Before having children, life for many people like me, that is, those fortunate enough to avoid daily struggles over money, food, access to clean water or a plasma screen TV, is a relatively benign series of unremarkable happenings. Highs and lows are binary. Sure, there’s sadness and disappointment, like a relationship breakdown or galloping weight gain. There’s happiness too, like a new job, house or shoes. And, quite naturally, there’s also some frustration, as anyone who has ever encountered a hiccuping e-toll tag can attest. But by and large things go according to plan. You are in control of your life, and mostly able to edit out unpalatable contingencies that might cause severe emotional swings.

Having children marks the end of this tedious ennui. You will rediscover an emotional range not exercised since you started primary school. First up: Rage.

Having children puts you back in touch with a sense of frustration so deep, so immediate yet so enduring that you can watch your civility unravelling right before your eyes. It doesn’t matter how leafy the suburb, how polished the Audi, all those taupe and navy yummy-mummies at the park are just one sneaky toddler away from chewing the bark off the nearest tree. Just yesterday two immaculately-dressed women ran past me in open-mouthed terror, desperately searching the well- manicured vegetation before finally unearthing a three year from behind a bush. ‘Haaa HA!’ he declared upon discovery, displaying the nuanced sense of irony that’s made Christopher Pyne such a sought after dinner party guest.     

This isn’t a rare occurrence. In one week in genteel, suburban Willougby I counted four separate incidents where neatly coiffed women tore around the playground in a cacophony of un-oiled shrieking, sweating heavily with sphincters on valve bounce  before stuffing a pink-cheeked offender into a shiny four wheel drive with a force usually reserved for Indonesian cattle. Make no mistake, this is an emotion greater than anger or frustration. This is sheer, unadulterated parent-rage.

Parent-rage sneaks in on a set of transparent car keys, and then, tickled along by sleep deprivation and bald-faced screaming it fulminates into a full-scale, hopping inversion. The serene are the hardest hit. New age vegans who spent their pre-child lives in a state of peaceful, harmonious existence with all the energies present in the universe quickly discover that exhaustion combined with repeated whacks to the face with a plastic hammer makes them want to eat things that bleed. A friend recently admitted that becoming a parent had turned her into the kind of person she didn’t want to be, the kind of person she didn’t even particularly like. ‘Where does this rage come from?’, she gasped over a plastic watering can of chardonnay.

Well, it’s no mystery to me. But this is because when it comes to rage, I’ve had a primer. Unlike most people, I was brought up with a sense of pickling, blinking rage that borders on the absurd. My Dad, (never a violent man, I’ll just point that out right now) has always had fits of leaping, incandescent fury, provoked by the smallest infarctions. For my brother and I this provided us with an insight into the machinations of heartfelt rage, as well as a childhood of poorly veiled sniggering.

Ironically I blame Dad’s rage on his upbringing. My father descends from a long line of devout Quakers. In fact, a couple of hundred years ago one of his direct ancestors penned the seminal text on the gentle, friendly religion and asserted its role in worldwide pacifism. But 400 years of pent up fury compounded by abstemious living in modest underwear must eventually find human manifestation. Enter: my Dad.

As an adult I’m constantly surrounded by women claiming that they’ve turned into their mothers as they chastise, direct and agonise over wayward kids. I haven’t. I’ve turned into my father, complete with unpredictable, noisy explosions of boiling rage, only matched by the master himself.

Thankfully my daughter treats my fits of anger with the same gravity as we treated my Dad’s. Each outburst is received as a lighthearted pantomime unfolding for her amusement. Like generations before her, she is bearing witness to the general sense of frittering rage that characterised every one of my childhood trips across town in heavy traffic. And this has deeply shaped her sense of humour. For her, it’s just not funny until someone is shaking like an angry jelly that’s descended into Latin.

Some parents like to philosophise about giving their children the gift of forebearance, courage or charity. These people are unreconstructed hippies. I give my daughter a powerful instinct for unbridled rage and its natural handmaiden: the unstoppable giggles.

I never anticipated there’d come a time in my life where a firm turd would make my day. Well, that’s not entirely true; I fondly imagine a period in my mid nineties when I can shoot them at minimum wage nursing aides like a budget arcade game, but at this stage in the game I’d happily give a kidney for just one, perfectly formed log.

It was with this in mind that I fed my daughter her first tentative spoonfuls of solids.  I’m pretty sure I was thinking something like solids in…maybe solids out?. How wrong I was. It turns out, a healthy baby can turn a plateful of shot-peened titanium into a brown shocker in the time it takes you to say ‘Oh Christ, please let that be peanut butter’.

As tempting as the prospect of a solid turd may be, however, it wasn’t my main motivation for starting my baby on solids. I had a far more pressing need: a seriously hungry baby. Four months of breastfeeding, or as I like to call it: the most exquisite torture a person can endure without Andrew Bolt, I was still in possession of a screaming, ravenous baby. Despite constant breastfeeding, and I mean, constant feeding, my kid was clearly still really really hungry.

In cracked, bleeding, toe-curling desperation I turned to the experts: the La Leche League. The La Leche League (French for: ‘La Titanium Frontispiece’) informed me, quite naturally, that I was doing it wrong. I should be relaxing and enjoying this special bonding time together. Less clear was what to do with a baby that can suck the paint off a car.

Investigations continued, all to no avail. Surely I wondered, SURELY slipping my precious daughter a mouthful of powdered rice paste couldn’t be that bad? Is the six month rule really so absolute? After all, feeding patterns differ markedly across the world, and have changed drastically even from one generation to the next. It’s well known for instance, that in countries with dubious water and food supplies breastfeeding continues much longer than in richer places, where mothers have ready access to tin buckets of white stuff comprised of more than thirty naturally derived and synthetic compounds, comfortingly called formula. Even in the modern, Western world breastfeeding patterns have undergone drastic changes, swinging between the poles of formula-only and extended breastfeeding. My own mother tells me that I started solids at four months of age, but that was in the 1970s when all babies were introduced to a watered down mixture of dripping and asbestos as soon as they could make a fist.

Introducing solids is a major milestone and, like so many other aspects of parenthood, the issue is fraught and overlaid with expectations. Bogans have it easy – they just jam a Dorito into the front of their two month old and leave them to it. Angst ridden middle class mothers, on the other hand, have work to do. We must fret. We must consult. And lastly, We must Google. And that’s where things get ugly.

The trouble with Google-Parenting is that almost everyone has a baby at some point in their lives. And almost everyone has the internet (unless of course you are part of the 90% of the world who hasn’t got the internet, but then you’re not going to send me shitty emails are you?). The internet’s reach and ubiquity guarantees one thing: all baby-related information is truly ‘democratised’, that is, pitched at the kind of person who consistently tries do up buttons with their face. On the internet straightforward topics such as toilet training or age appropriate food choices are appended with related nuggets of wisdom, such as why you shouldn’t iron a baby. Add to this plethora of virtual information the combined wisdoms of all your relatives and every angry woman over 50 with a bus-pass and suddenly you’re navigating an unfathomable morass of information about how to raise your child.

Middle class mothers navigate this deluge of contradictory and troubling advice by simply editing and channeling all available information into exhausting fads that make them feel inadequate, like baby-wearing or exclusive breastfeeding (using your own breasts!). Ably propagated by the internet, these trends gain momentum until they’re eventually accepted as orthodoxies in their own right. Consult any parenting forum and you quickly realise that everything from sleeping patterns to toileting is presented as a discrete paradigm, governed by agreed rules. Occasional skirmishes only serve to solidify and reinforce the mainstream, acceptable wisdom. Parameters are staked out with high octane sleep-deprived emotion amongst a community of like-minded folk in their pyjamas, all seething with Respect for Each Other’s Parenting Choices. Deviate from The Rules (gasp!) and you risk shortchanging your little cherub’s life choices, condemning them to a life on tour with a hardcore punk band or forty years faithful service behind the reception desk of a suburban car dealership. The message is clear: only a grasping moron would wilfully question the orthodoxy. I certainly haven’t.

Until now.

And that’s because today is a special day. At the risk of having to hand back the Country Road tableware and keys to the Saab, I’m openly questioning The Rules.

Yes, I admit, it’s probably best to exclusively breastfeed until 6 months of age, (or until little Gehry leaves high school if that’s your choice because I TOTALLY respect that). But if you’re desperate it seems that that you can in fact introduce small amount of food prior to six months of age, with only a slightly increased risk that your child will grow up to be the drummer for Anal Leakage.

In fact, the introduction of solids is actually guided by just a few malleable principles. For instance, babies have relatively weak necks, therefore new foods must be roughly the same shape as their gullet. Baby’s first food will not be Twisties. Also it’s worth making sure that baby’s first food is fairly sterile and benign, keeping in mind the general objective of avoiding your baby swelling up like a human termite mound.

I know you’re dying to know – how did it go? Swimmingly, actually. And after a month or so of mushy rice powder (and thousands of litres of breastmilk) our kid indicated that she not only liked solid food but was keen to broaden her horizons.

Choosing her first ‘proper’ food was relatively easy. In fact, by the time we’d eliminated Twisties and celery sticks the size of your forearm we were pretty much left with what she tried try to snatch out of our hands as we ate. Her first non-rice-mush food turned out to be avocado which was devoured with gusto even if it did take her three goes to swallow the pip. Banana was similarly demolished, and at the end of a week of mashed carrot, avocado, parsnip and banana my little girl fixed me with a quizzical look that said;

“Hey! Hippies! Haven’t you got something in that fridge with a face?!”

Two days ago, my best friend and I engaged in a sweaty ballet familiar to mothers across the Western world. We spent a couple of hours looking for my car keys. We marched, we huffed, we swore. We second-guessed our children and looked under furniture, in the freezer, through drawers, even the fireplace. Periodically we would halt the hunt to gasp at one another through clenched teeth,

”They’re in plain sight. I know they are. We are looking right at them. This happens to me all the time.”

And, of course, they were. My car keys were cleverly disguised as my car keys and hidden at eye level, in full sunlight. I know this because the following morning I woke up, walked out into the chilly dawn and retrieved them from exactly where I had ”lost” them. It had taken a whole night to sleep off the incandescent rage, reshuffle my memory deck and reconnect with the image of my car keys sitting on top of the car, shining happily in the sun.

It’s only recently that I’ve come to accept this state of cognitive impairment. And I’ve realised that, as with many personal shortcomings, people are surprisingly accommodating once you are honest about your problem.

I say to my husband, ”I’m just popping out to the supermarket for some milk. I’ll be back in 20 minutes with a packet of neon highlighters and some popcorn.”

When it comes to ”mummy brain”, the scientific jury is well and truly out. Loss of memory is recognised as a medical consequence of pregnancy but I’ve also heard that mummy brain impairs cognitive function beyond memory. In my experience, neither description quite nails it.

For me, post-partum brain fade is a perfect storm of extreme tiredness, hormones and the crippling realisation that even your prettiest bras have hatches in them.

I finished my PhD in the first few months of my daughter’s life and although I found my ability to comprehend difficult concepts was perhaps better than it had ever been, leaving the house with pants outfoxed me every time. Not that it mattered, of course, because you can’t go far without the car keys.

Ironically, it’s not the loss of function that is the most distressing; it’s the complete relegation of the condition itself.

Even the term, mummy brain, attests to its infantilisation and dismissal. Had I not spoken to numerous other women with similar experiences, I would have been seriously concerned. Its widespread incidence should be evidence enough to justify some serious research.

And, for those of you who say that it passes fairly quickly, or that it’s not that serious, well, you try feeding your kid a packet of highlighters for dinner (Hint: tomato sauce).

Published SMH.com.au

INSTRUCTIONS

“Place cot on anvil of sun. Strip to underpants and commence wrestling. Note: locking one side of cot will cause other side to collapse immediately. Sides must be locked as per firing order of 1983 Saab. When cot resembles half-finished Gehry structure and parent is utterly spent and in tears, place cot in back of stationwagon. Cot will immediately spring into upright, locked position, ready for use. Fasten car boot with cardigan. Apply Zoloft.”

Last Saturday we stopped at a garage sale down the road. On the grass, set a little way apart from the usual jumble of computer keyboards and rice cookers was a tangled pile of blue and white nylon and metal.

The owner ambled over with a wan smile and nodded at the pile. “It’s a portacot. Good for traveling”.

For reference, when it comes to portacots, ‘good for travelling’ is universal parent-code for a structure that can be left permanently erected as a, soft-sided, moveable jail, easily hosed out in the time it takes to mix a stiff drink.

Garage sale man continued, this time more urgently;

“You can have it. If you want. Just take it. Never been used. Never. We got given it. It’s clean. Nothing wrong with it. Perfectly fine. Just take it away…Please.”

“I suppose it could be handy…” I said, as he started hastily bundling it into the back of our car. The man looked somehow…haunted.

So we took it home. After all, it’d be good for travelling.

This is how I came to be standing in my driveway, glimmering with sweat, circling a fully operational portacot. I’d been wrestling with it for ten minutes in a kind of furious Bikram yoga. It remained stubbornly dismantled.

I breathed deeply. Stay calm, I murmured to myself. You’re not in a hurry. There’s all the time in the world. Go inside and look up the instructions. There’s wine inside.

Go to any baby equipment website and you’ll be told how their product is made by parents, for parents. This might be true, but those ‘parents’ are clearly wolfing down armloads of Zoloft with a swing like Roger Federer. Almost all baby equipment is utterly impossible to navigate by anyone operating on less than 12 hours of sleep and a bellyful of benzo. Do not be fooled – from portacots to car seats, it is all designed to leave you drenched in sweat and blinking with rage.

I now realise that the portacot death-match is an important rite of passage. Certainly, childbirth, with all its ruptured flanges and leaky gaskets is transformative, but you haven’t had a child until you’ve stood hunched over a car seat, breathing a mixture of hushed assurances and sulphurous epithets. “It’s OK darling, it’s OK, Mummy’s just JESUS CHRIST…OK sweetheart, no no it’s OK, Mummy is OK, SHE IS OK. She just can’t..quite…fucking leaping CHRIST!” etc., etc…

The moral of the story is that if someone offers you a Portacot ‘for traveling’ thank them politely but tell them bubba can sleep in the glove box like everyone else. And then WALK AWAY.

Today’s kids are a bunch of over-pampered whiners. When not assiduously avoiding melanomas they’re enjoying organic cheeses or performing re-sections on their NeuroSurgery app. Screen-time and organised activities have super-ceded the simple pastimes of my youth, like peeling blisters off your nose or being thrown bodily out of car windows on sharp corners.

Children are now wrapped in cotton wool, ushered away from the kinds of everyday risks that enabled previous generations to flourish into well-rounded adults. Take car travel. When I was a kid, traveling in the car was premised on safety in numbers. Children were all stuffed in the back, pink bodies packed stubbie to skiddie in a swirling miasma of cigarette smoke and cricket commentary. In the event of an accident the entire fleshy block moved as one. My Uncle Mike’s pale blue Belmont resembled a tin of spam with mags.

Babies, of course, traveled up front. Securely wedged in a loving polyester embrace they were lulled to sleep by the gentle zzzzt zzzzt-ing of a sparkling shower of tobacco, burning a delicate lacework around their supine little bodies.  

But as time went by manufacturers developed more sophisticated solutions to child restraint. By the mid 80s even late adopters realised the safety benefits of strapping small children in (restraining the little buggers prevents them tumbling around the footwell and fouling on the brake pedal, or worse, getting into your smokes).

Fast forward a few decades and I’m standing in the hospital carpark with my brand new baby. Keening with sleep deprivation and blood loss I’m staring at a plastic capsule covered in disarming little turtles, a baffling tumble of scrim and webbing that anticipates my new baby like a cross between a Formula One driver and a tiny Hannibal Lector. How things have changed.

On balance though, I think the obsession with safety might be worth it.

You see, I’ve become rather attached to my child. I take all kinds of extreme measures to protect her from being drowned, maimed or eaten alive. And, quite apart from these silly emotional drivers, it’s also practical. Producing babies is time consuming and at times really rather unpleasant. It’s also quite difficult, in my experience, to do anything other than be a parent, for a while at least. Possible, certainly, but not easy. The less time spent breeding replacements for the kid you left on a conveyor belt at the airport is time well spent in my view. And it’s nice for the kids too. I think they appreciate being valued, like something more than a misguided Dorper in pyjamas.

This is why I have little time for the common argument that we’re ‘micro-managing’ our kids. From what they eat, to what they play, to how often they set one another on fire (more than once a week and it’s a new daycare centre for little Johnny) there’s no shortage of cranky old-fashioned criticisms of modern parenting. But paying attention to the little ratbags might just be the key to making a good future for them and the world more generally, one middle-class angst-ridden ‘behaviour guideline’ at a time.