On Mean Girls and Keyboard Warriors

So, Tattlelife.com vs PTWM

 

I don’t usually comment on other people’s blogs or affairs because let’s face it- my blog isn’t all that big and is only interesting to the people that know me.

 The people that do know me know that my biggest hatred is bullying. Anyone that bully’s is a cunt. Plain as. I was bullied horribly in high school and it really shaped how I viewed myself for a long time and made me miserable as fuck. Obvs I’ve grown up and got some lady balls now so don’t give a flying fuck about anyone’s opinions but my loved ones. Not everyone is like that, not everyone has a platform to fight back with or a way to articulate a defence. So it’s down to the people who can to knock that shit on the head rather than buy into it for the sake of entertainment at someone else’s expense.

 This week it all blew up between tattlelife (sun newspaper style gossip bitchfest) and Part Time Working Mummy- a blogger I’ve been lucky enough to chat with on many occasions and someone who gives a huge amount of her time to helping others less fortunate.

 The basis of the drama was some anonymous person claimed to have proof of misuse of a go fund me account. The discussion then degenerated into mudslinging and what amounted to bullying. One particularly delightful soul wished an unborn baby dead. Yeah...so 40 pages on and still no proof of financial chicanery but a lot of personal details being published about minor children and their life/ routines etc. 

I can’t help myself so I posted the above. And got promptly banned.

 I’m pretty proud to be honest, who wants to be part of such an unhealthy group or so unhappy with yourself you need to try and destroy a family? I mean I’ve known a few girls like that in real life and my advice is the same to them as the keyboard warriors.

Treat others how you want to be treated. If you can’t be cute, stay mute. And don’t say anonymously what you won’t say to someone’s face.

 

The mean girls I’ve known in real life have always seemed to get their comeuppance- karma is like that. I suspect the same rules apply online too.

 

My husband and the rantiest of rants

I’m a little bit late for Father’s Day but I hope a good excuse I promise- I ended up in hospital with my crappy back again. More on that later.

I take the piss out of my husband mercilessly and I love having a good moan about his tendencies towards illness and injury but my god that man is a saint for putting up with me and my foibles. I have food rules that are insane- I’d never tried cheese on toast until I was 37. The first time I slept at his house I sleepwalked, rifled his bedside drawer and made a crop circle with his socks around the bed. The time after I managed to get into the fridge and drank a jar of mint sauce. I’ve also had a sleep fight with someone I hated from school and broke my hand on the cast iron bedstead. He was woken by my howling and took me to a&e.

When I met him I was a single parent out of a horrific relationship and he was very clear about not wanting children or marriage. Nonetheless he took on our eldest as his own. She’s been his longer than her biological parent who isn’t involved in her life. I cannot think of a better dad for either of my girls. He is the one who runs out for medicine in the night when they are unwell, he makes sure everyone eats something green at least once a day and he is who I want my girls to judge future relationships by.

 

We aren’t perfect and I often debate strangling you with your fishing line but you are the single best choice I’ve ever made.

Also sorry for ruining Father’s Day with my tantrum about my Gucci shoes being robbed from the hospital.

So, about that.. funny story. Due to a combination of fuck ups I ended up being take to A&E by ambulance with a paralysed leg. Panic grabbed my Gucci trainers- which I proper love and treasure- I hate being without shoes on. I end up doped up on morphine in casualty and my hubby and his mum head off home as they're transferring me to a ward and we had kids to collect.

I'm having a lovely drug induced kip when someone walks past and swipes the trainers right off my feet!!!!!! Fuming isn't the word for how cross I am.

What kind of person do you have to be to steal the shoes off an unconscious person in hospital? Jokes on you dickhead because you missed the handbag which is significantly newer and nicer.

So after falling victim to the hozzy shoe thief I asked for a bag of essentials to be brought in. I'm currently wearing Ste's long johns and a shirt roughly the size of Mars so look like they've rescued me from the streets.
Ste, god love him, made the mistake of asking our eldest to pack me a bag. She sent me in two thongs, my sexiest bra and a Christmas jumper. No pjs, no comfy clothes. I think she thought I was going to seduce a doctor or something whilst I was high and dragging my gammy leg behind me.

 I had to call my best friend to talk me down from disowning the entire family.

I won't forget though Elise, and my revenge will be beautiful. Thankfully my bestest came through and dragged her husband and son down with some decent knickers and pjs for me so I looked respectable.

I had to leave hospital in £1 primarni flip flops though.

Could only happen to me.

 Shoe thief, I hope you get a nasty case of athletes foot and some morals.

Why I missed most of Wynter's first year

I haven’t written anything for a while. This is due to a combination of having a new job and actually spending time working instead of blogging and that thinking back to this time in mine and Wynter’s life makes me really sad and a bit angry. I’m going to try and write it down just for my own benefit, but I might decide not to post this because it’s so depressing compared to my usual stuff.

As you all know, Wynter was hard work compared with Elise, she liked to be carried everywhere so when she was about 4 months old I started to have a twinge in my back. I assumed I’d pulled something lugging her round and carried on with my life. When it got worse I went the GP and was told to do pilates. So I carried on with life. By week 3 of backache I couldn’t stand up straight, the house stank of deep heat and Wynter was spending most of her time with my mother in law because I was in too much pain to function. I was referred to physios and prescribed painkillers, and then stronger painkillers and muscle relaxants and nerve blockers until I was permanently as high as a kite and wheelchair bound because I couldn’t stand up straight.

Certainly not able to cope with a tiny baby either physically or mentally.

Poor Ste had to do all the housework, all the childcare and work full time. I cannot stress how good he was, I take the piss out of him but honestly, I wouldn’t have gotten through this all without his support.

It continued this way until just before Christmas, when I woke up one Saturday morning and my legs wouldn’t work at all. I also had the happy side effect of not being able to feel that I needed to pee- fortunately all the kegels paid off and I managed not to piss the bed with my husband still in it.

Emergency trip to hospital and transfer to the Neuro hospital, long story short was that my labour had fucked my back and I needed emergency surgery before my 3 ruptured discs completely crushed the nerves that control my bladder, bowels, legs and sensation in the whole undercracker area.

Brilliant.

I spent a week in the Neuro Hospital following emergency spinal surgery, poor Elise and Wynter got farmed out to my mum and mother in law while Ste shuttled back and forth to the hospital, worked and attempted to keep the house running.

I get released from the hospital with Oramorph and instructions not to lift anything heavier than a brew. Wynter and Elise spend 6 weeks at my mums while I recover from surgery. By now I have started to get blinding headaches, I can’t keep food down and begin to lose weight, I assume it’s because of my back and take even more painkillers. The only thing that eases the headaches is to lay flat…why is this you ask? Apparently the first surgery left me with a hole in the covering of the spinal cord, the headache is because the fluid that usually cushions the brain is leaking out of said hole into my lower back.

So back to the neuro hospital I go. This time my surgery is more intrusive and I have to spend the following week flat, in bed, in hospital.

I had a funny reaction to the anaesthetic and woke up from surgery fighting- you haven’t lived until a surgeon bellows “get the Ketamine in her” about you.

Another fun point about staying in hospital- if you’re on any type of painkiller they dose you with laxatives at every opportunity. I can’t get out of bed….you see where I’m headed with this? By day 4 in bed I am extremely uncomfortable and have stopped eating. Day 5 I drop off to sleep and wake up looking like Spud in Trainspotting. I’m duly hosed off and my husband arrives to find his wife wearing a hospital issue granny nightie and a nappy. Fun fucking times.

The recovery from this surgery was actually easier than the first and I was able to have the kids back home fairly soon after.

I’ve recovered as much as I’m going to now. I feel cheated though, I missed so much of Wynter’s first year and I won’t ever get that time back. Elise was incredibly brave, but she shouldn’t have to have been. It makes me angry, even though there’s not really anyone to blame. Most of all I feel guilty because I couldn’t be a proper mum to them for so long.

God, I’m a barrel of laughs aren’t I?  

Sleep isn't a life choice

What nobody tells you about having children is that it’s likely your first child is a sleeper agent. Sent from goodness knows where to lull you into a false sense of security. Really what they’re doing is paving the way for their sleep thieving sibling. Oh I was so smug before I had child 2. “My kid slept 12 hours from day 1.” Elise really did but if pre-Wynter me was to say that to post-Wynter me, I’d kick her in the fanny. Smug bitch. I both detest and envy pre Wynter Dannielle. I was the type of well-meaning fool who would give an exhausted mother advice on how to get her baby to sleep actually having had nil experience of struggling to do so. Elise was literally a dream baby. I mean at first it was because she was too jaundiced to wake up but you get my meaning.

Wynter has taught me the meaning of exhaustion.

Post Wynter 

Pre Wynter 

There have been nights I haven’t closed my eyes once because the only place she will sleep is on my chest, I’ve paced our bedroom floor during the early hours singing Time to say goodbye in Italian until I’m hoarse because she once fell asleep while the song played. I have cried countless tears thinking I’m such a bloody failure of a mother because after the hellish nights I don’t want to leave the house because I’m either too exhausted to or I’m completely unfit to drive. I’ve also snapped at my husband, friends and parents out of sheer frustration that once it gets dark my baby decides that she can’t abide me.

So now she co-sleeps. Which definitely wasn’t in my parenting plan, but my little Wynter is fierce and likes to stay in my bed. And there are some good nights, where she sleeps for more than an hour. There are some bad nights, after which the drive to work feels like the scene from Wolf of Wall Street where Leonardo Di Caprio drives after taking Quaaludes. I have a new level of appreciation for the times my husband manages to spend an entire night upstairs without the baby banishing him to the conservatory and I have a whole lot of gratitude for the friends and family that have offered cleaning and babysitting or just to listen to me moan.

I didn’t know it would be this fucking hard and I’d done it before! Oh, and my baby is called Wynter....in case you didn't get that.

Though she is but little she is fierce 

That time I got de gooched

Today is D- Day. Naturally I’m writing this after, believe me if you manage to write a blog post during labour you’re a better woman than I am.

So me, hubby and my mum all traipse off to the induction ward at the arse crack of dawn. The midwife puts the pessary in and then we wait. Obviously overwhelmed by the focus on my under-crackers the husband decides he’s going off into town to do a bit of shopping….. which actually worked out well- despite all my obsessive packing of my baby bag, I discover I’ve only brought jeans to labour in. So he gets sent off to buy me something that isn’t jeans to wear. The day part was pretty peaceful to be honest. The hospital food didn’t look great so we sent Ste to Wok’n’Go on his way back from town and we all sat in my cubicle scoffing Chinese food and generally having a lovely old time. Ste managed to spill his all over himself, which sent him into a spiral of madness over grease stains. Naturally he scarpered off to clean it and came back looking like he’d vomited all over himself.

Obviously Chinese food and labour are incompatible because about an hour after eating my contractions started ramping up. The midwife had (as I saw it) the barefaced cheek to offer me two paracetamol. No love, I want gas and air- this whole time I’ve been promised the good painkillers and now I’m being fobbed off. Muuuum tell her.

When my pains got to two minutes apart the lad in the cubicle next to me made the fatal mistake of ringing his mum about his, also labouring partner. “Her contractions are every 15 minutes and she’s doing so well” I accept that it was probably out of order for me to loudly hiss “we all know they’re every 15 minutes from the pants and wails”.  It was at this point they decided to transfer me to the labour ward- probably to stop me being lynched for making snide comments about Moaning Myrtle next door.

The delivery midwife introduces herself as Pam- this has bearing on my story later. Pam offers me an epidural but sweet summer child that I am I insist that gas and air is more than sufficient for my pain. Of course it was Dannielle you fucking imbecile, you’re only 1cm in. So I’m happy chuffing away on my gas and air and all is right with the world. Now since Pam very first said her name I’ve had the song “black betty- pam balam” going through my drug addled mind.

Halfway through Coronation Street Pam decides she’s going on her lunch. My uterus decides that now would be an opportune time for all fucking hell to break loose. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone in labour but the pain reached a level where my body was so outraged I lost the ability to even think. That might explain me roaring at my mother to “get Betty and her magic glove in here, I need an epidural”.  Sadly the nurse who answered my dulcet bellow wasn’t Pam. She was however far too cheerful to be allowed in the room, so I made my poor mum throw her out.

Unnamed nurse- I sincerely apologise.

Pam decided to bring in what must have been the world’s most nervy anaesthetist because I swear every time I huffed that gas and air he jumped. Epidural goes in and some semblance of calm is restored.

 Ste decides he’s sleepy and needs a nap to fortify himself for the long night ahead. So off he goes to sleep in the car….returning about 30 minutes later declaring he’s frozen. So he took himself off to the bathroom. I drop off to sleep to be woken up by my mum and two nurses howling laughing at my husband, asleep on a pile of bags on the toilet floor wearing….wait for it….an eye mask.

Ladies and gentlemen- my husband, phantom of the labour ward.

I don’t know whether to be genuinely impressed at the level of forethought that went into bringing an eye mask into his child’s birth, or terrified at what the display of such evil genius holds for my future.

Post eye mask the rest of delivery was a blur of blood and howling (mostly mine) and my husband came out of it with the thousand yard stare of a veteran of a dreadful battle, for quite some time afterwards. When questioned on the worst bit he says the episiotomy  “the sound- it was like when you cut the head off a fish” obviously the savage de-gooching had an effect on both of us.

Welcome to the world baby girl! 6lb 4oz of love. Sorry you don't have a name yet because your dad want's to name you after the woman in the Alien films.

35 Weeks

It is a fact that from week 32 of pregnancy onwards absolutely everyone you see will say something along the lines of “you still here then?” Why yes Kathy I am still fucking here.

My womb squatter hasn’t had her marching orders yet- she’s not quite cooked so I don’t expect to see her for a little while yet.  I do however feel like I’ve been pregnant for approximately 938475763 weeks and am clutching my industrial sized bottle of Gaviscon with the fervour of Gollum clutching the One Ring. My husband tried to suggest he had heartburn the other day and I actually growled at him when he tried to take some. Swig some milk you bastard and leave my precious alone!

Some other news is that I’ll be having the baby induced at 37 weeks, I’m just not well enough to continue to 40 weeks so an early arrival it is. This has meant I’ve become even more hysterical and maddening to my family. My hospital bag has been packed literally since the end of the first trimester but I’ve taken to packing and unpacking it obsessively in case I’ve missed something out.

Sleep has become something of a rare commodity in this house recently too. Between my hips and my bladder it’s like a military operation to hoist my fat carcass out of bed. When I finally manage to get out I usually trip over something and set the dog off barking, which means no one has really had a good night’s sleep in weeks….my heart bleeds for them.

As much as my posts suggest otherwise, pregnancy isn’t all bad. I particularly enjoy getting onto a full train and glaring at people until someone gives me a seat- yes I am entitled, no I don’t care. I’m also enjoying being able to eat my own body weight in pickles and crackers without anyone judging me for the first time in forever.

My dreams have gotten strange lately too. I dreamt I gave birth to a little yellow chick and Ste refused to accept it was his. We spent the entire dream arguing about his paternity of my tiny winged child until he accidentally sat on it which upset me so much it woke me up. Whereon I was mad at him for crushing my dream baby and he was confused “I only offered you a brew, why are you so angry?” The poor man is going to end up with anxiety before I give birth if I don’t manage to rein myself in.

Hospital Visit

In recent weeks I’ve spent some time as an in- patient in hospital. Not on a maternity ward, oh no. My pancreas, prompted by some sweet and sour chicken, felt like it wasn’t getting enough attention and so I ended up in hospital. I was taken into A&E, by ambulance. I know, it all sounds very dramatic- it wasn’t.

Anyhoo, they good doctors at A&E decide to admit me, and we trail round to a little side ward off the emergency department. By the time we actually got to a bed it was about 11pm as we’d waited a fair while for meds to be set up etc. The ward had 8 beds and most were full- turned out that it was a feeder ward, so you stay there whilst you wait to be admitted onto a proper ward or discharged home.

I get settled into the bed with some painkillers and the next thing I hear, in a low sinister whisper, is “how many people have you killed?” erm….looked round and there is a little old lady sat in my visitors chair in her nighty. I swear to god, I nearly gave birth there and then. She then follows this up with “they’re watching you” and my personal favourite “you’ll come to a bad end you will” bear in mind, all this is said in possibly the thickest Wigan accent you can imagine. By this point I’m sat up in bed with my head swivelling round like a meerkat looking for a nurse…in the end I resort to pressing my buzzer and trying to work out if I’m hallucinating or she’s real. Why of all things I would hallucinate an elderly Wiganer I don’t know. Tom Hardy in a loincloth is more my style.

So the nurse toddles up and goes “ooh Annie, you naughty thing, everyone’s been looking for you”. Annie gets carted off to her own bed, under protest, and I assume that’s the end of it.

Oh no. Annie decides that she wants “a good old fashioned sing song” and starts belting out Oh when the Saints. I’ve come to the conclusion by this point that a) She has dementia/ Alzheimers or the like and so should be humoured and b) I’m getting no rest in the near future. When the nurse comes back to my bed to reset my drip, I asked if Annie had dementia etc. No, says the nurse, absolutely nothing wrong with her mind. She wants to go home and has decided to be a pain in the arse so they will discharge her early. And a pain she was…some gems from Annie;

To the nurse

 “I want a cup of tea” the nurse gets her a brew “whats this? I didn’t ask for this. You’re trying to poison me”

“I’m freezing” screeched in the manner of a wounded animal. She gets extra blankets (bear in mind, everyone else on the ward has a sheet each) then “You’re suffocating meeeeeeee”

“I’ll be telling my daughter about you, she’ll see you’re trying to kill me”

To a police officer (wandered in from A&E in response to the howling)

“You’ve come in to molest me”

“That’s right, run away- I see your bad intentions”

Howled into the night at no one in particular

“I’m soooooooooo collllllllllllddddddddddddd”
 
 
Eventually around 4am, the nurses got Annie’s daughter to come in a taxi and pick her up, so the wily old coot got her own way because as soon as the very harassed and tired looking daughter walked in, she became all smiles and skipped off home quite merrily.

And we all went to sleep.