Strange Machines

Ridiculous notions I’ve heard this past month about pregnancy and child rearing:

1. Breastfeeding past the age of 1 will cause an Oedipus complex.

Wow, there must be many mothers and sons having sex now because the sons were breastfed past 1! Seriously, all documented cases I’ve read of incest involves relatives who DID NOT grow up and/or live together from birth.

2. Drinking cold water will make the baby cold.

Right and drinking hot soup will burn the child.

3. Exposing a pregnancy belly is disgraceful for a mother.

But a fashion consultant told me it is chic to do so!

4. 2 year old children need to be toilet trained whether or not they are ready for it.

Tons of research show they are not physiologically ready till 3 and the best way to toilet train is for them to be ready.

5. Children must be fat to be healthy (and hence are overfed).

We already have enough problems with obesity so I wish purporters of this notion will just read some research articles and get a clue. Just because a child is genetically slim and active doesn’t mean he doesn’t eat. He grazes, just like Dr Sears recommends. Smart kid. He’ll never be fat.

6. Children need to be dressed to look as old as they can be.

Children are only small once. Why force them to look old prematurely?

7. Mothers are not entitled to personal time.

This one probably irks me the most. People decline to help or worse, criticise very disparagingly when a poor mother stays up for a few hours after baby sleeps for some personal time, and looks rather tired the next day (we look tired every day!) because they think stay home moms should be on call 24/7 but even maids get a day off sometime! And they get to sleep through the night.

That’s all I can recall for now. You can tell I’ve been hearing these a lot. Feel free to add, and to point and laugh.

Our world is becoming increasingly fractured.

Humans, social animals by nature, are sequestered from the better world by crazy work hours, social obligations (not usually for pleasure, or so it seems), and an idle inquiry in the unimportant (aka TV).

People are turning to counsellors to their problems. Few have time to listen and few feel compelled to open up to their friends, especially if they haven’t spent enough time nurturing their friendships with work hours getting ridiculously longer. And those are the lucky ones. Many turn to drink or worse vices. Heck if you need to find someone to talk to in person, check out a Counseling Services List or a Counseling Services Directory.

A friend of mine once said, if you want a happy life, move to Australia where people finish work at 4 or 5, have time for outdoor activities, their families, have barbecues with friends and overall, lead a more peaceful life. You can actually have a family life.

And it is true. Friends of mine there are happily taking at least a year off to nurture their children. Fathers have time to spend with their children. They live in a nice house with a garden (with actual grass). No one feels hurried or caught in a rat race to compete.

Here, we’re in the thick of it. But it is possible to live in the rat race but not compete. What is a rat race but an unending loop which no one ever wins. Heck even Bill Gates got toppled with Warren Buffett (my idol) this year. It is possible to exist in the system but live out of it. And believe me, we are much happier than when we were both working and getting home at 9-10pm every night.

We don’t go to fancy restaurants, drive a fancy car, buy that spanking new condo, or buy any branded stuff. Everything’s made in China nowadays anyway – what’s the difference but the tag? My $3 Old Navy tee feels more comfortable than the $50 (see I can’t even remember the brand) top I bought years ago on sale. Plus, having modelled before, I am used to people paying me to wear their label, not me pay for their label and wear it for them all the time!

Good quality food and books are what we spend our money on, as well as paying off our home and car. The rest, we spend with family and good friends. Bear changed it for us. We want a better world for him. A better life. A happy life. Children do that I think. He has changed us for the better.

I try to cook more, to create a sweet family environment for Bear to grow up in. To remember his Mom in the kitchen cooking for him, Dad coming home to hug and kiss him. Us having dinner and talking together. Mom and Dad reading to him, sharing a cuddle before bedtime. Those are the things I want him to remember. A loving happy home.

It has been a privilege to be born. The longer I have lived, the more grateful I am to my parents for having had me. For as mortality too quickly looms and the veil of invulnerability falls, death becomes a true reality for those who once thought it myth.

How quickly life passes by. Moments come and go like road runners, racing to make the next memory. I can hardly keep up anymore. My journals are full and then emptied. Each day I struggle to encapsulate the highlights and savour them.

For so many, life is over in an instant.

A male calf born to a milk cow, torn from its mother at birth, kept in a cold dark tiny crate for a month alone without food to tenderise its flesh, and then slaughtered to make veal. What sort of life is that? It has never known the warmth and love of its mother, who will lose many more children this way to meet the demands of humans who drink their milk.

Small kittens never asking to be born are born, then thrown into a sack to be discarded, taken away to be gassed, or worse, clobbered to death, just because their mother’s human owners decided not to neuter her and let her wander outside to be impregnated.

Human children born in places where there is no food, no clean water, no medicine. They cling onto their starving mothers as flies buzz around their faces, vultures, undeterred.

Then there are children born, outsourced from day one into a daycare production line or a neglectful nanny, never lovingly held by their own mothers and left to cry without any help or comfort. The imprinting is permanent. They grow up, brittle, unhappy, and angry people, hating life, wishing it would end.

So I must feel blessed that I was born into a loving home, have loving parents who nurtured and care for me. I have had the chance to savour this thing called life and it was kind to me.

When it is time to close my eyes and say goodbye forever, I will remember that in my life I have loved and I have brought joy to others, I have given life to my son and loved him and taught him well. That I have caused as little pain as I could to others to sustain my own existence, and in the process, inspired others to do the same. And that I have created with my mind and my hands many good things I hope will outlive my memory.

At my funeral, this too, shall be read:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, ‘the present century.’ The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century’s being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship’s ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship’s robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn’t arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn’t burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder.”

~ Richard Dawkins from Unweaving the Rainbow

Every mother needs it. Personal time. I had been craving it for a while and indulged the past week or so post-midnight till about 3-5am doing mindless things like reading novels, surfing for stuff to buy from the The Animal Rescue Store, scouring goss online, and writing emails to friends. The past 2 days I have been printing photos of Bear for his family.

I don’t know about other stay-home moms but I have been feeling very nesty. Aye. The nesting instinct is strong in me and I spent the better half of an hour at Ikea looking for stuff to make our home more homey for our family. My better half loved the art print of a real-life Feralas harbour (damn I miss that game!).

When I bought it, I had given up on putting up my own paintings on our wall, even though DH thought they are great to be hung up. First of all, all but one are incomplete. Second, I think my skill needs improvement and that can only be achieved some years from now when I can carry my child without oil paint on my fingers (I am a messy painter).

As a mother, I have sacrificed a lot – television, movies, personal time, clubbing (much overrated now), free time, and sleep. Yet I feel I have gained a whole new world in return. Cooking, caring, and holding this little creature made from my husband and I is nothing short of amazing. Yet it is the most natural thing in the world. Two family members asked recently how I felt about being a full-time mother. I responded, it’s the hardest job I’ve ever done but also the most rewarding.

I don’t know why I can’t sleep but it’s been a long-term problem I have been having, especially when pregnant and in the years before. I’ve learnt to befriend Insomnia and practice unwinding and then slowly tiredness takes over and I am able to fall asleep.

Anyway, I thought I’d take the time to catch up with news, since I haven’t been reading the newspapers much the past few days and I have been especially riveted by the strangeness surrounding Anna Nicole’s passing.

They apparently haven’t done the DNA test for to resolve the paternity of Dannielynn, Anna Nicole’s daughter yet. I’ve seen pictures of her and she’s a beautiful little girl. It’s so tragic that she lost her mother and brother so early in her life. I do hope she finds her real father soon and that he will treat her well.

Britney’s just lost it. She’s starting to make her husband look like an angel. I guess his antics, the awful press stories and pictures of her, and her recent ex Issac Cohen’s revelations haven’t been quite complimentary, to say the least. She may also be going through post-natal depression. Here’s hoping rehab helps.

I can’t believe I am making a commentary about goss. It must really be late. I better head to bed now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about flow lately and what sort of activities I do get immersed in, some practical, some not, and that explains why sometimes I get annoyed when interrupted midway of the activity.

* Organising pix of my cats and Bear
* Meddling with my blog or website
* Playing any RPG
* Oil painting
* Reading an engaging book
* Watching an engaging movie
* Watching a happy scene in my mind’s eye

Flow is a sort of play for adults and kids alike which has been proven to bring happiness and fulfillment.

One route to more happiness is called “flow,” an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you’re doing than from how you do it.

(Source: The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don’t Use Them)

For me, it is very therapeutic to immerse myself into something for a while.

Happiness is within our reach. We just have to stretch out and grasp it.

The joys of motherhood are much to behold. I have had such immeasurable joy since I gave birth to Bear that I’d gladly suffer the 28 hour labour and the trying first month all over again. Many have told me that once I have my own (human) child that I would feel differently about my cats and very easily give them up. I scoffed at such comments, although secretly in my heart I feared that I would love them less, and worse, bear to give them up.

Into my third month of (human) motherhood now, I find that that hasn’t been the case. If anything, I love and appreciate my cat-children even more and find so much more delight in them. The difference between loving them and loving Bear is that Bear needs me constantly. I confess I had neglected them quite a bit those early days. I remember Boy’s forlorn looks, Tux meowing at me for attention. Now that things have stabilised, I’ve been able to spend more quality time with them, without neglecting Bear as well. That’s what parenthood is about, isn’t it? Loving all your children, adopted and otherwise, each as much but differently.

And cats, like children, change over the years. What a delight it is to watch them every day. The joy of watching Kaku play with her mouse toy, carrying it around like it is her baby, grooming it, swatting it and grasping it with her paw! Coming home to see Tuxie lounging on the sofa like a possum and staring innocently at us. Boy napping on the couch head, contented now that the rest don’t bug him as much. Sam (Mu Child as we call him more and more these days) finally succeeding in jumping down from the rafters all by himself! Buffy, a gentle protector watching over all of us, her family.

I grasp these moments like a lifeboat, knowing that we have such a short time together. Life is, unforgivingly short. Even more so with our beloved cats. Children are not meant to outlive their parents. With my 5 cat-children, the probability is very high that I will outlive them. It would pain me so much to have to see them die one day. But as the saying goes, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Isn’t that what life is all about? I raised all 5 from the time they were kittens, adopted them with the promise that I would care for them all my life, and give them every bit of love I have. I will not give them up simply because hearsay dictates pregnancy and cats are incompatible, or that cats and children cannot coexist. I have done my research. I know what is fact and what is fiction.

So if you are reading this because you found this entry while Googling “cats and babies” or “cats and pregnancy”, please do your research, check up on the facts. Don’t give up your pet because some “concerned” person says they will cause allergies, malformations in your child, or any other similar misinformed problem. Stand your ground. Those who believe strongly in this myth will persist. I still hear it from many well-meaning folk. From the lips of those who did give their pets up, it is a terrible thing to live with the guilt that you sentenced your pet to death.

Yes, giving them up to the SPCA, AVA, or risk giving him to someone who may abandon it eventually, is tantamount to a death sentence. If you didn’t know, SPCA simply doesn’t have the space so they have to put down (read: kill) most of the pets turned in to them. Similarly, with AVA. You’ll be very fortunate to find a good adopter. There will always be the possibility that the person may abandon your pet (who may get caught by AVA and put down, or worse, taken by an animal abuser) or give it up to SPCA or AVA.

For those still worried about cats and children, my son is wonderful, normal (no allergies, eczema, asthma), immensely happy, and to his family and friends, the most beautiful child, who lives with his Mommy, Daddy, and 5 cat-siblings.