I have been reduced to eating hot chocolate out of the tin over the last few days; things sleepwise have not been helped by the start of (I think) teething. What I thought was teething before? I was wrong. I think. This is worse. Last night I got about three or four hours of (interrupted) sleep. I feel like a zombie. (The usual disclaimer applies, here, by the way – leaving the witchling to cry just isn’t on the cards.) I have this ongoing battle with myself, as a parent – I read books about parenting when I was pregnant, and it seemed to me that attachment parenting was the way forward. Now, AP involves basically listening to your instincts and responding to your child’s cry as a means of communication, rather than of manipulation, because at the end of the day you’re dealing with a very little human being who probably hasn’t worked out how to manipulate at the age of x days. I still feel that this is true; I don’t think the witchling wakes up, as she did last night, every couple of hours with a bloody long burst from 2 – 4.30 to piss me off, nor do I think she does it out of bloodymindedness. I could be wrong. I probably am. At the moment, I feel I’m probably wrong about most things which don’t involve the consumption of chocolate. The point is, most of the AP books say how peaceful and lovely parenting will be if you only follow their suggestions. Ha. And also, ho.

I try to find reasons all the time. Could it be dairy things that I’m eating (though I eat very little dairy as I don’t get on well with milk products myself)? Could it be teeth? Could she be overtired (yes, certainly)? Could it be something that cranial osteopathy will fix (ye gods I hope so, at £30 a go, bearing in mind that this month our entire household income was £700, and we’ve just switched to capital repayments on our previously-interest-only mortgage)? Am I picking her up too much? Not enough?

See? I can analyse. Oh yes. Analysis is not the problem. What, I think, is the problem is that I have read, heard, been offered, ignored and otherwise encountered so many different schools of thought about childcare that I’m not even sure what my own instincts are at the moment, not least because of the sleep deprivation (see earlier comments). My heart tells me that I am not picking her up too much but that she needs to be carried a lot; my heart tells me that it’s the right thing, certainly, to still breastfeed her, and that shuffling her off into her own room would only add a lot of walking about in the middle of the night, probably while a bit cold, to my list of woe. My heart also tells me that nearly everyone I know who offers advice, often when I’ve not asked, thinks I’m barking mad for not booting her into another room, switching to formula feeding and as for co-sleeping, well, don’t even go there. I’ve had a bellyful of ‘well I don’t know how I managed with Quercus because I didn’t do all this [insert nearly audible sniff] reading, yet here he is’ from my mother-in-law, and I have (thus far) resisted the temptation to say ‘and aren’t you a model of a parent-child relationship now’. But I don’t know how much longer I can resist.

I’m also worried about my thesis. Yes, I passed my viva. Woo, and also yay. But – and this is a big but – I have corrections, some of which involve rewrites (though my examiners called these ‘minor’). Reading the examiners’ report, I don’t know where to begin on the things which aren’t ‘move that comma over there’. They talk about the need to explain the way I ‘conceptualise my research methodology in terms of critical historiography’, to which, clearly, the only possible response, after the inevitable ‘what on earth do you actually mean?’ can be ‘arse’. At the moment, the witchling is sleeping, normally in two stints, roughly an hour to ninety minutes during the day (this, instead of what health visitors tell me should be four to six hours). That isn’t really much time in terms of conceptualising anything beyond a cup of tea and a sit-down. I need to get this done and re-submitted by early December in order to graduate in January; if I don’t make that deadline, firstly I need to get an extension agreed with the Graduate School, and secondly I won’t graduate, i.e. I won’t be officially a doctor, until next July. The knock-on effect of that is that I can’t then set up the website I want to try my hand at, proclaiming my PhD status by linking to the British Library entry for my thesis and taking on academic proofreading and copy-editing work. See, I want to find a way to work from home. More and more, I dread going back to work (that’s a whole other entry, but still… might as well get all the woeses out while I have chance). Not because I loathe the job, but because it’s just not who I am. It never has been. I mean – I. T. Services? I very much think not. It’s lovely in lots of ways – people are nice, job is easy, has creative bits, and involves, sometimes, one’s brain. Oh, and of course they actually pay me. But it’s also forty hours a week out of the house, away from home, doing a job which ultimately is a reasonably obvious alternative to the academic job I thought I wanted when I started my PhD, but is little beyond that. I don’t really want to do it. I want to write. I want to read other people’s writing. I want to use my brain. And I want to do it as organised by myself.

(In the meantime, however, I am thinking of setting up an etsy shop. In a former life, I used to make jewellery. I even sold it, on eBay and at craft fairs. I still have some, and I still have the equipment to make more. I also quite fancy starting that off as a way to [eventually] sell pots; though I’ve not yet had chance to post pictures here, I do love me some potting, and I do miss making pots regularly while the witchling is too little to make night-classes an option.)

In short, a very disorganised, very combobulated (and yes, that is a word, thank you very much), slightly bewildered ‘waaaaah’.

Thank you, and good night.