Harry was lying there in his cot in the hospital and I thought What do I do? What do I do?My husband is
Posted in General on 31. Jul, 2010
Harry was lying there in his cot in the hospital, and I thought “What do I do? What do I do?”My husband is wonderfully good-natured but he was scared too – when he first changed a nappy it was all green, which he wasn’t expecting, and he vomited. One evening Harry started screaming at six and didn’t stop until 11pm And he kept on doing it every day We were at our wits’ end. The health visitor said it was three months colic and I said “What’s that?”Every night he would start at six, just as the news came on. The only thing that would get him to sleep was turning all the lights off and playing Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do”. And that was our evenings for three months.Harry was a perfectly healthy baby so I didn’t feel I could complain. You think everyone else is doing better than you and don’t dare admit when things aren’t going so well.
Once Kitty slept for 12 hours and I was worried but the health visitor said “Don’t say that in front of the other mums – you’ll get lynched”.You’re scared people will criticise you and they do – everyone becomes an instant expert. Now when I see a mother with a screaming child and everyone tut-tutting I go up now and say “I’ve been there, don’t worry” I think it’s the gap between expectation and reality. It’s like weddings and holidays – they can be awful but no one will ever admit they haven’t had a wonderful time. I think if, before you had the baby, people, said to you “This is going to be a nightmare” at least whatever happened would be better than your expectations. One of my friends had a smiling health visitor turn up on her doorstep who asked her how she was getting on and she said “It’s a f—ing nightmare! Why didn’t you tell me?”As they get older, every problem that’s alleviated is replaced by another. Practical problems like nappies are replaced by emotional ones like school. The worst time is supposed to be when they pass their driving test! But of course it’s the classic thing with children – they just have to smile and you forgive them everything.’I'm Okay, You’re a Brat’ by Susan Jeffers, Hodder & Stoughton pounds 9.99; ‘The Mother Dance’ by Harriet Lerner, Thorsons pounds 8.99; ‘The Mask of Motherhood’ by Susan Maushart, Pandora pounds 9.99..
e likes to come across as an ordinary lad, Kenneth Branagh He’s a Spurs supporter He’s partial to a drink. And when not penguined out for some gala performance, he wears jackets and trousers that look slept in. The impression is reinforced by his laid-back RSC Cockney accent, which gradually replaced the original Ulster vowels after Branagh’s family moved from Belfast to Reading in 1970. So keen is he to swap Shakespearean diction for man-in-the-street inarticulateness that our Ken keeps getting his syntax in a tangle, adding another “so” or “but” or “cos” and only then realising that he’s let himself in for a whole new dependent clause, just when the sentence is running out of steam In a sense, his career’s a bit like that. Here, in one Joycean passage, is Branagh on having a private life that, like a stately home, is unavoidably open to public view: “Given that the lines of demarcation around celebrity now are very blurred, I think you have to make your own decision about where it begins and ends, so while some of it is out of your control – people can write or say what they want – you don’t have to be any more complicit with it than you choose to be, so you can invite more or less of it, or you can just decide to draw your own line in the sand and it doesn’t have to be a big dramatic gesture – there are some things you talk about and some things you don’t, and if people still want to write about them, that’s fine, and you understand the appetite and all the rest of it, but I kind of – my view is that if I’m not interested in person X’s private life, you know, I don’t necessarily feel that I have to share mine …