On turning 43 and reading Bluets

Pictures of Kirstenbosch this past Saturday. Late summer sun shining on Castle Rock. Red balloons in the trees. A quiet bench. I was in a bit of a mood. Still digesting turning another year older (43). Nothing to feel bad about really. Tea on my birthday with family two days earlier. Lovely presents (including some really interesting books, many of them chosen by me).

Admittedly Leah had a complete meltdown on the evening of my birthday. It was a good thing we hadn’t planned to go out. Screaming. Refusing supper, bath, bottle, bed. Climbing out of her bed. Telling L and I to “Go away!” It’s all relative of course. I told L that I thought our daughter had the beginnings of a mood disorder. “This is not normal! Our daughter will end up with Bipolar.” L in tears.

So to Kirstenbosch on the Saturday. By myself for an hour. A book (Bluets) to finish but I was disappointed. I loved parts of this book but as a whole it was disappointing. As a memoir there was so much she left out. As a meditation on the colour blue and what it meant to her in that period of her life it was amazingly powerful but also …. skimpy perhaps? It didn’t fit the mould of memoirs that I’m used to.

But as always, just thinking about this book makes me appreciate it more. And I know that when Litlove reviews it, I will see it again in a whole new light. But on Saturday I was grumpy. And the book didn’t help. I think she captured the intangibility of the colour blue and also the intensity of emotion. (Very crude plot summary: she was a bit depressed at the end of a relationship.) The result was a disturbing but also inspirational read. We love (people, colours, things) and then those things disappoint us. Life goes on.

Easter at Betty’s

We’ve just returned from Betty’s Bay where we spent a relaxing Easter weekend. The weather was mostly foul (wet and windy) but we made up for it with an abundance of chocolate, some reading, shopping and walking.

The Leah girl clearly loves chocolate. She had fun on the Easter egg hunt and also enjoyed her new keyboard. Hope you had a great Easter weekend too.

Friday Bullets

• The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud promised much but it’s proving a slow read. Freud can be wonderfully chatty and interesting but he also takes ages to support his arguments. I’m also reading it on a Kindle which I find is better suited to reading fiction. For one thing, I don’t get the chance to flick backwards and forwards, gaze at the cover, read the blurb, and gauge my progress. My Kindle just tells me that I’m at 38% of the way through.

• Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan is about Serena Frome, a young Cambridge graduate who gets groomed to work in the British Intelligence services (MI6) in the early 1970s. The sweet tooth of the title is a project to finance promising writers who have the right (that is, not pro-Communist) attitudes. Serena soon becomes romantically involved with her writer and I’m guessing that this sparks off all kinds of problems. McEwan is a masterful storyteller and there’s just enough intrigue to keep me engaged. The only snag at the moment is that her writer is not terribly good (although he does have a lot of promise).

• Susan Cain’s Quiet is brilliant. The blurb says it’s about ‘the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking’. Cain has done extensive research into extroversion and introversion and she explains it all so well, and with so many relevant examples, that it is a pleasure to read. I’m quite taken with being an introvert at the moment and Cain reassures us that introverts are important and need to be nurtured. She also debunks the extrovert ideal without devaluing the values of being sociable. At the moment she’s discussing the genetics of high reactives versus low reactives and I’m guessing that it’s the high reactives (or the introverts) who will take great comfort in knowing that there’s nothing wrong with them, they just get over-stimulated quite easily by all the sensory input around them.

• Two years ago L and I got married and had a child. It’s been a wonderful two years in some ways and a really exhausting and frustrating two years in others. “No-one tells you about the tiredness” would be one theme from a post like that. And even if they did tell us, we probably didn’t believe them. Early parenting is not the best environment for nurturing a relationship. And a youngish relationship is probably not the best environment for nurturing a child either. Ah well, we muddle along.

• Leah has started playschool and is enjoying it. Yesterday she didn’t cry when her granny dropped her off, which was a bonus. She seems to have grasped the idea that after three hours someone will come and fetch her. The group is small, the people are kind and she has made a friend.

• I’ve been neglecting the psychology side of this blog. There are interesting books to discuss, interesting articles to explore and, as always, new psychology-related blogs to find. But I’ve been ignoring my own psychology journey and I’m not sure that this is the right place for me to talk about that. Should I stay or should I go? Perhaps the year will bring greater clarity on that.

Baby Jesus and the Leopard

In the run-up to Christmas I made Leah a makeshift nativity scene with her Lego. We had a collection of animals, a manger for the baby Jesus, mama Mary (who was actually Lady), and three wise men consisting of Policeman, Pops and Robin. Thinking about it now, I wish I had included some wise women into the mix. I’m sure Snow White would love to have had a walk-on part in the Christmas story and the female Vet would have been invaluable.

We didn’t have a Lego Jesus and so the baby bunny had to stand in for him. And very sweet and angelic he looked too. Leah was quite taken with this and told quite a few people that “Baby Jesus was a rabbit”. My parents heard about this and were a little worried about their second grandchild who has not been baptized and who now thinks that baby Jesus is a rabbit.

They sprang into action and bought her a Nativity scene with the instructions that she was to look after it (Be Careful. It can break.) and one day pass it on to her own children.

It’s gorgeous. Leah doesn’t get to play with it very often but when she does, she rattles off the figures with ease.

Leah: There’s Joseph. There’s Baby Jesus. There’s Mama. There are the Three Wise Men. There’s the sheep. And there’s the Leopard.

Dada: A Leopard!? What’s a leopard doing there? Oh you mean a shepherd.

Leah: Be Careful. It can break.

And so she is well on her way to being a Christian. The three of us went to our local Carols in the Park where she concentrated intently on the singing and later gave us her own version of “Away in the Manger”. It’s the standard version except for a small change.

Away in a Manger / No crib for a Bed / The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head / The cattle are lowing / The baby awakes … the little Lord Jesus asleep on the ham.

Well no wonder that the Leopard makes an appearance. If there’s ham to be had, the little Lord Jesus had better watch out!

***

Here’s a Christmas collage. Leah loved her water table so much that she climbed into it.

And another addition to our Christmas rituals has been a Gingerbread House. My brother gave Leah a kit and so after a few attempts and some roof repairs, we — or should I say L – produced this. I think it’s rather good.

Wilderness and Christmas

A week ago today I returned from four days in the Cedarberg with some of our staff and boys who were busy with their annual wilderness adventure course. The contrast between the quiet and sparsely beautiful Cedarberg and the frenetic Christmas activity in the shops couldn’t be more pronounced.

I took a number of pictures:

The first one shows the wildness and dryness of the mountainous area. As you can see, it is beautiful but also quite desolate.

The second is of rock art from the San (or Bushmen) which shows hunters and elephants. It’s hard to imagine that this area was once teeming with wildlife, including elephants.

The third is of two boys abseiling down a 25 metre cliff face. I was pretty scared just before it was my turn to abseil (first I might add, since I had to be at the bottom of the cliff to un-clip the boys when they got down there). After the initial fear had worn off, I was looking forward to some controlled falling. Unfortunately that didn’t happen since the line was too tight. Either that or I wasn’t skilled enough in using my weight to do those graceful and quite dramatic jumps that you see in the movies. I ended up hanging by a rope and being lowered some of the way.

I got back to Cape Town to a sick toddler and exhausted wife. I’d forgotten just how awful it is when Leah is sick. She’s better now but looks like a spotty dog. Yesterday I was pointing out all the Christmas decorations in the shops and explaining that just as we have a Christmas tree and the Teletubbies have their tree, the shops are also celebrating Christmas. Leah’s response: ‘Christmas is all around.’ When I reported this to Lindy she said I was imagining it. Very possibly, and of course I haven’t been able to get her to repeat it.

Audits and accidents

First up, a picture of the pie-girl as a hungry little drummer girl.

I could spend the rest of this post telling you about the cute things she says, such as her attempts to read herself a story (One morning … Robin said “I don’t know” …) but it’s been so long since I last posted that I will list a few bullet points as a way of clearing house instead.

Things are a little overwhelming at the moment and I find that my brain seems to shut down in response. So, in no particular order, and because I think it will be helpful for me to list them, here are some of the things that have been happening.

• My anger talk has been delayed yet again and now I’ve changed the topic to “Trauma and Loss” to reflect some recent events at school.

• Selecting new interns for next year has been very difficult but I eventually made the decision. Our internship programme was also audited last week by a team from the Health Council whom we called the Psychology Police. The head honcho was terrible and as much as she said that the visit was not meant to be punitive, we all experienced it as such and I felt like a naughty child being reprimanded by the teacher. The overall feeling was one of anxiety and shame.

• This winter has been particularly wet and our roof at home has started leaking. Fortunately, we have some money saved to cover it. And Spring is nearly here (and with it, a five day holiday to KwaZulu-Natal).

• Also on the subject of building, our offices at work are about to refurbished and not in a good way. They are taking away our lovely intern annex to give to another department and turning our downstairs meeting room into offices. We have had little say in the matter and I am dreading the weeks of noisy building work that are imminent.

• It was my 25th matric reunion recently and I really enjoyed chatting to the guys again and seeing how we have all changed (and also not changed terribly much) in the 25 years since we were last at school.

• Reading-wise, I started three new books in August and have not finished any of the books that I was reading in July. The new books are all non-fiction: Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax; Traumatic Stress in South Africa by Debbie Kaminer and Gill Eagle, and The Dance of Connection by Harriet Lerner. All very interesting (the last two more than the first) but I need to finish what I’ve started.

• L and I went to a Joshua Bell concert in Cape Town and it was fantastic. Joshua Bell played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the Stellenbosch Camerata and he is very, very good. The Bach Concerto for 2 Violins (which he played with an up-and coming black violinist) was quite disappointing, however, since she was no match for him in skill, emotion or volume and the performance made her look very average. It might be great for her CV to be able to say that she performed with Joshua Bell but it can’t have been great for her confidence. And it’s also worth pointing out that she was not playing on the Huberman Stradivarius. He told us about the instrument afterwards and it’s a fascinating story.

• On the first day of term I managed to scrape the left-hand side of my car at school. I was just starting to get over the trauma of that when I managed to reverse into someone else’s car outside my parents’ house. There are clearly a lot of things on my mind at the moment (instead of my driving) but that doesn’t take away the terrible feeling of being so careless and stupid. It’s been a very practical and rather painful lesson in mindfulness.

• I’m also frustrated at how difficult it is to blog at the moment. The only time I seem to get is when Leah is asleep and that is the opportunity for L and I to talk (or just watch TV, read or catch up with some work). Naturally, the less time I spend on the blog, the less confident I am at saying anything worthwhile and the less satisfying it is to write as well. I suspect that I just need to be patient here (but it might take a few years!) I wonder if I will still have any readers by then?

Little miss F goes swimming

Little miss F loves swimming. She also loves talking and running around. For the dada and mama, this can be a bit of a nightmare since as soon as we take her anywhere that has space to move she starts crying “run-a-run-a-round”. But we love her to bits so we mostly let her do what she wants.

The swimming happens for 15 minutes on a Saturday morning and her teacher (Julia aka Doowah) has a good rapport with her. The first time we took miss F there she was quite reluctant to get into the water without L and a little wary of this new person. By the end of the lesson she was wailing “bye bye Doowah, bye bye Doowah” from the changing room as the next little girl was having her lesson.

To say that she actually swims would be stretching the point but she does float nicely on her pool noodle, she does a few kicks, throws the toys into the box and makes a good attempt at ‘monkey walks’. She also keeps up a running commentary on the whole proceedings.

Miss F: Minnie (a penguin) ….. wee-wee (a fish) … duckie … Munny! (her bunny)

Mama: Bunny doesn’t like swimming, you can have him later.

Miss F: Munny! Munny!

Mama: Munny is right here but he doesn’t like water so you will see him later.

Miss F: Leah! Leah! Doowah. Doowah.

Mama: Yes, you’re Leah and that’s Doowah.

Sometimes I fear that she has OCD and that’s why she repeats things so often. But I think she just loves the interaction.

Yesterday I took her to the library (‘run-a-run-around’) and once I’d carried her up the ramp, she was let loose on the books. Her book selection strategy is quite random. She will grab the nearest book off the shelf, drag it to the middle of the floor and plonk herself down. She also confidently walks up to another little girl who is sitting reading quietly and takes one of her books.

“No, Leah, that’s this girl’s book. You have your own book.”

Eventually we made it out of there with The Runaway Dinner , Each Peach Pear Plum , a Quentin Blake and The Bear Under the Stairs as well as The Dance of Anger which is for my anger research.

The biggest treat of the week though will be tonight when she gets to watch some new episodes of Uki, who is her absolute favourite TV character. I’m quite relieved that it’s not one of the Tee-baas (teletubbies) and that these episodes are only five minutes long. Uki is sunny and cheerful, has a best friend who is a bunny and loves reading. She’s also smart as any bee can be and solves problems. A pretty good role model for any little girl. Instead of dialogue or voice-over they have a pretty clever musical accompaniment and this is sanity-preserving for any parent.

Most evenings when I get home miss F will greet me with a happy “Udi! Udi!”

Dada: Do you want to watch some Uki?

Miss F: Alright, Alright.

Pie-girl is one

Isn’t that a gorgeous cake? Well done to L for her baking and icing skills! I was pretty nervous about the stress involved in baking and icing a Winnie-the-Pooh cake but L really rose to the challenge. She even hired the baking mould a week before to practice and so this one was pretty near perfect.

Leah’s first birthday party was great. Tiring, happy, fun – but mostly tiring I’m afraid. I’m not sure why I seem more drained than usual at the moment. But the party itself went very well. Lovely jumpy castle, perfect weather, yummy food, kids playing happily, adults chatting merrily. L and I didn’t really get to sit down for very long since there’s always someone to greet and stuff to fuss about. Of course I didn’t HAVE to flit here and there. Guests can find their own drinks and snacks for example. And also make their own conversation. But I’m a worrier.

Leah had fun – and the kids had fun. Some even cried when they left because they were having so much fun. And it was good to see friends and family again (since it often seems as if L and I don’t really get the time to connect with friends or family other than the grandparents very often). And the grandparents had really gone out of their way to make it a special party as well.

(That’s one of L’s friends lighting the cake in case you wondered.) Leah was a little surprised by all the attention. She’s used to having Nana and Pops to herself and suddenly there were 15 kids and about 30 adults swarming about. She also doesn’t really understand the concept of unwrapping a present. She’ll sit with it looking a little bored while we try and get her to rip off the wrapping.

“What’s in the present, Leah? Look!”

And then Dada will rip the wrapping off and start playing with the toy.

One thing she does love is her car.

Her actual birthday is today so it’s off to the grandparents again for tea and cake and more presents. I can’t believe how quickly this first year has gone. It’s been a crazy rollercoaster ride. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.

***

Next time I hope to write a review of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. In fact I’m quite annoyed that I have to go to school and can’t just sit with my feet up (preferably with a cool sea breeze) and just finish it in peace.

Babies and Bullying

BABIES are to be used in classrooms throughout Scotland as part of a pioneering initiative to reduce levels of bullying and aggression. The Herald in Scotland reports that the project, called Roots of Empathy, encourages children to interact in a nurturing manner with each other by bringing a baby and its parent into the classroom over the course of a school year.

Pupils are shown the attentive, loving interaction between the parent and child in a bid to teach them to better understand their own feelings and the feelings of others. The primary focus of the programme is to reduce problem behaviour, including fighting and bullying.

Louise Warde-Hunter, strategic director of children’s services at Action for Children, which is running the project, said it helped schoolchildren to get along.

“This raises levels of empathy among classmates, resulting in more respectful relationships and a dramatic reduction in levels of aggression among schoolchildren,” she said. “By increasing levels of emotional literacy in children at a young age we can lay the foundation for safe and caring classrooms and, in the long-term, safe and caring societies.”

That makes perfect sense to me but I’m still trying to get round the idea of bringing Baby F to school. I’m sure the kids would ooh and aah (well I hope they would) but the whole ‘bring a baby to school’ idea would involve quite a bit of organization and involvement from the mother (L in this case). Not practical for us since L is already swamped at work and I’m trying to get up to speed with the requirements of being a school psychologist 12 years after I last worked as a school counselor.

I’m enjoying it but there’s a fair amount of anxiety about living up to the standard set by my illustrious predecessor, who earned his PhD in Psychology in his last six months here and was a much-liked and respected speaker at schools and conferences. I’m lucky if I manage to get to one conference a year so the idea of actually presenting at a conference seems light years away.
**

I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to post something since I’m usually so discouraged by the lack of sustained concentration when it comes to blogging that I don’t post anything at all. Perhaps I’m losing my blogging enthusiasm. But one thing I would really like is if any of my blogging friends managed to find me on Goodreads so that I can keep up-to-date with what people are reading and have read and recommended.
**

Quite unrelatedly, L and I were browsing through Exclusive Books on Sunday when we saw a series of Gruffalo-related soft toys. They’re delightful and I was very tempted but eventually we thought that a book was probably more worthwhile. While we were admiring the true-to-the-book likeness of the toys, security arrived and were escorted into the backroom where the booksellers were keeping a shoplifter. I gathered that the shoplifter was a she and that she was black but other than that I didn’t hear anything more and felt a bit bad about being too curious. I remember that in the London riots the looters smashed all the windows in one street except Waterstones (which the commenters saw as a sign of the times – trainers being far more in vogue than books). But now I can’t help being curious. What was this woman trying to steal? Perhaps a DVD or a magazine. I can’t imagine anyone stuffing The Gruffalo under their jacket. But what if it was something for her child? Would we think any differently about it?

On the same topic, if you want to hear what Jenny Diski has to say about shoplifting (and her own shoplifting of books as a young teacher) then check out the podcasts at The New Yorker. I’m still reading and enjoying her Skating to Antartica but I don’t have anything interesting or profound to say about that.

Because there’s never a good time …

… I thought I would just seize the moment and post a few thoughts and pictures. I see that it’s been almost two months since I last posted. A lot has happened since then. I left the military and started my new job as a school psychologist. Baby F grew up some more and is now sweeter than ever. L is doing an amazing job at balancing working 5/8 at her job and being a mother. I finally finished reading a couple of books.

And here’s the thing. Having finished the books, I would love to write about them here but I don’t have the energy. It has been a big adjustment starting work as a school psychologist and then there are the day-to-day demands and anxieties associated with being a parent of a toddler. I’d love to say more about the job but I probably need to let it settle down first (and also not write about it on a public blog).

So what have I been reading? The first book was Writing through the Darkness by Elizabeth Schaeffer. She writes from personal experience about using writing to ease her depression. She suffers from bipolar mood disorder and found it incredibly useful to write down her thoughts and feelings. From there she started a writing group at Stanford University for people with mood disorders. She has some excellent ideas on how to use different kinds of writing in different ways. Journalling, poetry, creative writing exercises, writing about trauma and so on. She also provides very valuable tips on how to start a writing group of your own and how to handle feedback (only constructive feedback is allowed). It is the kind of book that makes me want to go out and start such a group myself.

The second book is a therapy memoir about recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder using dialectical behaviour therapy, Buddhism and online dating. The Buddha and the Borderline is really good from both a therapy point of view and a memoir perspective. Kiera van Gelder captures excellently in words what so many people struggle with. And the fact that she does it with self-effacing humour, honesty and courage had me cheering her on all the way through.

It would be good to read another therapy memoir and to be able to compare these two. But at the moment my attention is quite divided between my job and Baby F.

Speaking of which, a couple more pics …

I love her expression in the first one. She’s clearly quite unimpressed to be faced with the prospect of learning to play the piano. Perhaps she senses the hours of musical misery which her father inflicted on this instrument (and his family)?

In the bottom one she’s in her element on her safari mat with her Lion-Cow and other animals. She’s also wearing a green baby-grow in honour of the Springboks (it is World Cup time after all) and in the background you can see some of the books which are piled up on my bedside table.

That’s probably enough for now. I hope to be back before another two months go by.