Endings ... and ...Beginnings

I have just had my last visit from the Health Visitor. My almost three year old baby girl has been 'signed off'' and I am officially 'babyless'. Last night my best friend had a baby girl and the life neatness of this and the resulting overwhelming combination of sadness/relief for the former and joy/jealousy for the latter was the nudge I needed to start a blog.

Visits from the health visitor have this life changing effect on me. Our health visitor is an anomaly on two counts. Firstly, he's a man which means that he goes through that little red book with an even redder pen changing all the feminine pronouns to masculine with militant precision. As in: Your Health Visitor is ___________ and you can contact her him at: ... ... . Secondly, despite the fact that 'reassuring manner' must come pretty near the top of the job specification, you come away from every appointment convinced that you are suffering from severe post natal depression (even when your child is two and a half) and said child has cerebral palsy/ADHD and food allergies. Conversations go something like this:

HV: So, is Araminta/Liam/Colin holding a spoon?
Mum: Mmmm, I suppose so?
HV: Good, good. Because that's one of the signs of muscular dystrophy and we're seeing an awful lot of that recently.
Mum: Silence. Remembering that Araminta/Liam/Colin still eats fishfingers with his/her fingers. Now convinced that Araminta/Liam/Colin has cerebral palsy/ADHD and food allergies.

My girlfriends and I have a pact. After every visit, we phone each other with reassurance that you are not suicidal; that everyone does not know that you are severely depressed whilst you are blissfully unaware; that you child is developmentally normal and that we all still eat fishfingers with our fingers.

Perhaps to stave off the 'pnd' diagnosis, I was always slightly manic before his visits and raced around slapping on touche eclat ("baby is sleeping through from 10 days"), washing the kitchen floor ("i am domestic goddess") and frantically hiding all the dummies/ expressing kit etc ("no nipple confusion here"). I would then sit at the kitchen table, a vision of serenity, nodding knowledgeably about thrush and routines. I did the same at my 'booking in' appointment with the midwife. I thought she had to 'approve' my pregnancy and give me a licence to bear children. Hence the immaculate house, freshly baked cake and lies about units of alcohol drunk.

But times have moved on. Like most of the country, we had a snow day yesterday. As I'm a teacher, this doesn't fill me with the same dread other working parents experience. But it did mean I could schedule Blossom's three year check. HV said he would call by late afternoon giving me five straight hours to apply pledge and touche eclat. However, as the snow moved in, he rang just before lunch to say he would come straight over as he was finishing early. I was bare faced, the children were bare arsed (we have three wardrobe changes before lunch) and the spaniel was dripping dirty melting snow apologetically all over the kitchen floor. I ran through my revision notes on thrush and routines and pasted on a beatific smile. High points of the visit were DD1 playing openly with pliers, DD2 refusing to be weighed/ measured/ answer to her name or desist from a break dancing routine on the floor and HV stepping in cat sick on the way out. I think my baby licence may be revoked.

However, after he left, my overwhelming emotion was not shame but sadness. No more baby weigh ins - I've always measured my success as a mother by centiles. 'Top 2% .. good, good'. He's right. I am depressed. But it's Post Baby Depression.

So before I go and visit my best friend with her baby so new she's still got the tags on, I wanted to write my first post. As a reminder that I now have 27 minutes uninterrupted in which to write this. And as a reminder that there will be new milestones and I will have this blog, rather than a little red book, to mark them with.