboards and sigh with relief.
Dinner, cooked by my outstandingly supportive husband, is next which takes us to 9.30pm then it's on to reading academic texts in preparation for the following day's lectures. Attempt a Habermas' paper on the Public Sphere and fall asleep after one page. Manage to rouse myself and struggle through to the end of the chapter but not without falling asleep a further six times over the course of an hour's reading. Unsurprisingly nothing sinks in. Express milk for Child 2 for nursery the next day and fall into bed exhausted at 11.30pm.
It is at this point Child 2 wakes (teething) and requires feeding. Half an hour later I am back in bed and it's midnight. At 12.30am Child 1 wakes (heavy cold) and needs comforting back to sleep which takes half an hour. When I do manage to get back to bed I am sleeping cat-like, coiled, with one eye open, ready to spring up at a moment's snuffle or cry which comes at 2am from Child 1. This time he's quite upset, so I end up remaining in his room for the next two hours, falling asleep on the wooden floorboards beside his bed when exhaustion takes over. At 4am I am back in my own bed. At 5am Child 2 awakes for another feed. As soon as she is asleep, Child 1 gets up chanting 'morning time, morning time!'. It is 5.30am and so he spends the next hour entertaining himself with the iPad beside me in bed. At 6.30am we officially get up and the day begins.
Once we're all showered, dressed, breakfasted, lunches made and dog walked (did I mention we also have a dog?), I load up the kids (one on my front and one in the pram, backpack on and school bags attached, doing my best impression of a packhorse) and walk 15 mins uphill to their nursery. En route we see a boy of about 12, in uniform, heading to school on a unicycle carrying a violin and I am unsure if I am imaging it. If he's not a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation then the alternative is that he's just a remarkably precocious child with painfully hip parents, all of which I take an instant, irrational disliking to.
I arrive at uni bleary-eyed and exhausted, keen to impart my sorry tale of the previous night to my classmates in order to illicit some sympathy and/or admiration. However, for the most part they, being decidedly younger and with far greater freedom than I, have spent the weekend in a fog of alcohol and all manner of other intoxicants, making the most of this great city of London. They too are bleary-eyed and exhausted so offer none of the sympathy I am after. I like to think my excuse for not having completed the required reading for class that morning is somewhat more noble than those of my classmates but at the end of the day both situations, albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum, are self induced. Can I really expect any pity?
Thursday 24 October 2013
Spilt Milk
One of the pitfalls to being a full-time student and a mum to two young children is that you constantly feel a bit inadequate. To help address my shortcomings as a mother and to alleviate some of the associated guilt I have tasked myself with the job of continuing to provide breast milk for the 6-month-old while she's at nursery. This, of course, entails expressing milk multiple times a day at university to keep up with demand.
Now I'm no earth mother and expressing milk is possibly one of the least fun things you can do with your funbags (one can only assume it is exactly like being milked as a cow, all rather unpleasant and certainly nobody's idea of a good time), but I dug my own hole as Child 1 was breast fed till he was 12 months old and all being fair I suppose Child 2 deserves the same. Well, that was my reasoning anyway for setting myself this exhausting, time consuming and logistically challenging mission.
One particularly fraught Thursday last week, as I was still coming to terms with the newness of my surroundings, workload, timetable etc, I found myself in the unfortunate position of it having reached 3.30pm and not having had an opportunity to express. Needless to say I was up to my eyeballs in unexpressed milk and feeling decidedly woozy.
At that point the tutor suggested we have a 10 minute break. I saw my chance and dashed upstairs to the Equality & Diversity appointed expressing-cum-first-aid room; a sparsely furnished cold, grey box of a room, littered with old filing cabinets with the only defence against a rogue intruder and a hallway full of staring students being a flimsy 'do not disturb' sign on the door.
I whipped out my double action, super suction, hospital-grade breast pump (a frightening contraption) and set to work. Ten minutes later, feeling suitably drained and having produced a pleasing amount of the good stuff I was feeling quite smug about my university/baby-rearing juggling abilities. Of course what should happen two seconds later? In my haste to get back to class I proceded to drop the entire contents of the bottle, causing a veritable tidal wave of milk to spill all over myself and the floor. What a dick.
I returned to class somewhat less smug, but certainly more damp, and feeling decidedly despondent about whether or not it was all actually worth it. But as my husband so glibly put it later that evening, there's no point crying over spilt milk.
Onwards and upwards.
Now I'm no earth mother and expressing milk is possibly one of the least fun things you can do with your funbags (one can only assume it is exactly like being milked as a cow, all rather unpleasant and certainly nobody's idea of a good time), but I dug my own hole as Child 1 was breast fed till he was 12 months old and all being fair I suppose Child 2 deserves the same. Well, that was my reasoning anyway for setting myself this exhausting, time consuming and logistically challenging mission.
One particularly fraught Thursday last week, as I was still coming to terms with the newness of my surroundings, workload, timetable etc, I found myself in the unfortunate position of it having reached 3.30pm and not having had an opportunity to express. Needless to say I was up to my eyeballs in unexpressed milk and feeling decidedly woozy.
At that point the tutor suggested we have a 10 minute break. I saw my chance and dashed upstairs to the Equality & Diversity appointed expressing-cum-first-aid room; a sparsely furnished cold, grey box of a room, littered with old filing cabinets with the only defence against a rogue intruder and a hallway full of staring students being a flimsy 'do not disturb' sign on the door.
I whipped out my double action, super suction, hospital-grade breast pump (a frightening contraption) and set to work. Ten minutes later, feeling suitably drained and having produced a pleasing amount of the good stuff I was feeling quite smug about my university/baby-rearing juggling abilities. Of course what should happen two seconds later? In my haste to get back to class I proceded to drop the entire contents of the bottle, causing a veritable tidal wave of milk to spill all over myself and the floor. What a dick.
I returned to class somewhat less smug, but certainly more damp, and feeling decidedly despondent about whether or not it was all actually worth it. But as my husband so glibly put it later that evening, there's no point crying over spilt milk.
Onwards and upwards.
Sunday 20 October 2013
Reinvention
Damien Hirst once said, you have to reinvent yourself every day. I must say I've been doing a fair bit of reinventing of late.
Making the leap from full-time mum to full-time student has been an exciting and liberating challenge if for no other reason than I've been able to redirect some of my attention away from the kids and onto more intellectual, selfish pursuits. But starting uni in middle-age with a class full of bright, young twenty-somethings is not without its drawbacks.
One of my main problems is that I've opted to attend an art school and art students are so effortlessly goddam hip. I, on the other hand, have spent the past two and half years operating in the role of frumpy house-frau; covered to a large degree in varying amounts of baby food, vomit and other bodily outputs, wearing shapeless, oversized clothing and struggling to maintain any semblance of a decent hairstyle. Now I've suddenly found myself out in the world again, amongst functioning adults and I need to get it together or at the very least remember to look in the mirror before I leave the house in the morning.
As a result of my desire to fit in I've been recently trying to marry the sartorial styles of both mother and student into a whole new look. An updated me.
My latest attempt at art student chic has been to invest in my very first pair of SKINNY jeans. This statement should be accompanied by some kind of elaborate, theatrical sound effect such is the enormity of the occasion. The reason being I've always felt a certain disconnect between myself and anything with the name skinny in it, predominantly due to the size, or perceived size of my midsection. My brothers once helpfully told me as an impressionable teen that I had 'monster truck' thighs (reference to 1990s sumo superstar Sally The Dumptruck) and the image has kind of stuck since.
Anyway I've got to the age where I'm slightly less concerned about how I look. My body image has reached a state of equilibrium with actuality, aided in part by the fact I've now had two kids so couldn't possibly be expected to look as I might have done in my twenties. I'm OK with being a little soft around the edges given what my body has been through over the past couple of years and being able to not only wear skinny jeans but feel pretty good about it is a huge step forward.
As to the new look, am I going to impress anyone with my hip-ness? Probably not. But I'm quietly confident I won't be totally ostracised as an over-the-hill wannabe by my university peers and come home time when I have to line up at the metaphorical school gates I should be able to hold my own with the other mums. That's not to say the odd bit baby vomit won't still make its way onto my clothes every now and then but I guess that's still part of who I am. For now.
To reinvent yourself every day? Nah, too much effort. But every once in a while is fine by me.
Making the leap from full-time mum to full-time student has been an exciting and liberating challenge if for no other reason than I've been able to redirect some of my attention away from the kids and onto more intellectual, selfish pursuits. But starting uni in middle-age with a class full of bright, young twenty-somethings is not without its drawbacks.
One of my main problems is that I've opted to attend an art school and art students are so effortlessly goddam hip. I, on the other hand, have spent the past two and half years operating in the role of frumpy house-frau; covered to a large degree in varying amounts of baby food, vomit and other bodily outputs, wearing shapeless, oversized clothing and struggling to maintain any semblance of a decent hairstyle. Now I've suddenly found myself out in the world again, amongst functioning adults and I need to get it together or at the very least remember to look in the mirror before I leave the house in the morning.
As a result of my desire to fit in I've been recently trying to marry the sartorial styles of both mother and student into a whole new look. An updated me.
My latest attempt at art student chic has been to invest in my very first pair of SKINNY jeans. This statement should be accompanied by some kind of elaborate, theatrical sound effect such is the enormity of the occasion. The reason being I've always felt a certain disconnect between myself and anything with the name skinny in it, predominantly due to the size, or perceived size of my midsection. My brothers once helpfully told me as an impressionable teen that I had 'monster truck' thighs (reference to 1990s sumo superstar Sally The Dumptruck) and the image has kind of stuck since.
Anyway I've got to the age where I'm slightly less concerned about how I look. My body image has reached a state of equilibrium with actuality, aided in part by the fact I've now had two kids so couldn't possibly be expected to look as I might have done in my twenties. I'm OK with being a little soft around the edges given what my body has been through over the past couple of years and being able to not only wear skinny jeans but feel pretty good about it is a huge step forward.
As to the new look, am I going to impress anyone with my hip-ness? Probably not. But I'm quietly confident I won't be totally ostracised as an over-the-hill wannabe by my university peers and come home time when I have to line up at the metaphorical school gates I should be able to hold my own with the other mums. That's not to say the odd bit baby vomit won't still make its way onto my clothes every now and then but I guess that's still part of who I am. For now.
To reinvent yourself every day? Nah, too much effort. But every once in a while is fine by me.
Monday 14 October 2013
Diary of a Part-Time Student/Full-Time Mum...
...or should that read full-time student/part-time mum? Officially, I guess, I'm full-time at both endeavours but as with anything in life don't really have enough time for either. So with that in mind perhaps we should leave it as somewhat of a student and a sometime mother but in all likelihood partially failing on each front.
Some scene setting then. I'm a 30-something (now disappointingly closer to mid than early) married mother of two young kids; a terrific, if emotionally fragile 2-year-old boy henceforth to be known as Child 1 and a (dare I say it?) beautiful 6-month-old baby girl aka Child 2. I recently started a one year full-time masters degree in Public Relations at the London College of Communications in Elephant & Castle and thought to myself what could be better for a sleep deprived, hectically busy student/mum type than adding blogging to my list of things to do. Why not, eh? I'm a woman, I can multi task surely? She says trying to write and eat breakfast at the same time and choking on the latter. This does not bode well.
So everyday, more or less, after dropping the kids off at nursery I enter the Elephant as a frazzled mother of two infants and emerge on the other side a born again student, trying desperately to hold my own in a class with an average age of much younger than myself and not fall asleep during lectures.
Take this blog as a starting point, a statement of intent to document my year long adventure in juggling home and school life. I hope to update once a week but given I intended to begin this three weeks ago we may have to adopt an 'as and when' approach.
Cheers.
Some scene setting then. I'm a 30-something (now disappointingly closer to mid than early) married mother of two young kids; a terrific, if emotionally fragile 2-year-old boy henceforth to be known as Child 1 and a (dare I say it?) beautiful 6-month-old baby girl aka Child 2. I recently started a one year full-time masters degree in Public Relations at the London College of Communications in Elephant & Castle and thought to myself what could be better for a sleep deprived, hectically busy student/mum type than adding blogging to my list of things to do. Why not, eh? I'm a woman, I can multi task surely? She says trying to write and eat breakfast at the same time and choking on the latter. This does not bode well.
So everyday, more or less, after dropping the kids off at nursery I enter the Elephant as a frazzled mother of two infants and emerge on the other side a born again student, trying desperately to hold my own in a class with an average age of much younger than myself and not fall asleep during lectures.
Take this blog as a starting point, a statement of intent to document my year long adventure in juggling home and school life. I hope to update once a week but given I intended to begin this three weeks ago we may have to adopt an 'as and when' approach.
Cheers.
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