Eccentric Seal

In the days that follow, I work out what has happened. It looks as though the hospital didn’t properly log our change of address and appointment letters have gone out to our old place. I relay this to the social worker when she next calls. She sounds sceptical. “So, that’s what your saying has happened?” I cut her off “That’s what I think has happened. I can find out for sure when I go in for my scan.” The scan they have finally booked me in for. The one that should have happened months ago.  I agree to pop down to the social services office afterwards. I research child protection procedure, to better understand what will happen next. I talk to people about it, especially other mothers and especially other mothers who have been investigated themselves. There is a predictable class divide. Middle class people tell me there’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a mistake and of course it can all be smoothed out. Working class mums tell me to be fearful, to p...

 “That was social services” I say to my husband. He flips. He is outraged and also scared. There’s something else too, He sees this as an insult. Something is implied about us. “They should know we’re not that kind of people” I never get this attitude. What are “that kind of people.”? If child protection procedures apply to one person they apply to everyone. But now is not the time for that argument. We’re about to have a much worse one. I tell him not to worry, it can all be cleared up. He accuses me of complacency. We “discuss” how best to deal with the situation. I think a letter should sort it. He thinks we should go to the midwives and demand to know what is going on.  In other words, in the words we actually use: He thinks I am a weak person who puts my own discomfort at conflict ahead of our baby’s welfare and will end up getting him taken into care. I think he’s a crazy bam who wants to kick off at midwives which will get the baby taken into care....

Its late Monday morning and I am mooching about the kitchen. It is my third week of maternity leave and a Monday morning with no work is still a novelty. I am drinking tea and reading a letter from the maternity hospital. It says I haven’t had any antenatal care since Christmas, which is bollocks because I go to the midwives at Maryhill Health Centre every month, and have done since we moved here. The phone rings and I pick it up. “This is Susan McDonald from social services. We’re a bit concerned that you haven’t been accessing antenatal care” The training kicks in, as they say in the military.   The CAB training that is.  I remember when I first started there. I used to ring up the DWP or the council and bark like a little terrier. It was aggression born from powerlessness and inexperience. Later on, I got a bit more used to being listened to and that changed. I developed a smoother, more polite negotiation style. I pull it out now, along with ...

The light from the generous bay window is shining in onto a dozen anxious couples perched on mismatched sofas and chairs, more indicative of wealth somehow than matching ones would have been. Various clutter including a child sized viola case and sheet music has been pushed into a corner to make room for us and a jolly woman in Birkenstocks has just asked us to brainstorm sources of help for new parents. We are at an NCT  class is Glasgow's West End.  “Imagine you’re at the very end of your rope” says the Jolly Woman “Who would you go to for help” It’s a sobering thought. I have worked at the CAB, however and I pride myself on knowing what to do in most situations. I think I would know what to do. In my mind I am thinking “Sure Start Centre, GP, Health visitor, Social Services” Following my usual strategy for group activities, I do not leap in straight away with the answer. More polite to let everyone else have a go first, I think. I am immediately glad of th...

1. If he’s a bit sleepy but not actually asleep, he can go to sleep by himself in a cot, without being kept awake by the existential terror of being alone.  2. He can amuse himself for short periods of time by looking at shadows and trying to work out what they are 3. He can bat objects about with his hands 4. He can almost roll over 5. If you put him on his front he can do a sort of action man commando crawl- except without going anywhere. Then he can cry with frustration until someone picks him up.

0.00:  The living room. Changing bag, nappies and spare baby clothes are strewn about the floor. Husband is plugged into facebook. I am dozing under a blanket on the sofa. Baby has woken up in his moses basket, covered in cold wee and protesting this loudly. Husband does a nappy change as I gradually awaken, and hands me clean baby for 30 minutes of vigorous nipple sucking. 4.00:  Baby wakes needing changed and fed again. Husband changes. I feed. Discuss whether it is worth dragging our sorry carcases upstairs to sleep in a proper bed. If so, this will be the first time we’ve made it that far in three days. Decide to sleep in bed. Carry baby and moses basket upstairs and settle baby. Brush teeth and get into PJ’s. Husband sleeps. I sit awake faffing with I-Phone. Finally sleep about 5.30 8.00:  Baby wakes.  Note visit from health visitor is due today. This requires house work. Also, should make baby presentable. Take baby to bathroom and dunk...

Way back in 1994, when I was 14 years old and picking my GCSE subjects, I thought about studying childcare. After all, I liked children, I thought I might like to have children one day, so it might be interesting to learn how to look after them.  I was called into a meeting with my parents and told I was not allowed to take this subject. Childcare, it was explained, was a subject for pupils with no other choices, who did’nt stand a chance of getting proper GCSE’s in other subjects.  Not for people like me who could take the academic subjects and might go to university one day if I worked hard.   So I did’nt get to do Childcare after all. I did Electronics instead and spent 2 years learning to solder light sensors onto little circuit boards. And it is for this reason, that I have spent the first 3 weeks of my sons life, blissfully unaware was supposed to be winding him, and indeed of how such a thing might be done.  Many thanks to the h...

I’ve recently left work at the Citizens Advice Bureau to take maternity leave. My work is primarily in benefits advice and I am a huge benefits geek. It’s a combination of the intellectual exercise of manipulating regulations along with the pleasing sense of mastery over a system that appears all powerful and capricious when you are on the other end of it. I love it.  One interesting thing about the benefit system is that every government since its inception has tinkered with it to some degree and marked it with its own ideology, so that the regulations resemble rock strata, each layer reflecting the social narrative of its time; the prevalent views about unemployment, the social contract and the minimum standards of dignity which citizens should be afforded. The majority of benefits claimants I come across at work are dealing with the most modern form of the system, the means tested benefits. Jobseekers Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance (the recent replacement ...

I have a collection of blog posts sitting uselessly on a memory stick.  They are waiting for me to polish them up.  They are waiting for me to make them "good enough" for the internet I have a list of possible blog post subjects saved on my mobile phone. They are waiting for me to have time to do them justice.  In reality they are waiting to become documents on the memory stick that will never see the light of day because they will wait and wait and wait for me to get around to making them "good enough" to be seen by the world.  Enough of this! The internet is not the library at Alexandria. My blog is not the Time Literary Supplement. There is no standard to be met. There is no "good enough." We've all seen the total crap that's out there for Christ's sake.  This is my personal blog. the whole point is to be rough and incoherent. The whole point is to put out your half formed ideas, for them to be chewed over and shot down and built...

Breastfeeding involves up to 15 minutes attempting to get a latch and you aren’t sure if the baby’s making the mistakes or you are. Getting little hands through little arm holes in vests is really really difficult. You fail to manuover a (ridiculously overlarge) pram around a tight corner and end up doing some kind of elaborate three point turn while a queue of other pedestrians build up behind you. You have no idea that getting (still ridiculously large) pram on the underground is going to be a problem until you are standing at the turnstile unable to get the pram through, hearing the platform attendant telling you to fold it up and knowing that you will never be able to work out how to do that. You spend your time thinking “is he too hot?, is he too cold?, if I put a blanket on he’ll definitely be too hot though, hang on, is he still breathing?” It takes you three days to get around to writing a blog post about being a new parent.  

OK, So I’m going to have a dive into the massive and Choppy waters of Intersectionality   Intersectionality is a sort of add on to feminism. It’s the shocking idea that gender is not the only basis on which people might be oppressed and that other thing (class, race, sexuality) might be worth looking into too. Nothing to argue with there. My slight problem with Intersectionality (and it’s a geeky one) is that adding new bits to an existing analysis (feminism) to make it encompass more things can be a little bit clumsy and can lead to some odd conclusions. Some of the limitations have been very well over here  by the magnificent Mhairi. I comepletely love this post and once based an entire gender training day on it.   As Mhairi point out, Intersectionlity (and the term Kyriarchy  used here to describe the totality of these intersectional oppressions) does not tend to deal well with class. This is because class is to do with material things. On...

Here’s a concept I like: Performance of Femininity. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_performativity Its basically the idea that gender is something we do rather than something we are. It’s the reason why I love that Caitlin Moran called her book “How to Be a Woman” because I’ve always felt that being a woman is something to be done, to be mastered, to be performed and I suspect that others feel the same way too. It’s nice for someone to say so; directly and in the title of a book. A well named book My performance of femininity is shit. I am not polished, I am not convincing. I stumble over my lines. If you followed the wikipeadia link, you will know that performance of femininity takes in the way we act as well as the way we dress and present our appearance but I’m going to focus on appearance here because that’s the part I’ve historically had most trouble with. Growing up, we were skint; permanently. I can only remember feeling actively frustrated by this for a s...