Blogging centres me. It’s why I blog. I have such a “portfolio” life that when I don’t blog I just don’t feel centred. I got myself a mid-year diary today just so I can keep track of all the little bits and pieces that are my life. I’m going to not worry too much about starting anything new from here on in and just focus on a couple of things because that’s all I have the space and energy to do.

Xav’s not why I’m all scattered, I think I’ve always been someone who is so curious about all the different lives one can lead and I end up exploring all sorts of alleys and nooks just for the hell of it. Like even now I can’t just focus on teaching the one class - I have to go and explore new learning technologies, philosophies and reinvent the wheel. Which would be great if it’s what I want to do - but then I go and take on work or study in a completely unrelated field because I want to know more about that area, or offer to take up dribs and drabs of contract work which distracts me from what I’m trying to focus on. It’s always been this way. I suppose it’s why I would make a very good personal assistant.

But I’m a bit sick of being a jack of all trades and really want to focus on my goal of getting my portfolio ready for a higher degree in creative writing. In the past few months I’ve come to realise that a lot of writers study creative writing, in the same way a musician would study music. I’ve had no luck finding a non-degree workshop and I really can’t afford to pay for anything at undergraduate level. Someone has offered to supervise me at a higher degree level and now I have to knuckle down and get my project idea together before I go and see her. Once again, I have to just be ruthless and cut out a lot of ideas that I have and focus on one and stick to that one.

The best thing that’s come out of sleep and time deprivation is that I just don’t have time to indulge in neurotic internal Woody Allen’esque monologues.

A gift from my husband and another reason why I’m finding it so difficult to work when I get time off from mommying duties.

I’ve just read “Feral” and “The Museum of Doctor Moses”. I read both of these stories when I was on the train and I could see people giving me funny looks because I just find it impossible to hide my shock and horror.

“Feral” is the story about what unfolds after a terrible accident in which a child nearly dies. It’s every mother’s worst nightmare. “The Museum of Doctor Moses” had me on the edge of my chair. It wasn’t what happened in the story that freaked me out, but what could have happened and the tension.

Here’s a review of the book.
Anyway..I’ve used up my free time for today.

Adios.

I took up a part-time teaching job because Xav and I were sleeping so well a few weeks ago. It’s very part-time and more a chance for me to take a break from full time motherhood. Thanks mum and dad. I really enjoy the job and was thinking how everyone would want to be a teacher if there were smaller class sizes and fewer classes to teach. I think the ideal full time teaching load would be at most 4 classes and at most 18 students in each class. Dream on…

I’ve still got a couple of contracts to complete. I’ve done 1/3 of it AND I said yes to writing an article for an NGO magazine… I wanted to write a piece about social cohesion and how I believe the answer is in creating a human rights culture - that is a culture where everyone has rights not just minority groups. I think that this is key to our future as a multicultural nation. It’s really important that we don’t have another era where the mainstream feels so alienated that once they have the chance they vote in another anti-rights conservative government that “unites” Australia under a 105 year old racist “One people, One land” (….One Nation?) slogan and kills all debate on cultural diversity and it’s challenges by saying, well we’re a nation founded on a Judeo-Christian religion and people who don’t fit into OUR values can go home. I mean Australian values of a “fair go”, equality for all, compassion for others are not just Australian values or Christian values. They are values that all human beings should aspire to and I think the only way you can teach the next generation how to live in harmony is to point out our similarities not our differences - which is central in human rights education.

The problem with using a term like “human rights education” is that the word “human rights” has been used as rhetoric and its something people think of as an unattainable lofty ideal. A bit like the UN Peacekeeping troops in Rwanda, Haiti… or people think of it as something minorities use to to disenfranchise the mainstream group. Or another misconception is that we don’t have to worry about human rights because we have such affluent lives in an open and free society. In Howard’s Australian Achievement speech he said that we didn’t need a Bill of Rights because it was just “grand charters and lyric phrases”…a white elephant. But the thing is if we don’t have a rights based culture what else do we use as a framework in a diverse society? Obviously forcing everyone to tow the line and assimilate into an imagined Australian cultural identity isn’t the answer.

The thing is if all students understand that they have rights, not just people from minority groups, maybe they will feel an ownership of rights as a collective. There are already elements of HRE in our school curriculum informal and formal - it’s just that no one has actually said, “hey that’s in line with a human rights culture” because political correctness has become such a dirty word in the past decade.

I am reading a paper on HRE called “Teaching Human Rights at University: Critical Pedagogy in action” by Briskman and Fiske (sorry not sure how to reference academic papers in an informal blog entry) and they cite the example of the Thatcher government’s unsuccessful attempt to abolish NHS in the 1980s because so many people in the UK felt that free health care was a fundamental human right - not as an individual choice or responsibility.

In this same paper it is suggested that if organizations start to create a rights based culture then formal education will follow because education has become more about VET, skills training for the workforce than anything else.
I don’t agree with this. Sure it’s important to prepare students with skills they can sell and generate an income from, but this does not have to exclude other aspects of education. Schools are supposed to prepare our students for the future challenges in life. They’re not there to train up non-thinking machines. Sure at work we might just switch off our brains and do what we have to do - but we’re not machines, we are thinking, imaginative, emoting beings who have to interact with others. Some like us, some unlike us.

I have cringed every time someone craps on about how we have to go back to basics - teach literacy and numeracy to the exclusion of everything else. Numbers and words do not exist in a vacuum! Also in an ideal education system, a lot of the basics should be taught at primary school level. By the time they get to secondary and definitely by the time they get to upper secondary students should be able to write and do basic calculations.

Though what sort of bubble do I live in? Teaching is not valued in our society.
You want to know something really scary? When I was doing my teachers training we all had to sit a literacy test - a 50 word spelling test and an essay writing component. It wasn’t even an academic essay we had to write, it was just a personal essay. Less than 10 of us passed the test - fortunately the English teachers passed and everyone else had to take remedial literacy classes.

The current government talks about an education revolution. I think improving the status of teachers would be a start. Don’t think buying kids laptops will really help them that much.

Apologies to people who have tried to read this blog. I took it off line for a while because I’ve been horribly sleep deprived and paranoid about lactation fetishists.

I started a photo blog else where but it’s just not the same! That’s more of a museum piece and commenting on other people’s blogs as a non-blogger just isn’t the same. I guess my blog was undergoing a bit of an identity crisis.

Firstly the sleep deprivation - I’m seeing a “sleep expert” at the health centre about Xav’s inability to settle himself. I know she’s going to tell me what I know already - I can’t keep feeding him every time he wakes in the night, I have to not give into his screams etc… Xav has really bad eczema and it keeps him up at night. I’ve not slept through the night all year. We had a few good weeks there where he was sleeping through the night, but then we all got the flu, sleep and feed patterns disrupted, now I’m just living in a haze.

I decided to go back to work part time during that week Xav was sleeping really well and took on a few extra projects which I thought I’d be able to manage. The brain just doesn’t work when one has no sleep. No wonder sleep deprivation is a form of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Will write a bit about what I’m working on in next post - hope that someone, who has slept a whole lot more than me, will stumble across this and give me some ideas. Right now I see fluffy pillow, clouds and some hippie on my TV singing Dylan - Oh it’s Joan Baez Dylan’s ex-girlfriend. She still looks really good. She was famous before he was famous. I think she had something to do with his success, and then after he got famous he dumped her. Pete Seeger is also in this documentary.

All of a sudden I’ve run out of things to say.

Maybe it’s my lack of anonymity and integration of real life and blog personality that’s really killed the joy of blogging for me. Or maybe I’m just too damn tired. Returning to work even on a part time basis has been a bit of a shock to the system. Fortunately it’s only very part time and for a fixed term.

Leaving the cocoon for the first time in a year has been a surreal experience. I’d forgotten how people relate to each other when they don’t have babies attached to them. I had also forgotten how much people hate their jobs and forgotten the joy of workplace politics.

I’m just making a point to stay out of it, which will be very easy since I am only there for about 3-4 hours a week all up. I’ll try not to listen to any “advice” well meaning or otherwise and make up my own mind about people. Because I’m only part-time, I’m finding this experience educational - I have never been very good at playing workplace politics. This time I’m going to see if I can just remain independent and not get sucked into people’s dramas.

After all it’s just a job and I took it so I could retain some skills and leave the house.

Now I know why bloggers who blog well get book deals. There are a lot of blogs out there, but so few people who write well and blog regularly. I was following Baghdad Burning and bought the paper copy of her blog (I prefer books to LCD screens). She made it to Syria late 2007 and hasn’t blogged since. Then there’s Petite Anglaise the secretary who got fired from her job for blogging then got a book deal, but I discovered her after I heard about the book and it’s just not the same.

The only narrative’ish blog I’ve been following that’s is Do Not Tell Alice which is a sad blog by a mother who is coming to terms with finding out that her husband molested their daughter.

This morning I took Xav to the library and we borrowed a whole stack of books. He was very excited about the bookshelves and cars in the carpark:

1. Travel with Kids - William Gray (fantasizing about lugging Xav around the world with me)

2. The museum of Dr Moses - Joyce Carol Oates

3. Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood

4. Friend of my youth - Alice Munro

5. The Grandmothers - Doris Lessing

6. The Australian Fiance - Simone Lazaroo
Three of the books are short story collections. Am off to read a bit before bed.

Sure maybe they live closer to work and where the action is, but still - how do they do it? How do single mum’s do it?

This week I have to work in the afternoon and go to a function early that evening. Perth is really spread out and we only have one freeway that gets you from south to north of the river. Originally I thought I was not going to the function but I wanted to go there to support the person whose event it is and I have volunteered to play a part in the event. It’s not key. I could opt out, but I’ve opted out of so much over the past 18 months. It’s important for me to get out and be amongst like minded people. For the past year or so, I’ve been hanging out in my mum’s group and making an effort because I’ve been afraid of turning into a friendless hermit. They are nice people, but I seriously have nothing in common with them. They are also so conservative and parochial. I kept going because I thought Xav wanted to be around these people or people in general. I tried joining a bookclub but everyone who reads in this hood seem to be retirees.

Before I had Xav I treated this place as my retreat from the world. I worked elsewhere, had my life elsewhere and came back here to sleep, rest and be a hermit. But then after I had Xav it was more important to feel connected to a community. Maybe it’ll still happen when he starts school and I get him into a school that reflects my values more. I suppose before Xav it didn’t matter so much where I lived because I had a life and was mobile, but now I’m wishing I lived near where I grew up. I know at least two good friends there who have babies Xav’s age. I could have just dropped by and spent the day with them. I really miss that sense of community.

I’m seriously considering talking to mum and dad about moving in with us. We live ridiculously close to each other in two houses and I spend all my days at mum’s anyway because even though it’s a mess and they still live as if they’re going to move one day, I feel more at home there than I do my own house. My house only feels like a home when my husband is home. It’s just too big for the three of us. I’ve grown very close to my parents since Xav was born and I’m only able to have a life at the moment because they help me out so much. If I didn’t have my parents I’d probably move to Sydney to be closer to my sister. Which leads me back to my last post - when or should I have another kid? Now that I have a good relationship with my sister, dare I say close, I think Xav will miss out if he doesn’t have a sibling. Maybe he can marry someone with good siblings.

I thought I could ward off having a period for another 6 months by continuously breastfeeding. But no…After 20 months of being on a relatively even keel, my damn period has returned. Damnit damnit damnit.

I’m sure that’s why I’ve been feeling really down lately. It’s PMT! I’ve not had PMT since sometime in the middle of 2006!

This means Xav can have a younger sibling - which is one way of warding off PMT for another 20 months, but I just don’t think I can handle having another child at this stage.

I’m not sure if I want another one. I know only wanting one child is a taboo in our society. Everyone seems to have them within two years of each other, but seriously if I have another child now I probably would not cope very well and be on anti-depressants. There are just some things that need to be in order before I have another child. I didn’t really plan Xav and that’s fine because with one you can roll with the punches especially when you have some grandparent support. But two… I’ve always said I’ll wait till Xav is 4 years old and see how I feel then. I get a lot of mum’s saying, “oh but they can’t play together” and “would you like to ‘get it over and done with’” I can see their point, but I seriously believe this will do my head in. There are some things I need to do for myself in order to be a happy mother. My mother-in-law goes on about how our generation are so selfish these days and back then they just did it, but the woman had about eight kids, was pregnant (on and off) for nearly two decades of her life and confesses to spending many evenings crying in the kitchen when she couldn’t cope because her husband was a provider but little else. She was the woman who lived in a shoe.

I’m looking at living in a townhouse somewhere closer to the city in the next 5 years.

Obama writes so well and he is so intelligent.

I felt really uplifted after I read this book.  Even though I’m not American, what America does affects the rest of us. I wonder how someone who is so idealistic can survive in the dirty world of politics.

I feel really hopeful about the future.

I went off line after reading Ben Elton’s Blind Faith.

I think I went through a mini-depressive episode after reading the book which is very dark. I love Ben Elton’s black humour but this one really frightened me. The book is 1984′ish but instead of a bleak and grey communist world, it’s a pink candy pop world where stupidity reigns supreme. It’s a world where every one is on-line blogging their every move, where it is compulsory to put up videos on “Tube” of your milestones - such as losing your virginity, giving birth, a world where privacy is a crime, vapidness is celebrated and ignorance a virtue.

I am a fan of dystopic texts (my favourite books include Brave New World and 1984), but I was really really disturbed by this one. I’m not sure whether being a mum has changed my taste in books and films.

Anyway, my reaction to this was to deblog, call up a good public school and offer my services as a relief teacher and look into going back to university next year and keep writing fiction - instead of a “me me me” autobiographical text that serves no purpose other than to jump up and down and say, “look at me!”.

My god..I’m so depressed.