Lasts, longings and love letters to my babies

The saddest thing happened last night. You see, Leya used to do this thing; I would say to her, "What sound do crickets make", and with an earnest expression on her face, pursing her cherub lips, she would rub her chubby fingertips together. Last night I asked the same question - "what sound do crickets make?" - and she answered "chirrrp chirrp chirrrp".

It may sound like a small thing, but it was just one more road sign along the path of her vanishing babyhood.

This is something I have always hated. Both my children were born on a Wednesday, so while other people start celebrating the mid-week hump and looking forward to their weekend plans, I spend a quiet hour counting down how many weeks left until their next birthdays and the inevitable moment they start calling me 'mom' instead of 'mommy'; the split second when I cross over from being the central point in their world to a peripheral feature they have to remember to phone and who irritates them with reminders about cardigans and questions about supper. This mourning for their passing time literally happens every single week; it means that my love for them is like a pressure band around my heart and that every milestone has at its centre a tiny gremlin of sadness.

What makes me most sad is that, one day, I will pick them up for the last time and put them down again - and that will be it. And I probably won't even realise that this was the last time. It's kind of like when you keep hearing your favourite song on the radio - you sing along and sing along, not even noticing that the intervals between the times its played are getting longer, and then all of a sudden it's no longer on air, and you don't even realise until a few years later, someone plays it on a golden oldies segment, releasing a burst of nostalgia. Or, I look at Jessie - who at seven months is now closer to being a toddler than a newborn - and I wonder how that happened. And I think that, pretty soon, her tiny starfish hand will stop closing reflexively around mine. And then one day she'll think she's too old to hold my hand at all.

I guess it's an irony - in between the times that you're wishing bedtime would just hurry up and come, you're wishing equally hard that those perfect seconds - their giant toothless baby grins, the little hand sliding into yours, your pride when they attempt a big word and it gets hopelessly tangled on their tongues - would hang, suspended, forever.

Brave new world

I truly appreciate that the world my girls are growing up in vastly superior to my own. Who wouldn't want to be able to grow a new nose? Who wouldn't choose a waterless red planet in December over cocktails in Camp's Bay? Having private thoughts? Pah - totally overrated (says the blogger - yes, I see the irony).

But, technophonic anachronism that I am, there are some things that I feel they missed out on.

1. The original cast of The Magic Faraway Tree. In case you didn't know, Joe, Bessie and Fanny have been replaced by Jo, Beth and Frannie. I'm proud to say, though, that Leya is not fooled. The other day, when I was reading her this classic, she burst out laughing. "Frannie!" she exclaimed. "That sounds like fanny!" (Of course, this might just be related to her natural propensity to relate absolutely everything in the world to genitals or fecal matter.)

2. Advertising that sticks in your head. Remember Timmy, with his fever? His mommy called the doctor, because he was a children. Or the little guy who called everything he loved Wedwo? Or the mom who let her kids use new towels around the pool - just kidding, she didn't; she just washed them with Surf. Or the guy who was so out of tune with groceries he thought powdered milk would be kept inside the fridge. Ahh - those guys were doing it right. Thirty years on and I can remember the jingles like it was yesterday. All together now: "Mr. Min is my name, a sparkling shine is my game..."

3. Being able to eat without taking a photo of your food first. Again, I am aware of the irony - I photograph everything in case I want to blog about it on MyTwoCents (see how I subtly wove in that bit of self-promotion there). But seriously - can you imagine going out for dinner, and not having that solemn moment of silence where everyone gets out their phones (what am I saying - the phones are already on the table) and art directs their pasta.

4. Dating blind. No, not blind dating. I mean dating someone where you know absolutely nothing about them. Not what cossie they were wearing in Durban in September 20004, not  what they think about the latest BuzzFeed quiz, not what their ex looked like...Dating where the stalking has to be done in the pure, old-fashioned sense of actually walking past their res window to see if their light is on, or phoning their landline 10 times to see if they pick up (and if they are, by extension, at home and therefore perfectly able to phone you should they so wish). Which leads me to...

5. Always holding out hope. Ah, the good old days when you had to go out clubbing with a pen in your handbag in case a guy asked for your number, and hope like hell someone was able to produce a serviette for you to write it on...and then, hope even harder that he didn't lose it. Of course, chances are that if he did, you'd never know, because if he dialed your landline at the one time you left the house, that was it. Something that could have blossomed into a love to rival that of Will and Kate would perish, stillborn. The advantage? You could always convince yourself that he had met with ill luck, and was currently lying in traction, wishing like anything he could phone you.

6. The Britpop invasion. Damon Albarn or Liam Gallagher. Noel Gallagher or Jarvis Cocker. Not since the Beatles and the Stones was there such hot musical debate. And while no one in the world would decry today's musical geniuses (who doesn't feel a tear of pure unadulterated emotion when they hear 'Drop That Kitty Down Low'), I still think that nothing will dim the anthemic light of Wonderwall (I was an Oasis girl, myself).

7. Ross kissing Rachel for the first time. Admit that, on those occasions when The Rembrandts are hauled out of Jacaranda's Golden Oldies box (what is it doing in there? Surely we're not old enough for our music to be considered for Throwback Thursdays.), you find yourself clapping in between the verses...and wishing there was a fountain you and your friends could dance in while swishing around your heavily layered, mascara'ed hair.

8, Looking up something in a library. There's something about the smell of books, isn't there? When I was at university, I used to feel awed every time I walked into the library, thinking about the sheer volume of knowledge it contained, and imagining the feet of students as much as a century older than me who would have walked the same path. It was inspiring. I also loved the way you would get sidetracked when looking up something, especially in the dictionary. Inevitably you'd find a word so much better than the original one. That's how I came across the word 'vibrissa', which is the technical name for nostril hair - see, imagine how intelligent I look when I toss that out at dinner parties. But, hey, the Internet is so much faster.

...And this is why men shouldn't be medics

I have a thing about male medical practitioners, whether they're the family doctor or podiatrists. My dad thinks it's hilarious that even my vet is female, but my predilections have been influenced by such awkward incidents as the time my last male gynae asked me if I was going away in December. It was March. While I appreciated the attempt at small talk designed to put me at ease, the fact remained that, when you're the kind of person who exits rooms backwards so that your husband of four years cannot see your bum, you're never going to feel okay about being peeked at by a stranger.

There have been other uncomfortable instance along the way, like the time I went to interview a gastroenterologist about future medical developments. I was pregnant at the time, which turned out to work against me when he led our conversation onto the topic new treatments for hemorrhoids. "Looking at you now, being pregnant, I'd say you're probably suffering," he said cheerfully. I wasn't - but knowing that was the first thought that came into his head when he looked at me did nothing to assure me that my feelings of unattractiveness were all in my head.

I was again reminded of the importance of having a female-only medical team when I went to see the chiro this morning. My neck has been in spasm for ages, because I am so afraid of saying 'no' to either of my kids' requests to be carried that I frequently find myself lugging around 27kg of child (I know, I know - my sister is always looking at me pointedly and saying 'Who is flying this plane' when I give in to my kids, but I believe that to be a rhetorical question).

After months of either turning my entire body when I want to check my blind spot while overtaking in my car, or simply neglecting to do so and hoping for the best, I decided it was time to take things in hand. Hence today's visit - the only problem being that since my chiro is a guy, visiting him requires as much prep as going to a red carpet event or appearing on Clifton in a bikini. This created a Catch 22: on the one hand, my desire to sleep in waged war against the need to pluck my eyebrows and iron my hair but, mornings being what they are, I decided to act like normal people and just go to the appointment without embarking on a spa-style professional beauty journey first.

(Alright, confession time: I may have a tiny, slight, minute crush on my chiro. I understand that, as a married woman, this is highly inappropriate - also, he is the same age as Harry Styles. But then again, that may be part of his attractiveness. Either way, although eyebrow grooming was out of the question, I had carefully planned my outfit to hide the fact that there has been no Pilates in six months, as he suggested, and so was rather taken aback when he presented a nylon gingham garment with no back and asked me to put it on.)

So there I was, lying on my back as his face hovered above mine, wishing I could just relax into the moment when, instead, my mind was flooded with questions. Is there any way my oats could have given me garlic breath? Do I have any bears in the cave (a dirty nose, for the uninitiated)? Can he smell my shampoo and does this make him feel comforted, knowing that I tried to be clean for him? Or is he repulsed by my eyebrow stubble?

I think my paranoia in this regard stems from my own reluctance to touch people - that episode from Friends where Ross was reduced to massaging people with a wooden spoon springs to mind. In fact, for a while I contemplated becoming a yoga teacher, but then I considered having to handle other people's cellulite while I adjusted their poses, having to pretend I didn't mind that their sweat - which is, after all, just diluted urine - was getting all over me, and I knew this simply wasn't for me.

This is what I am thinking while my chiro is adjusting my neck. I am worried that he is finding the grapey texture of the mole on my neck (it had started out as little more than a freckle, but you know what happens to moles during pregnancy - it now looks like I have a little twin peering out from behind my ear) disturbing, and that he is yearning to wipe his hands on his pants after touching me (which is what I would do), and wondering if he is simply waiting for an opportune moment to do so, and trying to talk without exhaling in case I do indeed have garlic breath, which makes me sound weird...and then he starts to shake my head about. I imagined how I must look, with my head bobbing wildly about like one of those spring-loaded dogs on a dashboard, subjected to a drive through a mountain pass, my teeth chattering ever so slightly and the unbleached hairs of my moustache glinting as they briefly came into the sunny patch by his window, and then disappearing again, kind of like a strobe light.

I really hope my neck is better after that session - if it isn't, I will have to book an hour with my therapist before I see the chiro again, just to boost my self-esteem. She's female, of course.

The shame, the shame

You always hear moms discussing the things they miss most since they had their kids. Usually, it's the Saturday sleep-in, or the ability to go to a restaurant where there is a distinct lack of chicken nuggets on the menu. For me, it's my food dignity.

What is food dignity, you ask? It's being able to eat openly, rather than lying to your three-year-old, telling her you can hear your phone ringing, so that you can sneak into the kitchen to spoon some cookie butter into your mouth while she's patiently waiting in her bedroom, Doc McStuffins stethoscope at the ready, to give you a check up.

I know I am not the only person who feels bad about The Secret Eat. But note that guilt doesn't translate into a willingness to come clean. My sister has a charming story about how she forbade her husband from eating the last Tempo bar in the house, telling him it belonged to their son, just so that she could hide in her specially designated Secret Eating corner (in the scullery, hidden by the pantry door), scoffing it down in giant mouthfuls.

The Secret Eat is accompanied by the kind of loserish shame usually experienced only after you have truly let loose on a night of tequila and gay abandon. Let me assure you, there is nothing to make you feel proud about peering around guiltily to make sure that you haven't been followed,stealthily and silently reaching up into your contraband cupboard, shoving the food into your mouth with ferocity and velocity of a Banteur told they have a free pass to eat carbs, and then trying to saunter casually back, making sure there are no giveaway smears of food on your cheek. The worst sound in the world, as any secret eating mother will tell you, is not actually the 3am wake up cry. no, no. It's those little footsteps making their way into the kitchen, Followed by the sweet little voice asking, what are you eating.

Surely it wouldn't hurt to share, you might think. And that's where you would be wrong. Sharing, contrary to popular belief, is not caring. It sucks - and if more people were honest, they would admit it. Of course it doesn't hurt if someone just wants to use your pen, or if you're letting your sister wear your best dress to her friend's wedding. But come on - think about it. Sharing food means Less For You. Less. For. You. Fewer mouthfuls. In no one's world is that a good thing. Also, while we're being honest, those little toddler mouths are almost always studded with crumbs from the last morsel they cadged.

So this is what I mean by loss of food dignity. No one likes to become that whiny kid from school who, when asked for a NikNak at break, would say "But it's my only lunch". And yet, sad as I am to say it, that is precisely what I do when Leya asks me for a bite of whatever it is I'm eating. I tell myself that it is in the interests of her development, and that she has to learn about boundaries. How else can I save her from becoming a much hated dictator? After all, what is the difference between snatching the hero chip someone has specially been saving, or invading another country? Neither belongs to you, so it's all a matter of scale.

This brings me to the fact that constantly trying to provide a healthy role model for your child - allowing them to take countless bites of the carrot cake you have been looking forward to as a reward for making all your deadlines, cleaning up after you, being nice to telemarketers - is exhausting. Sometimes all I want to do is let me true self shine, swear at bad drivers, let the dirty dishes pile up and go to bed without brushing my teeth, But every action has a repercussion, so I will take the safer route, and continue to bury my stash out of reach and snatching moments to eat them when I can no longer contain myself. I might not feel good about it - but just think how much worse it would feel to see that beloved face fall when she hears the words No, you can't have any of my brownie.