Being Babies

Says it all

Look, you need to explain something to me. Why in the fuck is it that we, as a society, are still - still! - discussing women who choose not to have children? Twice lately I have seen big features written by women in national papers explaining why they they've not spawned and the trouble they have when this comes up in conversation. 

Excuse me? Do you think that we, as both a nation and a species, could stop lobbing rocks at the sun for a mo and find something more bloody interesting to talk about? I dunno, the humanitarian crisis in Syria or the social destruction being waged on Britain by the Tories. Anything actually. Anything other than this mouldy fucking chestnut. 

Is it really still such an issue that women choose to not reproduce? That they employ their ability to make intelligent personal decisions? That they allow themselves to experience a life made up of career success, foreign adventures or just plain peace and quiet? Because every time a woman is pushed into explaining her decision to not explode a child from her vag what she is really doing is justifying that she is of some worth beyond being a walking womb. It's as bleakly offensive as a grope from a drunk in a pub. Each is as objectifying as the other.

You know by now that I have spawned to the tune of Kraken Junior, for stunningly complicated reasons that arose from a staggeringly bizarre situation. Yet, until that point I was a woman who had decided to never have kids. I was also a woman who had to explain this basic choice to every fucker who wondered why, at the age of 36, I still wasn't up to my neck in nappies. Christ, how I remember the bewildered stares of people when I told them that I preferred world travel and lazy Sunday mornings to being screamed at by an 8lb shitting machine. The reactions I received made me wonder if I'd actually admitted to some strange sexual fetish or an urge to chuck myself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge. 

Problem is that I never heard anyone discussing why men decide to take careers over kids. Or why men travel the world when they could be watching Peppa fucking Pig instead. No one ever turned to Conjugal Kraken and asked him why he didn't want kids. They'd ask me instead, goggle eyed, as if the freakish decision was mine alone because, God forbid, that a male brain could be involved in such an irrational decision. 

So if we want to genuinely become the progressive society that we already think we are we need to stop giving a shit about what women decide to do with the tennis-ball sized organ that nestles low in their bellies. And we need to start regarding 50 per cent of the population as more than just incubators for the human fucking race. 

So let's cross our fingers for some sense, is it? Oh, and while we're at it let's just accept that sometimes women cross their legs too. 

Mummified

Joanie: My kinda muvver

Look, I've got to admit something, OK? And if you're a Mothercare catalogue kinda kraken-lover you'd better gird yourself. Here you go: I can't stand talking to other mothers. No really, I can't fucking bear it. Now I don't mean my mates who are mums and I don't mean the few mates I have made through Kraken Junior. I mean the whole school gate brigade. I just want them to leave me the frig alone.
I felt it this morning when I took KJ to her new school for a link-up sesh and I feel it every day when I pick her up from her current venue of enforced labour. Seriously, when there are 30 mums queuing up for the 3pm bell, all nattering about the cost of kids shoes or their vaginal sagginess, I'm the one deliberately standing on my own with anything from a good book to a lengthy nose-pick. It's infinitely more interesting.
Now, I know this makes me look like a standoffish kind of kraken but that's the way I like it. I have no fucking interest whatsoever in any child except my own and those of my dear mates. I really don't give a shit all the others. And the thing is, until their mothers start talking about something of interest, I really don't give a shit about them either. See, I told you to gird yourself, didn't I?
Thing is, expecting women get on just because they are mothers is like expecting all brown-haired people to be mates or all disabled people to forge lifelong friendships. The only thing we have in common is that we've shouted obscenities at a random midwife and that does not a friendship make. 
Anyway, talking about kids over and over again is not what I want from my chumships. Who in the fuck wants an entire afternoon's discussion about the firmness of Little Johnny's turds? I want to talk about politics, careers, music, art, sex and cake and any other subject that actively doesn't get out of bed at 4am just to ask me when Santa's coming back.
Y'know, I recall being coerced into attending a mother and baby group when Kraken Junior had just emerged from her festering shell. It was one of the most hideous moments of my existence. After weeks of fuck all but leaky tits, soaring bewilderment and clambering exhaustion I thought it would be a chance for intelligent conversation with other wimmin. Fuckadoodledo, was I wrong. It was a room bereft of intelligent anything. It was, however, a void into which a collection of females all pitched their random thoughts about feeding, sleeping, nappies, feeding, sleeping, nappies. And as I watched I had the most horrific thought: "Is this it? Is this what I should talk about now that I have spawned?" needless to say, I wrestled the live mouse out of KJ's mouth and took off, never, ever returning to that lair of the damned.
So, yeah, I sound like a kraken hag but spare me, will you? More importantly, spare me the endless kid chat. I don't care now and I never will. Really, readers, you have been warned.

Girl Talk

Go the frig away

I was the distraught recipient of terrible news today, care of a certain Kraken Junior, for she has informed me that when she grows up she wants to be a...princess.
A princess. A fucking princess. What sort of ambition is that for any sentient being? After all the times I've talked about space travel and authoring and construction and athletics she has still decided that she wants to be the equivalent of the horrifically benign Kate frigging Middleton.
In much the same way that I would be mortified if she were to become a Tory, KJ's preferred career choice makes me want to sob into the balled up hopes and dreams that I have for her. I know, I know, she's four and she's going to change her mind a thousand times (Christ knows, I'm 41 and still don't know what I want to do when I grow up), but what if this is it? What if KJ has already decreed that her life is to be one of pouty tuffet-sitting, X-Factor entries and professional vajazzling?
What if this candy-floss career attempt actually pulls off? I blame those horrific magazines she's seen. No, not Heat or Hello but Princess, that schmaltzy and offensive rag that's stuffed with coy looking Princesses from Disney films, you know with names like Belle and Aurora. 
On the rare occasion that she's managed to get her sweaty paws on this ambition-smothering shit I've been forced to take things into my own hands, namely by finding pictures of said princesses and drawing  mortar boards, books, test tubes and trainers on them. I then go on to explain to KJ that only dimwits want to be princesses and why don't we get the chemistry set out now?
Look, it's not that I'm a pushy cow of a kraken. It's just that I can see how, at every turn, girls are force fed these stinking fucking images of what society wants them to be; pneumatic, silly pushovers. It's my job to create a balance by offering KJ the opposing image of women as intelligent, strong and go-getting. Princess magazine sure as shit doesn't do this so I'm having to do it instead.
So I've decided not to fret over this crinoline draped beast that KJ wants to become. I have every faith that she'll be the lucky recipient of common sense and run a mile from anything that involves a lifetime of daintiness. Or she'll have me to answer to and, guess what? Dainty I ain't.

Cling-Ons

Blimey. Splashed all over today's news is a picture of the missing Madeleine McCann. It's a mock-up of how she would look today at the age of nine, five years after her disappearance from a hotel in Portugal while on holiday with her parents and twin siblings. Fuckadoodledo if this isn't most spine-chilling story for anyone who's experienced an exploded vagina, or at least witnessed one. I have one nagging problem with it though...

You know, even five years after the event and the thousand times I have envisaged how I would react if Kraken Junior disappeared (badly. Terminally badly), I still can't get my sweating brain over how Maddie and her siblings were left alone in the hotel room while their parents went out for dinner. Yes, yes, yes, I know that the restaurant was just across the pool from the room and that the parents checked on the kids every half an hour but, fuck me...is that really a risk worth taking?

Aye, it's easy to become dangerously obsessed with your kids to the point that you could accidentally become conjoined. I never quite rest unless I can see or at least hear Kraken Junior, hollering my location across the house at her if I so much as go for a shit. It's the same wherever we go and whatever bollocks we do. In the summer I love evenings in the garden but my creeping fear that KJ could need me while I'm casually flicking my snot into the grass keeps me in earshot and close to the back door. 

So it's utterly beyond me that I would ever leave her in an unlocked room hotel room while I dined with mates, even if said eaterie was so much as a burger van ten yards away. 

Ok, Ok, so this says way more about my insecurity than it could about the life-changing mess the McCanns have been pitched into, but isn't just the vague perception of danger enough to make a parent careful to the point of insanity? Isn't it the same cold fear that drives us to always put babies to sleep on their backs and makes us rush, screeching, to A&E when our firstborns develop strange rashes?

This is in no way a condemnation of the McCanns. Fuck knows if they haven't already turned themselves inside out and punished themselves daily for what has befallen them. It's an existence that I can't even imagine surviving. Yet I still find myself taken by the urge to shake them and ask, "What? What were you thinking?"

Tragedies can happen to anyone. Shit slops down onto the most virtuous of parents. But sometimes it pays to keep up an umbrella, even if this makes us laughably and embarrassingly cautious. I realise how nuts my motherly radar makes me look and how I could probably do with releasing the reins but, on the offchance - even the vaguest most absurd offchance - that something goes terribly and horrifically wrong, I'll keep clinging on, thanks. 

KJ is the same age that Maddie was when she disappeared. I don't want to have to imagine her from her on in. I'd rather see her in all her snotty glory and for that I'll never, ever understand what the McCanns are thinking now, and most of all, when they were thinking then.

Hot Stuff

Burning issue, my arse

You know, I really do try to not fall into the idiotic trap of hating anyone under the age of 18 but this week, I'm afraid, I've reneged on this personal promise of mine. Yeah, yeah, I hate myself but I've been privy to some of the most wankish yoof behaviour I've ever seen.
This week I've had to call the Fire Service three times because I've witnessed teenage boys setting fire to the hillside opposite my home. For fuck's sake. It happens every Easter after a dry spell when the molina grass on the hillside is nature's equivalent of barbecue briquettes. I even wrote about it for The Times two years ago because it's such a bastard problem. The arson, I mean, not the bloody grass.
Anyway, I've had the harrowing opportunity to view idle yoofs at their best as they walk along said hillside with a lit branch setting alight to tufts of grass. And by alight I mean really fucking alight. I'm on about rapidly spreading blazes that take hours to put out because they engulf the entire hillside. On one evening this week in the time it took for me to dial 999 these troll-like fuckers had lit five small fires along a path. By the time the Fire Service had the chance to dispatch an engine, get it close to the hillside and then trudge to the top with their fire-beaters the blaze was razing entire trees to the ground.
Why in the fuck would anyone do this? Why? When I researched my Times article I found that it's mainly a social and cultural problem. I'd still kick the little fuckers into submission if I could get my hands on them though.
For a start, what in the fuck is with yomping up into the local woods to set fire to a few acres? How blindingly bored and stupid would you have to be? Jesus, I could be idle to the point of counting my own pubic stubblings and not come up with such a cock-headed idea of entertainment. And what's with the parental supervision? Yeah, I know you can't keep an eye on everything but don't the parents of these little shits notice when they come home stinking of smoke? That clearly didn't happen this week because the three consecutive evenings that fires were started, the same little fuckers were the arsonists. 
Funnily enough, a mate of mine is a fire fighter and he's been dispatched to these very fires year-in, year-out. He's also chased an arsonist, catching the little fucker and handing him over the the police. Problem is, the police refuse to do anything with 'em because they're so reluctant to get involved with the problem. It involves them having to put down their doughnuts or something.
All of which means it's up to the likes of me and the Fire Service to keep the town from going up in smoke. I don't have an answer to the problem but I do have some rather scorching ideas about how to make the fire-lighting fuckers pay. I don't know if tying them to trees and chucking lit matches at them would do any good but it would make me feel one hell of a lot better. At least the pee running down their legs would help put out the flames. And who knows, it might teach them a lesson or two while we're at it.

Again?

That bloody stork...

Tell you what is the oddest thing I've found about my single season of spawning, it's that getting knocked up after 20 years of infertility just isn't enough for some people. I still get asked when I'm going to have 'another one'. By another one, I take it to mean child rather than breakdown although there is certainly room in my life for another trip to the psych unit. 
So in an effort to allow the world to move on, I'm laying out my top five reasons for never, ever creating another human being ever again, ever. I said ever, d'you hear? Here, my little kraken lovers, you go:
1. As a woman who, post partum, lost her plot so profoundly that deep sea submersibles were drafted in to recover it, I will officially be fucked if I am going through all that again. 
2. One exploded vagina is quite enough for one lifetime. Women say that you forget the pain of labour. Ha, I'll be fucked. Every single day I remain grateful that I will never again have to feel a Winnebago reversing out of my love tunnel. 
3. Why in the frig would I want to be left in charge of a newborn again? It was the most horrifying, confusing and exhausting twelve-month of my existence. Jesus, it'd be like soldiers returning to Kabul for a reunion bombing, ie. plain sodding stupid.
4. No, I never understood which cry meant hunger and which cry meant taking a shit, so every time Kraken Junior opened her mouth I was pitched into a panic-stricken bout of tick-boxing. The guesswork. Oh Jesus, the guesswork. 
5. Creche fees. Do you realise that, had we not spawned, we could have spent the creche fees on three round-the-world trips on a cocktail-laden, gold-plated magic carpet and still have come home with enough change to buy an island such as Australia? 
So hopefully this is enough of an explanation to allay the fears of those who think we are taking our time in producing yet another little kraken. There will be no other little kraken. We are kraken-lite. Not least because the little kraken that we do have just can't be bloody beat.

Timber!

We're going for
something small this year

Tomorrow we're decorating the kraken cave with a Christmas tree. I tell you this because it might be useful information when the police ask for witnesses. Personally I'd put the tree up at 9pm on Crimbo Eve and then saw up the fucker at 9am on Boxing Day but with Kraken Junior in her fully festive mode that's out of the question. 
Ironically, I used to love shoving an expensive spruce into the corner of the living room and festooning it with flammable tat. Now, while I long to love the day of erection (as it were) I know that doing it with a three year old who's stamping on baubles/ chewing tinsel/ crying because the fairy is the wrong shade of pink is a complete and utter fucker. Yes, it should be a day of great joy where we share the hanging of lights, conjure up fabulous displays of glitter and then gaze adoringly at our creation as it twinkles but c'mon will you? It's more likely to end as it did last year with me sobbing on the doorstep while stabbing myself in the foot with the sharpest plastic star I could find.
And that's the thing about Crimbo with kids isn't it? Yeah, it's a joy to see how excited they get at seeing Santa and to watch their faces on Crimbo morn. Yet it's also a complete bastard when they refuse to eat their turkey dinner because the stuffing isn't the right colour and throw an almighty wobbly at 3pm because exhaustion has stolen their brains.
It's the same business with the tree. In my imagination it's a scene from a Bing Crosby festive bonanza. In reality it's just a scene from, well, Bonanza. Except where the Injuns win. 
Now go dial 999 and forewarn the police. And tell them to bring a chainsaw.

Yoof

Then stamp on it

Christ on a bike if my heavily medicated spirit has just taken another small, yet everlasting, kicking. Why? Read the conversation I've just had with Kraken Junior. And weep:
Me: "Look! Your Tinkerbell comic has a fairy mobile that we can make!"
KJ: "A mobile? Can we play with it?"
Me: "Course. Want me to put it together for you?"
KJ: "Yeah. Can we call someone after that?"
Me: "Eh?"
KJ: "Call someone. On the mobile phone you're making."
As sure as shit slides off a shovel, this has to be the most disheartening fucking conversation I've had in something like 30 years. KJ is three years of age and she thought I was talking about a mobile phone. How the fuck did that happen? We read her books about bears and pirates! We spend hour after fucking hour spilling glitter across the floor! She thinks thunder and lightening is caused by Santa taking a dump! 
When the fuck did technology overtake all that's good and innocent about dangling fairies off her ceiling by making KJ think I was fashioning a mobile communication device from the pages of a bloody magazine? 
Start praying for the safety of the next gimp who tries to flog me a mobile phone, will you? Or it'll be them that KJ finds dandling from the frigging ceiling.

A Child's Portion?

Dry heave on the count of three

Shit on a shovel! I, The Kraken, witnessed a harrowing sight today while scoffing lunchtime fodder in Frankie and Benny's. And I'll be fucked if you'll see it on a Disney channel anytime soon...
A boy n a girl came in and plonked themselves opposite Conjugal Kraken, Kraken Junior and myself while we were face down in the trough. Now these kids were aged about 11 although fuck knows what their real ages were. With those Bieber-like mops they could have been heavily disguised 50-something train drivers. Anyhoo, after shoving themselves into a booth they proceeded fumble with their Blackberries before fumbling with each other. Aye, fumbling, of the conjugal kind. So far, so Kidulthood. Then the waiter came over and you know what they did? In the manner befitting two young loves enchanted with each others' nooks and crannies they ordered food...off the children's menu.
The children's menu! But seconds before ordering their chicken nuggets and fruit juice they'd been re-ordering their own chicken nuggets in the privacy of their own crotches. I didn't know whether to offer them teeny tiny condoms or extra large crayons. I'd have handed them a wet wipe although fuck knows what they'd have done with it.
It was like witnessing the crossfire of childhood and adulthood. I dare say that they're tucked up in bed by now (8pm) although I hope to Christ it's not with each other. I mean, where the fuck will the teddy bear sleep?