Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

What’s the point of being nice? People are going to hate you anyway.

Everywhere I go, people keep imploring me to be nice. Just be nice at the BBQ, be nice online, keep yourself nice in public. For gods sake, just be nice Veronica, okay? Surely you can manage that?

I am tired of just being nice, for the sake of everyone else’s comfort. Doesn’t my comfort matter too? Did anyone worry about how nice they were being the last time my reputation was dragged over the coals? Hey, how about that. I bet no one worried about how nice they were being when they bitched me out publicly, blocked me on twitter and refused to ever speak to me again.

I don’t do silent well. I don’t do nice for the sake of public propriety well either.

Nice is such a boring word. It’s bland. It’s inoffensive. Nice doesn’t make you think, or make you feel. Nice sex doesn’t give you a spine melting orgasm that makes your legs shake for minutes afterwards. Nice books are the ones they send home in Amy’s home reader, about Marcus sharing his toys and getting a cookie.

Nice. It’s warm milk. It is white walls. It is something that I won’t remember five minutes from now because fuck me, but nice is boring.

I am a kind person. I have empathy. I worry about how people will feel, about how my actions will be received. I want to be kind, and caring, and opinionated. These things are not mutually exclusive.

I say fuck a lot. Fuck is not a nice word. It isn’t bland, and it doesn’t leave any doubt in your mind about how I feel. I throw things. I shout, and I wave my arms in the air. I loudly used “because VAGINAS” as an argument to my husband in the supermarket, much to the shock of the lady walking past. It was a reasonable response when you consider that the question was why mothers wanted fluffy pink socks for Mother’s Day.

Being nice will get you nowhere. I don’t want someone to remember me as vaguely nice when I die. “Oh, her. Yes, she was nice.”

There’s no point to niceness. People will hate you no matter what you do. Maybe your hair offends them. Or the way you laugh. Maybe the way you capitalise your sentences sets their teeth on edge. No matter how nice you are, someone out there somewhere imagines punching you in the face, and it makes them feel better.

Nice gets you nowhere.

I am a strong person. I have opinions and I like things the way I like them. My sense of humour is kind of fucked up. I frequently daydream about poking some people in the eye repeatedly with a blunt stick. I rescue small starving kittens and I cuddle small sad children.

I don’t want to be nice. I want to be smart, funny and kind. I want to be interesting and colourful and compelling.

You can keep your warm milk.

I’m aiming to be top shelf liquor.

July 16, 2013
When your baby’s knees dislocate

I’ve been telling our medical teams for months that Evelyn’s knees are clicky.

“It’s just her low muscle tone. As she grows, it will improve” they all said. “Nothing to worry about.”

Until I was sitting at a physio appointment with Evelyn, talking about her knees when Evelyn began to click her knee in and out of joint.

“Hang on, is that the clickiness you’re talking about?” asked our lovely physiotherapist, while turning a little green. “That’s not normal. That’s not right. I’ve never seen anything like that before, ever. You need to get a referral to an Orthopaedic Surgeon for that.”

Oh. Right. Because dislocating knees in an 11 month old isn’t a good thing.

She’s learned to pull to standing, but her ankles are rolling in. We’re giving her another 6 weeks to encourage her muscle strength before she’ll have to start wearing support boots full time to keep her feet where they should be. Her hips seem fine, but because of the laxity of her knees, her feet end up turned backwards.

It’s a fine line, between wait and see, and actively intervene. We need to give her muscles a chance to strengthen, but we also need to be prepared for what happens if they don’t.

Evelyn choked yesterday, sitting at my feet. She’d been chewing on a rice cracker and I immediately assumed that something had gone down the wrong way. I held her while she spluttered, coughed and then stopped breathing entirely, her little eyes full of panic. I smacked her on the back, thanking everything for first aid training, and held her over my knees while she began to cough and breath again, finally vomiting in my lap.

Only, the thing is, there wasn’t anything large enough in her vomit to have caused a choking episode like that. She’s choked before on her own saliva and I can only pray that it isn’t getting worse. She’s stopped swallowing most foods, and I’m awaiting an appointment with a speech pathologist to discuss the choking/swallowing issues. We also see our Paediatrician soon, where we’ll discuss everything, before another EEG occurs later in the month.

It feels like we’re just running to play catch up right now. Her knees are dislocating, she tried to choke herself and she’s still having seizures overnight.

On the bright side, she can clap hands, wave bye bye and she woke me up this morning by very carefully biting me on the nose. Twice.

And she’s adorable.

July 11, 2013
On not drinking alcohol – Shloer Giveaway.

I don’t drink alcohol. Part of this is the Ehlers Danlos – my body doesn’t process alcohol very well and I end up as hungover from two sips as I do from an all night bender. The other side of things is that I have an addictive personality and when I start drinking, I want to get very drunk, very quickly (and stay that way, preferably). I know this about myself, so hence I don’t drink anymore.

Shloer got in touch with me a few weeks back to ask if I wanted to try their non-alcoholic wine. I’m a big fan of anything fruit based and fizzy, and so I agreed to try their drinks and run a giveaway.

I really liked the red grape sparkling juice, because it wasn’t overly sweet. It doesn’t taste anything like wine and that’s okay with me – but if you’re a wine drinker and looking for something with the taste but without the alcohol, then this might not be for you. It is nice though – and no artificial colours or sweeteners makes it a plus in my book.

The white grape juice tasted more like a wine and it was sweeter too, but still nice. I wasn’t as big a fan of it – probably because of the wine flavour, but I still drank the two bottles I received .

If you’re pregnant and looking for something to serve at a baby shower, Shloer is nice. Also it would be good to serve at kids parties, etc etc.

Because Shloer would also like you to try some of their products, they’ve offered me an amazing hamper to giveaway!

Frankly, I’m a bit envious that I don’t get one of these hampers too! How nice does that stuff look?

If you’d like to win, leave me a comment below letting me know where you’d serve Shloer, and why. I’ll pick the best entry.

Competition closes on the 10th of July. One entry per household. Entry is only open to Australian addresses. Etc etc. All the standard stuff. No offensive entries.

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I received four bottles of Shloer to try in exchange for this giveaway. Opinions are my own. Normally I wouldn’t do something like this unpaid, but the giveaway component made it worthwhile for you guys.

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After much deliberation, Toni, you are my lucky winner! I’ll be in touch shortly.

June 30, 2013
Evelyn pulls to standing

If you’re on twitter, yesterday you might have noticed my ecstatic tweet about Evelyn pulling herself to standing. I am SO proud. Tonight, I got it on camera.

She thinks she’s very clever.

I agree.

June 27, 2013
#Iamnotaproperfeminist BECAUSE VAGINAS*: Why we started the hashtag

Yesterday morning I was on the phone to Frogpondsrock. We were bemoaning the fact that the #convoyofcleavage had sparked such disparaging language, that some feminist circles were angry about the terminology used, and the “slacktivism” of the whole thing.

I can’t remember who said it first, but one of us stated that we obviously weren’t proper feminists because we don’t know the secret feminist language/we like our husbands/don’t think feminism should be an exclusive club.

Then we got the giggles, because we think we’re hilarious. Suddenly, we had a twitter hashtag on our hands.

Thus is began with both of us tweeting on the #Iamnotaproperfeminist hashtag and amusing ourselves.

We wanted to poke gentle fun at the idea of there being a “right” way to be a feminist. Sometimes, people in the know get so hung up on the terminology used that they forget women all over the world are coming at feminism from a perspective unique to themselves. We’re not all the same person, with the same circumstances. To state unequivocally that feminism is THIS THING and not THAT THING is to discount the experience of women different to you.

By yesterday evening, our hashtag had taken off, grown wings and flown far away from where it started.

All across twitter, women and men were joining in to promote feminism without borders. And not just cis women, but trans women too. I count this as an extra success, because if their tweets are anything to go by, trans women are told they’re not able to feminist properly more often than I am.

Feminism has become something quite narrowly defined in recent years. Women who study feminism at Uni bristle at those of us who didn’t complete a degree calling ourselves feminists.

It’s all a bit ridiculous.

How do you define feminism anyway?

With all the drama and terminology complaints, it’s no wonder that young girls have been stepping back from calling themselves feminist. Who can be bothered when you have to always make sure you’re using the perfect word for the job, and inevitably, we all end up “doing it wrong” anyway.

Young women want to be feminists. We want equality. We just don’t want to have to constantly talk about what feminism is and isn’t – and I’m pretty sure that we don’t want women who are further along the paths of education (self, or otherwise) to be pointing out how we’re not being the perfect feminist.

I am not a proper feminist hit back at the stereotypes, at the exclusionary language, and it showcased the discomfort a lot of us were feeling at being told there was only one true way to do this feminism thing.

I am not a proper feminist, because there is no such thing.

And that’s why it’s awesome.

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* Because VAGINAS reference from here.

June 23, 2013