We were never being boring

The side effects of parenthood are well known. From nausea in early pregnancy, swollen ankles to sleepness nights and mummy brain (when you walk into a room and can’t remember what for).  But I have yet to read anything about how being a parent can turn you into a bore overnight, especially to those friends of yours who have no children.

It starts when you give up the alcohol in pregnancy. This is already potentially the start of being a huge bore. When your friends are ordering beer you are nursing your herbal tea, hoping that the honey will make you a bit tipsy. It doesn’t.

When the baby is there, you notice that some friends just don't call you anymore. When you meet up, it is often at home, conversations snatched between scooping up baby food and nappy changing. Piled up laundry it is. Fancy free and fun it ain't. It isn't sipping cocktails in a cool bar, or checking out the latest exhibition or shopping. It's apologising as you have to put the baby to bed and might not emerge for another hour, if at all. 

Whereas you may be able to talk to other mothers for hours on end about baby food, breastfeeding and childbirth stories, this won’t wash with many of your other friends.  Why should it? You are literally cocooned in your own little baby world and by the time you emerge your friendships may have reshuffled and changed.

You don’t (in their eyes) do anything anymore. You are boring. This is a tough one to deal with, on top of the above mentioned side affects of parenting. It is creeping, underlying and often not said out loud.

In Berlin I would literally take my baby with me everywhere, to loud street parties, to open air film screenings, I didn’t think anything of riding home on the U-Bahn at 3.00 in the morning.

When you have two kids (and you move to a less cosmopolitan place like we had to), this becomes impossible. A three or four year old will not put up with this, and then you find yourself getting into their routine. Having two kids is like two to the power of four, it is just weird maths, which mean that the efforts of parenting have quadrupled rather than doubled.

In order to survive the year you have to dig in and get downright boring. Celebrate your boringness. Don’t get any hobbies, or if you must, try Suduko.

‘Get a babysitter’, come the cries from the outside of your nest, trying to rake you out of your babybore phase.

But my kids don’t get to sleep until 10pm, and I usually am asleep before them, you reply. And so it goes on. It is funny, but you can blame yourself when friendships drift apart. You don't think, heck, they could come round and chat about formula milk. You think, I have got to get out there, otherwise I am in danger of falling off the face of the earth. 

I say, give yourself a break. 

I am advocating raising the boring stakes a notch. Baby birth bore talkathons, baby poo talkalongs and baby food shaggy dog stories.

So, when you have young kids, forget upping the interest stakes by trying to be like your former all night partying former drink bingeing self or feeling you have to get a cool career to boot.  Play fire with fire by celebrating motherhood in all its glorious bore-potential.  Get down right boring. 

One day you may wake up feeling bored yourself. Then you can think about what actually interests you. Maybe your old friends are right. You have changed. You may be surprised yourself that  the things you found important before you had kids no longer interest you. In fact, you find them rather boring.

Over a barrel

 chillaxing, not having an axe to grind

Last year they redid the main road that runs along the top of my street and left no room for a bicycle lane, in fact the bicycle lane literally just ends at some point, and the cyclist is told to dismount.  This got me really angry, I mean why should I stop, when it would take me about 2 minutes to get home by bike.  Instead, I would have to walk my bike along the road and then breathe in the fumes of two-lane traffic. Totally unnecessary.

This week I called up to complain about a bill I had received, nearly 70 Euros and for what? The plumber showed me that I had to press the button on the gas heater for 5 seconds and not 1 in order for it to start. Seventy Euros for 5 minutes work, which had been billed for 1 hour and 15 minutes of repair and skilled work. Talk about daylight robbery.

In the Kindergarten where my son is, he will be probably be chucked out after one year. Not for bad behaviour, but because my husband’s work contract runs out at the end of November and the Kindergarten is run by his place of work.

Recently, I’ve realised that I spend a lot of energy getting worked up about things that I can’t really do anything about. After all, living as a trailing spouse with a soon to be jobless husband applying here there and everywhere, it is not like I haven’t got any other concerns at the moment, including my own fledgling career reboot plans.

So today, as an experiment I got off my bike where the bike lane cuts off because the sign told me too, feeling absolutely ridiculous at my obedience to walk the 100 metres along the road to the crossing. Other cyclists sped happily by me.  I accepted the rules absurdity and somehow it made me feel better. That’s a hard one for me, not to fight/break stupid rules.

And the plumber. God, I always have to deal with these issues, with the landlords, with the handymen, and with the authorities. And from my experience even having lived here for years with a fairly good grasp of German, it is a real handicap if German is not your mother tongue.  Sometimes you can use this fact to your advantage as I did with the plumber last week. He wasn’t letting me speak, and I said, please could he give me time to speak as he must know that German is my second language, the subtext being “you are not treating me with such little respect because I am a foreigner, are you?” Usually works a treat. But in any language, it is hard to contest a bill.

And the Kindergarten? I knew this was the case when I applied to the Kindergarten.  But somehow I had a glimmer of hope that somehow our situation might change, or the Kindergarten may show mercy. Sometimes they designate the child a place if they have no applications in that age group. But somehow the idea of removing a child from a kindergarten where efforts have been made to integrate the child and make him seem comfortable seems so ludicrous and just about rules and regulations, where there is in actual fact a child at the centre of things. In my fantasy, I imagine myself fighting such bureaucracy through the courts, but in reality it is just something else to get worked up about.

So plan A (acceptance), I am going to follow the rules, with a smirk. The good citizens of Bielefeld will bless me, and I might even get my bike lights fixed, I mean really go for it.

I will pay the daylight robbers – “Hut ab!” a German phrase roughly translated “I take my hat off to you”, or in the language of youth – Respect!  Dear Mr Plumber, I am over a barrel, you win, “bin über den Tisch gezogen” – literally - you’ve pulled me over the table, thank you for your trouble,   Frau (sucker) Marshall. Actually not as bad as I thought, losing that battle.

And the Kindergarten place – well it’s a bit of a journey to get there, children are more adaptable to change than we are as adults. Or what about that old chestnut – it’s not the end of the world - I think the saying goes. Might help with this one.

This year may just be a lot easier to deal with if I just accept that I have no control over the Kindergarten situation or the imminent wobbly job/place/future situation otherwise known as the rug being pulled from under me scenario.

Less of a plan, and more of an experiment.  Lets see how it goes.