November 2015 – Katie Freire

When people talk about pregnancy cravings, they name normal things like ice cream or sawdust or pickles. This baby is obsessed with chilli. I’m putting it on everything, in quantities that would make my normal self burst into flame. I’d blame Brazil’s spicy Latin genes (#racism), but he’s an even bigger chilli wuss than I usually am.

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My brain is adjusting to a new scale of time. We’re making plans for things that won’t happen for two years, or five, or twelve. It’s like my whole life has opened up in front of me, ripe and ready to finally be lived — but it’s also narrowed down, and thinned out.

So many things will be harder or take longer or be off limits for a while now. I don’t feel like I spent enough Wednesdays drinking impromptu wine… but I also did almost nothing else for over a decade, and I know I was ready to move on.

So many things will be out of my control. Baby will have their own timetable and set of priorities, and my career and social life are unlikely to make their list. The nature of what we do means the work comes when it comes — I don’t plan to take maternity leave, per se, but I also can’t make any plans about how or when I’ll work. Projects may or may not come up. Baby may or may not cooperate. We’ll make it work as best we can.

But at the same time, some sense of urgency has lifted. I’ve got time to do things and write things and see things. We might not get to travel beyond NZ and Brazil for a while, but we will eventually — and when we do, our little people get to do it too. (I’m sure that will come with its own set of issues, but it also feels pretty cool to me.)

I’m scared I’ll never have time to write for myself, but I need to make time for that, and currently I’m not doing that anyway. The optimistic, slightly dim part of myself is sort of hoping that “ask a busy person” thing will kick in and I’ll discover reserves of organisation and focus I never knew I had.

I fully expect future me to read that back and laugh until she cries.

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The cat and I are in a battle over the garden. Everything I plant, he promptly digs up and shits on. I’m currently on the sixth iteration of my vegetable protection system.

After he dug up the carrots, I covered the whole garden in bird netting. Lucas immediately shat on top of it, managing to dig up the lettuces underneath without tearing a single hole in the material.

Next, I raised the netting with stakes. He sat on it until it collapsed, and then shat on it again.

Then I added a fortress of bamboo skewers poking through the netting. That night, as far as I can tell, he perched himself on a stake, backed gently over the netting, deposited a perfect pile of shit in the middle of it, and left without breaking a single skewer.

Finally, I raised the whole thing about a foot on each edge, then tented it over a teepee-like contraption in the middle. Then I fortified it with skewers and weighed all the edges down with blocks of wood.

Now he shits on my flowers.

I’m trying not to think too much about who this baby is. They’re their own person already, even inside me, and they have their own story. I don’t want to have too many expectations about what I want or hope for them.

Still, I hope they get their father’s musical talent and his easy way with people. I hope they love learning as much as we both do, and we can foster and build that love in them. I hope they feel my sense of wonder, but maybe direct it a little better. And now I’m projecting things again… I don’t want a baby to do the things I couldn’t or be what I can’t.

I hope they see the world is beautiful and magical, and that they have power within it — power to make things better; to change things for themselves and others; to get what they want if they have the courage and grit to work for it.

I hope the world is still a place worth living in when they’re grown. I hope my generation will do more than my parents’ to ensure that happens. I hope I can be a good mother. (I know Brazil will be a good father.)

Mostly, I think, looking at my friends’ kids and myself as a child and the world as it is right now, I hope they realise that life is an active thing, a verb to take and run with. This world loves passive box-ticking: school, work, mortgage, car, TV. You can follow all the rules and never actually live, never realise that your life is yours, and unique, and meant to be lived, not just consumed.

I desperately want my children to know what it took me so long to figure out: that there are more choices than anyone will ever give you. That breaking the rules isn’t always bad, and won’t always get you in trouble. That grown-ups don’t know everything, and you don’t have to listen to them when they tell you writing doesn’t pay and you should probably be a lawyer. That there’s time to figure all of this out. That your opinion of yourself matters more than anyone else’s of you. That you can’t please everyone. That love shouldn’t be hard, but it does take work. That you deserve it.

I hope I learn to listen to myself, too. I realise, the longer I think about it, that I need to work on some things myself if I want my children to be healthy, well-rounded people. I worry, if we have a girl, about everything society will teach her about the way she should interact with the world. About marketing and pornography and instutionalised, insidious sexism.

But I also think about how my mother was on a diet for most of my childhood, and my grandmother before her. I’ve been obsessed with my weight to varying degrees since I first noticed, probably around 11, that I was tall and strong and needed a bra. (Although I remember worrying about it earlier than that.) My self-confidence is so directly tied to my bathroom scales I can look at any photo of myself and tell you exactly what I weighed that day, and how I felt about it.

How can I teach a little person that their happiness isn’t tied to their size if I still don’t believe it myself? How do I show them that society’s arbitrary standards of beauty are bullshit when I wear makeup and shave my legs and sometimes buy stupid heels that make my feet bleed?

That stupid, endless feminist battle: sometimes I like to look pretty and dress up. I feel good when I look good, and I do that for me, not for anyone else. But I hate that it’s expected. I hate the sneaky, slimy subliminal messaging that tells girls from before they even hit puberty that everything about them needs to be altered or improved or removed to be found suitable for society. Wax this, dye that, tan these, tone those.

And, if we have a boy, how do I teach him to respect women in a society that still doesn’t? When he’ll grow up with violent mainstream entertainment that features women as passive set decoration, if at all. When anything for girls is considered shameful to everyone but girls. When porn.

We’re considering not finding out the sex in advance, partly because my head will probably explode at the inevitable deluge of pink gifts if it’s a girl. But there’s nothing wrong with pink just because it’s associated with girls. Deriding things for girls just because they’re things for girls is fucked up too. Pink isn’t the problem. Tiny tutus and glittery shoes are awesome, and every child who wants them should have them. Every child.

“Girls’” lego makes my blood boil, because lego is a children’s toy, not a boys’ toy. Heavily made-up baby dolls in tiny skirts make my blood pressure skyrocket. But I’d love my little boy to have a sparkly tutu and a baby doll, and I hope my little girl will be into dinosaurs and space.

But those are their own decisions, because they’ll be their own people. If I wish for anything, it’s just that they have the freedom in this crazy world to become whoever they want to be. To be true to themselves. To be kind to themselves.

And to listen to their mother.