Headfuck

My views on welfare reforms for teenage mothers

by Veronica on May 5, 2011

in Headfuck, Soapbox

Teenage mothers are going to be running the gauntlet in trying to keep food on the table, with the government announcing new welfare reforms for young parents. Once their child is 6 months old, they will be expected to attend Centrelink interviews once a week and will be forced into compulsory education or work training after their child turns one.

“It’s not a question of punishment, it’s a question of providing opportunity.” says Wayne Swan, Treasurer.

And with that comment, my blood pressure starts to rise and I’m not sure if I should yell about things, or cry at the stupidity.

I had Amy when I was 17, so I have a vested interest in teenage mothers and the help provided for them. I also know how hard parenting is, regardless of age and I’m not sure a policy that seeks to make life harder for a minority of parents is, in any way, a helpful thing.

Centrelink interviews are time consuming. You sit in a waiting room for an hour, waiting to be seen by someone who only knows you as a case file number. Add in a 6 month old child, who may or may not be an “easy” baby and a stressed mother, who may or may not have had any sleep and it feels like a recipe for disaster. I couldn’t find the time to shower and eat when Amy was a baby, let alone lug everything into the city and spend half a day waiting to have my name ticked off, so that money would continue to trickle in. And believe me, Centrelink is a trickle, it’s not a flood of cash, or an easy life.

I’m curious as to why, you can leave school at 16, but now, if you have a baby as a teenager, once your child is one, you will be forced back into schooling, or certificate level training.

Sure, it all looks great on paper, but who is looking after the toddler while Mummy is forced out of the house?

I see that 100% of the childcare costs will be covered by the federal government. Do they really feel that is it better to force young mothers to give the care of their child over to “professionals” while they “better themselves”? We’ll leave aside the issues of finding decent childcare to begin with.

And I’m sorry, but at any age, parenting is IMPORTANT. Kids need parents who are around. Childcare workers, while lovely, are not the same as Mummy and Daddy.

I know you’re going to argue with me that “These kids having kids, they need help and prospects” and I’ll agree there. They DO need help and they DO need support.

BUT – this is not the way to do it.

It feels like punishment for young women daring to fall pregnant.

You know what we need? Sex education in schools. Free contraception. Discussion and advice.

We do not need to make mothers feel like second class citizens, no matter their age.

This is hearkening back to the 70’s, when unwed teenage mothers were put in homes until their baby was born. Then the mother was forced to give her baby up for adoption and life went on as normal for everyone else.

I am angry, I am so so angry. Beating teenage mothers with a stick is not the answer to the problem.

Did anyone in the government think to speak to a teenage mother and find out what hardships she is facing and how it could be made easier for her? No?

How about I put my hand up.

Dear Labor Government: I would be more than happy to meet with you and discuss the real issues facing teenage mothers, so that you can have an insight into Real Life and not life as it’s written on paper.

Bedhair

 

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I am tired

by Veronica on April 11, 2011

in Grief, Headfuck

I am tired.

I am tired of the screaming from my son. Right now anyone would think that I had cauterised a giant wound with a hot poker, rather than covering a blister with a bandaid. Sensory issues. Great.

And Amy, who is permanently exhausted, and sulky and also has this terrible cough, that isn’t so bad of a day time, but is keeping us all awake of a night.

Why does this year feel like all I’m doing is facing into the wind and refusing to walk backwards?

I will not give up. I will not give in.

It would have been my grandmother’s birthday today and grief is tough. Watching someone you love die is exhausting, when your brain won’t switch off and you get to relive the moments again and again in your dreams. Like deja vu, but different.

April was always Nan’s month, her birthday and Easter falling on the same weekend a lot of the time, Easter was her celebration. Now I get to create new traditions and dammit, I didn’t want new traditions. I liked the old ones perfectly fine.

Facebook keeps yelling at me and telling me it’s her birthday. I’ve been counting it down. Another year gone and yet, it’s not getting any easier.

We were five generations and cancer shattered that, the bastard motherfucking thing. Fuck cancer. Fuck it to the moon and back.

I am tired and grief is hard.

Really that’s all I’ve got to say today.

Five generations.

I hear this gets easier eventually. They’ve been telling me for 2 years now. I’m not convinced.

But hey, Isaac just fell asleep on the floor in front of the fire.

At least something is looking up.

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Not having fun

by Veronica on March 17, 2011

in Blogging, Grief, Headfuck

I wrote a post for a PR company the other day, as part of a new website launch and three sentences in, I realised that I was having fun. I couldn’t, for the life of me, manage to be sensible, and so I wrote the post tongue in cheek and deeply satirical and then sent it off into the ether, hoping that the company would ‘get’ it and still want to use the post.

What the hell I thought, if it’s not suitable, I’ll be serious and use the first attempt as a post for Sleepless Nights. Win|win.

A week and some follow up emails later, I was told my post was great and it would be used, which is fantastic, but I’d also hoped to share it here, because that’s how much I enjoyed being silly. The post isn’t live on the site yet, so I can’t link to it, but it made me realise, I haven’t been having fun.

I’m unhappy. Sure, good things are happening and I’m enjoying them – I really enjoyed the ABC International Women’s Day event I attended and I’m really looking forward to getting married and I’ve loved organising the Aus Blog Con … but I’m not happy, in myself.

I had a conversation with Paul Smart during the opening of MONA about the importance of having fun. I agreed with him in theory, but also, while we were racing around the museum and having the best time, I realised how rare my having fun had become. Yes, I enjoyed things, but being silly? Having fun? I’d lost a lot of that. MONA FOMA made me realise how much I missed myself, the bent sense of humour and the darkly funny and the loving life. Doctors appointments leave no room for satire, or jokes.

Life has been feeling like an endless grind of meltdowns and shitty nappies and being urinated on and stuff breaking and things falling apart and appointments and screaming and stress and really, where is my fun?

Nan died almost two years ago and it doesn’t feel like that long, not when I’m missing her so much it hurts. It feels like a heartbeat and yet, at the same time, surely I’ve been living this way forever?

I think grief sucks the fun out of life, really fast. Autism and a falling down house help, but the grief feels like a giant weight that sits, between my shoulders, making everything that bit more difficult.

Nan died and then my hot water cylinder exploded and then my car died on the day of her funeral, at the fucking funeral home and there was a giant falling out with family and thousands of dollars worth of plumbing bills and then a baby who was having trouble feeding and a seizure and Ehlers Danlos and then Aspergers for Amy and then total social withdrawal from Isaac. Not to mention the two dogs killed within a few months and then just everything.

Sometimes life is too much and surviving is all you can think about. It will get better, or it will be fine, become mantras and suddenly, it’s years later and you’ve been surviving, just, for so long, that you can’t remember when you last thought about how crappy it all feels now.

I’ve gotten so used to things going wrong, that I don’t even tell people when things are meant to be happening, because surely, it’s all going to go to shit before then anyway.

I’m going away this weekend, to Sydney, for the Aus Blog Con. I’m going to sleep in a hotel room without anyone screaming at me, and I am going to breathe deep and photograph everything. I am going to laugh, as much as I can, as often as I can.

I am going to be silly and stupid and I am not going to care what people think. I am going to hug the group of women who have held my hand through tough times and I am going to eat with them and laugh and be myself and trust that they’ll like me anyway. I’m sure they will. I am going to meet new people and make new friends.

I’m going to have fun, despite everything else, because fun makes everything easier.

When I come home, I am going to spend four days quietly freaking out, because you guys? I am giving a talk to post-graduate media students at the UTAS on Friday the 25th, on blogging and new media and what I do all day and then I’m going to have coffee with the senior lecturer about something that might end up being a Very Big Deal, or it might not end up happening. I am trusting that telling about it won’t jinx it.

And I am going to have FUN. And you’re going to have fun with me, because there is not enough fun lately.

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Dear Internet, how much do you love me?

by Veronica on March 8, 2011

in Blogging, Headfuck

Subtitled: Swallowing my pride.

The last week has been like a giant snowball of things going wrong. Tonight, the kids bathed my iPhone and while it’s sitting in a container of rice, I’m not hopeful that it will work again. Considering it was given to me by a friend in the first place, I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

I ran my finances a week ago and had to hastily look away. If I wasn’t an organiser of the Aus Blog Con, I would have pulled out of going a month ago, for financial reasons. Everything appears to have conspired against me, leaving us with bills to pay and things to replace and not much left.

Of course, as one of the organisers I can’t pull out and while I can just manage to make it to Sydney, it’s only because I’ll be maxing out my credit card and eating rice for a month when I get home.

Ideally, I’d love sponsorship by a company, who sell optus phones (because my mobile number is on my business cards and I really don’t think I can hold up to another mobile number change) and then I can stop wondering if the Universe is conspiring against me.

But I also know that this is really late notice, and it’s very likely that no company will see this.

So, dear Internets, if you would like to send me $5, I will be grateful forever. All donaters will score themselves a sidebar link under ‘People I will love forever’.

There. Done. Pride swallowed.

Now I’m going to go and mope over my dead phone, my dead garden and stolen ducklings.

 

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Sometimes, people are utter bastards. So is the weather.

by Veronica on March 5, 2011

in Animals, Garden, Headfuck

On top of the stress, some bastard stole 17 of my ducklings.

I am, as you can expect, rather angry about this.

The ducklings were here and accounted for at 4.30pm when we got home from Isaac’s psych assessment and I couldn’t see them at 7pm last night when I was on the phone to Mum. At the time, of course, I just assumed that the mother had put them and herself to bed already, and I filled up the water containers, didn’t bother doing a full head count and went back inside.

This morning when I woke up to a frost, I figured I’d best check to make sure everything had survived the night.

Outside, I found 3 ducklings with one mother and one mother with no babies at all.

A quick walk around the paddock found one duckling in a nest that they’d slept in, obviously suffocated – this duckling belonged with the 3 other live babies. (How can I tell you ask? They were slightly different colours, because of a 2 day age difference). Obviously that mother had slept indoors with her 4 babies.

A long slow walk around the paddock turned up nothing.

A detailed examination of all the water containers, the blackberries, the septic tank, the marshy back corner and ALL the surrounding paddocks (risking electrocution and plover attacks), plus the sides of the road and the paddock across the road, showed nothing.

17 ducklings, vanished.

Last night, as I cooked dinner, Maisy barked at the window. We ignored it, being busy, figuring she was barking at the cat. Now, we assume she was barking at whoever was in the yard, stealing ducklings. Cars and people stop at the front of our house all of the time, so it’s not something we pay attention to anymore.

Moral of the story? Always check when the dog is barking. Always.

I’ve been on the phone to the police this morning who agree with me, that losing 17 is definitely theft, as a hawk or snake would only take 1-2, and not 17 in a 3 hour time frame. And if they’d died of anything else, I would have found remains.

I am so upset. They’re only 4-5 days old and so so fragile still. They won’t survive if they’re separated from each other and they’re probably already doing badly without their mother. I’m worried about them, hand rearing ducklings is hard work. The RSPCA has also been notified, so that they know to ring me if ducklings start arriving there.

On top of the duckling theft, we had a major frost that wasn’t forecast on my weather forecast and I lost nearly the entire contents of my garden.

All of my tomatoes are dead, or dying. I didn’t even get any to ripen on the bush this year. I’ll save what I can for green tomato chutney and for ripening inside, but still. That’s over 100 tomato plants dead.

All my pumpkins died. I was able to rescue 3 half grown pumpkins off the vines, but all the vines are dead.

All of the zucchini. All of the corn, the basil, the cucumbers.

Everything.

You know how sometimes it just feels like too much? Yeah, this is too much. The stuff in my garden was for preserving and bottling, to get us through winter, on a tight budget. The ducklings would have been sold at the growers market in a few months.

I am Not Impressed.

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