Ramping It Up: Children w disabilities, opinions, books

Writing with Boxing Gloves On

Right now I should be standing, left foot forward, weight on the balls of my feet, guard up, in front of my punching bag. Ready to deal with some adrenalin and a raised heartrate - but I've opted to sit here, with adrenalin and a raised heartrate, doing some metaphorical boxing instead. Because I'm feeling anxious, flutter in stomach, emotions behind the eyes: for not particularly good reason. This is extraordinarily hard to admit. I've been getting bouts of anxiety ever since I went on LWOP. Nothing overwhelming, nothing clinical, but enough to not feel like myself, and enough to feel unproductive, immobilised, not engaged, and a bit dithery.

And I've never felt like this before, not really. 

So finally I admitted it to Abe last night, that I'd been feeling a bit anxious, and he briskly and sensibly said, You Need to Do Some Exercise. Get onto your punching bag. And then I admitted that I know I should, but feel anxious about the time it will take, all the things I need to get done, the very small amount of time I have to do things, and so on. And he wasn't being glib. Abe is very thoughtful about anxiety and depression and coping and what you need to do, and exercise - and creativity, pleasure, intelligent responses to problems etc - is part of it.

But I also know that words can land those punches too, sometimes, can allow the sweat to flick off your shoulders and make the mat under your feet slippery with exertion. And sometimes instead of a hsst-jab-jab-cross that's what I need. When time is short. When deadlines beckon. When Things to Do and Am I Wasting this Rare Opportunity looms.

But then I fear being as self-indulgent as an Elizabeth Gilbert, with all her eat-pray-love, meet-play-puke, cliche-food-guru carry on. Add Julia Roberts' toothiness to the mix and it all sounds like a vision of hell.

Because yes yes I know, some would say that a child with a disability means that it should be ok to whinge about your life sometimes, but really . . . is it? My girl is well and healthy at the moment; she ate her banana and yoghurt for breakfast; she's off being entertained by some fabulous people at childcare. Last week, on the other hand, my cousin's wife died, at the age of 48, of mesothelioma. I didn't know her, and my cousin was a presence and memory rather than someone I knew. Older than me, he was the handsome one from a family of close-knit brothers - one went to university; one still lives at home with his mother my aunt, and has no front teeth; another was working on the railways and fell out of a train and was smashed against a pole at the age of 17, and his liver was split, but her survived; and then the Handsome One went to live in Cobar and was a miner. Three daughters, and his wife - who never worked in the mines - got the miner's disease. A dreadful story. Too sad.

And within a few hours, miners in Chile will be brought up that impossible shaft, 700 metres, one at a time, into the light. I read this morning that Isabel Allende is there, along with families of the miners, unpaid clowns, politicians, engineers, the army, and a huge contingent of the world's media. Awaiting miners, some of them illiterate, who have forged a collective agreement about benefiting from their stories together. How they'll survive the experience of blinking into the light is anybody's guess.

These stories make me want to erase my first few paragraphs, as it has already worked. It's like pouring warm honey onto a spiky burnt thing, melting and soothing it. Being reminded I have nothing to fear. It's about words.

I'm also reading Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna - and the power of words is central to it. Well, of course, it's a book. That's not what I mean, it's part of the plot. Her fictional writer is saved by his words, and he uses them in many different ways. He writes journals and reports; he builds a novel out of Mexico's history and a reflective, leftwing, nationalism. He's funny and secretive, as he describes the pale skin and smooth muscles of the Dutch man he lusts after. He's exuberant when he describes the marketplaces and foods he buys and cooks with. He's occasionally naive as he writes letters to Frida Kahlo, who admonishes and hectors him, and swears like a trooper. Frida Kahlo. In the 80s she was everywhere, but I only had a simplistic feminist notion of who she was. Her powerful, bold, not-really-narcissistic images were so very familiar, but her voice was not. In this novel at least - drawn apparently from her journals, and those of Diego Rivera - she's stroppy and powerful, opinionated and sexy, a force to be reckoned with. And she values words just as she values colour, images, politics, and making everything from her dress to her table to her house, artful. And she wasn't one of the world's whingers, despite the withered leg from polio, hidden under the swish of her skirts; despite the shattered pelvis, the lung diseases, the skin inflammations.

So, girlie, why the hell should you be feeling a little bit blah?

No reason at all, it turns out.

I also listened to an interview this morning with the artist Jutta Feddersen, whose story gives us the "other side" of the second world war narrative. She was a middle class child from an artistic family, in Germany, whose world was destroyed by the war. Camps, Russian soldiers, brutality. And she still looks for and exalts in beauty, partly as a way to deal with loss, and stories, and memories. I know her work, or bits of it, and she uses repetition and large scale installations, uses miniatures and the gigantic, shadows and juxtapositions of feathers, toys, dolls legs, eyes, and woven pieces of steel, to tell her stories. The interview left me feeling a little flayed, but not necessarily in a bad way.

It also reminded me of Rachael Sieffert's The Dark Room, which I also read recently, after avoiding it for a long time - for some reason. Three stories, connected without it being spelt out, about Germany's history and the impact of World War ll. It's also about photography, and writes about it beautifully. Like chess, photography is often overused as a metaphor. But this time, the photography has been used well - the f-stops are there for a reason, the description of red flags with swastika's glowing in a grey square are described so they send a shiver up your spine, as alive as a Leni Riefenstahl image; and the inability of photography to capture some events is also well done. Not to mention that I couldn't put it down, and read it balanced in one hand while doing other things; stayed up late; opted for words over sleep.

And there was Berlin, in part of the book, divided and marked. I've never been there, but not long after finishing the book I was talking to a friend who'd just returned, days before. She has an eye for a thoughtful detail, and for clever analysis, and so she saw the present and the history of the place at the same time. The bumps in the cobblestones, designed to trip you up with stories of the holocaust; the spiral staircase drawing you up and through the politics of the Reichstag; the museums. And the conversation helped me make a (screamingly obvious) connection I'd missed, when drawn in by China Mieville in his remarkable book, The City and The City. This is a noirish crime novel, that's also fantasy, that's also about two intertwined cities, circumscribed by rules of seeing and unseeing, where the two populations can't and won't and shouldn't either see each other or cross over into each other's territory. It's also a story of conspiracies and politics. And while it feels very Eastern European, in the slightly downtrodden feel of the city/ies, surely Berlin is - or was - the archetypal divided city.

China Mieville is one of the most dramatically inventive writers around, I think. He is so so so so very imaginative, in a way that can be surprising, and which also draws you in great detail into other worlds. If more fantasy writing was like this, I'd read more fantasy writing. Sure, some of his earlier books follow that silly fantasy convention of beginning with an obscure chapter that makes no sense at all until you've come to the end of the book, and which need not be there at all, but he's still remarkable. I did read his first book for all the very wrong reasons: fancying the pants off the bloke who recommended it to me (years ago, pre-Abe). But I read The Scar and was astonished.

Mieville's subconscious - or wherever he sources his imaginative worlds, given that he's a political activist as well - resonates with mine. One of his books features giant moths whose wings blur and oscillate with colours and shapes, that drive anyone mad or kills them, who looks directly at them. Unfortunately, that's a feature of my nightmares: insects and flowers that, if you look directly at them, kill you. If I'm very very stressed, I've been known to leap out of bed with a yell when they appear. A-hem. Not at that stage at the moment. 

But one of his other creatures, reminds me of that exposed spikiness that happens when you are outwardly calm and on top of things, but instead have a jagged armour that's ready to jump into place. There's a strange subplot in one of his novels - which will sound overly macho and aggressive, but here goes - in which these intelligent creatures are involved in prize fights, in which they slash their own arms and legs, and their blood spills to form a spiky armour that protects them. Stay with me, there's a motherish metaphor on its way. I imagine them greyish green and fierce.

There are days when I emerge from the world in which I cope well and happily with Morgaine's level of disability, and find I have spouted from similar wounds, leaving similarly spiky jagged armour. At home, we can play and interact and bring out her best. Can put her in her supportive seating and let her reach things. Can take her to childcare where the inclusion support worker manages the interaction with other children, and she's part of it all. See, it's not so hard. See, other children do know how to interact with her. And then I'll take her out for a walk, to the playground, and see once again that she's excluded from most of the park, see other children ask their parents why M is "like that", while never talking to us; see the hammock she should in theory be able to go on completely covered with regular kids having a fabulous time, in a way that excludes her unless I chase them off and do a "disability" speech, which would defeat the purpose; or means I have to wheel her onto the one thing she can use, and have to explain that yes this is a wheelchair and yes this is what it's for. And I think we're calm and happy, and realise instead I've slashed something and spilt spikiness, am interacting in a defensive way, am presenting a brittle armour to the world.

But the knot has now dissolved, so I think it's time to take those damn gloves off. To wipe down the mat.

Writer in Residence at a Hospital

I'm no great fan of Alain de Botton, but when I heard him on the radio reading from his recent work that came from being a writer in residence at an airport, yes I was inspired. It wasn't the writing, so much as the idea. At an airport, of course, he got to see it all: drama, passion, reunions, farewells, lost luggage, bad behaviour, exemplary behaviour, all sorts of cultures and nationalities - and, perhaps, architecture and a space that's sometimes stateless sometimes all about citizenship, sometimes cozy sometimes cold, and frequently defined by ridiculously expensive mediocre coffee. But the thing that got me, was the idea of institutions and writers in residence.

Where else could you have writers in residence, and what would their stories be?

Of course, lost of institutions have already done this. Libraries. Schools. Prisons. Art Galleries. Universities. But imagine what would happen if you kept expanding it. Imagine the skills required: not just to write, but to listen, to elicit, to empathise, and maybe to confront. Writer in residence at a funeral home. Writer in residence at a laundromat. At a hardware store. At one of those dreadful baby shops full of cute furniture and anxious new parents. At a shoeshop. At an aged care facility. At a petrol station and roadhouse in the middle of nowhere.

At a hospital. At a children's hospital.

It's not news that hospitals are full of dramas. ER. All Saints. Scrubs. General Hospital. Grey's Anatomy. But the delicacy of telling the real stories and being a writer whose job it is to gather those stories? How would you do it? And how on earth would you do it ethically? I can imagine the writer sitting for days by a bedside, needing to be part of the action, needing to feel the energy and flows and stories that swirl around. Feeling the anxiety and tears and warmth.

Because, OMG as they say, the stories.

Morgaine has been out of hospital now since 26 July. Not quite two months. And I've been off work on LWOP for most of that time - which seems odd, given that after the crazy six months of endless hospital admissions, she's fine now. For the moment. It's increased my anxiety and guilt in some ways, rather than lessened it, as I feel that I'm waiting for the next crisis. It may happen next week, or it may not happen until next year. Stasis. Limbo. But time to reflect.

Time to remember some of those many many hospital stays - and the people, and their stories. There was one particularly intense ten or twelve day period, when M was admitted under the neurology team, because as well as her usual respiratory distress, she'd had seizures as well. So we were in a different ward. The room wasn't particularly big, but there were six beds, and six recliner-chairs for the parents. All in a row, all right next to each other, with a strange intimacy and a carefully practiced set of rituals around listening and not-listening. We all made an effort to let the others be private, but were also ready to leap in when required. We couldn't help but know each other's stories.

The small boy in the next bed had a terminal cancer and a set of zippered-looking scars all over his head. They were on holidays from interstate, when he suddenly got very sick. The parents were delighted with the care and treatment he received at this hospital, the progress made, but there was an undercurrent between them. The father was utterly dedicated to his son, with an air of zealousness that I suspect we all get when our children have complex health problems and no easy answers. He'd latched onto an alternative food regime that he was convinced of, that meant this child was being fed only protein. Nothing else. The father made up all his food, and the mother was weary and resigned. The doctor's didn't think it was a good idea, and I don't think she did either. And the little boy was offered some toast one day, by one of the wardies, and the poor child was delighted. It was taken off him. Those wardies are the ones you might follow, if you were the writer in residence, as their everyday activities create the connections between people. Emptying the bins, collecting the trays, endlessly mopping the floors and saying hello to the crumpled, stiff necked, parents, and the wide-eyed children.

Across in the next corner was a 15 year old girl who'd had major brain surgery, and was peg fed. Her mother was constantly on call and never seemed able to even take a deep breath on her own. If she walked to the corner to rinse out the attachment for feeding, the girl would start calling out, anxious and demanding, peevish, annoyed. Where were you where were you I can't see you. Both had masses of dark wavy hair, but the girl's was shaved on one side. That woman was doing it tough. One day she called her ex, to explain yet more surgery, another procedure, another in a long list of dramas, and as we all pretended or tried to close our ears, there was clearly a complete meltdown going down on the other end of the phone, of the Why Didn't You tell Me I have a Right to Know. Just calm down, she kept saying, let me tell you, it happened so fast, just calm down. And on and on and on. She was curled in on herself, her and her child, didn't really speak to anyone else, and had a pretective air. She seemed so private I didn't speak to her when we finally left, a week later or however long it was, and then there she was, standing up in the corner, waving, wishing us all the best.

And right in the middle of another night, a thin woman came in from the Intensive Care Unit, with her 9 month old baby connected to more tubes and wires and shunts and ivs than I've ever seen. They had had to lift off the entire top of his skull, and cut open the bones which were fused together, not allowing space for his brain to grow. He had a helmet of bandages that made his head seem huge, and his eyes were black and swollen. She was breastfeeding him, and all he wanted was to be held, to feed, to be given pain relief. Her husband and two sons came down with a horrible flu and couldn't come in to see her, and they were from hundreds of kms away, staying in hospital accommodation. Then, within a day or two, this fragile child sat up, smiled, looked around, was ready to play.

Directly opposite, was a young Samoan girl, only about ten years old but looking older, which meant everyone thought she was able to cope more than she could. Her leg had been broken and reset with pins, and was now encased in a series of metal halos and wires, that meant she had to go through many complicated manouvres to get in and out of bed. To be hoisted into a wheelchair. To try to go to the loo. How do I put my undies on, she said to the nurses? A conversation about sewing and velcro ensued, and whether her nanna could maybe fix that for her. A young and utterly gorgeous mother, with another little baby, in and out by her bedside. Lots of visitors and laughing aunties and grandmothers. Then they all went out one night, and took longer to come back than she expected. Sobbing from her bed. I've never been on my own before, she said. So I called them up on my mobile, to find out where they were and when they'd be back. They thought I was a nurse so there was lots of confusion, and of course we were all best friends after that.

And in the other corner? A young Aboriginal woman with a tiny beautiful baby who was having breathing problems. Her team was by her side - literally her team, a whole group of young women in uniforms, with the Aboriginal flag and an air or protectiveness. Stories of custody and access. Lots of laughing. Conspiratorial intense phonecalls. Someone wasn't going to be let into the bedside.

Everyone offered each other fruit, or leftover sandwiches. Magazines full of mind-numbingly tedious glamourpusses in red dresses and push-up bras. I'm going down to the cafe do you want anything. Keeping track of the many teams of doctors who flitted in and out, never leaving any clear sign that they'd ever been there.

And sleeping in a reclining chair that doesn't quite recline properly, with a foot jammed against the bottom to stop yourself being concertina'd back like a cartoon cat in a booby-trapped house. Cameraderie and strangeness.

Then the boy with the protein was able to go home, and another woman came in. She had the final space, right next to the bin and the front door. There were visitors everywhere, and chaos. My girl was moaning a lot, less than a metre from her child'd bed. She rejected any overtures of friendliness. Her daughter had fallen off a piece of playground equipment and broke her arm - awful, of course, and distressing, but if there's a heirarchy of these things, it didn't really compare to the brain surgeries and terminal illnesses and touch-and-go situation of the rest of the room.

This woman looked around.

But We Are Private Patients, Don't We Get a Private Room?

This is a public hospital, m'dear, said the formidable nurse. In these situations, they're all Formidable. Beds are allocated according to need.

Her body language froze with distaste, and she then spent an entire night listening to my girl moan unhappily (a sure sign she was getting better, but not that much fun for everyone else), with lights flashing in her face from the nurse's station, and with the tap going off and on as everyone paid attention to best handwashing practices. Part of me wanted to laugh - this woman was getting the Public Hospital from Hell experience, just as she expected.

So if I was writer in residence for that ward, that'd be the comic relief.

Your Daughter? That's My Worst Nightmare

If only I could write like Hilary Mantel - whose wrenching, angry, memoir Giving Up the Ghost made me laugh out loud, or snort and snuffle into the lounge to the surprise of both Abe and Clancy. Because she's intelligent, because she's a good researcher, because she's articulate, doctors spent a lot of time being surprised by her and, because it's the late 1960s and early 1970s, they pathologise her rigour and turn it into psychosis. One doctor tells her she's conscienscious, with a mind for detail, in a mildly accusatory way. She was studying law, and so goes on to say, "I tried to imagine the other kind of law student, the kind who favoured the broad-brush approach, who took on the law of trusts, for example, with a grand generalist's sweep and dash." Well, it made me laugh.

I also loved this, when being treated appallingly by dickhead lecturers at university, who couldn't see why a woman should be studying law at all: "Some people have forgetten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn't patronise you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favour . . . It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman's affective life, and the end of her mental life." (pp 160-161) And goes on to describe how, in job interviews, you were grilled about marriage, intentions, when you were going to "start a family", by "some grizzled ringmaster, shifty and semi-embarrassed as he asked a girl half his age to tell him about her sex life and account for her next ovulation." But really, it's  one of the best descriptions of pain and illness and misdiagnosis I've ever read. I had thought that both Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, even David Rieff, talked about illness and hospitals and the medical system well but, really, Mantel takes the cake by describing this ostensibly sweet self who was raging and railing and almost screaming with frustration inside a body that was going out of control. But then again, maybe I only think that because I finished reading it in the last few days, so it has inhabited my imagination.

That, and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin - vibrant, clever, convoluted, sad, utterly gripping. In some ways, a novel about grief (I wept through one entire chapter; then was buoyed up the hard edge and street rhythm of the next, which left me surprised at the left-over sniffling); in others it has the euphoric poetry of Philippe Pettit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers balanced over everything, turning your eyes and the character's eyes up and up. Then some cringeworthy moments of race politics where you can hardly look at the page. Still, it helps to have seen the doco Man on Wire, about that tightrope walk, to give you Pettit's arrogance and his poetic hopes, given that he walks in and out of the novel. Must go and find some more words by McCann, because this Irish-American storytelling was really something.

And on the whole entertainment thing, I've also managed to see two films (ta-da) and start a few other novels. Saw Jane Campion's Bright Star which was so beautifully framed and gorgeous to look at, and wasn't Abby Cornish fabulous, sweetie? And the opening scene, full of laundry and washing lines, like elegant birds in the landscape, made it a very domesticated, women's film, without being a conventional Chick Flick (which is a dopey term, but hey). For a story about a relationship with a male poet, it was so covered in cloth and held together by handstitching, with views below stairs and in the kitchen, so that the work of capital-R romance was on display. No "Elven Grot" for Keats' rather more earthy Lady of Shallot, rather a house that had to be rented and walls that were a little thin. Given that nothing much happened, it still held me . . . and of course, wept through the last bit, and emerged from the cinema with mad hair and a red nose, in the middle of a hot sunny day, and had to slink down the street without a tissue, feeling rather tenderised.

And then saw Avatar in 3D (on the "now for something completely different" stakes). It was so completely and utterly "filmic": a huge spectacle, roaring over your head and leaping right into your face. And yes, some ooga-booga spirituality and none-too-subtle colonialism versus the pure indigenous hearts and minds. But what a beautifully imagined world, with lovely detail. Am still wondering, though, what to make of the soldier with a disability at the centre of it: there he is, being self-sufficient and capable, and seems to have enough ramps and access points to get around in; yes, we see him being discriminated against by some macho marine pratts, but he doesn't give a shit; and the promise is held out to him that, if he could afford it, he could get working legs back again. So, is this the future? And then there's the project he's working on, where he has a "conventional/ unconventional" body by inhabiting this alien avatar. He first disappears into this pod, this terrible claustrophobic space that keeps him still and make him terribly vulnerable (exposing both him, and a central plot problem; that, and what happens when his alien self is asleep. Lucky there weren't any little alien babies nearby or he would have been in big trouble for sleeping through). His broken/ disabled body is left behind; he stands up and walks and runs and exalts in the physicality of his new alien body, that can not only stand up, it can leap, almost fly. He's remembering old sensations. Get up out of your wheelchair, my child, and walk. What if he'd been a kid who never could walk, who had to learn afresh: would he have enjoyed it as much? Must the disabled body always be positioned as something that's "wrong", so that even living virtually, while isolated in a pod, where "at least" he can walk is better than living in a new way in his own body. With all that military technology, you'd think he could have a pretty fine chair. I really want to know what the properly thought through disability activists and theorists think of this one. I don't really know what to think. A few links here, including a man who says hey, we don't all necessarily long to be "fixed".

But here's the link back to a non-alien, non-green-and-scaley skinned ordinary life. What if the person in the wheelchair is imagined not as a person - or a child - but rather as the worst possible scenario, the "nightmare"?

We live next door to a very nice, very social, couple. Two women who talk and laugh loudly, and know how to throw a generous party, with a bottle of champagne or 50, and everyone invited. So just before Christmas, I wandered over, leaving Abe (who wasn't in the mood) at home with the babes. There were lots of people who I'd seen in the street but not properly met. Often glimpsed as we all head off to work, or wrestle stuff into cars, or chase dogs down the street, or do 85 point turns (me) in a very narrow street with bugger-all parking. A young couple were there, pregnant with their first child. Young Professionals, who I didn't find wildly interesting, but I threw back too many glasses of sharp cold white wine and became all wide-eyed and overly-enthusiastic about everything (sigh, must grow out of that). So we talked about the baby, and the guy said things about how they were having one who'd be all dressed in frills and pink, making me grind my teeth with irritation, but really - perfectly nice, all very bland and middle class, everyone well educated and had read the right books on pregnancy and health. I'm not into giving out unwanted advice, or pretending I know how to do things. I did say they should yell if feeling overwhelmed, just on the basis that the snot/ green baby shit/ weird behavious might be reassuringly familiar.

So we talked about pregnancy, and health, and labour, and I did say that yes, with Miz M, it was a healthy pregnancy, full term baby, no known problems, and yet yes the mysterious, severe, disability happened anyway, and here's our lovely girl, likely to never walk or sit, may or may not ever talk, will need us forever.

Disability.

"That's my worst nightmare", he said. I was a little bit pissed so didn't get at all offended or upset, and just did my usual, "Oh well, you just cope with what you cope with, don't you" routine. But really, my daughter is your worst nightmare? Full marks on the subtlety stakes, I say.

And it had been a week of it. Not long before that, Abe and I had actually managed An Event without children. We organised a babysitter, and went out to a Christmas drinks thing for Abe's work, full of medicos and scientists and heirarchies like I'm not at all used to. Standing around on a lovely verandah with a view over the city and (again) very nice wine, and met some interesting and not so interesting people. A fabulous young woman who was a paediatrician and very funny, who pointed out a very senior guy she worked with, and that she'd always thought he looked as though he should be wearing a puffy shirt and being one of the three musketeers. It was D'Artagnan at thirty paces from then on. A man who ran a branch of an airline, but clearly didn't read the papers, which was odd. And a woman who told me she was a physiotherapists before she retired, and worked with people with disabilities. "Physios are terrific," I said, startling her with my conviction. So I had to explain why, and told her about Miz M's work with therapists . . . and then, in another act of great subtlety, she told me how her children used to be mortified when she'd be out with them and she'd see a client and go to say hello. "Mum", her kids would say, "why do you always have to go talk to the people in wheelchairs with pasta stuck to their foreheads". Oh ho ho ho and Merry Christmas to you, too, good to see there's a laugh to be had there too . . .

On the Untimely End of the Pregnant Bitch

And I'll get to her in just a moment, but first, how's this for a line: "And into this hotel they receive the battered wanderers, the weary sailors, the refugees from ferocious lives . . ." (Sebastian Barry, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Faber and Faber, 1998, p 282) The refugees from ferocious lives - what a wonderful, poignant, tender, feirce sort of description. It'd be trite to say, "but aren't we all", because we're not. Some have such ferocious lives you wonder how they survive at all. Like those news stories of murder and mayhem, of savage deaths in families, where a 7 year old is spared, quivering under the bed, and they say, "And the girl was unharmed". No no and no, harmed forever.

But that's not the point of this, but rather a line in a novel that in its elegance lifted me out of a blah and hormonal and rather squashed sort of mood. So thank you for that.

And here I am, in a moment of respite, ready to vent or crap on or indulge myself, or retell friends stories, or reduce them to a line or two (the tall elegant friend with Florence Broadhurst lamp and the mind of a scholar; the smoker with wicked sideburns and a bookcase of sideways looks and ex lovers; the Melbournian for whom men always do things and offer up bunches of floweres) and so on. In other words, ready to blog - but what does it mean and who does it hurt? Because over at the Pregnant Bitch, she's taken down her shingle for the moment, because she offended too many friends by being amusing and frank and raw about her responses to them. She said she was sick of making people cry and turning her world upside down.

So, as Gilbert and Sullivan once said, "Here's a pretty how-de-do"!

And although her blog gets right to the heart of the way motherhood is mythologised, and even about how women's lives are made more and more complicated while being judged endlessly, the post that caused the gnashing of teeth was fairly innocuous. It was all about how difficult the stories of "enjoying motherhood" are for her, and that if she lived next door to a particular friend of hers, she'd feel like stabbing herself (etc). Fairly light and amusing, while making a very personal point. So, here's the question: is this any different to any other type of writing/ reading/ expressing an opinion? Does a blog mean we enter into a different audience contract, or not?

Fiction writers have spent years defending their right to plunder other people's lives; at the same time as they debate the ethics of it. Journal writers and diarists have tended to write for themselves, in which case they can be as opinionated as they like . . . except when they don't, or they were writing journals to be read aloud in middle-class victorian drawing rooms; or they were writing personal reflections as public personages, in which case they were part memoir part despatch (and I remember reading the travel diaries of Harold Holt in the National Archives, which combined 1950s protocol with stories of throwing up into his hat when he got off the plane in Rome and made it clear that, while widely known as a Bear of Very Little Brain, that he had a cosmopolitan edge very different to much of 1950s Australia); or they very self-consciously knew they were writing For Posterity. And so, do we edit out bits of blogs, change names, protect our friends or ourselves, or not?

Another reader of Abby the Pregnant Bitch described how she shut down her blog, after offending her in-laws, and started another one anonymously. And I'll confess I'd be mortified if my outlaws read my less-than-generous comments about them. I'd want to qualify it to hell and back, with acknowledgments that they're interesting and clever and with worthy life stories and struggles in the face of adversity but oh please oh please don't let me be stuck in a lift with them. Et cetera. So Abby the Pregnant Bitch is much much braver and more honest than me in not disgguising herself or even holding herself back.

But as another reader said, what and who are you writing for? If it's a personal vent and a bit of space y ou need then hey, why not just keep doing it? But then again, we could all do that on a pile of paper somewhere, that's then filed in the bin; or in a new folder on our computer that we then immediately delete delete delete. And yet we don't.

We marshall our thoughts together and receive our thoughts and angst as our own battered wanderers, refugees from ferocious lives; just as we allow in our mind's luminous dancers and sinuous lovers. And sleeping babes.