In La Marshall, the gay tango club in Buenos Aires, I was introduced to a married couple: successful, globetrotting, career women, both, as I had been until I decided that, for me, being there for my children and not being controlled by one of those who thrives in a dystopian, political, corporate world was more important than earning money.
Besides, I never trusted anyone or any organisation enough to happily hand my children over to strangers, for care. I did try. One nursery put my son in A&E despite knowing about his allergy. Before that I had asked a woman from there who babysat for me on the one night I have ever used someone outside the family: Why does the nursery leave that chubby baby in its car seat for so long? She is always sitting squashed into it when I drop off my son. The reply: Oh, she doesn't arrive in the carseat. The staff put her in the car seat. It's just easier.
After the A&E incident I tried, a year or so later, a different place. My younger son, at two and a half, two years younger than his brother, used to beg to stay with his brother and play with the trains, which were practically an obsession. He would protest when he was taken away. So the nursery, which was in a large church hall, found them both a few morning slots. But alhtough I had had to drag him out of the door before, it seemed now that I had somehow overestimated his desire to stay. Despite the advantages of meeting other children, different toys and activities and my own hunger for a couple of hours on my own, I was never comfortable with leaving him. I stood outside the hall, listening, by the door, knowing the staff thought it was not good for me to hear his sobs. It wasn't. They told me each time that he soon got over being left. Later, someone who worked there told me it hadn't been true. The only thing worse than abandoning a crying child at nursery is finding that out. So, apart from disliking my attention being divided, I was never cut out to be a working mum. The younger one still comes to talk to me every morning in my bed. I asked him what he remembered about that nursery. He said, it was OK but he didn't like being left. So they remember. He stayed a few months before I moved him, for again a few mornings, to a smaller, cosier, purpose built nursery in the grounds of his brother's school where he settled with relative ease.
Besides, I never trusted anyone or any organisation enough to happily hand my children over to strangers, for care. I did try. One nursery put my son in A&E despite knowing about his allergy. Before that I had asked a woman from there who babysat for me on the one night I have ever used someone outside the family: Why does the nursery leave that chubby baby in its car seat for so long? She is always sitting squashed into it when I drop off my son. The reply: Oh, she doesn't arrive in the carseat. The staff put her in the car seat. It's just easier.
After the A&E incident I tried, a year or so later, a different place. My younger son, at two and a half, two years younger than his brother, used to beg to stay with his brother and play with the trains, which were practically an obsession. He would protest when he was taken away. So the nursery, which was in a large church hall, found them both a few morning slots. But alhtough I had had to drag him out of the door before, it seemed now that I had somehow overestimated his desire to stay. Despite the advantages of meeting other children, different toys and activities and my own hunger for a couple of hours on my own, I was never comfortable with leaving him. I stood outside the hall, listening, by the door, knowing the staff thought it was not good for me to hear his sobs. It wasn't. They told me each time that he soon got over being left. Later, someone who worked there told me it hadn't been true. The only thing worse than abandoning a crying child at nursery is finding that out. So, apart from disliking my attention being divided, I was never cut out to be a working mum. The younger one still comes to talk to me every morning in my bed. I asked him what he remembered about that nursery. He said, it was OK but he didn't like being left. So they remember. He stayed a few months before I moved him, for again a few mornings, to a smaller, cosier, purpose built nursery in the grounds of his brother's school where he settled with relative ease.
As a family, we were fortunate, and, forfeiting some things, we could get by without both of us working. There was no option of both of us doing so part-time. My husband was employed away for at least days but often weeks and sometimes months at a time. So I stayed home with my children, or rather, took them out, adventuring. I was grateful not to have that struggle between trust in childcare and not, work and sick children, work and school events, and most of all work and time together.
Adorable, magical, charming creatures though small children are, raising them in that moneypit on my own, year after year even with money coming in was often a thankless, sleepless, relentless grind. When they were about one and three, I discovered that if I drove them into the gorgeous Scottish countryside after lunch they would both fall asleep for an hour or so. I would pull over immediately, wherever I was and drink in the peace. When their father was home, he was not much interested in them. It was not until years later once the drudgery of toddlerhood was well over that both his weekday and his weekend life stopped being virtually independent of us. On my elder son's second birthday he took him to the park just across the road from our house, for the first time. I was worried. He didn't know anything about children. We live in a house on four levels with sixty interior stairs but the children's father had not been involved with teaching them to negotiate these. Outside, at the front we have about ten, sharp, steep stone steps. Make sure you hold his hand when you go down the steps I said, failing to suppress my fear. He holds the bannister with one hand. You hold the other. Hold his hand by the road. But listening is not my husband's forte. If he was British he might favour the cold baths and open windows tone of learning. At supper he confessed that, by accident or by design, he had not held his son's hand. But the little, trusting one had indeed fallen down the steps top to bottom, miraculously coming away apparently physically unharmed.
When one raises children largely alone, everything has to be done sequentially. There is no You take the bags, I'll take the kids; or even You take the toddler, I'll take the baby; no You get an ice cream, I'll do the sun cream; no You get the supper on, I'll do the baths; no I'll clear up, you do bedtime; no, at 3AM, with a sick child's temperature insistently nudging 40 degrees, You take him to A&E, I'll watch the other one. There is too the intangible weight of constant, sole responsibility, for thought, decisions and actions. I didn't feel coherent enough to put together a job application never mind work and juggle the logistics of childcare, though, ironically, if trust in strangers had been less of an issue, had I done so I might have retrieved some of that coherence. The result of that experience is that there is no-one I respect more than the single working mother. The same mother who gets none of the: Wow! You do it on your own? that the odd, single working dad might hear.
So I opted - though to me it never really felt like a choice - for time with the children before I realised that too much of that can turn you into a burnt-out fiend. I seem to have managed when they were little and I was younger, but home-schooling my two boys aged 8/9 and 10/11 for a year in 2017-2018 left me with a - fortunately temporary - quasimodal twitch in one eye and so collapsing from exhaustion that, by the summer, pushing the pedals of my bike was an inordinate effort. I think in fact those earlier years were not dissimilar, one just doesn't like to dwell on what the years of five hours sleep or less were like and the many happy photos fortunately distort the perspective. But I look back and think: how did I do eight years until both were in school?
Adorable, magical, charming creatures though small children are, raising them in that moneypit on my own, year after year even with money coming in was often a thankless, sleepless, relentless grind. When they were about one and three, I discovered that if I drove them into the gorgeous Scottish countryside after lunch they would both fall asleep for an hour or so. I would pull over immediately, wherever I was and drink in the peace. When their father was home, he was not much interested in them. It was not until years later once the drudgery of toddlerhood was well over that both his weekday and his weekend life stopped being virtually independent of us. On my elder son's second birthday he took him to the park just across the road from our house, for the first time. I was worried. He didn't know anything about children. We live in a house on four levels with sixty interior stairs but the children's father had not been involved with teaching them to negotiate these. Outside, at the front we have about ten, sharp, steep stone steps. Make sure you hold his hand when you go down the steps I said, failing to suppress my fear. He holds the bannister with one hand. You hold the other. Hold his hand by the road. But listening is not my husband's forte. If he was British he might favour the cold baths and open windows tone of learning. At supper he confessed that, by accident or by design, he had not held his son's hand. But the little, trusting one had indeed fallen down the steps top to bottom, miraculously coming away apparently physically unharmed.
When one raises children largely alone, everything has to be done sequentially. There is no You take the bags, I'll take the kids; or even You take the toddler, I'll take the baby; no You get an ice cream, I'll do the sun cream; no You get the supper on, I'll do the baths; no I'll clear up, you do bedtime; no, at 3AM, with a sick child's temperature insistently nudging 40 degrees, You take him to A&E, I'll watch the other one. There is too the intangible weight of constant, sole responsibility, for thought, decisions and actions. I didn't feel coherent enough to put together a job application never mind work and juggle the logistics of childcare, though, ironically, if trust in strangers had been less of an issue, had I done so I might have retrieved some of that coherence. The result of that experience is that there is no-one I respect more than the single working mother. The same mother who gets none of the: Wow! You do it on your own? that the odd, single working dad might hear.
So I opted - though to me it never really felt like a choice - for time with the children before I realised that too much of that can turn you into a burnt-out fiend. I seem to have managed when they were little and I was younger, but home-schooling my two boys aged 8/9 and 10/11 for a year in 2017-2018 left me with a - fortunately temporary - quasimodal twitch in one eye and so collapsing from exhaustion that, by the summer, pushing the pedals of my bike was an inordinate effort. I think in fact those earlier years were not dissimilar, one just doesn't like to dwell on what the years of five hours sleep or less were like and the many happy photos fortunately distort the perspective. But I look back and think: how did I do eight years until both were in school?
And what do you do? one of the gay women asked. She was new to dancing tango and evidently unfamiliar with the etiquette about personal questions in the milonga. I braced myself and tried to think about dancing. But they had been pleasant, friendly, very enthusiastic about tango, a little brittle but then they were brand new to the milongas.
I'm just a mum.
Oh, is that all? she said, with a directness which, even with much experience of hearing answers to this statement, surprised me. She turned away and started chatting to someone else, a caricature of crassness. I breathed in and went to dance with a German girl in her first ever milonga tanda. I had met her at the house I was staying in. She was brand new that week to dancing tango and to the milongas. When I met her a year later, she still attended the milongas, now in Barcelona.
Those two women were very different from other Argentinians I met. They were executive types. They were not like people I met in the traditional milongas and I did not feel it was necessarily to do with their sexual orientation.
Those two women were very different from other Argentinians I met. They were executive types. They were not like people I met in the traditional milongas and I did not feel it was necessarily to do with their sexual orientation.
At a milonga in Edinburgh before Christmas, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, chipper young man with an American accent struck up frank and friendly conversation. He had studied philosophy, was studying psychology, had travelled and came from an interesting family. In five minutes he had covered Victor Frankl, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Schopenhauer and corrected me on both the dates and the politics of Hegel and Heidegger. I never studied the continental tradition in philosophy but even so, general knowledge ought to have preserved me from those basic mistakes. Politics came up. I asked him where he 'stood' on Trump, cringing, feeling old, thinking I should get out more to save my dancing and my small talk.
- On my own two feet, he shot back.
I shrank, deservedly even as I was delighted for him. Thanks for the conversation he said ambiguously over his shoulder and with youth's insouciance as he went off to dance.
Let that be a lesson to those who ask unsuitable questions.
- On my own two feet, he shot back.
I shrank, deservedly even as I was delighted for him. Thanks for the conversation he said ambiguously over his shoulder and with youth's insouciance as he went off to dance.
Let that be a lesson to those who ask unsuitable questions.
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