An unwanted child...

There has been a story in the news this past week about a woman in Sydney, Australia, who dumped her newborn baby boy into a drain pipe. She intentionally dropped him into the drain, where there was a 2.5 metre drop, expecting that the fall would kill him. The baby survived for six days (nobody knows how!) and was rescued after passing cyclists heard his cries. He has been taken to hospital and is reportedly stable.

The “mother” is being charged with attempted murder – and yet it seems has been allowed to name the baby.

The Department of Family and Community Services has said the act was one of desperation.

I know I don’t know the facts and maybe I’m being overly unsympathetic – but there is no justification, no circumstance, and no level of desperation that makes what this woman did anything but evil. I know there are such things as postnatal depression, but what she did – which was premeditated and with full understanding that the baby would likely die – is inexcusable.

You only have to look at the location of the drain and the structure of the drain to know that this was not a spur of the moment, impulsive act. She had to go to the drain which is quite isolated off a major road. Once there it would not have been easy to put the baby into the drain given that its entry was low down and quite small.

Why, why, why can someone like this have a baby and I can’t?

Most of the time, now, I am okay with not having a baby. I have a good life and I pursue all sorts of interesting things and I spend amazing times with the children we have in our lives. Then something like this comes about and I cry for hours wondering whether there is any fairness in the world at all.

And why should she have any right, whatsoever, to name this tiny, precious, baby boy?

God?

Got any answers?

I didn’t think so.

New Story from Sydney Morning Herald

Don't tell Hugo...

My parents have jetted off to New Zealand for a bus tour around both of the beautiful islands that make up that country. I am somewhat jealous!

Before they left Mum said to Hugo that they would send him a postcard. He thought about this and suggested that perhaps they could put a postcard in a bottle, and then lower the bottle down to the ocean using a rope so it didn’t break, and then the bottle would float here to Adelaide. Mum and Dad are going on a boat tour for a day, but recently Hugo went to New Zealand and went on a cruise ship, and therefore he believes everyone who goes to New Zealand must be going on a ship.

Obviously putting a bottle in the water in New Zealand doesn’t guarantee it will float to the shores of Australia (although you never know!), and that Hugo will be down at the beach at the exact moment it arrived (again, you never know!).

Mum and I believe in letting children have the joys of imagination and adventure and letting them believe in things that might not be real. Some people may think this is “lying” to children, but some of my best memories from childhood are those that I now know my parents, or other adults, set up for me to have some magic in my childhood days. To me the effort they went to is a show of love.

So, we have a plan. When Mum and Dad get back from New Zealand we are going to find a bottle and put a postcard in it that Mum and Dad will bring back with them from New Zealand. It is nearly summer time in Australia and so the beach is the place to be. We will take Hugo down to the beach one day, and attempt to put the bottle somewhere along the water line without him seeing. I say “attempt” because he is very observant and generally doesn’t miss anything. One idea I’ve had to meet this challenge is for Mum and Dad to put the bottle under the jetty near a pylon before Kirby and I arrive with Hugo. We’ll then let him find it.

It will be magic to see his face when he discovers the bottle that has traversed the seas to him from a faraway country. He will be so excited. So very excited.

I think I will be too – I tend to get wrapped up in the excitement and imagination that the children around me experience. After all, I still believe in fairies and also that plants talk to me. Though that last belief may be supported by research soon – check this out!

I’ll let you know how it all goes, with photos of course! But, in the meantime – don’t tell Hugo!

Convoluted arteries and crowded nerves…

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been as regular with my blog posts lately. It doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about you!

In the last couple of months I have been diagnosed with a condition called Hemifacial Spasms (HFS). My neurologist, before he saw the spasms first hand, thought they might be a form of epilepsy, but I actually had them while I was in an appointment with him and he immediately recognised them as HFS.

So, what is it? It is a rare condition where an artery in the base of my brain is pressing on nerve/s that control facial movements on the left side of my face. The pressure is making the nerves misfire and I am having spasms on one side of my face. At first they were only every few weeks and were minor (i.e. a small twitch near my mouth, kind of like an Elvis impersonation, for a few minutes at a time), but they have steadily gotten worse in the past couple of months and now I am having them most days, they are contracting the entire left side of my face (and sometimes go over to the right side a bit too), and they can last up to a couple of hours.

Initially I had Botox (yes – I was a celebrity for a while!) to try and stop the spasms, but that hasn’t worked and it left me with the side effects of not being able to open my left eye completely and of having facial droop.

The next option, one that is scary and has risks, is to have surgery. I won’t go into that right now as I have to talk to a neurosurgeon to find out more. I do know the recovery time is lengthy and can be very difficult. Activities after the surgery can be quite limited and are gradually reintroduced over a period of four to six weeks.

Anyway, the spasms make me very tired and I am having trouble getting a lot of things done at the moment. But, I promise I will do blog entries whenever I am able to.

I have been thinking lately that looking after children would be very difficult after the surgery. In some ways it is better that I don’t have children if I have the surgery, but that makes me sad. I am sad to think that not having children could be a benefit in this circumstance.

I also feel angry sometimes. I could have much worse health conditions to be sure, but I sometimes wonder why I have HFS, as well as major depression, as well as a rare skin condition, as well as epilepsy, as well as unexplained hot feet at night that stop me from sleeping, as well as infertility. It just doesn’t seem fair – but then who said life was fair…

Well – that’s enough of me sharing my despondency.

I will finish on a lovely note. I was outside by my fish pond having a cry the other day and my dog, Ari, came to comfort me. Sometimes pets make the best therapists.

One of my three boys...Ari...

Grandma...

I’ve recently reconnected with one of my best friends from school.

We spent many hours in our teenage years walking to and from the local grocery store in the country town that she lived in singing Guns n Roses, The Beatles, and AC/DC songs – well, sometimes they were our versions of songs. Instead of “it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll” we sang “it’s a long way to the shop if you want a sausage roll.”

We were cool… At least we thought so at the time. Our fashion, when not at school, consisted of basic t-shirts, checkered flannel shirts, and jeans which were ripped at the knees. We didn’t bother with fancy hair or makeup. We adopted a dog from the local fair and brought him back to her place, where her parents begrudgingly let her keep him.  I’ll never forget Ben!

My friend played guitar and sang amazingly well. I sang too, but amazingly terribly.  But that didn’t matter.

We went to another school when our school was closed for the day. Our teachers and parents thought that it was wonderful that we came up with the idea of attending another school for the day to experience what it was like.  Ummm…our intention wasn’t really to experience another school…we just wanted to meet boys…

We chose a mechanics class for one of our school subjects. Once again, so that we could meet boys…

The first time I went to the city without my parents was with her. We ended up not coming home when we should have. It wasn’t our fault…really…  Our parents got together to try and work out what they were going to do with us, and we were out in the backyard deciding that we would run away to the sand hills near my home to live. Surely they’d never find us in a 0.325 km2 conservation park about a kilometre away from my house!

My friend has just become a grandmother to a little boy.

It is so unbelievable to think that the little girl who led me astray in the 1980s is now a grandma. Okay – maybe we led each other astray…

I gave her some things (cups, bibs, etc) that we had here for Hugo when he was a baby to have at her house for when her grandson comes to visit. I also gave her two romper suits. These romper suits were ones that I bought for our babies in 2008. Ones that we never got to use for our children.

I am so grateful that my friend has come back into my life and that a part of what I had planned for our babies can become a part of the life of her grandson.

She asked me whether I would like to come up with her and visit her grandson in the next few weeks.

Gee…let me think…

YES!

Leaving baby behind...

There have been two stories that are similar to each other in the news in the past two months. I have cried at reading both and I have felt a powerful anger while reading both.

The first is about a little boy named “Gammy”. Gammy is the twin of a little girl called Pipah, but they don’t live in the same house, or even in the same country – thanks to their selfish “parents”. An Australian couple used a surrogate from Thailand to have their twins for them. Pipah was born healthy, but Gammy was born with Down Syndrome.  So his “parents” left him behind in Thailand. 

Little Gammy has been adopted by his surrogate mother and will be raised in a loving home. I have to wonder what is in store for Pipah – will her “parents” expect her to be a certain way? What happens if she gets sick? Will they give her up too? Will they think she is not good enough if she doesn’t meet their expectations and standards? The Thailand story...

The second story, which came out this week, is about another Australian couple who used a surrogate in India. They had twins – a boy and a girl. They brought the girl home, but left the boy in India. They didn’t want him because they already had a boy. It seems they may have sold the baby to another family in India, but nobody really seems to know. The India story...

I wonder how many other times children have been abandoned by their Australian “parents” in other countries because they weren’t wanted.

Frankly these people make me sick to my stomach. I do not understand how any parent could leave their child behind. How could anyone decide their own child is not good enough or does not meet some ridiculous criteria?

A couple only wants a baby of a certain gender. Responsibility is withdrawn for a child because they have a medical condition. These type of people do not deserve to be nor should be called parents. They are pathetic.

And it makes me angry that such people have children when there are so many of us who cannot. We would have loved our babies no matter what because we know how precious they are. We would never have left them behind.

How could they?

A monster maternal instinct…

SPOILER ALERT: there are some small spoilers in this post about the movies “Cloverfield”, “Aliens”, or “Jaws 3”.

There’s a movie called “Cloverfield” that I really enjoyed when I first saw it. It is about a group of young adults who are having a farewell party for one of their friends in New York when a huge monster starts attacking the city. The movie is filmed through a home movie camera which is held by the boyfriend, the guy who’s a little be annoying but everybody kind of likes, and the guy who turns into a bit of a hero in turn.

I’ve watched the movie a few times and with each viewing I became more uncomfortable and realised I was feeling sad for the monster. This was despite all the death and destruction it was causing in Manhattan.

It seemed to me that the monster was really frightened. It wasn’t meaning to hurt people – it was just hungry and curious about these things were that were running all over the place. I realised that I didn’t want the monster to be harmed and wanted people to understand it rather than to just try and kill it. My maternal instinct was kicking in and I started to think, by what the monster was doing, that it was actually an infant of its species. It was scared, alone, hungry, and wanted its mother and/or father. When I told Kirby about my thoughts he looked at me like I was crazy.

Well, it turns out I was right. While some viewers of the movie do not believe the monster was meant to be a baby, the producer, J J Abrams, indicated that the monster was an infant, and the director, Matt Reeves, has stated that the monster is, indeed, a baby. It does what infants do – they have separation anxiety and cry for their parent/s, and they are curious about things and put what they find in their mouths to see if they can eat them (hence not leaving small things such as marbles and pieces of Lego within reach of human babies and toddlers).

So it seems I have a great maternal instinct. I can recognise an infant in another species – even if the infant is 20 stories tall (there’s some dispute on this, but basically it is huge!)

Perhaps my maternal instinct is going a little bit overboard, but I wish the monster baby could be reunited with its mother and that they could go back to wherever it is that they came from, whether that is the depths of the ocean or another planet. Though I guess that probably wouldn’t make for a very attractive movie to those who like a good monster flick.

There are two other movies that bring out the maternal instinct in me in a way that they probably wouldn’t for most other viewers.

One is Aliens which stars Sigourney Weaver. Humans go to a planet and start killing baby aliens – what did they expect the adult aliens would do? Go the aliens I say!

The other is Jaws 3. When you accidently trap a baby shark and don’t release it – the mother is going to come looking for it and is going to be pretty mad. At least in the movies but not in real life as Great White Sharks don’t actually care for their young at all once they are born.

Well, now you know I have a ramped up maternal instinct. I wonder how protective of my own babies I would have been if I lean towards protecting a massive infant monster, the young of a scary looking alien, and the ferocious baby of an even more ferocious White Pointer shark!

When You Can't Have Kids...the book...

I haven't written any entries since last month due to health issues, but also because I've been working on getting my book "When You Can't Have Kids" ready for sale.

And it's ready and available through Amazon!

For the paperback version please click here.

For the Kindle version please click here.

And I promise I will be writing some blog entries over the next few days...I have so much to write about!