Monthly Archives: July 2011

Leeeea-ving on a jet plane…

BA 747. Taken from the jump seat of an ATR72 d...

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And so, the countdown begins. With a few days to go until we leave Dubai for the summer, they can’t go fast enough and yet I need them to be an extra hour longer to get everything done. My suitcase lingers half full waiting for the ironing pile to make its way inside. I have a two page packing list for my son’s case which will be done over the weekend. The hand luggage will be stuffed to bursting on Sunday night and I’ll spend the next day sweating and swearing about how much crap I put inside when I have to carry a rucksack full of toys, a nappy bag and a toddler the inevitable 14 mile walk from the plane to passport control at Gatwick airport.

I have mixed feelings about leaving for seven weeks. On the one hand, we are leaving our home, our cats, our routine. I am supremely stressed about the travel, as always, which will be a trial from start to finish with no-one to help me. Then there are the sleeping arrangements for my son to worry about, who has grown out of his travel cot and will sleep in a bed for the first time when we reach the UK. I have little hope that I will get much sleep for the first week whilst he simultaneously recovers from jet lag and discovers he can get out of his bed and into mine with no barriers. Due to weeks and weeks of confinement inside, we are worn out, pasty white and have been constantly sick with something or another, and I’m so damn exhausted from trying to keep this stupid super-sized house clean (the maid is away as well) that I have no hope of not completely losing the plot within 48 hours of us landing. Probably at my mother or my son or both. So apologies to both of you in advance, it’s nothing personal – it’s just I’m knackered before I even start this travel marathon, and part of me wishes I could check into a spa for a week instead and be left alone to sleep and read magazines whilst being massaged until my muscles fall off.

On the other hand…I’m going home. To Essex and clean fresh air and green fields and friends and family, to watch my son run around a garden made of real grass with the people who matter most. To London to hang out in pubs and bars and restaurants in cobbled streets that smell of tramp (who knew you could miss that smell). To New York where I leave a little bit of my heart every time we visit. To Massachusetts, to reunite with my husband’s family after a full year apart and play on the beaches and relax to the sound of the ocean. Seven weeks doesn’t seem long enough to get my fix of all of this before I have to head back to the desert. It makes my heart ache thinking about how little time I actually have to soak it all up, and take everybody and everything in before we return. Despite being back for so long, I’m seeing most people only once because there simply isn’t time for any more. It breaks my heart having to cram in all our news, laughter, and enjoyment of eachother into one evening and that be enough to last me until, well, who knows when.

I will, of course, make my annual attempt to persuade everyone to come and visit us sometime over the winter. Despite all my gripes about living here, Dubai is a truly great place to come on holiday and I love having our friends and family visit because as well as the fact that they always have a really good time, I like to think it gives an insight into our lives here, and helps them to know us better as we spend more and more years away. I love seeing our friends and family in a relaxed environment where they are not running off to work, and having the time to spend reconnecting that I don’t get on trips home because there are just so many people to spread myself around. It also helps cure the homesickness during the long periods we are in Dubai, to see a familiar face or two and catch up with the day to day back home.

But even with visitors to support us in our quest to keep up, we do miss things and the summer is our chance to make sure we haven’t been forgotten about entirely. I can’t wait and yet I need to put up some emotional barriers to stop me from feeling too much or I’ll never be able to leave. I know everyone’s going to tell me about traffic jams and rain and cold and no housemaids and financial crises and how nobody sees eachother anyway and I know that seven weeks of summer isn’t real life, I really do. But it is my life, fast tracked into less than two months, that I would usually live over the course of a year, and it’s a rush and a downer at the same time, to know it’s all I’ve got.

The next blog entry will no doubt be from somewhere a long way west of here. However it’s fair to say that I plan to make the most of my summer and therefore you won’t find me sitting at a computer that often. With any luck those who have substituted talking to me or emailing me with reading this (and I have had at least two admissions that this is the case – one from my own sister!) will prefer the live version and forgive the slow-down in production. For the rest of you, I’m sure there will be plenty to read come September when I’m sulking about being back in Dubai. Wishing you a all a wonderful summer, just like mine is going to be. Bring it on.

Having it all Part III

“It is never too late to be who you might have been” George Elliot

Tragically this quote is not an indication of a brilliant mind, but is merely the stolen last line from the season finale of ‘Brothers and Sisters’, which I watched during one of my son’s lunchtime naps last week. As well as saying my farewells to Kitty, Nora, Kevin et al,  in the past week I have also completed a Cougar Town series 2 box set and the last ever episode of ’24’. My husband has been away for a couple of nights too which has meant I’ve had to tap into my reserve recordings and start watching the last five episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’, which I have been trying to save because there will be no new TV until September and after they are done I have nothing left to watch.

A quick assessment of all of the above tells me that a) I watch too much trashy TV and b) if I have enough downtime in daylight hours to waste it watching this crap then maybe I should stop procrastinating and get on and do something with my life.

Problem is now would be a rubbish time to start, given I’m just about to go on the road for seven weeks. So having made the decision to turn off the TV and do something less boring instead I now can’t do anything until normal service is resumed in September. What I can do, though, is figure out the what. And suddenly, while this post is in its draft form, things are coming my way without me even looking. I was offered a one day acting ‘gig’ last week that could lead to more of the same, doing something that I love and am good at. I’ve also started meeting with potential business partners to get another, completely different project off the ground. It’s slowly taking shape, and as I begin to figure out how to manage this new phase of my life, my default ‘can’t do’ attitude is gradually being replaced with the faint whiff of optimism and entrepreneurial spirit.

Maybe sometimes all it takes is someone else to spur you on, so that you don’t feel like you’re going it alone. Being asked to come and work for someone because of the skills I had to offer gave me a real buzz that I haven’t felt in a long time. A different kind to the one you get being a mum, because it was all mine. And I realised just how much I have missed the kinship of working alongside anyone these past few years when I had my first meeting with my potential business partners. Motherhood is such a lonely job. I don’t think you ever realise how lonely until you stick your head above the parapet. To be able to share ideas and experiences beyond those of the under-3s was so refreshing – it made me feel like I’d given my brain a cold shower. Under a waterfall. In the middle of a beautiful rainforest full of birdsong. And talking to another person in a professional context who is also a mother made me realise that all my worries are for nothing – there is not a single issue I have that can’t be worked out somehow if I put my mind to it and turn off the damn TV.

I worry that I will make a wrong turn and what I commit to now will turn out to be just another notch on the career bedpost. I don’t know when I became this careful. Certainly when I was younger I never thought twice about the consequences of doing anything. My CV reads like about seventeen different people contributed to it. But on the question of what to do next with my life I keep getting stuck. As a world-class perfectionist of all things (or at least an attempt thereof), I  don’t want to change my mind, or to fail, or to compromise my family for my own selfish needs. I live daily with the guilty knowledge that I can’t even be the full time mum I dreamed of being because my patience, or lack thereof, turns me from Mummy to Monster if I don’t get time off for good behaviour. I feel I failed myself by not living up to my own expectations, however unrealistic, and I vow everyday to be better. But at this point in my life I can’t and won’t repeat these feelings of inadequacy in my professional life as well. I want to be successful at whatever I choose next. I live with so much uncertainty – if or when we will leave Dubai, where we will go when we do – the tendency is to let these issues overwhelm my ability to make decisions, or to make change, or to do anything other than tread water.

But the more I think about it, the more I think: so what if it’s not the last job I ever have? I’m never going to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant, I don’t have a ‘calling’ as such, so why not just pack as much in as possible? Maybe a little reincarnation every few years isn’t such a bad thing. And why should my temporary situation in Dubai stop me from doing anything? I think I’m finally figuring out that I need to relax a little – and that it’s ok to make change as and when it feels like the right thing to do.

I’m not sure even in a perfect world, that there is ever a right time to go back to work, or start a business, or have a baby for that matter. It’s clear that returning to work in any capacity will alter life not just for me, but for my family too, and I want to make sure as much as I can that it is a positive experience for all of us. But I’m learning to accept (albeit rather slowly) that we will adjust, and although it might take a bit of time to get the balance right, we will get there.

And now I have an opportunity, or two, I don’t want to regret not taking them because I’m worried about what might happen if I do. I live in the land of dreams for goodness sake. If there’s one place in the world where you should aim high and believe anything is possible, it’s in this small city with (still) such big potential. It is, as Mr. Elliot rightly says, never too late to be who you might have been. But why leave it that long, especially when you have so much to get through?

A bit of a coup

newspaper reader

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Apparently according to the blog fanbase I may have veered too far into whinge territory with my last post. Apologies. I was cross and hot and fed up and wasn’t thinking straight. So here is my attempt to rectify the situation and get back to just being a bit on the dark side. Who knows, eventually I may surprise you all with a blog made entirely of happiness and optimism (but that wouldn’t make for very interesting reading now, would it?).

There is a category on here called ‘political’. I don’t know why I put it there, I think maybe at the start of things I had grand ideas about broadening my horizons but quite honestly it’s unlikely to happen. I’m not big on politics. It might not be very 21st century-woman of me to say this but it’s a massive effort for me to find it at all interesting. Even large-scale world news does not beat its path to my door very often unless I’m watching it whilst on a cross trainer blasting Brittany Spears through my ipod at the same time. The collapse of the News of the World this week is the first piece of news to really make it into my life since the Royal Wedding, and that could quite possibly be because I was alerted by about 50 of my friends posting on Facebook. Shameful I know, but when it comes to current affairs I am more Katie Price than Kate Adie.

To give you an example of this, my husband has been banging on about ‘Arab Spring’ for a good few weeks now. Having successfully masked my confusion at the time and furtively conducted some further research on the matter I have discovered that this is not a gymnastics manoeuvre but is in fact a reference to the recent uprisings in the Middle East. Last week I nearly booked us on a plane to Thailand before he politely reminded me the reason why the flights are so cheap might be due to the steady stream of political unrest that has been plaguing Bangkok following its military coup in 2006. Oh yeah. I remember now.

And suddenly, politics loom large in my life, because I’m trying to book a holiday for November and there is not a SINGLE place we can go within a 7-hour flight radius that isn’t at war, recovering from war, occupied, protesting, bankrupt, religiously extreme, disappearing under the sea, covered in nuclear waste, over-populated and poverty-striken, raining, cold, maleria-ridden or really bloody expensive.

Now, clearly I’m not a glass half-full kind of person usually but surely, I hear you cry, even I would find it difficult to turn booking a holiday into a miserable experience. But no, instead of having the wonderful adrenaline rush of gazing at the room/pool/beach of our chosen destination and envisaging hours of uninterrupted bliss lying on a sun bed reading a book whilst my toddler frolics happily with his daddy in the surf, I got completely depressed at what a mess everything was in and gave up altogether on the world ever turning out the way John Lennon hoped it would. (Which, for the optimists amongst you, is the closest I can come to describing what it’s like to live in my head. A John Lennon wishlist graveyard.)

So instead we’ve ended up booking a hotel in the desert about 4 hours’ drive from here. It’s a very nice hotel in a very pretty part of the desert and because we didn’t have to pay for a flight we’ve bagged a great room – with the added bonus of being able to load the car with as many books/toys/dvds as we can fit. The weather will be perfect, and there are no land mines, tidal waves, radiation sickness or violent crimes against women reported from the area. It seems a shame not to leave the UAE but on the other hand when we do eventually move from here I doubt we’ll come back too often so it’s nice to explore it while we can. Also despite being plonked firmly between Europe, Asia, the Sub-continent and Africa, with an airline that flies to every conceivable destination from 40 minutes down the road, there is apparently absolutely nowhere else to go.

Dubai time

Clock

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The British have “between 3 and 6pm” or preferably, “3.25pm and don’t be late”

The Spanish have “manyana, manyana” (phonetic because I’m not sure how to do those ‘n’s on my mac) which is fair enough because at least they set expectations.

The South Africans have “just now” (later) or “now now” (right now) which whilst confusing to the rest of us seems to work South African to South African.

The people of Dubai have “I’ll give you a time and then ignore it completely and turn up at a time of my choosing. I will then blame it on the traffic, or the van breaking down, or I won’t give you a reason at all.”

A typical example would be today. I arranged for workmen to come because water was leaking from the bathroom hose. (for those who don’t live in Dubai, this is a shower nozzle-type attachment next to the toilet that is used to..erm…well, ‘clean things up’ before you wipe). They promised to come back ‘very soon’ after the inspection and returned THREE HOURS LATER to turn off the water which by this point was pouring all over the floor.

Also today, I was supposed to open a new bank account. A very nice lady called to say another lady would be calling me straight after we had finished on the phone to go through what I needed to do. One hour and 47 minutes later I received the second phone call. Question: why bother to tell me I would be receiving a phone call immediately, if I wasn’t going to? How is that ever going to be helpful?

Here’s another one. From today. Because just two examples in a day would be churlish and this is the one that really irritates me. The people who emailed me to buy our old baby furniture who said “can we come after 3pm today?” never turned up, so I just assumed they weren’t coming. How naive of me. They have just called to say they are coming NOW. It’s 6.46pm. To me, “after 3pm” would indicate, say, 3.30pm. Or at the latest, 5pm with an apology sms for running late. Not 4 bloody hours later. Why not say “after 6pm”??

Which is where we revert to rule no.2 of Dubai timekeeping, which is the ‘Inshallah’ rule. This basically can be applied to any situation by anyone living in the UAE (you don’t have to speak Arabic to say Inshallah, they teach it to you on the plane) in order to indicate that something may or may not happen but that it’s all in the hands of fate. In the Muslim faith, applied properly, it means ‘God Willing’. But it gets it’s fair share of abuse here by anyone and everyone. It seems to have been rejigged into a polite way of saying “we want to help you/turn up on time/supply you with what you asked for, but we may have over-promised and if we don’t deliver then it’s not our fault”. Technically, my buyers should have said “after 3pm, Inshallah”. Then I would have known to expect them any time between mid afternoon and next Saturday.

So, by the way, they are still not here. And now it’s nearly 7.30pm, way, way, way, way past 3pm, and distinctly not the ‘now’ they promised half an hour ago. To the average person (or just me, if I’m not average) this is borderline rude because it’s my afternoon and my evening dammit and now I’m waiting for these people to turn up before I cook dinner and sit down for the evening and it is SO INCONSIDERATE and so utterly predictable.

And I can guarantee when they get here they will try and barter for the stuff I’m selling even though they probably have more money than Bill Gates. That’s if I answer the door…

Having It All: Part II

Who are these women who can devote their lives to bringing up their children without a shadow of regret for the life they left behind? I fear they are distant relations of the women that somehow have the ability to pack up their troubles in their old kit bag and become Trailing Spouses without a single doubt that it might be the kiss of death on personal gratification for the duration.

It’s safe to say I do not fall into either of these categories. I reckon I might feasibly have one more year in me before I go completely nuts from either Trailing or Full Time Mothering and it would be unfair not to admit that I have spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about how to escape from either. Or both. I have come to the conclusion that running away might be the only answer. As long as I’m back in time for tea, bath and bed because my husband is in a meeting and can’t leave early tonight.

Before I had my son I thought I would be a stay at home mum until the youngest was at least five. Yes, the youngest, meaning more than one child. Due to exhaustion and old age the number of children we would ideally like has dropped from more than one to just the one, thank you very much. One is plenty. So with that in mind, I thought I would relish spending my days playing with my little angel, taking him to coffee mornings and swimming and baby yoga and maybe even just gazing at him for quite a lot of the time. Instead I spent the first few months thinking I had made the most terrible mistake and subsequently about another six (or is that 16?) trying to figure out how to accept being a mother instead of fighting it all the time. I remember only two things about the first three months of my son’s life: the first is my husband finding me in the nursery when he got home from work, having not left it the whole day, with sick down my bra and tears streaming down my face, claiming that I couldn’t do this anymore (quote “I feel like a friggin’ cow, being milked all day long with no form of adult contact”). The second is the time when I made him pull over at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and threatened to leave him and the baby because he mentioned that we might want to rethink having any more children.
Now in my defence, three things may have exacerbated my unhappiness. Firstly it was really, really hot when my son was born. I couldn’t leave the house for the first month unless it was in a car and I couldn’t drive after my c-section. My first outing after 2 weeks at home was hobbling up and down the road at 10pm at night, sweating and panting and crying and wishing myself anywhere but here.
The second big downer was the lack of support. There are no NHS midwives in Dubai. Which means no home visits, no checks. You are sent home with the baby and that’s IT. Trouble breastfeeding? Google it. Not sure how you bath the baby? Use wet wipes. Baby won’t sleep? Neither will you. There are no family members just down the road who are happy to come and rescue you when you reach the end of your rope. No-one to say “why don’t me and your dad come over for the day and let you get some rest?” For the first six weeks of my son’s life, it was just me and my husband, walking around like zombified idiots hoping we didn’t cock up too much because it’s only 3am in the UK and we can’t call anyone to ask if it’s ok that the baby is hiccuping/snoring/sleeping without a blanket on (delete as appropriate).
The third and final straw was that we had been due to move into our newly finished house when I was four months pregnant….and when our son was 9 weeks old and we were on the verge of being made homeless (we literally had 24 hours left in the house before the lease ran out) we finally got the keys. Moving house in the boiling heat with a new baby and no family support around…hardly conducive to having a fluffy, shiny, rose tinted spectacled new baby experience. Particularly if you are a ‘glass half empty’ kind of a gal full of raging hormones and an average sleep time of 3 hours per night.

As we settled into our new home and my son got older the full realisation of what motherhood was all about began to sink in. And I must admit I didn’t like it much more than I had at the beginning. I love my son. I would do anything, anything in the world for him. I think he is the most amazing individual and sometimes I just sit looking at him and can’t believe we got it so right. But OMG I am terrible at full time mothering. If he’s with me 24/7 for longer than a 3-day stretch I start to come out in a rash. It exhausts me and I end up resenting him, my husband, other smug full time mums, people who are thinner/younger/prettier than me, anyone who’s ever had a job…pretty much everyone, in fact, who isn’t me or directly looking at me telling me how sorry they are.

It’s taken me a long time to admit to the fact that full time mothering is not for me, and longer still to accept it. Fortunately a good friend of mine shared her secret over a few glasses of wine last summer. She is allergic to full time mothering as well, so her kids are in nursery. This does not sound like much on paper. But it was a revelation at the time, because a) someone else admitted they felt the same way as me, b) they had found a way to manage it and c) they weren’t ashamed to say so. Co-incidentally she is an expat too. It makes me wonder just how much of a negative effect the lack of immediate family support can have on you if you were pre-dispositioned not to cope particularly well in the first place. Whatever the reasons, the fact is I had been battling for so long with these demons that it was an enormous relief to discover there is no shame in admitting you need a break.

Still, it took me another six months to stop listening to the guilt-voices in my head. And despite the fact that he loves nursery, and has gained so much confidence from going, sometimes they are still there. Sometimes, the guilt of not wanting to be with your child all day every day when you don’t have the excuse of going to work is overwhelming. Until I got over myself, I felt it was like admitting that you don’t love your kid, which isn’t true. Or that you are a bad parent, which also isn’t true. Or worst of all, suggests you’d rather be in an office, which is definitely, positively not the case either.

Admittedly, after a few months of enjoying myself, I think I would like to do something more than just have ‘downtime’. The problem is this: every time I think about going back to work, I start to think about all the times I won’t be there for my son. I think about how much I enjoy the parts of my life that are interesting and fun and fulfilling, and how nursery has changed everything, made me more relaxed and allowed me to recharge my batteries three mornings a week to be a better mum the rest of the time. I think of all the great things I get to do with him, precisely because I have the time. The moments we share and the battles we fight and the giggles and tears and the magic of it all. Then I mentally fill in the week with somewhere between 20 and 40 hours of work and suddenly that doesn’t seem like such a good idea either. I can’t bear the thought of losing all that time just yet, the time I have for me and the time I have for my son. And yet, I feel the need to do something with my life. At the moment ‘something’ is this blog but it’s not exactly making me big bucks, nor is it the most socially interactive of career choices. Granted, I never realised until I started writing how much sh*t fills my head on a daily basis, and this is certainly a great forum for getting it out, but it’s not a job (I really must keep reminding myself of that). On the other hand, is it enough for now, just to be doing something that I enjoy that means I don’t have to compromise on the rest?

Basically, I’m really bloody confused. ‘Having it all’ is a concept I can’t even begin to contemplate. ‘Having a clue’ would be a good start. Because if I don’t want to be a full time mum, I don’t want to go back to full time work, I don’t want to have another baby and I don’t want to sit around doing nothing, then I ask you, WHAT THE HELL DO I WANT TO DO?!