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Poor David had to work on his day off today - to be accredited to do RE, for goodness' sake. So he dropped me off at work on his way there, and picked me up on his way back. Because we were in a hurry this morning (I was up all night with a horrible headache and managed to keep him up too) the house was in a dreadful mess when we left, and I had resigned myself to having to sort it all out when I got home.

To my surprise, when I got home, El Presidente had done all the breakfast dishes, folded up a ton of washing, and even cleaned up in the littlies' bedroom. I was so relieved I cried.

Greta Garbo was languishing on her bed (or more accurately her mattress - we have not authorised a proper bed yet since she returned home from moving out... something to do with consequences, not wanting to mess everyone around, little stuff like that).

Stompy was having the queen of all sulks this morning because she had to go to the school holiday program for the curriculum day. In the end she got to make lemon slice (minus the lemon juice "because kids don't like lemons") with icing that she coloured blood-red, so it wasn't a dead loss. And they rigged a trap that tipped tanbark chips all over people at the tug of a rope. Great stuff.

The Diva is off with her friend who is more of a conjoined twin, really! She has a better social life than I do.

Miss Four-Going-On-Forty is reading herself a book in bed, much to the astonishment of El Presidente.

Work was rough today, not because the work itself was rough but because in the aftermath of the headache and no sleep, I felt incredibly unwell by the middle of the day. Not eating probably doesn't help but i just don't like to eat at the moment. Not even a family sized block of Club Peppermint Dark Chocolate can tempt me past a few squares. Everything gives me indigestion.

Lady in waiting

Half way there, just about. Nineteen weeks today.

What am I waiting for? Not just the baby. Waiting for maternity leave (I put up the advertisement for my job last week) so that I can just be "mum" for a while. Oh how I am looking forward to that!

Waiting for the eldest daughter to leave home. Not in a gleeful way - I just don't think it's working out at the moment, sadly enough. We have as many bad and snarky days as good and helpful ones, and I can't see that anyone is particularly at fault. It's just not working out very well. Her needs and desires don't particularly coincide with the way we run our home, and it leads to tension.

Waiting for dd2 to start school next year. I so want this to work out for her. She's come a long way.

Waiting for Clare to start school. Not sure if she is ready. She's so jolly bright, and such a little madam. Perhaps school will reduce the madamness!

Waiting to find the kernel of whatever it is in me that my therapist wants me to find so that I can look after it. Waiting maybe for God to show me that this bit is the bit made in God's image. Waiting for directions on the next step, I guess.

The most tiresome old saw of all...

"Why have children if you aren't going to look after them?"

It's such an easily dismantled judgement against working parents that I am stunned it still gets airplay. As the letter writers to the Age quite succinctly managed to articulate yesterday, there are any number of reasons why parents use child care and there can be few people, even childless people, who really don't get the complexity behind individual family situations.

But it's worth looking at the question minus the judgement and ignorance, because even our righteously outraged responses belie our need to justify our parenting choices, our shopping list of acceptable reasons for using what we seem to be subconsciously tagging as a sub-optimal choice.

The best way for me to talk about why I had children if I was going to "get someone else to bring them up" (that's a fallacy for another post, all on its own) is to talk about my own story.

When I had my first child at the age of twenty, I very much was of Ms Hutchison's bewildered point of view - how could anyone give birth and then surrender care of that infant? Then after another child appeared soon after, my marriage broke down, and I was suffering a severe post natal depression with two children under two. I found myself using family daycare two days a week, because my mental health demanded it. All of a sudden, I understood that sacrificing two days a week did not mean sacrificing my status as mother. (I suggest that most mothers of teenagers wish it were so easy to let oneself off the hook!)

Why did I have those two children? Like many young mothers, there was no reason that I had them other than that a sperm met an egg, and I gestated. Twice. There was no relationship between my reasoning to have them (what little reasoning there was, and I fully own the deficit) and my subsequent decision to use daycare. We functioned as a unit, and there was a need, and as the only responsible parent in the picture, I met the need as best I could.

I know women - stay at home mothers and working-out-of-home mothers alike who have had children for a variety of reasons. Holding their marriage together. A daughter fantasy. A son dream. A desire to heal a fractured childhood. An inability to feel purpose without a foetus on board. An insufficiency of love. Hormones. Intense maternal instinct. A great love of children, babies, laughs, learning to walk and read, the soft skin on a toddler's belly when you push your lips against it and blow raspberries and the ripples of giggles that flow through them to your kiss.

Why have children if.... you are going to shout at them when they are naughty? Choose public schooling? Not give them siblings? Vaccinate them? Not vaccinate them? Not breastfeed them? Pass on family illnesses? These are our assumptions, our judgements, our retaliations against why we think people ought to have children, but how many of us had children "just so we could do everything right"? Is that anyone's motivation for having a child?

It's not mine, and never has been. These are judgements we make after our children are a fact, after they've burrowed into our hearts and we are already caught up on the balancing beam of meeting their needs, assuaging our love, and defending it all against the challenges of a world that insists on throwing us parents off kilter at every turn.

Fast forward twenty years.

Here I am. Without intending it, a sperm met and egg, and I am gestating. I wasn't thrilled about it to begin with, but like many relationships, it's growing on me. At nearly five months, I can feel my little precious baby wriggling around from time to time, reminding me that it's there.

Will I use daycare? Probably, at some point. I'm planning on returning to work after taking a year off to be "just mum". But my income is necessary for the other five children to have the chances they deserve in life, and the world benefits in some small way from the work I do. And my husband and I will go on juggling what we have been juggling for some time while he does the "mum stuff" and I come home from work and ask what's for tea.

So why have this baby? Because I love it. Because it's growing in me, and it's my baby, and will be my toddler and my grown daughter or son. And the fact that it will be in the world and loved is enough reason to have it.

I hope that answers your question, Ms Hutchison.

Tempus fugit and all that.

I need to journal.

I'm an attention seeker.

It's time to blog again.

There are so many things different at the moment. There are these ebbs and flows not just in my life but all around me, and it feels like I'm just coming out of a cloud and noticing it all.

There's so much space around me. Space coming up with maternity leave, space at work with having moved off a big project at last, space at home as I begin to get well and can get on top of things a little. Emotional space, psychological space... it all feels a little liberating and a little frightening. I suspect that when I have explored that space, things will appear to have a very different shape, and I'll be moving differently in the space.

The Daily Hack

One of the things I am very good at (if I do say so myself) is coming up with workarounds: solutions to complex problems when the resources are not at hand to Buy Something To Fix It. Sometimes I manage a hack for daily life - commonly I manage hacks for getting around technology. Sometimes I achieve those by cobbling together other people's hacks!

Today's Daily Hack:

Removing unwanted stationery from Entourage email
A co-worker sends through very garish pretty stationery with her email. Unfortunately, it slows down my mail client, Entourage. I don't want to make all my emails default plain text, as I receive a lot of complex html emails that I actually want to see. I didn't want to set the rule to simply remove attachments, because sometimes she will send me things that I actually need.

So I downloaded the remove attachments script from this site. With this script, I can now create a rule that when an email comes in from her, the script will remove attachments, save them in the saved attachments folder, and the same script will allow me, if it is apparent there was supposed to be something other than eyeball-piercing lime green pyjama stripes, to allow the attachments folder and view whatever she sent me.

I spent maybe an hour figuring it out - but I'd spend easily that much time waiting for her emails to open, minus the sense of satisfaction!

Come, meet my body.

My body is sitting at my desk, wearing size fourteen trousers (that's a twelve to you Americans) and a blue satin top which is showing the bulge of the bit of body that won't fit inside the size fourteen trousers. It has just avoided walking up the three flights of stairs, and has instead very lazily taken the lift.

There could be little better summation of this body of mine, to be honest. It is about to ingest leftover pasta from last night, a matter of expediency over health. Isn't everything? It's more expedient to eat the block of peppermint chocolate than work on the relaxation excercises. It is more expedient to sit on the train out of the wind than battle through a stiff north-westerly.

My body is nearly thirty nine years old. For the first sixteen years or so of its life, it was tiny, scrawny even, and insignificant. It was good for little except to draw the attention of bullies, both outside and within the family, my father taunting me as mercilessly as the vile schoolyard variety.

When I hit sixteen, my body suddenly discovered it was meant to belong to a woman, and took on womanly attributes that attracted a different sort of attention. Now, not only could other people abuse my physicality, I had the means with which to abuse myself.

For three years I had the ultimate weapon against myself - a gorgeous figure that attracted just the right kind of bully.

When I was nineteen, my body did what the doctors told me it couldn't do, and it got pregnant. The changes were as rapid and disconcerting as the whole of adolescence, wrapped up in less than a year. "Scrawny" was a thing of the past. After a first trimester of severe nausea and vomiting that saw me plummet to 48kg, I made up for lost time, regaining the weight and then some, clocking in at the end at a whopping 94kg. Motherhood had indeed made me - I was literally twice the woman I was before.

I imagined much of it would be syphoned off post partum in the form of excess fluid from the pre-eclampsia. I had no idea how transfigured I was, EEE bra notwithstanding, until I returned home from hospital with a baby and a wardrobe three or four sizes too small. The fact that looked back at me was tired, and old, and fat. Nothing hung right. Nothing sat right. As I began to exercise, up at 5am to do Aerobics Aus style while the baby coo-ed on the floor next to me, the weight came off but the weight of the world, the weight of motherhood, the weight of depression, dragged at me and my appendages, adding wrinkles, sagging and fatigue.

Soon enough I was pregnant again, and the transformation was less dramatic but equally exhausting. And terminal for my marriage, I thought. My husband left me emotionally for another woman before I was eight months pregnant, and physically left me five weeks after our second baby girl was born. I was no longer the woman he married. I blamed my weight. Then I found out that the woman he left me for was larger still, so presumably it was only my being that was lacking, not my figure.

So, I went on my divorce diet. It's amazing what your husband leaving you can do for your figure. What with not eating for six months, I lost 30kg and what remained of my confidence, which may have been an extra ounce or two.

I've gone up and down many times since then, in varying degrees of acceptance. I am proud, now, of what my body has done. What I want is to accept that my body, my physical self, is not just a container or a tool for self-derogation or punishment or comfort, but is actually part of me. It's as much a part of me as my reason, my love and my pain, and it deserves to be nurtured as such. My reflection deserves to be celebrated for what it shows me - which is, me.

So I'll eat my pasta, and enjoy the taste of the garlic and cheese on my tongue, and think about stretching out in the cool breeze outside, and accepting that as being as much a part of my day as the laugh I will have later with my coworkers. And when I laugh, it will be as much about the tongue and stomach and lungs as it is about heart and humour. And I'll think not about the weight of it, but about the lightness of laughing.

What's this - I'm a person?

What a bizarre evening.

I came home from work, and got changed. While I was getting changed, nobody came in and hassled me about the colour of my knickers or asked me why I wear a bra or why my tummy jiggles.

I looked in the cupboard, and decided that a tin of cream of chicken and mushroom soup sounded very nice for dinner, and that I would go up to the shop and get something disgusting for dessert, and a magazine to read after tea. I didn't argue with anyone, nor did I have to negotiate the flavour of soup, figure out whether I'd have to buy two packets of something disgusting for dessert, or put three pairs of socks (if I could find them) on three pairs of feet and drag them up to the shop.

When I walked up to the shop, I didn't have to hold someone's hand while she balance on the brick wall, or call to racing children to come back before they got run over. I didn't have to listen to three different conversations at one time and make sense of them all.

I went around the supermarket and picked what I wanted off the shelves. I didn't have to say "no". Not even once. Well, only to myself. But not at the chocolate shelf. And when I picked up the block of chocolate, I didn't have to promise to share it with anyone.

When I got home, I cooked the soup, and served it up, and nobody told me that someone else had more than them, or that they didn't like those bread rolls, or ask if they could have it in a pink bowl and tell me NO I WANT THE PINK SPOON TOO!

I sat down and ate my dinner without interruption, and then I watched the show I want, and then I cleaned up and pulled a blanket over myself and now I am sitting here making a blog entry, and I am not having to promise to read a story in a minute and please will you brush your teeth.

One night. One night of the life I never really lived - coming home from work, on my own, doing my own thing. Quiet. On my own. I haven't spoken a word for two hours.

It's wonderful.