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.

Food Fight

Just. Eat. It.

Here's my horrifying secret: I've been trying to poison Kraken Junior. You know, slipping digitalis and crushed yew berries into her Petits Filous, watching her wilt and pale over the following months...Well, at least that's what you'd think had been happening if you were to overhear her squealing tones during any given frigging mealtime. I mean, what in the fuck is with her increasingly queer culinary demands?
It's like feeding a panicky Saddam Hussain: the peas can't touch the gravy; the sauce can't touch the sausages; the mash can't have potato skin in it; the parsley sauce mustn't contain 'bits'; the spag bol must have the onion picked out of it; the yoghurt must be pink; the mice must be alive; the goats must be virgins...Jesus Christ, Karen Carpenter would have been easier to feed. 
So what, exactly, will happen if any of these arbitrary rules are suddenly and recklessly transgressed? If Kraken Junior's bug-eyed terror is anything to go by a hole will be torn in the fabric of the universe and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will gallop through. If my bug-eyed frustration is anything to go by the social services will be called in and I'll make headline news with my swirling cudgel. 
I don't give into 98 per cent of these deranged grumblings. I'll be utterly fucked if I'm going to spend ten minutes of my time plucking the parsley out of the fish sauce. If I wanted to serve royalty I'd enrol at Eton and toss onto a digestive. 
Course, this whole frigging rigmarole happens every day and, worse, with food Kraken Junior loves. So it matters not if I knock up a glorious pile of sausage and mash. Should the gravy be pooled around the curling bangers rather than over them the sun will suddenly darken, locusts will start battering at the windows, and Kraken Junior will be greeted with a stout, "For fuck's sake!". An Enid Blyton picnic it ain't.
I'm going to start presenting Kraken Junior with the contents of a compost heap to show her what it's really like to be fed inedibles. A couple of slugs and decomposing pondweed should do it. Oh and some digitalis and yew berries. That should really give her something to holler about. 

Twitchers

On a quiet day

Why in the fuck didn’t anyone tell me that when I gave birth it would not be to a human being but to a perpetual motion machine? You know, I once saw a perpetual motion machine at the Boston Science Museum. I thought it was a work of genius. Genius, my hairy arse. Next to four year old Kraken Junior it’s got all the motion of my lower bowel after a large omelette.

Jesus, how can anything move so much and so often without being experimented on in a laboratory? Kraken Junior is never knowingly conscious and still. She jigs, twitches, dances, waggles and jerks and that’s just when she’s sitting at the table to eat. I’m seriously wondering whether she’s missing a substantial part of her sweltering brain.

The fact is that this endless bouncing of hers is driving me around the fucking twist. It’s like being tortured by the Iraqis, you know where you get woken up every five minutes to partake of disturbing images. I swear I have to leave her company at regular intervals just to rest my eyeballs. They spin in my ocular nooks like an aging raver on bad skag.

Course, it’s great that she’s an active little kraken but she’s burning off calories faster than I can wedge them into her. I’m starting to wish she was one of the fat kids who spend eight hours a day glued to the telly. At least she’d be in the same position after each of my fevered blinks.

So, is this normal? Does every four year old twitch as if they’ve wedged a piece of Lego up their fundament? And if so, how in the frig am I, the Kraken, expected to survive it, especially seeing as polite society frowns upon the use of basements and restraints?

Oh, don’t tell me. Resistance is futile, isn’t it? So instead of fighting it perhaps I can turn it to my advantage. Once I get Conjugal Kraken to pin her down I’m going to surgically attach mop heads and dusters to her ever-frisking limbs before retiring to my bed. Kraken Junior can be put to good use, the cave will finally stay clean and I can sport a cold flannel over my eyes for the next ten years. Win win, innit. Well, innit?

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.

Back to Normal
Thank fuck for Jennifer Garner, actress, wife of Ben Badflick and now mother to three Flicklets. Here is a photo of her mere days n weeks after spawning her third child. And doesn't she look gloriously normal? Her hair is scraped back, she's hiding her eyebags with shades and she's layered up to the max to hide her still-bulging tum. 
She's also got a fucking huge smile on her face because, hopefully, she just doesn't give a shit that she isn't already back into a size 8 bandage dress and six-inch heels.
This is what women should look like just days after shouting obscenities at a midwife. Forget the twisted 'normality' of Beyonce and Victoria Beckham. Garner's, bless her glorious chops, has got it spot on.

Motherly Madness

Chuck yourself on, why don't you?

You know, as a mother I've been privy to all sorts of child-rearing bollocks, but fuck it. If a mother wants to breastfeed until her kid's graduation, I really couldn't give a shit. Yet (yeah, you knew it was coming) there is one trait displayed by some mothers that makes me twitch violently: self-imposed martyrdom.
Sorry, but I find motherly martyrdom so fucked up that my brain sweats when I think about it. And by martyrdom I mean that thing when some mothers proudly announce that they haven't shaved their legs/ cut their hair/ moisturised in four years because they love their kids too much to spare the time. 
I'm not banging on about being too busy to take a shit. Jesus, that's all of us. I'm talking about the giant, flag-waving gesture of renouncing the person you really are because this, apparently, makes you a better mother. 
Look, motherhood changes everyone, and not just from the ladygarden down. But this notion that you have to sacrifice yourself in some ritual burning of your entire pre-kid life and personality is about as healthy as chewing glass. I've watched some mothers wither away after adopting this wild-eyed notion and it's abso-fucking-lutely terrifying. 
When I got knocked up I promised myself that, whatever chaos raged, I would always put on my mascara, just because it reminds me that I matter too. I know! The audacity! And fuck me if I've stayed true to my word, even when it's been done to the tune of infant shrieking. 
See, I'm the opposite of martyred mothers. I take pride in taking time to paint my toenails. And no, this doesn't make me a less caring, loving mother, as much as my blog makes some of you want to call Social Services. In fact it contributes to the notion that all of us, in this little kraken family, matter. Not just Kraken Junior, but I, the Kraken, and Conjugal Kraken too. And that means we all grab a slice of the happiness rather than handing it lock, stock n barrel to Kraken Junior for her to snot all over it. What in the fuck would be the good of that?
So can we pour cold water over these personality pyres that some mothers light when their offspring slop from their bodies? It's like some twisted form of imprisonment, with the kids rattling the keys. Fuck knows, motherhood can be cruel enough as it is don'tcha think?

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.

Sleeptalking

Yeah, knackered.

Look, before I start, I want you to know that I've always despised this club mentality of parenting. You know the sort of thing, that because you haven't squeezed another human being out of your vag you can't possibly understand what it's like to live in chaos or rinse shit from under your nails. I hated all of that before Kraken Junior slopped into my life and I still hate it now.
However, and I am really fucking sorry about this, there is just one club rule to which I subscribe and that is to know the true meaning of sleep deprivation. Really, until you've had a kid or been tortured by the Iraqis you just haven't even got a vague understanding of what it means. That's because the term 'sleep deprivation' only tells half the story. The phrase should read 'sleep deprivation and an avalanche of screeching chaos to deal with as the shit-laden nappies and puke-riddled muslins pile up around your feet'.
See, it's because parental sleep deprivation isn't just about being awake in the night. It's about being awake and having an infant scream at you every hour until dawn as you feed/ change/ jig it through the tears of your exhaustion. For six days in a row. And then having to do all the usual kid-rearing crap during the day too. No lie-ins, no catch-ups, no cat-naps. Just endless mind-tearing torment. What the fuck the Americans are doing with waterboarding is beyond me. Just give the Guantanamo inmates a shrieking, purple, colicky newborn at 3am and they'd be spilling secrets like dropped Smarties.
And no, until you have done it you don't know how it feels. Fuck knows, you can't even start to imagine what it is like. I've had mates attempt a comparison with such gems as, "Oooh, I know how you feel. I was out clubbing until 5am last week!" or, "Oh I know, the blood dustman wakes me up at 7am every Thursday morning".
Excuse me? Are you out of your tiny frigging minds? Do you honestly think that choosing to snog and booze your way though a weekend with your mates is in any way comparable to being woken every hour by a raging offspring? Or averaging three hours a night for a month? No, no, no, no, no. And again, hell no. 
I'm afraid parental sleep deprivation is the equivalent of conquering Everest or having a car fall on you. Until it happens you haven't got a fucking clue what it feels like. Imagine having your senses ripped out through a hole in the top of your head and then run over by a shit-covered dumpster truck driven by Jonathan Aitken. Then scrap that analogy because it doesn't even come near it.
So while the 'club' is one that I'll never join, I'll give it the nod over this 'un. Or perhaps I'm just too fucking tired to get my arse in my hand for once.

If I've Said it Once...

You reckon?

You know what's really fucking hard about parenting? The repetition. Endless, bottomless, infinite repetition. Not so much in actions but in speech. If I say one thing to Kraken Junior every day I probably say it a thousand sodding times, usually twice before she responds and three times before she acts. By which time I'm physically smashing my head against the nearest hard surface at the scorching frustration of it all.
Do you know what phrases I use the most in any given 24 hour period? Do you care? Too bad, because, in a stunning fit of irony, I intend to repeat them here:

• Teeth! Teeth!
• Can you actually hear me?
• Just because, that's why.
• Shoes!
• Just sit still to eat your tea.
• Hands!
• You want what?
• Come. Back. Here. NOW!
• No, just two stories.
• For. Fuck's. Sake.
• Do you need a wee?
• You tit
• I said slow down!
• Just give me one bloody minute, OK?
• Do you need a poo?
• Can't I have a shit in peace?
• I love you.
• I need a drink.

This is it. This is frigging it, the soundtrack to my life. It used to be the latest from the Ministry of Sound or Pete Tong but now it's the endless fucking barking of instructions at a four year old who swears blind that she knows better than her 40 year old mater.
In fact, said repetition has even turned me hoarse. There have been nights when Kraken Junior got just one short story because my voice wouldn't have survived even more infuriating repetition by way of We're Going on a Bear Hunt or the bloody Gruffalo.
Jesus, and they say having kids broadens your outlook.Well, it does exactly the frigging opposite to your skills of erudition. Conversationally I've regressed about thirty years since KJ slopped into the delivery room. Oddly enough, the first words she heard were "For! Fuck's! Sake!" and "I need a drink". Yup, I should have known even then.

Only the Lonely

A better kraken than me

Whoa there, Great Britain, hold your frigging horses. What the frig is with the demonisation of single mothers, then, eh? Have all 62,218,761 of you lost your Daily Mail-poisoned minds? Because if you ask me single mothers should be kissed on the collective arse, what with them inhabiting the seventh circle of hell otherwise known as being the permanent and sole target for feeding duties/ tower building/ bum wiping.
What I mean is, I'm struggling to raise a kid with the help of Conjugal Kraken and assorted family members. How the fuck women do it when they are completely alone is beyond me. When do they ever get to drink a hot cup of tea? Or get dressed? Or take a shit?
Christ, I haven't taken a shit on my own for four years. How I'd manage if I was the only parent available to said offspring fills me with the sort of terror that turns my bladder icy. Seriously, it'd be me wearing the nappies just so I could get through the day.
And how the frig do single mums manage when they've come down with the lurgi? Just the thought of it makes me weep. Imagine crapping and puking your way through days of gastroenteritis all while building marble runs and grilling chicken nuggets? At what point, pray, would you get the chance to lay face down on the floor of the bathroom and weep yourself to death?
Really, it's a mystery to me how single mothers aren't single-handedly keeping therapists and counsellors in gold bullion. I sprinted over the edge even with a phalanx of willing assistants. Without them I'd have barely left the delivery room. In fact I'd probably have been transported straight from there to the psych unit just to save on the middlemen.
Which is why ripping apart these women is so pitifully short sighted. Forgetting the political and moral blatherings, they're working about as hard as it's possible to work without visiting a Gulag camp. And, OK, if they have fucked up on the procreation front, it's safe to say that they're frigging well paying for it when they've had four hours sleep for ten days in a row.
In fact, they don't need the pitchfork waving masses to point out pitfalls of single motherhood. I dare say the downside crosses their mind 40 times a day, like when one hand is filled with shitty wet wipes, the other hand is holding a wrigging baby and they need another hand to...oh.
So let's just give the babymama bashing a rest eh? Think about your own parental chaos and wonder how the fuck you'd have managed on your own. I dare your bladder to survive the sudden onset of an ice age. Brrrr.

Oh, Baby

Pasties all round

Blimey. I watched Jeremy Kyle over my porridge this morning and I almost choked on the boy Quaker. What's with these women who tell their partners that their offspring may not be theirs before quibbling that the terminally bewildered men aren't doing their bit in the childrearing stakes? Girls, are you for fucking real? Or are you just hard of thinking?

Firstly, it seems - from this and my other skirmishes with the ringmaster Kyle - that these idiot women fall into two categories. There are those who genuinely don't know who the dad is and those who holler the killer blow during an argument just because they've run out of expletives to lob. Either way, the blokes end up nursing mammoth amounts of doubt that invariably lead them to breakfast time soul bearing on national television.

Thing is, so many of the women who find themselves at the heart of this procreative chaos then proceed to rip the shit out of their stupefied partners because they haven't "stepped up the plate" or "been a man" when it comes to plunging their hands into shit-stuffed nappies.

Girls, what in the fuck do you expect? No, really, exactly what is it that you want these pasty faced blokes to do? Ignore the fact that you claimed to have got knocked up by someone else before taking on the life-changing responsibility of raising another man's child? Christ, that's one fuck of a leap of faith, don't you think? I mean, if your bloke came home with a baby that he'd sired during an affair and asked you to raise it as your own, would you? No, darlin', quite.

Worse, so often these girls seem to accept a stunningly paltry amount of responsibility for their actions. They drop these baby bombs, raising their heavily plucked eyebrows and shrugging "What? What're you blaming me for?" before banging on about plate stepping again.

Problem with saying this stuff out loud is that it automatically turns you into a Daily Mail columnist. It's looks like just one other thing to bash women with. This time, though, the women who do this are genuinely misguided. Cowering behind dated ideals that men are always in the wrong and can be blamed even for their girls shagging about is so deeply irresponsible that makes my brain sweat. 

And yeah, there are plenty of men out there who don't do their bit, knocking up women before washing their hands of them. But two wrongs don't make a right and, anyway, that's another sweary blog post entirely.

So girls, put your brains in will you? If you don't want to spend your prime yelling at a bloke for not doing what you told him was not his responsibility, keep your mouth shut. Oh, and your knickers up. 

Knocked Up

My kind of baby bump

You'll be thrilled to hear that this weekend I read something that made my head explode. It was an agony aunt-type column about a woman who was suffering depression after giving birth to the child she thought she'd never have. And all I can say is hallel-fucking-ujah.
You know, I actually, really and truly thought that I was on the only person who had gone through this. After a thousand years of a health problem that had caused infertility, somehow I managed to get knocked up. Problem was that when the rest of the world was rejoycing about my miracle baby and how I'd managed to kick the odds up the arse I was plunging into the mental health equivalent of a nuclear meltdown over the sudden destruction of my identity.
Within 60 seconds of wizzing on a pregnancy testing kit I'd gone from being a 36 year-old, happily infertile woman to a 36 year-old mother-to-be. And this, after twenty years of being told that it would be easier for me to climb the Eiffel Tower with my tongue than have kids. 
Jesus, no wonder I went on to have a breakdown. Thing is, while my body was playing host to the burgeoning form of Kraken Junior, my brain was playing keepy-uppy with the pre-pregnancy, career-chasing, travel-loving Kraken. Talk about the perfect fucking storm. It's no wonder that the first time I felt KJ kick my hand through my belly I screamed with horror. 
Worse, everyone was so deranged with joy at my news that my mental carnage went unnoticed. I was told a million times that I must be thrilled, that my baby was here for a reason or that I was unbelievably lucky. All of which, while heartfelt and natural reactions, made things even worse. Not only was I not coping with the fact that I had gone to sleep one person and woken up another but now I was the mam-to-be of some Christ-like figure who was here for some mysterious and wonderful reason. How the fuck the Virgin Mary never lost the plot is beyond me. I'd have kicked the donkey to death and told the three wise men to go fuck themselves.
Problem is, no one ever thinks to ask how you are feeling at times like this. It's assumed that you are with child and therefore must be chuffed to fuck. It's not that black n white though is it? Pregnancy tests don't come complete with party poppers. I was about as far from chuffed to fuck as I could get without being on Death Row. It's just that no one knew it. Anyway, how do you tell people who are actually, physically skipping about at the news that they need to take it down a peg or two? Well, don't ask me. I still haven't got a bloody clue.
Course, now that KJ is here, running amok and asking 'why?' like she has exclusive rights to the frigging word, I can see that she is the best thing in the world. But before you sit back in your chair to give me a satisfying I-told-you-so I've paid a heavy price for it. I've had nine months of panic, four years of depression, two career collapses, several thousand milligrams of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, ten months of therapy and one breakdown that's wiped out the person I used to be forever. 
But yeah, KJ did come here for a reason. And if that reason was to ask me daily why cups are round or what makes yellow not red, then I've seen the light. It just blinds me sometimes, that's all.

Candy Floss

Almost but not quite

Pink, pink, pink and more fucking pink. This, I'm afraid to say, is life with a four year old female of the species. Pink everywhere. No, really, every-frigging-where. Until she was born our laundry piles were divided into whites and darks. Now it's whites, darks and fucking pinks. 
It would be easier to avoid the grim reaper that it would be to avoid your daughter becoming mesmerised by the colour pink. I reckon Kraken Junior is less child and more black hole, slowly sucking into her all that's pink in the world. Seriously, she's got an event horizon that would put cosmological phenomena to shame. I'm even avoiding redecorating her -currently lime green - bedroom because there's a vile inevitability in her wanting to turn it pink. Jesus, it'd be like creating a giant, walk-in cervix. Stick her in the right clothes and she'd so match her environment that we'd need heat-seeking equipment to find her.
That's why I've started buying her boys' clothes, because unless she starts wearing blues, yellows, greens and reds she'll turn some strange strain of colour blind. You know how pit ponies stop being used to the light? Kraken Junior will stop being used to anything that doesn't resemble a crushed fucking raspberry.
I blame social stereotypes. If you should want to dress, feed or entertain your child first you have to chose between pinks and blues. Seriously, you want to buy a set of pyjamas, prepare to be funnelled into one or t'other. Or perhaps you want to buy a bike? Then make your choice. Jesus Christ, Kraken Junior even has a trampoline that's pink.
And yeah, this pinky overkill is partly down to myself and Conjugal Kraken buying the stuff but, for fuck's sake, sometimes you get sick of fighting your way upstream and just give in. Ok, Ok, it's weak willed but you try tussling with ethical dilemmas when you've had five hours sleep and are arguing the toss with a toddler in the middle of a heaving Asda. You'll give into fucking anything, just to get out alive. She could ask me for a chainsaw and I'd shove one in the trolley just to snag four (that many?) seconds of peace.
So pink has one frig of a lot to answer for. It's turning my kid into a walking strawberry sundae. Stick a Flake in her gob and Mr Whippy could flog her from a van. Well, at least the music would be Greensleeves.

Baby Talk

Oh, the glamour!

Wonders never bloody cease, do they? I’ve just been privy to an absurd debate on how the MTV shows 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom glamorise teenage pregnancy. Shit on a stick, it was like listening to common sense and intelligence spiral down the plughole.

Have these people ever seen the shows? If they have while simultaneously witnessing anything that encouraged teenagers to get knocked up then I’ll willingly let them take their pick of any of my vital organs. I’ve watched the shows since they first clogged up MTV and I’ll be fucked if I can remember a single moment of glamour. In fact all I can remember is broken hearted parents, abandoned 15-year old girls, feckless boyfriends, screeching infants, resentful 3am feeds and fuck all chance of a decent education this side of Russell Grant being straight.

So tell me, which part of this is glamorous?  At what point would any half-sentient teenager watch these shows and think, “what a fucking great idea! If I’m pregnant by November I can be dumped, broke, uneducated and friendless by Christmas. Whoo-oo!”

I’ve even heard the argument that these shows encourage teenage pregnancy. Are you for fucking real? Encourage pregnancy? What, by wooing viewers with graphic scenes of teenagers tearing their vaginas during childbirth? Or by wowing them with the blazing rows they could have with boyfriends who swear the kids aren’t theirs? Look, if this stuff encourages some girls to get pregnant then may I put forward the idea that said girls are unlikely to be chucking away great careers as physicists or diplomats as a result. Instead they’re probably so bat shit crazy that they’re an insult to bat shit.

Problem is, this argument is reeled out whenever any TV show or film addresses the shittier side of life. Chuck a scene about drugs, booze or sex into a show and suddenly we’re glamorising anything from overdoses to abortions. Oh spare me. No fucker ever complains that Eastenders glamorises the soul-sucking boredom of running a market stall on the square you are born and will die on, do they? And frankly, I find the encouragement of the latter way more worrying than the encouragement of the former.

So turn your ire on something a little more deserving, you soothsaying nutbags. When you see a show that rewards pregnant 12 year olds with duffel bags of cash and a shag with Justin Bieber feel free to holler. Until then, try rescuing your common sense from that plughole, if it’s not too late.

Mothering Heights

My kind of girl

Have you any idea, kraken-fumblers, how much I loath and detest the term 'yummy mummy'? Well, if you didn't before you will now, bless your poor, poor souls.
What a vile fucking concept this yummy mummydom is. It's no longer enough to be a mother, you now have to be a mother who is fragrant, delightful, erudite and, all in all, some mythical creature who has never been near a nipple pad in her life. It's utter bollocks, of course, and just another way of women bashing the fuck out of each other rather than just getting with the endless to-do list that they're already embroiled with every day of their lives.
Why the fuck does anyone want to add the burden of being yummy to the already crippling responsibility of being a mummy? Look at it this way: we, mothers, have already grown another human being, developed size 24 arses, had our vaginas poked/ stretched/ torn, shat on the delivery table with the effort of it all, leaked milk from our tits, fed another human from our tits, gone bananas to the tune of PND, survived on two hours sleep a night, wept with exhaustion over tasks as basic as getting dressed, swapped sex for Benjamin fucking Bunny and blown cosmic sized holes in our careers. And now you want us to look pretty too? Go, as they say, fuck yourself.
This yummy mummy malarchy is yet another unachievable myth, of course. Worse, it makes women feel like dribbling failures if their school run shoes have anything less than three inch heels. Excuse me?
I see women who have achieved this myth as the biggest victims of all. For fuck's sake, how much effort must it take? And why don't they have anything better to do with their time? The likes of Victoria Beckham are praised for their perfect mummydom but all I see is a woman so cowed by this image that she's not allowed to leave the house unless she's catwalk ready. Who, I ask you, wants a life like that? It's amazing VB has time to take a shit. Most mothers don't and that's when they haven't seen the business end of a mascara wand for three months. How the fuck you do it while matching you spring wardrobe with your new Laboutins is beyond me.
Funny thing is, I have a picture of myself and Kraken Junior by my bed and the frame has the words Yummy Mummy written on it. It was given to me when my fanny stitches still meant that I had to pee with my head lower than my pelvis just to stop the stinging (you work it out). I now revel in how the frame and picture are poles apart. It's my daily act of seething rebellion. My smiling face is hiding the rapid onset of severe PND and what would become visiting rights to the local psychiatric unit. That's about as yummy as I managed to get. And that's about as yummy as I'd like to stay, if it's all the same to you.

Mother Load

Hit this. Hard.

Here's another great reason for dabbling in contraception. While doing my weekly voluntary stint at Kraken Junior's school, said offspring went bug hunting with her little cohorts. That's it, that's it, get 'em out from under our feet. Only that upon her return she bowled up to me and triumphantly plonked in my lap a small plastic tub containing a...spider. 
For fuck's sake. If my own house was ablaze I'd rather burn than pass any eight-legged bastard lurking in the doorway. Problem is, in an effort to raise a fearless mini kraken I've never let this onto her. I've quietly smiled at our domestic spider skirmishes and then snuck off to heave my guts up, leaving her to think that I'm equally as brave and fearless. 
Well, I'll be fucked if that plan didn't bite me on the arse today. As Kraken Junior dropped her scuttling booty in my lap I tipped backwards off my stool, agog with fear, and beads of sweat visibly formed on my face as I shrieked "It's lovely! Good girl!". Trapped between deliberately stamping KJ to death or befriending the spindly little fucker (that's the spider, by the way), I actually managed to display supreme pride from the neck up and blind, hysterical panic from the neck down. I almost tore myself in two at the neck.
Today was the day that Kraken Junior realised her mother was less Boudica and more Bag-of-Bollocks. Note it in your diaries.

The baby blues

Me. By 10am

I'm going to tell you something that you won't find in Mothercare's Autumn/ Winter 2011 catalogue. Being a parent can be a right bastard. Look, you can put away your green ink pen and unlock that caps button over there on the left OK? Parenting can be like having an upright Dyson shoved up your arse because it sucks the fucking life out of you.
Now, my three year old is abso-bloody-lutely fabulous. I love her and she is a constant source of wonderment and love but tell me, am I the only Kraken who would occasionally like to leave my kid in a layby before driving away while she ain't looking? No. Although you'd never know it because nobody ever has the balls to say so. Instead they come over all glowy, like an advert for deluxe nipple shields, and bury the urge to get the stab themselves in the face because their kid won't stop shoving toast in the DVD player.
Want to know what's so fucking exhausting about the whole childrearing thing? Well, if you're dull enough to ask...


1. They don't ever stop moving
Never bleedin' ever. It's like living with the Duracell bunny except that you can't stamp the flop-eared little fucker to death after the seventh hour of twitching.


2. You're never alone on the toilet
I swear, having a child turns shitting into a spectator sport. I've weed and shat to the sound of crying, laughing and screaming and have prised toddler hands from my ankles as well as a toddler head out of my gusset. Po-based privacy, my arse.


3. They never shut up
Why do we spend hours encouraging them to talk? Because once they start they never fucking stop. It's like being tortured by the Libyans. Last winter I sat in the doorstep on the snow just to get some peace. Seriously.


4. They never respond
It's like raising Helen Keller. You say everything three times, show them everything fifteen times and then they do what they want anyway. 80 per cent of what I say I may as well keep to myself. I'd get better feedback from a conversation with next door's compost heap.


Thank fuck for 7pm bedtime.