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New Year's Resolutions from Elseweb

2024 Work:

Say no to project managers more

Shout up when I need help more

Keep project managers up to date on progress

No working weekends or evenings

Life

Use the time freed up from work to

Be more creative

Be more sociable

Do more exercise

Declutter and tidy the house

Get enough sleep

Sort out the problem with the bath/shower

Get the roof fixed

Is it possible to post a picture directly from my phone to DW? Or do I have to upload it elsewhere first?

Ignore that, I have read the FAQ. Ok, so can I post an image to a locked/private Instagram and also have it show up in DW? Or does the IG privacy setting defeat that?

I have been feeling fragile since Zoe was born. I cry ridiculously easily at the most ridiculous things, no matter how silly or sentimental. If I don't get >7 hrs sleep, my mood really drops and a couple of times Daz has had to order me to bed because I was feeling paralysed.

I have done my best to be careful and kind to myself and also to notice when I am being irrational. At this point, Zoe's needs are actually pretty simple (food, warmth, clean clothes, sleep and interaction) and I am confident that I can meet those needs. But there is this yawning terrifying fear that I will let her down somehow. This makes me feel paralysed (and so I don't interact with her as much as I want to) or avoidant of sorting out things she needs (such as her baby gym) because I keep researching instead of making a decision.

I am seeing my lovely counsellor on Thursday to try to dig into why this is happening and how to fix it, so I can be more present and actually enjoy Zoe's babyhood. (And stop bursting into tears over daft stuff.) I just realised that part of the issue is all the fear and grief that I kept squashing down through all the waiting and IVF process. So that's a thread we can tug on on Thursday.

Finally got around to reading the parenting book that my grandma gave my mum when I was born and my mum gave me just before Zoe was born. It's called “Pajamas Don't Matter"

There's a message on the first page where my grandma says that she is sending this book because my mum lives far away so she can't be around to help in person.

My parents moved from Birmingham to Central Scotland before I was born and in turn, I moved away to Manchester.

I was expecting it to be out of date in tone or information but it is actually very reassuring and fits really well with the parenting values that I have already.

So that feels like a quiet but deep connection to my mum and her mum, linking us together.

My grandma died a few years ago but the money she left me paid for the final IVF cycles that got us Zoe.

(Just done some calculations and realised that she was 31 when she had her first child (my mum) which was quite late in the 50s so that feels like another connection between us)

And actually, it has made me feel less worried about the next stages, when Zoe will need more from me than food and cuddles so it is definitely doing its job.

I know from talking to my mum directly and from a family friend that my mum struggled with anxiety when we were little so hopefully the book helped her like it's helping me.

I was doing reasonably well at posting regularly and then I had a series of frustrating technical issues with my setup for expressing breastmilk. That upset me and I didn't feel very inspired to post for a while. But I am feeling better and feeling like things are working smoothly now so I am back!

Some innovations since my last post that have helped with the logistics of childcare, especially when Daz and I are on our own.

1. I reduced and relocated the stuff in the corner of the living room so we could set up a play mat for Zoe. We have now added a baby gym, her toy box and a nightlight that gives a gentle light.

That is good for her and also provides a safe place she can be left for short periods while not in her cot. It lets us eg put her down while we make up a bottle or go to the toilet.

2. I have rented two different kinds of baby carrier to try. In non-Covid times, there are places to get advice and try on different options but it took me a while to find alternatives.

One is like a rucksack with lots of adjustable straps. Zoe and I went on an expedition and it worked pretty well, although Zoe was a bit squished because I had not quite fitted it right. She was OK though (remarkably chill baby and I kept checking on her) and I know what to do next time.

The other carrier is a long, stretchy piece of fabric that you tie around yourself. I was really intimidated by that because I was worried about putting Zoe at risk by doing it wrong but YouTube had helpful videos. I had a Zoom consultation with the woman who rents the carriers and that helped me understand how it works and how to adjust it.

3. We are trying reusable nappies. This was on hold because my washing machine was refusing to do more than the basic wash and also because Zoe was pretty small and the nappies are quite bulky. I bought some clothes in the next size up (at 8 weeks, she fits newborn perfectly so we got 0-3 months) so that there is enough room in the bum. The outer wraps have pictures of bees, ladybirds and whales on them which I am v pleased with.

Babies require an awful lot of equipment to look after! However, there is a calm joy in finding exactly the right tool for the job or the system that makes stuff just work.

1. The car seat that rotates 360 degrees.

Children's car seats now look like something out of Formula One. They are highly engineered to protect children in the event of a crash from any angle. They need to be able to face backwards (safest for babies) and forwards (for chatty toddlers) but we got one that can be turned 360 degrees, mainly because it is easier to lift Zoe in and out. But it also lets you can sit on the backseat when parked and talk to her!

The seat we bought can be used up to age 4 (subject to height and weight limits) so currently there is layer upon layer of padding!

I feel a bit guilty leaving the last post on such a down note. It had been a long day and the lockdown (and the ridiculous way it was handled) was depressing. Thank you for the encouraging comments. I am going to aim for a diary style entry unless

Yesterday Zoe was unwilling to sleep, except in someone's arms which made it difficult to post or get anything else done. I was supposed to attend a baby massage class over Zoom but I am an idiot and got the time wrong. It is on again next Wednesday so I will get it right then.

Today Zoe is sleeping in the cot part of the pram (which we are using as a Moses basket) and I have got everything done and feel much more in control.

I missed Biphoria tonight. It is tricky but not impossible to arrange to have baby free time. Although, it occurs to me that I think of it as a 3hr commitment (which it was when we met irl and could be if I helped with new members and then stayed to "pub time" but Biphoria itself is only 8 til 9:30 so that is more achievable than I thought. Yesterday, I was having a much needed nap at that time though!

Six days in and I am struggling to know what to write about. My daily life is fairly repetitive and feels trivial in the midst of the pandemic. I spend all day on social media, listening to people rage and circulate / repudiate various 'hot takes'. I am just heartsick and exhausted by it all.

I am relatively well-insulated from the effects of the pandemic but I feel helpless. We have been more or less living under these lockdownrules for months. I can't help my friends who are having a hard time in any of the practical ways that I would like. I also can't donate money to help out people who need it because our money is suddenly much tighter.

Tomorrow, I will have had more sleep and feel more positive.

(This is not necessarily interesting for anyone else but it seemed worth recording because our routine is completely different from Before Zoe and will change again as she grows.)

Shift change is at midnight when Daz takes on sole care of Zoe until I come down at 8 to 830. Normally when I come down, Zoe is awake and smiling so I get a bit of a cuddle. Daz winds down for a bit and goes to bed. Then I try to get Zoe to sleep so I can pump breast milk.

While she sleeps, I wash and sterilise the bottles and breast pumps, do the washing up and washing and take out any recycling. I am not great at sticking to routines but if I do these every day, they remain manageable and the kitchen stays clean.

Sometimes I go out on the afternoon, almost always to walk around a cold park which is currently the safest way to meet people irl. Zoe is too small for her outdoor clothes but they keep her very well snuggled.

Daz wakes up in mid afternoon and then we split looking after Zoe between us. We both need an hour's nap at some point or else we get tired and crabby. Daz makes dinner and we try to check in with each other to make sure we are not getting too tired or frustrated. It can feel a little bit like a pressure cooker because the pandemic means we can't get outside help. We have both ended up getting upset or over-tired at times but it blows over.

We called the baby "the astronaut" all the way through pregnancy. The most prosaic reason was that was because we wanted to keep the name and (assigned) gender private until birth. It developed into a whole story on Twitter, with me as the Mothership and Daz as Mission Control. However, I liked the astronaut metaphor for deeper reasons.

Before IVF embryo transfer (or IUI insemination), there are lots of scans and medication and doctors reviewing charts but afterwards, you get sent home to wait for two weeks. During that time, it's not possible for anyone outside to know what is happening. It reminded me of the scenes in Apollo 13 and Hidden Figures, where Mission Control wait to hear from their astronauts, not knowing if they are alive or dead. I found myself talking to the embryo (and the egg, in previous IUIs), telling it to find a safe place to land and grow.

When the embryo lands, it starts "terraforming" the endometrium to suit itself. It expands and adapts the ship it came in and requests the supplies it needs from its host-planet. The host planet provides those supplies and adapts to the astronaut's presence but there is always a slight friction because what the astronaut wants/needs and what is good for the host-planet. Their goals are not quite the same.

I liked this metaphor much better than the classical idea of a mother as a passive vessel, infinitely nurturing with no needs or desires of her own, meeting her baby's needs easily and instinctively. I am determined to do everything I can to help Zoe thrive and develop but it's going to be a human process, a negotiation between imperfect creatures with different viewpoints and desires.

Finally, now that Zoe is here, we have a playmat with planets and stars and a book called Baby Astronaut. I want her to grow up to explore the world and travel as far as she wants to go.

Zoe - ScienceBaby

1. My ovaries were not producing enough eggs, even with high doses of medication so we chose to use donor egg IVF. This is a pretty amazing thing - an anonymous donor takes all the drugs, has all the scans and finally goes through an egg retrieval under general anaesthetic for a baby that they will not meet for 18 years, if ever.

2. One of the options at the IVF clinic we used is that instead of observing the growing embryos, you can pay for an extra where they use time-lapse cameras to observe the embryos without disturbing them. As a side benefit of this, they sent us a short video of the embryo-that-would-be-Zoe changing from 4 cells to a morula (which looks like a blackberry) to a blastocyst (which is a compact ball of cells which forms the baby and a large empty zone that firms the placenta. It is really *weird* to watch the little cells develop and know that will be Zoe!

3. When she was born, we donated her cord blood to
Anthony Nolan because apparently, they can do amazing things with it.

(Cheating slightly by c&ping from Twitter)

Feeling gently pulled in different directions.

This period between Christmas and New Year is normally a time when I do a lot of planning and reflection and set goals for the year. But it feels different this year.

2020 feels like it has been a painful demonstration of "Man plans and God laughs". It seems futile to plan when so much is out of my control and all I can do is hunker down and wait it out.

On the other hand, I feel liberated from the pressure to improve myself.

The big life goal that I have been working on for over a decade? - Achieved!

The need to manage my workload and solve project problems? Off my shoulders until November 2021!

So for 2021, my goals are both simple and hard

1. Try to be the best mum for Zoe that I can

2. Protect and support my family

3. Give support and love to my gf, friends, communities and beyond.

4. Find space for the things which build me up and bring me joy.

The first two are going to take up most of my time and energy but I can't let the other two fall away completely.

The other specific goal is to post here, with a extra-credit goal of commenting and responding to comments.

I still read DW but I fell out of the habit of posting. The problems are:

I feel DW posts should be more polished than Tweets but I never get around to them.

I generally read via my mobile and it is harder to write long posts (and more risk of accidentally losing the whole post 😭)

I feel I should summarise everything that has changed since I last posted and that is too big a job!

In an attempt to get back to posting, I am going to set a goal of posting a short post every day and hope that builds up into a bigger picture. So I will write a post in my Notepad app with at least 5 sentences every day for a year.

The big change in my life is that after pretty much 15 years of planning and 5 years of trying, I had a beautiful daughter in November. She is a ScienceBaby (IVF, donor egg), an Astronaut and 95% delight /75 5% monster. I am on maternity leave until November so my life is pretty Zoe-centric at the moment but she is already changing fast and I would like a record of this year.

It turns out that I have more to say about 'gay gene' research. (Publicly accessible version of my previous rant here https://twitter.com/Red_Amber/status/1167852748714516481)

Spoiler alert, I think it's bollocks. Which is good because that makes it hard for homophobes to exploit it.

Genetics and evolution is only ever a history of *reproduction*. If we extrapolate from that to make judgements about human's sexual identities, sexual desires or even what kind of non-reproductive sex they are having, we are on shaky ground and need to be very careful about our assumptions.

Bisexuality complicates genetic research on same sex attraction. We mess up the purity of their gay and straight sample sets. But more fundamentally, this research is based on some fallacies that bisexuals refute by their very existence.

Fallacy 1 - Sexual orientation is a binary - you are either 100% gay or 100% straight.

Fallacy 2 - Gender is a binary - people are either male or female and you can tell their gender by their bodies.

Fallacy 3 - Sexual Orientation = Sexual Attraction - people only ever experience sexual attraction to their normally preferred gender(s).

Fallacy 4 - Sexual Attraction = Sexual Behaviour - people only ever have sex because of sexual attraction.

Fallacy 5 - Sexual Behaviour = Sexual Orientation - your sexual orientation can be determined by the gender of your current partner.

Fallacy 6 - Sexual Attraction is the same as the desire to reproduce.

It is trivially easy to disprove all of these fallacies by looking at what people actually *do*.

Disproving Fallacy 1 - Bisexual people exist.

Disproving Assumption 2 - Transgender, nonbinary and intersex people exist.

Disproving Fallacy 3 - Many (possibly even most?) people have experienced attraction to someone who is not their preferred gender (if they have one).

Disproving Fallacy 4 - People have sex for many reasons apart from sexual attraction. These can include experimentation, social bonding, social necessity (eg marriage), wanting to conceive and rape.

Disproving Fallacy 5 - Linked to the previous example - being currently in a same sex relationship is not the same as NEVER being in a mixed sex relationship.

Disproving Fallacy 6 - This works in two ways - people may have sex with people of their non-preferred gender in order to conceive and people may avoid conception when it is possible. This is not just a modern phenomena - people have been using contraceptives/abortifacients/controlling reproductive access since prehistory.

All the fallacies combine into one big error - equating sexual attraction and identity with reproduction. That allows us to ignore the complexity of human relationships and attractions. It produces bad, lazy science and meaningless paradoxes.

Another problem with this approach is it treats same-sex attraction as an oddity or a mistake. We are invisible in the genetic record, therefore we can't be that important. But humans are weird and creative and contrary. We always had many genders and we have always been attracted to many genders.

This is a quick post because I am almost falling over with tiredness!

Went to the gym for strength training. I find it really tiring but also I also really like the achievement I feel as I get stronger. I also like that it pushes back against the idea that exercise for women is about getting smaller - this is about being more powerful, not less. It's hard to see progress because I am always lifting to the point where I almost can't but I know the weights are going up and other measures of my energy and fitness are increasing.

It is also training my endurance at putting up with being physically uncomfortable, feeling sweaty and looking silly. I am doing a 'Colour Obstactle Run' in about a month, which is a 5k race with inflatable obstacles all along it and people through coloured powder at you. I did it last year so it's going to be an interesting benchmark given that I am much fitter than I was. Last year, I fretted about the running but actually that wasn't an issue - you have to queue at each obstacle so you can run or walk and you get round in the same time. But I found the inflatable obstacles much harder to clamber over than I expected. I am hoping that I am more able to scramble across them or haul myself up them this time.

I have spent most of my life hating exercise and feeling "like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around" to quote Microserfs. I've exercised before but rarely stuck at it long enough to see a change. I know it won't last - this is all driven by the need to lose weight to have IVF and I don't expect to be able to keep up this much exercise after that but it's an interesting experience.

Current Mood: determined

I have really enjoyed reading Nanila's daily posts and since this is approximately the halfway point of 2018, I thought I'd join in.

And so, I procrastinated for ages because I couldn't think of anything to write! I'm going to keep it short so that it doesn't get too intimidating to keep this up.

Today was blazing hot which is unnatural for Manchester. I went swimming with Katie followed by Japanese food for lunch. We misunderstood the significance of the word Bento box on the menu and over-ordered (we intended starters + mains and got Bento box + starters + mains) but it was delicious :).

CN Intentional weightloss

( Cut for brief discussion of intentional weightloss. )

End CN

If things go on as they are currently, I am hoping to have an IVF cycle in September. Possibly trying another IUI cycle in between (pros - massively cheaper if it works, cons - expensive and stressful for something that has failed 3 times).

I am still travelling down to Birmingham for work but the current rate of 2 days every two weeks is much more sustainable than three days a week, every week that I did for the first 3 months. The project is interestingly complicated and they seem impressed with what I've done :)

Current Mood: accomplished

BiCon peeps - if I ran another Bi Carers meet, would people be interested? You can DM if you would prefer

Got some squeaks of interest - have emailed BiCon 😀

(It feels really presumptuous to be writing about this as a cis person and I am really interested to hear if trans people think I am way off base here but people seemed to like the previous posts)

Hester Tidcombe asked a question in response to the last post which I thought deserved a longer answer than I could fit in a comment.

"could you recommend sources to explain what gender is to people who have got as far as the GCSE Sociology type definition that gender is the social construct that most societies inflict on different sexes? I've been seeking explanations to counter the "gender is a social construct, therefore there's no such thing as transgender, just people with body dysmorphia promoting gender stereotypes " brigade, but explanations of trans on some favourable places actually make it sound like gender really is nothing more than stereotyping! Best I've found yet is Fred's diagram suggesting gender is something that people have in different amounts and if you have little of it, or have a lot but it matches your presentation, then that's great for you."

There's a link to Fred's diagram here because I think it is a really useful thing too! https://assumebenevolence.wordpress.com/…/05/20/paint-chart/

( Cut for waffle )

Following up on my earlier post, I wanted to talk about why most anti-transgender arguments are either outright lies, unfair comparisons or else subtly require trans people to stop existing (or stop existing in public) for other people's comfort/convenience.

( Cut for transphobic BS )

Buzzfeed reports on a bus which is touring the US, emblazoned with a message asserting that "Boys are always boys and girls are always girls" and the hashtag FreeSpeechBus.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/dominicholden/this-bus-is-on-a-road-trip-to-convince-you-that-transgender?utm_term=.sl7QQb0MYz#.xqX11RJPG9

I had a bit of a rant in response.

( CN Transphobic BS )

Mamihlapinatapai

Distracting and a danger to maximum efficiency

(no subject)

Stupid question

Fragile (13/365)

Pajamas Don't Matter (Previously posted elseweb) (12/365)

Getting the hang of this (11/365)

Baby kit that brings me joy 1 (9/365)

Diary (7/365)

Lockdown 3 (6/365)

Daily routine (Wk 3 to week 6) (5/365)

Zoe the Astronaut (4/365)

Zoe - ScienceBaby (3/365)

Festive Perineum and Life Goals (2/365)

Still here! (1/365)

Gay gene nonsense.

2/183 - Getting strong

1/183 - Stealing Nanila's idea :)

(no subject)

Yet another post about Teh Trans.

A couple of FB rants part 2 - Transphobes arguments are utter crap

A couple of ranty posts from FB - part 1

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January 2024

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