Gosh, it’s been one of those days.

Kolya’s nanny called early this morning to say she’d be late. Which would mean I’d be unable to make my 9 o’clock meeting. Except that someone else happily rearranged to switch meeting times so mine got changed to 12. That was nice.

Oh, and then the nanny got in earlier than she’d thought. I had some time before my 10.30 appointment with the lady to fit the shower doors. I needed to fetch a basin from a warehouse on the other side of the city and get it to the house, but there wasn’t enough time before 10.30 for that. Except that my mom had arranged for someone from her office to fetch the basin and get it back to the office. So there was just enough time to get to the office, and make the 10.30 with basin delivered and plenty time to spare. That was nice.

Of course, I forgot my keys to the house. But the painters were there, making the place beautiful. So it didn’t matter. Oh, and the shower door lady arrived on time. She looked at the showers and said that she couldn’t measure yet. The builder would need to finish another row of tiling to level out the surface so that she could measure properly. With that, the builder arrived and she could explain to him just what to do. So we got through that just snappily, which left me with enough time to go through the whole house and compile a final list of what needs to be finished. And enough time to pick up some of the other plumbing supplies for the builder and a paint sample for the painter. And the lovely furniture shop still had the very lovely headboard that had been there last time I saw it. And it was the last one in stock. And they said it could indeed be mine. That was nice.

Then to the 12 o’clock meeting, after which I had to call an office in town to find out whether I needed to pop in to sign a document that needed to be sent off today. Oh, they said, you need to have it printed, signed and commissioned. That should’ve meant going all the way home to get the documents and print them, and then to find a commissioner, and then back to town to deliver them. But a friend is a commissioner. So she kindly said, just come to my office and print it out and I can commission it for you. So I did. And when I got it back to the office that needed to send it off – they realised that it was missing some of the pages. But there was another commissioner downstairs, so they just reprinted it and got it all sorted out. Then the courier walked in, as though someone had sent him just on time. Did I mention that there was a parking spot just outside the building? No, I probably forgot that bit. Well, there was. That was nice.

Then I realised I was low on fuel in my car. But I had remembered yesterday to put my petrol card back in my wallet with the pile of cards I’d taken out for the trip to Dubai. Oh, and the petrol place has a bakery with the lemon poppyseed muffins I like. That was nice.

So it’s really been one of those days. As Kolya frequently says these days: I LIKE it.

This email bounced.

So I’m hoping to invoke the powers of the fabled seven degrees of celebration, sorry – separation! – in order to get it to its intended recipient. Or just to spread the appreciation.

Please could someone pass this onto Naomi Wolf, who wrote Mis-Conceptions:

Dear Ms Wolf

Thank you for your extraordinary book Mis-Conceptions. Reading it has been a revelation. Your account led me with intense familiarity back along the road I walked nearly two years ago. You have beautifully, honestly revealed to me much of my own experience that I remember acutely but have never put to words. Thank you for articulating the terrible, marvelous nuances of the experience – especially the fluctuations between peace and turmoil, between anticipation and fear, between the desire to be the successful textbook mother-to be and the uneasy sense that the textbooks were skipping out huge swathes of something crucial but un-utterable.

Your book also had me weeping with gratitude for my own experience and with anger and outrage for the millions of women that routinely get cheated of that experience by the medical fraternity. Entirely by a series of chance encounters, I ended up opting for home birth. I was, at the time, a South African living in the UK, and had the support of a lovely NHS midwifery team as well as my doula. It turned out to be an extraordinary, marvelous, spiritual experience. Bloody, exhausting, ferocious, excruciating – and entirely possible. There was no need for medication or any intervention – and that felt normal, not remarkable at all. Not because I’m stoic (I’m not) and not because there wasn’t pain (there was); it just felt I’d completed some sort of gruelling marathon or endurance event – with exactly the right support team there to coax me up every last hill.

In the aftermath of that experience, I had the evangelical, elated glow of the converted when anyone mentioned home birth. The endorphins took months to wear off and carried me through the early days of my child’s life in a kind of blurry glow. And yet I also felt curiously silenced about the experience by the overwhelming prevalence of the very myths you list in your section on birth. I didn’t feel I was allowed to share my experience in case I offended someone who’d suffered the far more common medical-trauma style of childbirth. It’s more than good fortune though: it’s about information, the right kind. Your book comes as a welcome breath of fresh air. I only hope it is being read and heard my expectant mothers in the developed world, and is inspiring them to claim back their trust in their own bodies and instincts.

Much gratitude
Lisa Greenstein
Cape Town, South Africa

The doorman at our fabulous hotel in Dubai didn’t blink. A couple of shopping bags with a few items of clothing (the inevitable spoils of an afternoon off on a work trip in the UAE) – and a cabbage.

Going shopping in Dubai is – well, many things. Firstly, it’s terrifyingly easy and tempting, because it’s about the only other thing to do besides work, eat or sleep. The malls are veritable temples of consumerism. As Karen put it, they’re inhabited by small shoe-like creatures that are very tame and will follow you home if you let them. Secondly, it’s hair-raising. There’s a fixed ratio of about three near-death experiences per ten minutes spent in a cab. (Moral: find a mall that’s less than a ten minute drive away from your hotel.) Thirdly, it’s entertaining. Once your driver has navigated his way past the near-death experience, he will let rip with a diatribe invoking the kings of all the emirates. Considering all this, I think I got off fairly lightly. Didn’t die, didn’t get attacked by undomesticated shoes. Didn’t bankrupt self or anyone else (more than can be said for the emirati of Dubai!!). And found a cabbage.

I had to move several tins of Coke and soda aside in the well-stocked minibar in my room in order to refrigerate the leafy head. I’m away on business for the first time since K was born, and part of my plan (apart from mapping out a major publishing project) was to segue away from breastfeeding. I figured that as K only breastfeeds intermittently in the evenings, it would be pretty straightforward to let the milk supply dwindle away over my week overseas. I hadn’t quite realised how productive I was. Two days into the trip I had torpedo-like bosoms so sensitive that the lightest thing brushing past was agony.  From a variety of sources in both hemispheres, I’ve heard the common wisdom that cold cabbage leaves alleviate this particular condition. Now seemed as good a time as any to try.

Today’s day three away from home. I’m missing K like anything. Work’s going very well, so far. The stabbing pains from my unabated milk supply are abating, but slowly. The cabbage seems to help, but I suspect that cold facecloths might do just as well.

In the Cavendish parking lot, I bumped into an acquaintance. I met her and her husband on a dive holiday a few years ago. Beautiful, passionate people, rich in a million ways. He was reading The Power of Now and talking about the mindblowing principles behind Burning Man. I can’t remember what she was reading but I remember that I was fascinated to listen to her. The last time I saw them they were waiting in a doorway for pizza takeaways in Kalk Bay. I remember they reminded me of some Paul Simon lyrics:

…but they ended up by sleeping in a doorway / by the bodegas and the lights on upper Broadway / wearing diamonds on the soles of their shoes…

She was coming into Cavendish with a friend; I was leaving with Kolya. We exchanged hello’s, stopped and paused in that awkward moment that you do when you know someone has something to say, but it’s beyond admissable to utter the obvious – There’s something you want to tell me – so you hunt for the words and they come out – What have you been up to?

Leaving her husband, as she put it. Interesting way of putting it, taking full responsibility like that, I thought. I know so many couples that split up, that separate, that try a trial separation, that break up (or break down), that get a divorce, whatever that is. I’m not sure I’ve met anyone that readily announces I’ve left him. But she did. And I couldn’t help feeling I knew that already, that I knew it all along, and although I could feel the pain and devastation of it shoring up behind her bright, coping, nothing’s-really -hit-yet smile (Paul Simon again - they say losing love is like a window in your heart/ everybody sees you’re blown apart/ everybody feels the wind blow).

The conversation went on longer than you’d usually chat in the Cavendish parking lot. I sensed her friend getting distant, leaning off towards coffee and magazines and a more comfortable place. I sensed the sudden loss of social boundaries that comes from relationship wreckage. I sensed she wanted to say more, hear more. Even though she was spilling all over the place with stuff to say.

“He’s a lovely guy, but I don’t want to be married to him anymore,” she said. “I don’t believe in marriage. I mean, I do believe in marriage. I believe in … a marriage of souls, of selves. Not marriage in the legal sense, the document. I always felt he rested on that legal document.”

I wonder about that mythical marriage of souls, of selves. I know the vision she sees and feels; she is not alone in intuiting that grand possibility of love writ meaningful. The ultimate, wondrous connection that welcomes us to a sense of being at home, being ourselves, being known and held and cherished. It’s a gorgeous, endless, inviting vision, and it’s been sold to our imaginations through poetry and music and romantic fiction and hollywood narratives and the million myths that feed us from our earliest days to our last. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen it in real life. In real life, I think, partners treat each other like cutlery. Something you hold firmly and use daily. Sometimes pointy, sometimes sharp, sometimes polished up when there are guests coming. Sometimes invisible in the daily wash and clatter of things. Maybe behind the prosaic drudgery of it all there’s a grand love story, but I really don’t know about that.

All around me, couples are disintegrating; the terrible statistics of modern Western divorce rates is playing out its predictable drama. Bags get packed, homes reallocated. Those that don’t have to draw battle lines around the children can count themselves lucky, but in the land of the dislocated, luck is a motley ticket to draw.

Away she goes, the inspirational acquaintance. On to better, brighter, more dazzling things and people. On to heal herself slowly in the calm, knowing hands of friends who have walked that path, who may walk it yet.

Kolya’s nanny returned back from her end-of-year holidays this week. Today she requested a Conversation. She was very afraid to tell me this.

Had I noticed that she had lost some weight? she asked.

I hadn’t.

Yes, she lost weight. During the holidays she was sick and could not eat well. She went to the doctor. The doctor says she’s pregnant.

Wow, I say, congratulations.

No, she says. This is not good.  She didn’t want more children. She’s not happy about this, she says.

But you want to keep the baby?

If it were only one month, I would get that abortion, she says. But it is too far for that, she says.It’s funny, she says, because she didn’t feel anything, any movement of a baby.

How far along is it? I ask

Five months, she says, looking like she’s asking a question.

So the baby is due in May? I say.

She is not sure, she says. Maybe not so soon. The doctor couldn’t tell boy or girl yet.

Who is the father, I ask. Does he know? Is he happy?

The father is her current boyfriend. He is very happy. It is his first child. But for her, it is her third child. She has two girls. One lives in the Eastern Cape with her ex-husband’s family. The other lives with her. She did not want more children.

You did not want more? You were using contraception?

Yes, she says. She was taking the pills.

Every day?

Yes, every day. But maybe some days she did not take them so early in the morning.

You’re brave, I say. To have unprotected sex in these times.

No! she says. We used condoms every time. Maybe one time the condom burst.

Pills and condoms? I say. Are you sure?

I don’t know how it happened, she says.

The story is not adding up, of course. The sheer piling up of improbabilities, of inconsistencies. It’s not quite holding together. I don’t say that though.

She was so worried to tell me, she says. She was worried to lose her job.

Why would you lose your job?

Some ladies don’t like their nannies to be pregnant, she says. In case they are moody. In case they can’t work properly.

I assure her that her job will be okay, though we’ll need to find someone to help with Kolya when she’s off work to have the baby. It will have to be someone trustworthy.

Yes, she says. You can’t trust anyone. You can come back to work and find you have no job, because they will take your job.

I am not talking about that kind of trustworthiness. I realise we have different things to lose.

What will you do about looking after the baby though?

The family must look after the baby, she says. My boyfriend, his family will do everything. But if it is a boy, I will do everything for that baby, she says. If it is a girl, maybe it must go to the Eastern Cape.

No, I cry, don’t say that. NO! echoes Kolya, restless and tired of our conversation. No no no no no!

I leave the conversation unsettled. How much of this story is written by fear? Fear that if she does not give her boyfriend a child, that he will leave her for someone who will. Fear that only two girls is not enough; surely a woman must produce a son.  Fear that if she does give him a child, she is saddled with an additional responsibility she did not want.  Is she truly so ignorant about conception and contraception? Or is her ignorance scripted rather by fear, fear that a white woman can surely never understand, that a white woman seeks only to blame. Fear that I may be angry about a deliberate pregnancy whereas an accidental one can surely not be her fault. I wonder about the child in her belly. If it is a girl, it will be all but abandoned to relatives in a distant rural place. If it is a boy, then her youngest daughter will be sent away to make way for his privilege. It’s a curiously political drama, archaic, horrific and yet utterly ordinary.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.”

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

- George Orwell, 1984

“Controlled crying.” Modern doublespeak for: ignore pain til they get used to it.
I bump into a mom from Kolya’s swimming class. Let’s call her Mary. Mary and her husband and their little girl just got back from the UK (medical locums for a few months). I ask how it went. It went great.
We discuss how adaptable kids are.
We discuss how good it is to have grandparents around to help.
We discuss how it’s often anyone but the mother that can put a child to bed easily at night. Mary says, yes, she has to rock and cajole and soothe and wait out a long bedtime ritual in South Africa, but in the UK she didn’t have the energy. “So we did that controlled crying thing,” she says. “In South Africa we couldn’t do it, because wherever you are in our house, you can hear her cry. But where we lived in the UK, you could close the doors and you didn’t hear the crying. So the first night she cried for half an hour. But by the end of the week she was going to sleep just fine.”
Would you do it to an adult? I think, speechless. Would you do it to an animal?

Just how it is
A friend tells me about something that made him angry. His wife prepares a wonderful meal for her brother, who’s coming to visit. The brother visits, and spends the entire visit – a full 2.5 hours – on his blackberry, sending texts and emails. When he leaves, my friend’s wife says “Wasn’t that a lovely evening?”
“Well, no,” replies my friend, “it was a fucking horrible evening.”
An argument ensues. She doesn’t want him saying anything unpleasant about her brother. He reckons the brother’s conduct was indefensible. She says he should just be more accepting; that’s just the way the brother is.
The way society is going, my friend says, good quality human relationships are disappearing.
- What do we have in their place? I ask him.
- We have things, he says. Work, which gets us money to buy things. And things, which are supposed to fill us with satisfaction and meaning and a sense of connection.
- But do they do the job? I ask. What about when we have the things, and they don’t bring what they promised?

Passing it on
There is a silence as we contemplate it. The brutal cycle of it.
Ignore your children when they cry. After all, they need to learn that crying is fruitless; routine is all.
Be exacting in your criticism, and strategic in your praise. Teach your children that random creativity is dangerous. Seeking the approval of others is all.
Teach your children ‘yours’ and ‘mine’ and make sure you draw thick lines around each concept. The communal bowl is a waste of time. What is the value of time shared, experience shared, stories shared? No. Look away from the now, turn from the people around you lest they demand that most threatening resource: your love. Rather focus on projects, any projects, no matter how mundane. Whatever you do, don’t feel, don’t relate.
And soon, your children too can reach this pinnacle of modern existence, and spend their days avoiding and abandoning their lives, their selves, their wives, their children in order to amass a pile of money and things. If they’re lucky some of them will wake up sometime before they die and start paying attention to the missing piece. A few. Maybe. But most will continue, part of the machine, continuing the ethos of the corporation: produce, amass. Look inward. Shut others out.

There are days I feel like making placards – big, loud shouting instructions to the forsaken world in her lostness. Today’s placard would say: JUST BE KIND.

It’s been a big year. Time to close up shop and kick back for a bit. Have a lovely summer, those of you in the south, and a lovely wintry holiday, those of you in the north. And a lovely time to the rest of you too. L xx

Shameless appeal for audience support!!! I’ll be performing in Theatresports next week:

Monday 14 December at the Intimate Theatre, 8.30 pm

Tuesday 15 December at the Kalk Bay Theatre, 8.30 pm

The team will also do one last show on 22 December at the Kalk Bay theatre before we close til next year!

I popped in this evening at the Christmas night market at the Biscuit Mill, and dallied over some of Liesel Trautman’s utterly gorgeous ceramics. If you click on the link, you can see larger pics of her gorgeous, delicate work on her website.