Suffer the Little Children

And God said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” 

Somehow, I am not convinced He was referring to mine. 

My family’s forays into religious instruction have met with disaster. It is not surprising when one set of grandparents are Mormon, the other Anglican, your Dad is an atheist and your mother a sort of a Pagan.

Let me place this perspective. It was Christmas Eve, the tree was shining, the gifts were wrapped and my sons gathered around their father’s knee.

“Boys,” he said, “Your little sister still believes in Santa, so don’t ruin it for her. Okay?”

Ah, how sweet, or it would have been, if I hadn’t had a conversation a few nights later with the little sister concerned.

“Mummy, Daddy has told me the facts. There is no God.” stated my tiny daughter.

“How. Could. You?” I roared at my spouse.

“Hmm? How could I what?” he asked in mild bemusement.

“Santa Claus!” I spluttered, “The Truth!”

At his point he wisely decided to shut up and wait for the tsunami to pass.

“How is it okay for her to believe in Santa, but not in God?”

Small boy aged 7 came home perturbed by our eating habits.

“Mom. All animals are God’s creatures, so we can’t eat meat anymore.”

“Sure thing,” I said, “But then you have to eat vegetables.”

“Vegetables!”

“Yup.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to Father Ian. I am sure God will make an exception.”

It is not as though I haven’t tried to engage my children in religious thought. I took them all off to the family service at my mother’s church. It did not go well.

I should have known from the start, when after two weeks of readings from the Gospel of St Luke, my son James hooked up with another James and the two of them staged a revolt.

The priest stood and droned, “And the reading today is from the gospel of St Luke.”

The ritual silence was broken, “No!” said the two James’s standing up on the pews. “You read from Luke last week and the week before. This week, you read from James.”

In the face of their combined fury he was floored. He read from James. 

Then we had to face communion. We knelt in supplication. The priest made his solemn rounds of “The body of Christ. The blood of Christ.” And then he got to me. My son watched intently and then burst out in horror, “No, Mum! You’re not going to drink the blood of dead guy are you? That’s disgusting!”

My mother is still furious that I performed what she refers to as a cop-out and I like to think of a quick two-step to the right. I delegated responsibility for explaining the sacraments to the priest. After all I wasn’t sure if he subscribed to transubstantiation. Then I bowed my head and wept in laughter.

Since my son pointed out the rather vampiric quality of the communion ceremony to me I’ve not felt the same about it. Anyway my mother then suggested we take a break from church.

It must be genetic, because she was almost ousted from a prayer group for daring to challenge the origins of Easter – the pagan Goddess Eostre and the bunny and egg as symbols of fertility did not go down well with the church group. Funny that.

Who drank all my breast milk?

“You will feed an increased need for urination,” said the doctor. 

His cool medical jargon did not convey the reality of a pregnant woman’s need to pee every ten minutes. In a 45-minute commute to work I’d have to pull into every petrol station to use the bathroom. I developed loo radar. By month 8 I could do the midnight loo runs like a somnambulant zombie. 

Which brings me to maternity clothes. If you have the financial wherewithal to buy a new wardrobe from Marion & Lindie for what equates to 6 months of your life, go ahead. I didn’t, and I felt deep antipathy for not being able to wear the clothes I had. I had to give up when in the middle of a deeply depressing play about homeless people in London, my leather pants gave up the battle and PING my button shot across the audience to a domino effect of “Ow!”, “Ow!”, “Ow!” 

“What was that?” asked the father of the baby. 

“That,” I said in a fit of giggles, “Was my button.” 

He erupted into that male sort of deep booming laughter that was completely inappropriate for the scene enacted on the stage. 

Now, women have been breastfeeding since the year dot. It’s 100% earth mother natural. 

How hard could it be? Harder than you think. I didn’t have a clue, neither did my babe in arms. So, don’t scoff at earth mother remedies. I tried ice-packs, gels and other over-priced solutions to provide relief from painful swollen boobs. 

The answer is cabbage. Great big cabbage leaves. Stick them in the fridge, get the Dad to cut out nipple holes in the middle and slap them on.

Yes, you will smell like cooking cabbage. 

Yes, you will never eat cabbage again. 

But, I’ll tell you what it works like a dream. 

The things no one tells you. 

Like the fact that the pheromone released during sex is the same as the one released during feeding time. What this means is that when a few weeks have past and you’ve forgiven your husband for the act of birth and are ready to get jiggy with it, each time you start the baby will cry and your boobs will erupt like Niagara Falls. 

Basically, if you want a romantic night in Club Duvet, get Granny to babysit. 

For some reason men do not take kindly to these sorts of interruptions. 

Then there is going back to reality. We would all like to stay home and be fulltime moms, but the reality is that most of us work. Armed with my breast pump I returned to fulltime work after 4 months of self-doubt and a deep fear my job would be gone when I got back. 

The interior designers had equipped every office with a glass wall so I had to take refuge in the printer room for privacy. I would wedge myself into the space between the printer and the wall, get set up and suddenly everyone and his auntie needed to photocopy something. 

After each session I’d empty the milk into a bottle clearly marked, “Breast milk. Do not drink” and placed it in the fridge. One day I arrived to discover half of it was gone. 

I strode into the largely male open plan workspace and shouted loudly, “Who drank all my breast milk?” 

It seemed every one of my colleagues spontaneously ejected their mouthfuls of coffee. 

It was a sort of divine karmic moment.

Close to home

 My husband was appalled at the opening, but hey, I got published! 

The over the shoulder boulder holder

What do an egg cup, a tea cup, a coffee cup and a challenge cup have in common? 

They are the original cup sizes for bras.

Who knew? 

Having just experienced a female lingerie emergency, I thought I’d find out more about this garment that I either love or loathe.

I suppose I better own up to the nature of the emergency. Well, it wasn’t a 911, but it did draw blood. I was happily chatting away to my male colleagues when all of a sudden, the underwear on my, rather nice bra, stabbed me brutally in the boob.

 

“Are you okay?”

“Um… yes, I’m fine,” I replied breathlessly and a little desperately trying to find a way out of the conversation and into the sanctuary of the ladies’ room.

“Seriously, what happened? You look pale?”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“Why are you crossing your arms like that?”

“You want to know? Fine. I tell you. My bra just tried to stab me in the heart! OKAY!”

 Funny, how quickly they vacated my office and left me to try and extricate myself. Of course, it would be one of those days when you can’t take 20 minutes to run to the mall and buy a new one, so I had to resign myself to having one boob up one boob down for the day.

In fact, when asked about my most embarrassing moments, underwear malfunctions feature high on my list. But that is another story.

The bra is officially 115 years old. However, it has appeared in history all the way back to the ancient Romans, Greeks and Minoans. Then of course we had the corset. Now, I am not an advocate of wholesale whale slaughter, but I venture to suggest that whalebone might be more comfortable than the steel underwire that just almost gave me a mastectomy.

By 1900 several “emancipation garments” had been designed and patented. One rigid metal structure resembling a large dustbin was designed by Henry Lesher. Thank the Lord it didn’t catch on. Olivia Flynt had a “bust supporter” that sort of designated each boob into a pocket. Charles Moorhouse offered a “breast-enlarging garment” complete with BDSM rubber straps and cups.

In 1907, French Vogue coined the term brassiere or bra and voila here we are. Mary Phelps Jacobs is widely recognised as the architect of the bra. In a very Scarlet o’Hara fashion crisis she made a bra from two silk hankies and some ribbon. Not quite as impressive as the ballroom curtains, but functional nonetheless.

Credit for the first brassiere usually goes to Mary Phelps Jacob, a 19-year-old girl-about-Manhattan who, in 1910, bought a sheer evening gown for a party. The whalebone corset that was supposed to define her figure actually poked out of the plunging fabric. What was a girl to do? She and her maid dug two silk hankies out of a drawer, sewed them on to a length of pink ribbon, added some string and tucked her breasts in place. Girlfriends asked if she would make a similar device for them. Then somebody paid her a dollar to do so, and she took the hint.

Now corsets went out of style with the French Revolution, or started to, but really ended up on the trash heap of history with the advent of World War 1. Corsets were outlawed, apparently the steel was needed to build battleships. Who knew. By World War 2 women in the forces had to wear bra’s for “protection”? The advent of the bulletproof vest?

The only real blip on the sales horison of the bra came in the 1960s with the bra-burning Germaine Greer. When Ira Rosenthal, wife of William, the minds behind our current cup size conundrum and the Maidenform bra, was asked if she was worried, she replied that she had gravity on her side. Sure enough once the bra burning teens became breast-feeding baby boomers, they were back in Maidenforms.

Then along came Larry Nadler, the MBA behind the Wonderbra. It claimed to the first bra to empower woman rather than disempower them. I think that is a pretty lofty statement for a bra, but hey, its advertising.

What is more bizarre is what goes into making my Victoria’s Secret over the shoulder boulder holders. The Today Show says, “Even the simplest bra is composed of complex industrial parts that require the expertise of chemical engineers, biomechanics scientists, veteran seamstresses and color specialists. It takes hundreds of machines to produce…”

 

Did you know:

• Caterpillar spit and crude oil are among the ingredients of some bras
• Over 4,000,000 new bras are created on average every day
• Women own an average of 6.5 bras (The half bra, is what I was reduced to with the underwire crisis – we keep these in the hope that we can fix them, which we can’t)
• In the last 15 years, the average bust size has increased from 34B to 36C
• How many ounces in a cup? An A cup – approximately 8 fluid ounces; B cup – 13 ounces; C cup – 21 ounces; and D cup – 27 ounces. They were originally known as egg cup, tea cup, coffee cup and challenge cup
• Women spend around $16 billion a year on bras

(I found these on http://www.intimateguide.com/bras/bra-history-101-with-nifty-vintage-photos/)

Mums and Dads

I had one of those illuminating discussions with my 5-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son this afternoon.

The topic - What do mums and dads do?

MUMS

       1.     Mums go to work

       2.     Mums take kids to school

       3.     Mums help clean the house

       4.     Mums put on movies for kids

       5.     Mums read stories

       6.     Mums give good cuddles

       7.     Mums help when you get hurt

       8.     Mums take you to the doctor

       9.     Mums make hot chocolate

       10.  Mums make ponytails for little girls

       11.  Mums put on makeup

       12.  Mums make kids have baths

       13.  Mums buy stuff for you

       14.  Mums take care of people who are scared

       15.  Mums are nice and not mean

       16.  Mums can kill monsters and trap bad guys

DADS

1.     Dads build Wendy houses for their daughters

2.     Dads fix cars

3.     Dads go to Builders Warehouse

4.     Dads buys tattoos

5.     Dads make swings

6.     Dads fix stuff

7.     Dads hold you upside down and tickle you

8.     Dads play with you

9.     Dads help you with homework

10.  Dads go to work

11.  Dads help you with computer games and the Wii

12.  Dads buy stuff for you on your birthday

13.  Dads take you sailing

14.  Dads ride bikes with you

15.  Dads make ice-cream and hot chocolate sauce

16.  Dads make midnight snacks

Dads sound like way more fun than Mums.

Mr Tickle and the Very Public Apology

Remember sleep overs? Back in the day with your pink jammies and your BFFs? 

Oh… and midnight snacks? 

Well, I never quite got the midnight snacks part. I remember waking up one morning and staring at my BFF in horror. “What happened to your cheek?” I asked shocked at the vast red handprint over her face. 

“You should know,” she said, “You did it.” 

Apparently, I don’t like being woken up from REM sleep very much.

I had hoped I had left this violent streak in my past, but this morning I find myself in the dog box for a similar discretion. I had on my earphones and was deep into White Light Guided Mediation from Dick Sutphen. My body was on the earthly plane, but the rest of me was floating happily somewhere in the ether.

Suddenly and without warning I was jolted back awake, sat bolt upright and began a frantic fight with the earphone wires while trying to make sense of the hell was going on.

My husband had touched my stomach - specifically that inch or two of skin just above my hip. The feeling is akin to having 2000 volts of electricity shot through my system. 

I have no idea why that little patch of nerve endings renders me insensible, but last night it sent me jackknifing across the bed. I ended up somehow throwing my elbow back just as my spouse lent forward, smashing his glasses into little bitty pieces and probably leaving him with a black eye.

Needless to say I slept alone last night. I maintain that although I landed the killing blow, it wasn’t pre-meditated and therefore falls in the realm of a horrible misunderstanding and terrible accident.

I then picked up a spade and began to dig myself a trench, or a final resting place. I just can’t help it, no matter what I say I make it worse, so I’m writing this blog knowing that as I’ll be sent to Coventry anyway, I may as well record it for prosperity.

I am so sorry I hit you last night. I really didn’t mean to, it was an accident. 

I hope you are alright. 

I love you, please forgive me. 

 

PS: The moral of the story

I survived Christmas and didn't kill anyone

“My mom’s has big boobs!” announced my 7-year-old son halfway through Christmas lunch with my in-laws. 

The proclamation was followed by piratical laughter and a quick exit.

I could have said: “Like father like son.”

Or: “He’s entered a new stage in Freudian development.”

Or: “He knows a good thing when he sees it.”

But I didn’t.

I hid my head in my hands and wept with laughter until the wildfire blush had cooled down to a mild glowing simmer.

Christmas time. Like many mothers it is a time that fills me with deep seeded panic and exhaustion.

What on earth am I supposed to do with three small children that is not going bankrupt me, yet occupy them and stop them killing each other, hating me or burning my house down? There are many wonderful places to go and things to do around this time of the year; unfortunately most of them need a level of financial liquidity I am a stranger to.

I am also haunted, not by the ghost of Christmas Past, but the far more chilling spectre of the Perfect Mom. 

 

The Perfect Mom doesn’t work all year round and then collapse during her 5 days off over Christmas into a semi-coma. The Perfect Mom can crochet blankets out of the fur of her perfectly trained German Shepherd. 

The Perfect Mom can whip up a Christmas feast for ten and design her own bloody sleigh. She doesn’t have a problem fitting down the chimney.

This year I refused to allow Perfect Mom to wag her perfectly French-manicured finger disapprovingly in my direction. 

This year I blew the Perfect Mom into the stratosphere. 

I made Christmas Crackers that turned out to be very pretty, but needed Arnold and The Rock to pull them apart. Tissue paper is a lot stronger than it seems. 

We made nougat, bath fizz bomb, a rainbow cake and a gingerbread house. We even recycled Coca Cola bottles into bird feeders and made a wreath out of plastic bags. 

We even refurbished the boys' trainer bike for our daughter thanks to some purple glitter metallic paint and a pink saddle.

Beat that Perfect Mom.

'Twas the day Christmas when I went out 

To buy a gift for my industrious spouse

I went to the bicycle shop down the road

And I bought a gizmo that bicycles stowed

That’s when it got weird.

I met up with my man and he said “Oh dear me.

We must go to the bike shop immediately”

There I stood a step or two behind

Making desperate cutting gestures with my hand

The bike salesmen started to jeer.

It was a very awkward situation. 

The fact that I got out of with gift intact and unknown was a miracle. 

But, then it was the season for it. 

We didn’t go to the French Riviera or catch a tan in Mauritius. 

We went sailing, we went to the zoo and we spent time with each other in a way we can’t during most of the year.

That time is what the holidays are about – not presents, but people.

 

Next Christmas, assuming the world doesn’t come to an end, 

I think I will bake a large cake and hide inside it.

I’ve always wanted to jump out of a cake.

Perfect Mom can go jump off a cliff.

The handshake

Phew! Something smells funny in here - like a mixed metaphor.

Last night I joined a throng of parents at the Linder Auditorium for our sons’ speech day. I approach speech days with much the same sense of inevitable tedium I did at school. Ours took place on Saturdays under a marquee that smelt ghastly with an ambient temperature of hell. Nothing like as swanky as the Linder Auditorium.

We all duly queued in clasping our Blackberries, IPhones and IPads like comfort blankets. Some of the more experienced dads had a helpful hip flask. It was my first time. The dad I sat next too gave me some helpful pointers, like at which point to leave.

It started true to form with some rather nice speeches from the headmaster, the chairman and the graduating class of grade 7s. The keynote speaker was then introduced. I probably shouldn’t mention his name. He has a voice like melted chocolate and is obviously much in thrall to its melodic sounds.

If he had ended at the 20 minute mark we would have clapped loudly and said, “What a lovely speech with just the right mix of humour and wisdom.”  But he didn’t.

He led a round of applause for all the grade 7 boys who had their first kiss at the recent school social. That was a little odd, but we clapped. 

He went on to explain how these young teenagers will soon become enamoured by the subtle dips, curves and valleys of the female form. How the mysterious female will befuddle the brain and confuse the senses. 

And then...

How as more and more attention is given to the female of the species with no relief in sight, they will find themselves often “shaking the hand of the unemployed”.

I turned to my neighbour and asked, “Did he just say what I though he said?” 

Apparently he did.

The auditorium was silent expect for the mildly hysterical giggling of myself and my neighbour. 

The speaker carried on past the realm of slightly inappropriate into totally X-Rated.

The speaker’s son was in the audience as one of the graduating class. I shared my sympathy for him with my neighbour and we agreed that the poor chap should not come to school for the remainder of the term and maybe transfer somewhere else next year. No-one is likely to let him forget the day his dad stood in front the school and talked about masturbating.

Like our kids aren’t embarrassed enough by us already?

Once the horse was well and truly dead it was flogged a bit more and only when a small toddler finally began to yell, was the speech wrapped up with a bit of Rudyard Kipling. Can’t go wrong with Kipling.

My son also won an award. 

I was speechless. 

But, not as speechless as when he came out of the auditorium and asked me what “shaking the hand of the unemployed” meant.

Cleaning out the closet

“Don’t worry. My son is gay. Once you get over the gay thing it’s not so bad. Here, have another drink.”

In life as in music timing is everything. Arguably there is no perfect time to spring this on your parent, but some times are better than others. The night before your Matric finals, might not be one of them.

I know you think the world is all about you.

You can’t help it; you are an 18-year-old boy.

I forgive you.

I don’t know if your father will.

Here is the thing.

It is not that you are gay.

It is that you are having sex.

You know how you feel about your parents getting it on?

Multiply that by about 1 000 and you may have inkling of how they feel about you doing it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.

Let’s take the Matric finals first. Your father is terrified for you. He’d write those exams for you in an instant. He’s worried that you haven’t studied enough, that the education he gave you will fall short, that you won’t be able to achieve your dreams and so on. He also has to deal with the fact that in two months his baby boy will be moving out and going to Varsity. He knows what happens at Varsity and he is panicking – a lot.

Then you add into the mix that not only are you sexually active, but also have been active enough to make a decision on your orientation. Now he is remembering the Catholic Church trials in the States and wondering if you’ve been abused. Then he remembers all the times you’ve had a mate crash over in his house and he’s feeling a little freaky. 

Let’s put this in perspective. I’m not gay, but back in the murky depths of time, I was young once too. It unfolded like this…

Age 17

My father: “I’m going to the pharmacy, do you need anything?”

My mother: “No, but pick up your daughter’s pill while you’re there.”

He went to the pharmacy and was appalled to given a box of birth control. He was convinced it was a mistake. It wasn’t. Still, better safe than sorry he thought. She’s is just being careful and is taking it for medical reasons totally unassociated with sex.

Age 20

My father and my boyfriend pass each other in the hallway emerging from different showers.

We could just have been cuddling. Right?

Age 21

“Dad, I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”

Okay, he reasoned, two bedrooms in the house, everything is still okay.

Age 23

“I’m getting married!”

Perhaps it won’t be consummated.

Age 25

“I’m having a baby!”

This was when the proverbial penny dropped with a thundering crash.

My father looked across at my husband and in the face of incontrovertible proof had to accept that I was sexually active.

I don’t think he has ever quite got over it.

You see, no matter you old you are or how grown up you feel, your Dad will always see you as the tiny newborn baby he held in his arms, the little boy he taught to ride a bike and as his son.

Okay, a Victoria Secret underwear model might have been an easier sell than the captain of the rugby team, but hey, he’ll get over the “gay” thing, just not over the “my son having sex” thing. Ever.

Whether gay or straight, flinging your sexuality in your parents’ faces can lead to disastrous consequences – in my case, my father threatened to move to Saudi Arabia and put me in a burka.

They don’t flaunt their sex life in front of you, so show some respect and conduct yours with a little bit of discretion.

And by that I do not mean in the backseat of your dad’s BMW.

Black Tuesday

“A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” John F. Kennedy

There are times when silence is a virtue. 

Like when your wife asks if her bum looks big in this.

There are times when secrets are best kept. 

Like if you are a fan of Justin Bieber.

This is not one of those times.

Today is Black Tuesday. 

Weirdly enough that was also the name of the day that marked the start of the Great Depression. Regardless, I look like a large dissatisfied black bat of gloom today.

However, this Tuesday is so named because on the 19th October 1977, the Apartheid government banned a number of publications, people and organisations involved with black consciousness. It became known as Black Wednesday.

Today the South African parliament will vote on the Protection of State Information Bill or as it more popularly known, the Secrecy Bill. If passed it will effectively muzzle the media and hobble any attempt to expose the cancer of fraud, embezzlement and corruption that is at the heart of our government.

No government should ever be in control of the media, although they all try because for obvious reasons it is a very powerful tool to placate the masses. Desmond Tutu summed it up very well by calling it an insult to all South Africans.

History repeats itself. I just was not expecting it to repeat itself so soon. During the time Nelson Mandela was in prison, not a single photograph of him existed in South Africa. The first time most of us saw him, was the day he walked out of prison. His face was regarded as a threat to state security.

What state secrets do we have that are so vital to security that we need to hide them? In all honesty if we were in a time of war, perhaps this bill might have legs to stand on, but it is built on decidedly shaky ground right now. 

The ANC published this peculiar diatribe on their website today: 

http://www.anc.org.za/docs/anctoday/2011/at44.htm#art1

Apparently, the bill is intended to crack down those pesky international spies that plague us. 

What on earth are they spying on? 

Our total ineptitude? 

“The foreign spies continue to steal our sensitive information in order to advantage their nations at the expense of advancement of South Africa and her people. However, you won't find foreign spies openly marching in the streets of Cape Town complaining that we are removing their easy access to our sensitive information.”

I quite like the idea of spies marching down the road actually – a sort of James Bond meets Austin Powers convention.

I hasten to suggest we have more of a problem from Nigerian drug lords gunning down PTA moms in the street, but that might get me sent to jail for some 25 years.  

If it were really intended to protect terribly important state secrets, it might have some credibility. But it isn’t. 

It’s designed to protect corrupt little backstabbers so they can carry on lying to the voting population who they view in much the same way as I view the ruling party – as a bunch of total idiots. 

Shouldn’t politicians, municipalities, tenderpreneurs and so on be held accountable? 

After all, it is my money they are spending on their big BMWs and mansions in Saxonwold. If some bint takes her family and friends to buy blood diamonds in Angola and I have to foot the bill for her chartered jet, do I not have the right to be a little miffed?

Of course back in the day they only had to worry about carrier pigeons, TV, radio and print journalists. These days you’ve got social networking, blogs, the Internet and virtual smoke signals. 

No doubt the next step will be following our new BFFs the Chinese into an Internet crackdown. 

After that we’ll probably start burning books. 

 

Here's what Nelson Mandela had to say on the topic in 1994:

"Criticism can only help us to grow, by calling attention of those of our actions and omissions, which do not measure up to our people's expectations and the democratic values to which we subscribe."