Brief (BRIEF) coffee with mums from school.

Work like the clappers until 2:30, including editing, cleaning house, more editing, and some other writing-related admin jobs.

Pick up daughter from school, take for eye test.

Early tea with children.

Attend discussion panel at Fullers Bookshop on topic of Int. Women’s Day and Stella Prize.

Get home in enough time to put (hopefully only one) daughter to bed.

Record an episode of Galactic Suburbia.

That’s enough to be going on with, right?

NOTE: I typed this while listening to my 7 year old listing all the superpowers she has when she plays heroes in the playground.

Ready… set… GO!

Today is Pilates Day, an activity I took up when Justine Larbalestier started evangelising about how important it was for writers to start that kind of stuff BEFORE developing RSI or some other work related injury. When I started, it was amazing how many people were there to fix something awful they had done to their bodies. I would feel a bit abashed about being there pre-emptively, but it seems the thing to do.

Pilates is one of those things I had to circumvent a lot of guilt to allow myself to do – because it’s something that’s about ME and not the family. Especially when I was using household money to pay my way – but since our last big budget rehaul, I’ve been paying for it myself and buying less things on the internet in order to do so, which means I feel less like I have to justify This Thing.

(I know, by the way, that I shouldn’t have to justify it, and what’s good for me is good for the family and so on, but logic is logic and guilt is guilt)

Managing guilt is a huge aspect to being a working mother. Or a mother full stop, I guess. (it’s also one of the hardest aspects to reconcile with being a feminist – what works in theory often falls down in practice, and when the baby’s screaming, theory doesn’t help much!) I find it interesting when talking to other mothers that we all have different lines of guilt, those which we cross regularly and feel bad about, those which we try not to cross and feel AWFUL about, and those which we are okay with.

One of my lines is that I don’t use paid daycare for Pilates. I only have two days a week for the 2 year old in daycare, and I need those days for writing! I also use that time for shopping, housework, chores etc. but I’m well aware of how much writing and writing-related work I have to do that doesn’t quite fit into those days. Daycare days are my days where getting shit done is a lot easier than any other time.

I’m lucky that I have no guilt at all associated with daycare. But then, my kids have always loved daycare, and benefited from it. Our local centre is a really good one. And it constantly annoys me as a feminist that, when telling people that my daughter is in daycare, I always feel the need to tell them STRAIGHT AWAY how much she enjoys it, and the direct benefits she gets from going there, regardless of the whole ‘mummy needs to be sane, mummy needs to get her work done, no matter what’ issue. I shouldn’t justify myself, but… I guess there’s a hint of pre-emptive defensiveness sloshing around in there.

So lucky to have sociable children, though! I have witnessed the pain and stress of parents who have to fight their kids (and their own overwhelming guilt) to leave them at daycare, and it’s dreadful to see them go through that. I empathise deeply.

As we figured out on our last budget, it’s a bit dicey as to whether we can afford that second day. But one is NOT ENOUGH. Our compromise was that I would try to contribute the equivalent of that one day in my occasional income over the year (the kind that arrives in random cheques, fits and starts). I always knew daycare was worth it, so never really paid attention to quite how much it costs, but we’re talking $3000 over the year for each day. So, um, yes. There’s another level of guilt associated with those days – I always feel the pressure to make them REALLY REALLY PRODUCTIVE.

That is what we call Useful Guilt.

This, by the way, is my own way of looking at the world. Other people can spend their daycare days however they like! Mother guilt is kind of a personal, specific thing. Like body image, it’s amazing how many women can be deeply critical of themselves and yet happily encourage others to not feel bad at all, without even noticing the disconnect.

I couldn’t attend my weekly Pilates class if not for the voluntary service of one of my parents. This is another common thread of modern motherhood – reliance on the next generation up for unpaid daycare and babysitting, in order for our own family to function. The upside of this is that my Mum and Jem get some time together weekly (and it’s an arrangement that doesn’t have to change during the school holidays, which is a major plus – she can just include Raeli in the morning’s plans). There are other direct benefits – Mum is flexible, so I can extend my Pilates class into getting other chores done, parcels posted, PO Box checked, and even having lunch occasionally with my honey. Plus she always does my washing up, and sometimes cleans the floor too. MY MOTHER IS AWESOME.

The key to making Tuesdays work for me is to not plan to get much of anything done. Which is fine except when I have a daily writing target I have to reach.

My Dad chips in with at least one Raeli pick up a week, which extends one of my paid daycare days to 7.5 hours entirely child free instead of having to do the school run with my older child hours before I have to pick up the younger one. Which is fine until soccer season starts. At least Raeli can occupy herself for a couple of hours – far more than when she was younger. She has discovered comics and (in the last fortnight) chapter books, so hooray!

A huge decision this year, which turned out to be more drama than I hoped, was to move Raeli’s after school gymnastics from a Jem daycare day to a NOT Jem daycare day. It means a hideous Wednesday now, as it turns out that the cute little cage full of toys to occupy stray children is busier than a traffic intersection, and Jem didn’t want a bar of it. She spent the whole gymnastics session clinging to me and eating potato chips pointedly. But the pay off is that Thursday now is calm and streamlined – last year we had Raeli after school activities on both daycare days which was a bit frustrating.

All dull details for my readers, I expect! But the upshot is that all this juggling means that time is incredibly valuable to me. My time is money – because a good chunk of my writing time is paid for, by me or by our household budget, and thus is money not paying off the mortgage. So that adds a certain pressure not only for me to be personally productive, but to get paid for my work. I think a lot harder now before doing favours for people, or volunteering time.

I didn’t do a single hour of classroom help last year, which I felt extremely bad about, because we’re supposed to have that time, aren’t we? Supposed to give that time to our school and our kids. Without parent help, for instance, the classroom is so pushed that kids don’t get tested on their spelling. So there was a bunch of guilt. But not enough guilt to give up my rare, precious paid-for hours.

All this is great but it makes for a lousy writing day – often I don’t get home until 12-1pm, and of course I have to leave the house at 2:30 to pick up Raeli from school. Luckily my mother is good at getting Jem down for her nap early – later naps are starting to become a drama for us, because if she doesn’t fall asleep until 1:30, dragging her up for the school run becomes miserable for everyone.

These are the things I think about when people say ‘how on earth do you get any writing done?’

My answers, given with suitable facial indications as to how serious I’m being:

“Well, I don’t, really. Have you seen how many books other writers can get done in a year?”
“Panic = adrenalin.”
“I’m a really bad housewife.” (true, though I make more effort since podcasts)
“Daycare helps.”
“My mum cleans my house.”
“I neglect my children.” (mostly not true, though it felt like that the day my toddler punched my laptop)
“Oh, well, you know.” (translation: if I don’t write, I won’t write, and that’s not an option, what do you people who don’t write novels do with all that time pouring out of your ears?)

Mostly when people ask how I get my writing done, I resist the urge to laugh bitterly in their faces, and then try to tactfully answer so as not to in any way imply that they are in no way at fault for not writing novels themselves in the spare time they don’t have. Which means I completely never take the credit for all the work I do, and the effort I put into that work.

When you love something, you make time for it. I chew pieces off the ends of other pieces of time, and jam them all together with sticky tape. I never really stop and smell the roses, because I’m too busy trying to squeeze my time dry, three times over. I have no hobbies that aren’t, somehow, also work. Sometimes I let my kids watch too much TV. I never do enough housework. I don’t get enough exercise. I expect a lot of my partner.

I write because I write because I write.

I’m not sure why that it – the process stuff I understand, because I’m so wrapped up in the -aargh- phase of finishing my new novel that I’m not ready to talk about it. And, you know, my kids are cute and all, but there’s only so many pictures I can post of them dressed as Doctor Who characters.

Still, I’d like to continue talking about home and domestic stuff, if only to continue my theme of – hey, writing and parenting, go together pretty well but it’s HARD sometimes.

I didn’t work this weekend at all. I often don’t – taking weekends has been a big and important step for me, and one I’ve only come to in recent years. Partly it was deprogramming from the PhD years, and partly a symptom of working from home – I’ve always been self-employed/freelance/creative and that means you never have a structured day off. You have to make one.

As a parent, the weekend is the time when I have a fellow parent home all day, and there’s a lovely decadence in that. Baby smells whiffy, there’s a 50-50 chance I don’t have to deal with it! But because of that, I regularly slip into the bad habit of assuming I will get more done on the weekend than I actually do, and feeling on Monday like I’m WAY BEHIND which is stressful and horrid.

Also there’s the thing where, during the precious Nap Hours that still occur most days (that’s when the 2 year old naps, not the rest of us), my seven year old daughter quite reasonably expects that sometimes we’ll do something together. Something Jem-free. I had no qualms about telling her to go read a comic or something, Mummy was busy, during the school holidays, but now she’s back at school, there are very few Mummy-Raeli-Jemfree hours.

So I try to keep my expectations of the weekend to a minimum, unless I have a dire deadline. This weekend, once I got the head’s up that we were going to have crazy 35 degree days with it not cooling down much at night (a rare occurrence in the Tassie summer) I decided that okay, I wasn’t going to try to get ANYTHING done this weekend at all, except for maybe catching up on my bookshelf reading.

Which was fine except that I forgot I do have a daily wordcount quota to reach – this is not a particular ‘writing this thing’ month for me, because of school holidays in the first half and working up to my big Fury revision (apparently I need to take a run up) but I had a bunch of small projects to work on so my plan was, starting from the 11th of the month, I would write 500 words a day on fiction.

My overall goal for the year is 200K of fiction, but that’s based on 25K a month from April to September (my sustainable active novel writing target) and then a successful Nanowrimo in November. However, writing 500 words a day from the 11th to the 29th (on things I had to write ANYWAY, chapters for a co-writing project and short stories, mainly) meant I could get a 10,000 word head start on my year.

And, this weekend, I fell down on it. Because 500 words is so small, I can manage it mostly with an hour or so (sometimes more, sometimes less) of concentration, or a whole bunch of 15 minute bursts of concentration, and there was no concentrating happening at all this last weekend. Mostly it was icypoles, Doctor Who Monopoly, and endless baths for the children to make up for the fact that they couldn’t go outside.

But with only a few days to go before the end of the month, and a hard deadline for one particular short story, I panicked yesterday evening and drilled out the 1000 words (on the right thing!) in a moment of adrenalin fuelled madness.

Sure, it doesn’t sound like much. It’s half a good Nanowrimo day. But I am out of practice, and it was hot enough to melt everything between my ears. So I take that as the victory it is.

I really need to finish that short story today.

But I don’t know yet whether my after school babysitting option is a go or not, and the difference that makes is an extra 2.5 hours in my day. 5 hours, or 7.5 hours. When you also need to clean the house, cook the dinner, catch up on a week’s worth of email and… and… and…

Really, I don’t have time to write this blog entry. But unlike everything else I have to do today, it’s finished!

This is basically cake (two packet mixes swirled together so some is vanilla & some choc), cut to size & liberally spread with chocolate frosting. The windows and panel are made from roll-out white icing, the details from slices of a metre-long liquorice strap, and the fancy white writing parts from one of those squeezy writing icing things. All bought from the supermarket.

I had a near-disaster when I put gladwrap over the whole thing (having refrigerated the cake for some time I assumed all the icing was set – the frosting WAS but the writing sadly got smeared all over the place) so I recovered by putting a whole piece of liquorice strap over the mess, tidying up with a bit of spare chocolate frosting (always save the last spoonful just in case!!!) and re-writing the text.

It looks like a TARDIS, anyway! Imperfect, but delicious.

[and if anyone, not looking at anyone in particular, hon, thinks I was overreaching myself, I show further evidence that my goals in cakeitude are sensible, rational and achievable, unlike some people who take TARDIS-related cake art to EXTREMES - thanks to @greenspyders for the link]

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is Raeli’s second cake of the birthday season – I also made a gluten-and-dairy-free Time Vortex icecream cake for our weekly friends dinner last night, which consisted of mango and lemon sorbet swirled and refrozen in a silicon cake mould, with lolly dinosaurs, musk sticks and not-Lego Daleks stuck every which way into the swirl.

Imagine the kids faces (five of them) when I said “Every kid gets a Dalek.” The birthday girl was magnanimous in the sharing of mechanical monsters, and all 5 children (including the 2 year old Jem) played happily with them afterwards. No one tried to eat one. Happy ending!

Me: How about we watch that animated Batman movie you got for Christmas?
Him: Okay.
Daughter: Yay, Batman!

*family starts Batman Year One*

–Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham
–Lieutenant Gordon gets beaten up in street
–screen fills up with thugs and (underage) hookers

Me: Starting to think this film is not in fact appropriate for nearly-seven-year-olds
Him: Most definitely

*family examines DVD case*

Me & Him: Oh, crap, M Rated!

*lunge for DVD, turn it off*
*daughter wails with disappointment*
*we explain why M rated means not appropriate for nearly-seven-year-olds*
*we put on other animated Batman episode which is far more appropriate, with icecream to help daughter through the transition*

Me (guiltily): I think I just remembered that Batman: Year One was originally written by Frank Miller
Him: That explains a lot.

And this is why checking the film rating is sometimes not a bad idea, the end.

A home-made Adipose from Glammer to Raeli

And home-made cybermats!

I could say that we didn’t give Jemima the pirate hat because of Amy Pond… but it would be a lie.

Shortbread daleks! All now eaten.

And… well, yes. A fraction of the Doctor Whoness that invaded our household this year, as every member of the family received something along those lines. Things. Somethings. Many things.

This is not all the things.

I regret nothing.

My plan is to read from Love and Romanpunk, probably the opening Agrippina story, because seriously that story was made to be read aloud. I’m really looking forward to it. If you haven’t been to a Republic Reading before, they are very fun and relaxed, you can have a drink or something to eat, hang out and listen to stuff. They also have an open reading towards the end of the session – I think they used to put it in the middle but then everyone used to leave straight away and not stick around for the featured readers. Heh.

The event is about as family friendly as stuff in pubs is – which is a whole lot friendlier than it used to be thanks to the glorious smoking ban – and I’m pretty sure my kids will be there. Hmm. Not sure how family friendly what I *read* will be, so if you have smart old-enough-to-get-smutty-references kids you might want to take that into account. Or bring headphones for them. But you can rest assured I will not be reading anything that I couldn’t in front of my six year old.

Oh dear. Maybe I have to re-think the story. Eh, I’ll just let her play with my iPhone, she won’t hear a word I’m reading.

TANSY REPUBLIC READING

DATE: Sunday 2 October
TIME: 3-5 PM
PLACE: Republic Bar, North Hobart, TAS
RSVP: Nope, just turn up.
COST: Free!
WILL COPIES OF LOVE & ROMANPUNK AND SIREN BEAT BE AVAILABLE FOR SALE: Hell yes! Not officially or anything, but I’ll have a stack of both books propped precariously beside my cute children.

Jem turns two today! Sadly she has come down with a horrible virus and is not feeling very festive.

Luckily, to cheer her up, she has a sister and some new friends.

Also, cake.

I find this rather surreal, because I remember watching Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant with her already, experiencing the show through her eyes… but she was three and four years old, and she doesn’t remember thim now that she is a big girl of six. For a little while there, Matt Smith was the only Doctor in her living memory, HER Doctor.

Something I have learned about my daughter over the last few weeks is that she is a) fickle and b) a true Doctor Who fan.

We’ve been making our way through seasons 3 and 4 (Martha and Donna) plus a few classic stories along the way, and she triumphantly announced a week ago that Matt Smith was no longer her favourite – it was now David Tennant! She had been holding out for Rose as her favourite companion, despite not remembering any of her appearances, so I let her watch season 1… and it’s been really fascinating seeing her watch one of my favourite seasons of Doctor Who, as if for the first time.

The big difference between 3 year old Raeli and 6 year old Raeli is that the smaller version of her was pretty fearless about anything she saw on TV. In the last several years, she has developed huge panicky fears about all sorts of things – she’s terrified of dogs and cats, gets freaked out by all manner of sounds, and in the last 18 months in particular developed a deep horror of Sontarans, Daleks and other Doctor Who monsters.

But she’s a determined little thing, and while we’ve had years of her completely collapsing into panic attacks, she’s now starting to take control of her fears and her boundaries. She declared a few months ago that she was no longer afraid of dogs, which was a huge deal (much like her claim not to like pink, it was a total lie, but one we don’t call her on, because it’s one we thoroughly approve of) and a sign that while she is still severely hampered by overwhelming fear and panic, she is actually starting to imagine a future when this won’t be the case. And lo, the Stubbornest of Daughters Made Progress.

Her progress in managing real life fears has gone hand in hand with her science fiction viewing. She started out desperately afraid of the Silurians, but her love of the Ood Cast’s songs tempted her back to watch The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood until she adored them so much she wants to dress up as a Silurian for her birthday. She rationalised her Dalek fear to being okay with stories with just ONE Dalek at a time (ie the Big Bang, and The Five Doctors), as long as there weren’t more than three at a time. She drew the line at Victory of the Daleks, which she only “watched” from behind the couch, peering through a doorway from the other room, and at several points completely hiding her face in her hands.

The change which really surprised me was the Sontarans. Raeli’s fear of Sontarans, based entirely on a few images in a magazine and on a DVD case, was epic in the extreme. The very sight of one would send her into screaming fits. She was once so utterly traumatised by an unexpected Sontaran in an episode of Sarah Jane that she refused to watch the show ever again. But then along came our lovely sympathetic Sontaran nurse in A Good Man Goes to War, and she was over it.

If only her fear of dogs could be cured by a sympathetic TV character!

Today, she officially dumped David Tennant for Christopher Eccleston as her favourite Doctor. She then told me with glee that Matt Smith had been bumped down to fourth, because she quite likes Jon Pertwee too. Oh, and… as of tonight, she is no longer afraid of Daleks. The realisation hit her sometime between Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways, but I credit Rob Shearman’s Dalek for the shift in perspective – for the first time, she empathised with a Dalek, and now she’s immune!

One of Raeli’s favourite games last thing at night is for us to ask each other Doctor Who related questions – favourite or least favourite Doctors, companions, episodes, etc. Tonight, she informed me that her favourite episode of the Christopher Eccleston season was The Doctor Dances (she likes ‘everybody lives’) but her least favourite is The Empty Child (“because of Jack and Rose dancing and being romancey, Mummy, you know I’m not a romancey child, I’m an ACTIONY child”).

Then, just before she went to sleep, she remembered that she wasn’t afraid of Daleks any more, so now she can watch the Matt Smith Dalek story all the way through! The look of excitement on her face was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

This is totally what daughters are for.

Also, Doctors.