Author: Claire

Zurich Zoo

Rhino at Zurich Zoo. Photo: Iain Scott

It’s been ages since I’ve blogged. So much has been going on but I’m not going to talk about that now. I’m going to talk about the Zoo instead. Because Zurich Zoo is, for want of a better one, a great metaphor for all that’s awesome about this city.

The location is lovely, if not utterly breathtaking (by Swiss standards!). Situated, high up on the hill (Zurichberg) near the home of Fifa and crazily expensive, super-indulgent luxury hotel, the Dolder Grand, the zoo has some of the best views in Zurich. It’s clean and well designed but still friendly with it.

It’s obviously affluent but spends its funds well on continuous improvements (IMHO). The recently-opened Elephant House (or Elephant Hilton, as Himself calls it) is incredible. A huge indoor-outdoor complex with its own river, waterfall and elephant swimming pool! It’s part of a wider African Savannah section that’s due to open this summer, which looks like it will be equally impressive.

It’s got great connections – I was impressed by Zoo Zurich’s link to Thailand’s Kaeng Krachan National Park, where the zoo supports a project to help protect Asiatic elephants. I also liked the fact they sold Thai food there and it has inspired me to make this satay sauce, ohmygoditisgood.

It requires some effort, but you get out what you put in and it’s probably good for you anyway. Some of the walkways are quite steep and/or unmetalled but you can get around OK – a trip to the zoo thus constitutes a pretty good workout! And the air up there is clean and bracing.

It’s sustainable. The new elephant house features cool sustainable design elements – rainwater is recycled, and there’s clever, low-power air conditioning and heating systems in place. I wouldn’t expect anything less in a city that sends most of its rubbish to biomass and even has a “recycling tram” to collect bulky waste.

It’s manageable and knowable but still interesting. The zoo is not massive, but there’s new bits all the time and the various sections mean you can visit quite regularly but continue to have relatively different experiences.

It’s expensive but good value. Like so many things in Switzerland, zoo entry comes at a hefty price: CHF26 entry for adults. But you get what you pay for. And for locals who buy an annual pass (not exactly a snip at CHF210 per family) it’s well worth the money.

It’s surprisingly convivial. Because pretty much everyone in Zurich with zoo-age kids does have said annual pass, you’re bound to see someone you know here. Plus, because Zurich is such a managable size (pop. 350-400k) you’re even more likely to run into your mates.

It’s child-friendly. Like most zoos! In many ways life is very easy in Zurich with kids.

Transport is amazing. We are so spoilt for public transport in this city, it’s not funny. Two tram lines run from central Zurich up to the zoo and a tram leaves every 5-10 minutes, so even when there’s weekend crowds, you pretty much always get a seat, buggy room and a hassle-free journey.

It’s open on Sunday. I’ve come to like the fact that most shops don’t do Sunday trading here. It really puts the brakes on the relentless retail addiction. And it kinda forces you to do nice family stuff – like visiting the zoo and/or enjoying a leisurely Sunday brunch.

It’s a bit daggy. Zoos are not by their very nature particularly sophisticated places. I’ve said many times it’s like the 80s here in Switzerland (mostly in a good way) and this is no exception.

The Great Divide

Ok I’ve enjoyed the first two months of new-motherhood but now I’m ready for some time off. Maybe a week’s holiday? Or a two? Perhaps I’ll tackle a fresh project now, or return to an old one – get back to my German lessons maybe… What’s that? I can’t? No leave can be granted? Well maybe I could just chuck a sickie? Nope, not that either. What… not even one day to myself?

Sigh – just one of the many laments of early motherhood – it’s relentless and there’s no holidays in sight. Especially at this stage. Feed, sleep, poo, repeat. And the baby doesn’t do much more than that either.

It’s got me thinking about the roles of mum and dad (in general) again. I say “again” because the last time I properly contemplated this was the first time Himself and I became mum and dad (specific). And let me tell you, nothing highlights the Great Divide between the genders* much more than having a new baby. This huge change in the status quo of your relationship is something I’m yet to see listed in all those “Why I’m never having children” articles, but it should be right up there. Alongside the zero-holidays policy.

When you’re the one parenting a new baby at home while your partner is back at work, there’s no getting around the fact that in these early months, you are doing the motherload of childcare (pun intended) and dad is, well, working. In other words, you’ve suddenly taken on very traditional gender roles. And it makes your day-to-day lives very different indeed. Granted, this was more of a shock to the system the first time around when we went from the relatively equal footing of both being full time working “people” to a Mum-at-home-with-baby and a full-time-working-Dad (as opposed to just full-time-working person).

But in a funny way, the gender gap is gaping even wider now. Because I’m also a “trailing spouse”, I currently exist in a weirdly segregated world. The only new people I meet are other women, mostly mothers and other expats who are also usually trailing spouses. The facebook groups I join are generally populated by females and are parenting-focused. I never come across males in a social capacity, unless they’re the partners of mums I’ve met. It kinda sucks.

On the flipside, I chose this. And I’m lucky to be able to spend this time caring for my kids and not having to work for money outside the home. Himself would love to be home with them more often. If money were no object, I’m sure he’d quit work in a nanosecond (although how long it would take him to reach the boredom/resentment/need-a-break threshold I’ve just bumped into is hard to say… and I guess we’ll never know). If only it were easily possible for me to go out and find employment in this foreign country that pays as well as a male salary…

Not that I even want to work full time. Do I? I’d be lying if I said part of the appeal of this move to Switzerland wasn’t the sweet notion of being able to QUIT formal work indefinitely. Of course nothing is ever quite as good as it seems. And this is an almost entirely female problem. Not many men even get the choice of whether to quit or take a break from work to stay home and look after their babies, although it would be great if they had real options for this**.

As the kids get older, stay-at-home Dads become slightly more common. Slightly. [ASIDE: You don’t hear the male voice in parenting very often so I found it really interesting what Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard writes in his semi-autobiographical book A Man In Love about the mind-numbing mundanity of life as a primary parent. It’s basically several chapters of Toddler Time but more brutal! I can’t imagine many mums admitting the “job” bores them so starkly although it certainly struck a chord with me.]

Then there’s the money and value factors. Of course, rationally, we’re equal partners who are both contributing valuable work so we can afford to live and raise a family. But in reality, it can be hard to see it as entirely “our” money or perhaps more importantly, half “mine”, especially when it comes to the more frivolous purchases I might want to make. And in terms of valuable work, sure I’m doing a very important job but, well, no one’s flying me business class to Boston to be a Mum for 8 hours then back again.

So it’s an odd conundrum. A paradox of feminism? We have the choice but we have no choice. And things aren’t equal, but how can they be? Parenting, at least in the first year or so, is not really an equal opportunity playing field.

In some ways I can see it’s actually worse for the dads – slogging away at a crappy job (all jobs are a bit crappy right?) and missing out on time with the babies that goes so quickly. Plus, he has to do a big chunk of childcare and housework too – particularly putting in the hours with our first child in this second-baby situation. And yet, and yet… he also gets to go out of the house every week day, he gets to talk to people who aren’t obviously involved in their own childcare battles about things that aren’t to do with kids, he gets validation for skills that have nothing to do with parenthood. And he gets the chance for 7-8 hours unbroken sleep per night. It’s not a competition, but if there were a ledger of achievements and sacrifices, I’d say sleep is a biggie.

Likewise, I’ve been wondering about breastfeeding and feminism. Is breastfeeding a feminist issue? Feminism is about choice and equal opportunities. So Bfing is another paradox. Sure you have a choice, but there’s also no choice, as in, no one else can do it for you (with rare exceptions), well, your partner can’t anyway. And, like giving birth, it’s in no way an equal opportunity situation between the sexes. So I’m stuck. But I chose this. But, only by dint of being a woman was that choice possible. And, based on where we are at as modern, first-world people and parents, it was in many ways the only option. So therefore I had no choice. But still… I chose this. Argh.

I’d really like a day off.

*I suppose this is true for same-sex couples (assumptions, assumptions!) if you substitute “mum” for “primary carer” and “dad” for “the one who continues to go to work”.

** I’m a total advocate of The Wife Drought theory articulated so well in Annabel Crabb’s book – for society to move on, men need a life and women need a wife.

Jucker Farm Photos

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We went to Jucker Farm for brunch last weekend.

About a 20 minute drive from our apartment in Zurich / Oerlikon, this place is somewhat of an institution for family days out. The jury is divided on whether people love or hate Jucker (yes, their logo font makes it look like it’s called Fucker, haw). As far as I can ascertain, the hate is mostly due to parking nightmares – even the Jucker-lovin friends we went with mentioned that in summer the whole nearby town becomes an extended parking lot with long walks up the hill for the unlucky.

But we were there on a snowy Sunday in February and parking was no problem!

Our friends had booked brunch in the Hof Restaurant, which was great. A big, rustic table that would have comfortably sat eight for us four adults, one toddler and two babies. We were right by a large glass door and windows with impressive panoramic views down over snowy fields to the half-frozen Lake Pfäffikon (Pfäffikersee) and the mountains beyond.

Have I talked about Sunday brunch in Zurich before? It’s A Thing here. Perhaps even more so because the shops are closed. Most places seem to do similar brunch arrangements with a fixed-price, all you can eat buffet. Food comprises:

hot stuff: bacon and eggs, wurst (sausage), plus Jucker had fried eggs on rösti – which is a traditional Swiss farmer’s breakfast, I’m told.
several kinds of bread: proper loaves that you slice yourself including the tasty Zopfli (a buttery braided loaf) and gipfeli (croissants).
There’s deli meats and a plate of different cheeses – what European breakfast would be complete without?
Then there’s a load of jams – in this case all homemade Jucker farm products.
A range of fruit juices. Here, they were Jucker juices too.
Cereals including another Swiss specialty, Bircher museli – I’m a convert to this healthy wet dish!
There were also tasty cakes, which I was almost too full to eat. Almost. Mmm. (Thankfully, breastfeeding makes you ravenous and you can eat what you like. Not that I usually stint myself anyway!)
You order coffees separately but they were included in the price (as many as you want).

It cost chf32 per adult. Our toddler’s meal cost chf2 per year, so chf6 because he’s three. Most places do this kids’-age-price thing and I reckon it’s a nice touch.

So far, we’ve been to a few brunches in Zurich and I look forward to many more. This was the fanciest yet and just lovely. The room was stylish-rustic, lots of wood with delicate touches, vases of branches and classy gauze table runners, tea light candles in glass, vaguely “woodland”-themed decor. And not too crowded. Our friends had warned the staff we’d be arriving with two buggies so they had kindly put us to the far side where both prams could sit easily by the wall and be out of the way. It’s so nice to have room to manoeuvre, rather than extra tables shoved in where they barely fit just to maximise profits. I do love Switzerland for this (the restraint of easy affluence!?)

Afterwards we had a wander round the farm grounds. Himself and P-boy went further afield than S-baby and me. As well as three separate-but-together function rooms making up the restaurant, it’s a proper working farm with fruit orchards, animals, kooky straw statues (!!) and a prime lakeside position close to Zurich. Apparently “they” tried to buy it several years ago for redevelopment but the owners held on and now it’s a popular and profitabile attraction. It was fairly uncrowded when we went but you can see how it would be rammed in spring, summer and autumn when they also have demos and kids’ activities such as showing how cider is made etc.

I’d definitely book brunch again, particularly for a special occasion such as a birthday or with visitors in tow. As stunning as the farm was under a light a blanket of snow, my pals assure me it’s even lovelier in warm weather. And the farm activity days sound fun if you can find a parking spot. Roll on spring!

I saw some Dinosaurs

I’m currently living with a baby dinosaur. The noises he makes – gurgles, hiccoughs, squeaks, grunts, sighs, squeals and grumbles – are primal, almost prehistoric. And his little mouth is like a tiny pterodactyl or elephant – that kind of beaky but human shape. (Although his coos and increasingly regular smiles are very human 😉 ). So perhaps it’s appropriate that we recently took him and our not-so-baby-dino to the Dinosaur Museum / Sauriermuseum at Aathal, a 20 min drive from Zurich.

I must admit, I was a tad sceptical about a dinosaur museum. I mean, I have nothing against dinosaurs per se. Except for the fact they seem kinda fake. But I guess I believe in science more than god so, yeah. Anyway, the Dinosaur Museum exceeded my expectations. For one, it was bigger than it looked. There were heaps of full size skeletons of some really huge and not-so-huge dinosaurs (mostly replicas, although a few displays contained genuine dinobones) as well as models and pictures of what they’d look like in the flesh.

There were lots of rooms over several levels that were loosely themed so you got to see standing dinos, swimming dinos, flying dinos, meat eaters, herbivores, etc. Pretty much all the info was in German, but that didn’t matter much. P, our nearly-4-year old, can’t read (although his spoken Deutsch is better than ours) and the names are all in Latin so they’re the same anyway. Plus, there was almost too much info to stand around reading everything. An unexpected plus was a whole display on Archeopteryx – a sort of half-bird, half dinosaur about the size of a crow from c.150 million years ago – which just happens to be mentioned in one of P’s books about birds, so he was fascinated to see that.

Other particularly notable displays were the triceratops skull (very sci fi), giant turtle dinosaur bones, pterodactyl bones and those of the Steven Tylosaurus – a huge-mouthed shark-osaur.

On the whole though, P was a bit freaked out by the dinosaur museum. And fair enough, they are pretty freaky, and big. The website does say suitable for age 4 and over. Plus, we’d mostly convinced him they were all extinct and just models anyway and he’d calmed down, then we came across an awfully lifelike model of a baby dinosaur with a WINKING EYE that freaked him out all over again. (Also: how to explain dinosaurs are real and extinct but, say, dragons never existed?)

The museum was created in 1977 by a Swiss guy, Hans-Jakob Siber, a mineral and fossil dealer, who worked on some pretty hardcore excavations of dinosaur bones in the US and suchlike. So it’s got proper chops. And there did seem to be plenty of good information about palaeontological research, excavation methods, fossils, dinosaur eggs, dinosaurs in Switzerland etc. Although again mostly in German. (Interspersed with cheesy displays of Dinosaur and Monster movie paraphanelia and screenings of films such as The Land Before Time, heh). Plus there were activity corners where kids could do colouring in and stuff.

So on balance, the Dino Museum was pretty cool, but I don’t think we’ll go again too soon. A bit scary for young kids and, at CHF21 per adult, quite pricey for the rest of us!

One Year On

It’s been a year since we packed up the home we owned in London and moved out with all our worldly goods to a rented apartment in Zurich, Switzerland.

It still spins me out sometimes that I live here. London is one thing but to the average Australian, Switzerland is a whole extra level of exotic.

And what a year it’s been. German classes, shitty pregnancy, new baby, new car, new friends, new city, travel, gigs and holidays. This blog even. It’s funny because, without official employment, it often feels like I haven’t done much! But now I think about it, I really haven’t been idle.

They say it takes a year to get used to a new place. Chuck in the language barrier and a few extra stumbling blocks (such as morning sickness, lack of employment, depression) and I reckon it probably takes closer to two.

If I’ve learnt anything (have I?) it’s not to underestimate the importance of what’s important to me – and that these things are more mundane than I would have expected: good conversation, old friends, family and familiar smells, sights, and contact with places I love.

This move has been at the very-difficult end what I anticipated. Things were particularly bad for a couple of months there after I got back from Australia and the pregnancy was weighing me down mentally and physically. But I’ve felt better since Christmas and the new year and having the baby. Feels like I’ve solidified some friendships here and also that I’m now able to make more effort to seek out further friend opportunities. And it’s paying off already.

I think I have surrendered a bit to the lifestyle: Ok I can hausfrau it up for a while. And while it still feels like there’s big decisions to make about where both HI and I am going career-wise and where we want our lives to be, maybe we can just cruise for a bit. Or maybe there’s no rest for the wicked!

Haarschnitt in Zurich

: Before

: After

: Front view

It’s taking a while between posts lately because it’s hard to blog one handed. I can do most things on my phone or kindle while feeding the baby – emails, facebook, online shopping, read books – but writing is tricky. I was going to roll a few posts into one but this turned out longer than I expected. Sorry if this entry is not terribly exciting… Coming soon: Dinosaurs and lactobling!

Haircuts in Zurich

It’s well documented on the expat forums that good haircuts in Switzerland are hard to come by. There’s tonnes of hairdressers (Coiffures), that’s not the problem. Haircuts are expensive because everything is expensive here (or if you prefer: staff are properly paid and get decent benefits). The cuts themselves are often a bit daggy because it’s like the 80s here. And, at least around where I live, most of the salons look a bit old lady-ish. Truth be told, I don’t see a lot of cool, alternative or hipster types around Zurich at all, except perhaps near Hardbrucke. Even so, most alternative types appear to be under 30. But I digress…

Not long after I got here, I had my hair cut at Haarock, a gothy / motorbikey / tattoo type place, but I didn’t find it great. You can tell within about five minutes if a hairdresser’s got the goods by how they handle your hair and unfortunately the lady who cut my hair there came up wanting. (she fell into the “goths with scissors” category – someone who looks cool but doesn’t have the skillz to back it up. Maybe she’s an awesome tattoo artist, I dunno). Haarock is probably fine for long-hair trims and crazy dye jobs (and tattoos, presumably) but not for the kind of edgy, sculptural cut I like. So I held out and went back to my fantastic hairdresser in London at Good Old Days when I was there last July. And then I got chopped at Marked Hair in Newtown, Sydney when I was there in October. Many of the expat forums blithely recommend you “Go to Germany” – which is actually the answer for a lot of things (eg: where can I find affordable/decent clothes, baby products, food, anything). But it’s rolled around to February and I don’t have any trips planned anytime soon.

[ASIDE: Even if I wanted to cross the border, I’m stuck to the baby right now and he can’t leave Switzerland until we’ve got his passport, which we can get until he’s issued with a birth certificate. Swiss bureaucracy means that a baby born here to non-Swiss people needs a shedload of paperwork to get a birth certificate, including both parents’ birth certificates, which must have been issued within the last six months… so we’re still getting all that together. Once we finally have his birth cert, then we’ll apply for either a UK or Aussie passport/citizenship, which will also take time and cost money. Anyway, it’s not a huge deal, but just thought I’d explain why I’m currently “grounded”.]

Plus, my parents were here to mind the baby so I had to bite the bullet and get a haarschnitt, or probably wait another six months! I decided I’d just pick a relatively cool-looking place I’d seen from the no. 14 tram so I made an appointment at Black & White. And whaddya know, I got the gothy girl hairdresser who’d worked in London for a year! Nice one. She did a good job and I’ll go back. It wasn’t cheap but I used to spend a fair bit on my haircuts in London so I guess it’s not so very different. I think I’ll have to keep dyeing it myself though. Adding “farbe” to the mix really does start to break the bank. I paid CHF170 (£116, AU$230) for a cut and colour. And that’s fairly standard. Although pretty much exactly what I paid in London too!

I think next time I’ll go even shorter up the back.

Note: I tend to use “goth” in a generic way to mean roughly “a person who looks like they’d go to a goth club”. Not the full-on Morgana Deathspell 😉

A new vocabulary

My parents flew back to Australia on the weekend so I’m left feeling a bit more alone again. I think I’ve mentioned this before but, without mum and dad around, my little English-speaking enclave narrows and the isolation of not knowing the local lingo presses more heavily. I guess it’s time to sort out some more German lessons!

Thinking about words – new, old, unusual and familiar – I wanted to write a list of pregnancy-related words you barely hear at other times of your life. I kinda like the way so many unusual small things have their own term: like the first poo your baby does and the early milk they get. I also realised that while waiting for this baby, I actually really dislike the word “pregnant” – it seems a fat, awkward sort of term. Particularly when people would use it as a verb: How pregnant do you look now? Ugh. The German word for it, Schwanger, is not much better, although it does have a sort of swingin’ appeal.

Here’s some interesting words around pregnancy and childbirth I do like:

trimester
perenium
meconium
colostrum
lochia
letdown
Hebamme (German for midwife)
Schwangerschaft (German for pregnancy – somehow less blunt than Schwanger)
Stillen (German for breastfeeding)
Geburtshilfe (German for giving birth / obstetrics)

Got any other good ones? Let me know in the comments below…

Beer and Anxiety

I got out of the house on Sunday and went into central Zurich. Hooray! It’s so hard to strike the balance of staying home and resting, and not going stir crazy with cabin fever. It’s been snowing a lot too, which makes going out less attractive. But sometimes you gotta GO!

Anyway, I found a good solution in the form of a trip into Zurich’s old town (Niederdorf) in the snow to eat Cordon Bleu crumbed pork with ham and cheese in the middle) and drink Weissbeer. Did this calm my body or soothe my mind? A bit of both, and well worth it. We went to the Rheinfelder Beerhalle – very old school (we were the youngest people there by a few decades, well, baby S certainly was!) Then we wandered around the cobblestone streets for a bit. None of the shops were open because: Sunday. But it’s actually quite nice to take shopping out of the equation, on occasion.

It’s been good to explore a few more restaurants and cafes with my parents in town. They seem surprised I haven’t been to more local places but who do I have to go with? I’m not much of a one for solo cafe exploration… will that affect my novel writing? I hope not! 🙂

The first two weeks with baby S were just bliss. I felt amazing – so happy and content. I wish I could feel that way always. Why can’t I? Unfortunately anxiety has crept in. I remember this “newborn anxiety” all too well from when P was small – a breathless sort of stressy feeling like I need to get lots of things done quickly before… what? He wakes up? But so what if he does?

I don’t quite know what causes this nasty anxiety, but lately, I’ve been thinking about the Two Factor Theory of Emotion, as you do. I might not be completely undertstanding it correctly but, as I read it, it’s about how sometimes if you experience the physical symptoms of a certain emotion, you feel that emotion mentally. Even though you might not actually be “feeling” that emotion.

So – breastfeeding and early weeks with a new baby. Physically I’m tired, which always makes me cry easily. My chest hurts and my back and shoulders are stiff, which makes me feel kind of stooped and vulnerable. I’m sweaty (a common postpartum thing) and the waterworks are still a bit dodgy (it takes at least six weeks to fully heal – Sorry if TMI!) And I’m anxious as hell.

But I wonder which came first? Because all these physical manifestations are also symptoms of anxiety. Eg: when you’re anxious, you’re sweaty, stooped and need to wee. Is my brain taking cues from my body or the other way around? Maybe I’m not actually anxious at all, it just feels that way in my body, so my brain is reacting to it!

Or maybe I have a 3-week-old baby and I’m trying to do too much: housework, spending time with a toddler and attempting to crack breastfeeding with a hangover of failure the first time around (bfing is much harder than all the literature says – most things you read seem to say a few days and “no pain”. But when you talk to people in real life it seems as though everyone has issues. Pain can last for more like weeks or even several months, there’s problems with oversupply, undersupply, letdown and engorgement – so many women have these issues that I’m surprised the prevailing attitude seems to be that bfing is no problem. Maybe it’s just that once it goes right, people forget?).

So anyway, perhaps I’m faking myself into anxiety by being a puddle of postpartum and bfing mess. Or perhaps I am just freaking out with a 3-week old. (For the record, I mentioned this physical anxiety theory to my Hebamme/midwife and she said: nah you’re a mass of hormones now and you need more REST!) Either way, the answer is beer. Cheers!

Sweet Surrender

“You’ve surrendered,” someone observed of me recently. And it was true. I felt a lot better over the Xmas / New Year period than a month or so back and a big part of it was accepting the inevitable: The new baby is coming. Soon.

The concept of surrender is a good one to practise when you’re about to give birth because, without getting into too many gory details, the whole process of delivering a baby tends to involve giving yourself up to the physical and letting it happen. Of course it doesn’t always go smoothly. But that’s the ideal.

After I wrote about feeling so down with Antenatal Depression and being afraid to give birth, I did some good things. I asked for help from various sources and I received it, for which I am very grateful. One extremely useful thing I did was “reach out” to some of my amazing mum friends, all of whom have given birth more recently and more often than me. I found their advice so useful in pulling myself together and writing up a birth plan that I’d like to share some of their wisdom here. I hope they won’t mind me so.

EMBRACE IT

Worry surfacing in late pregnancy is natural and obviously not feeling comfortable (in a foreign country) is going to elevate that.
Listen to yourself: your fears first, which lets you get to your strengths.
Every birth is different but the principle of surrender and embrace really helped me… I realised that with my [first] birth it was more painful when I was (not always consciously) holding on or fighting the pain but I had a fast transition when I started to give in to it. So with [my second baby’s] birth I did this from the beginning. When I had contractions I stood and circled a bit and said yes yes yes to try and embrace them. Don’t get me wrong there was yes yes NO yes times but I think this made it happen faster and in the end a lot easier than I imagined.
It is painful but focus that between contractions you’re not in pain. I was laughing joking apologising for yelling. For me an ipod of music got me through in my own world.

SECOND BIRTHS

It is a good idea to get a birth plan together but the whole thing will almost certainly be better second time round.
I was DREADING contractions as they were so awful when I was induced with [my first] but I found it much more manageable with [my second] as it built up slowly and only had about 2 puffs of gas and air during the whole thing – mainly cos it all happened so fast!
In the end [my second birth] was very quick and I ended up on the birthing unit with [my husband] and a student midwife. It was intense but gas and air really helped me and I was totally up for considering other pain relief (and had asked for some) but [the baby] was just too fast and arrived after about a minute of pushing.
I had a terrible time with [my first] and ended up in theatre in a blind panic and having forceps and an epidural. This time my plan was very simple… try and if it feels awful, have an epidural. And that’s what I did. [My second] was born quickly and I felt enough to know when to push but no pain.

DRUGS

If planning pain relief gets you through the worry now then you should plan for that or at least acknowledge it as a possibility that is totally fine and acceptable.
A natural birth doesn’t have to mean totally drug free. I’m totally for it but it’s not about being a bloody hero or a martyr.
I wouldn’t rule out anything, you’ve got to do what feels right for you. I hate all this stuff about giving birth a particular way – I think it’s just designed to make women feel rubbish at time when you are particularly vulnerable.
“[For my second] I decided that I wanted to go for the same again (water birth) but I was definitely much more open to the idea of drugs both when I was thinking about labour beforehand and during labour itself!
I asked for an epidural and no-one was shocked or judgmental (as I had feared). It was incredible. I felt calm and happy because the pain had been taken away and I had mental clarity because it doesn’t affect your head. I chatted to the midwives and [my husband] and he kept asking me when the drama would happen…and it didn’t.
In my case the natural birth choice was (imagined) pressure and once I’d realised it wasn’t really the decision for me I felt really liberated to have the epidural if I wanted it. Don’t get me wrong, I totally respect a natural birth, but it wasn’t for me. Who remembers in the long run anyway?
The good side of being in Zurich is not only quality chocolate and alpine air – you will also get the best healthcare. No short supply of drugs and no shame in administrating or using them.
You know however you decide to do this, I’ve totally got your back.

IT’S AMAZING

It sounds mad but I would do it all again (both of my different labours) in a heartbeat, even with the pain – it is so wonderful to hold your new baby in your arms that I would love to go back in time to hold them again when they were so new.
[My third] birth was painful but I knew I could do it and in the end I’m so glad I did. Over 4kg with no intervention no stitches… Good for both of us.
My birth second time around was brilliant. It was such a happier experience than with [my first] and it some ways it felt quite cathartic to have a good birth.
My two goes at giving birth are two of my proudest moments. I love thinking back on them.

AFTERWARDS

It’s brilliant how quickly you can change a nappy from day one, not panic about them crying, know the signs of wind, overtiredness etc. You haven’t got the chance to obsess over pointless things like the colour of his/her nappy because you have a lovely toddler to hang out with. Your life doesn’t really change because you’re already in a kid routine and they just tag along.
I was very anxious throughout my [second] pregnancy. Once [the baby] arrived though I felt loads better, and actually enjoyed it more this time round.

My new baby S arrived a week ago after a relatively quick labour with a natural birth. We are both doing well 🙂

Missing You

I miss her funny fingernails

The way her hair sits over her ear

The angle of her head when she laughs that shows the gap in her teeth (you don’t really notice it other times)

Her slightly protuberant eyes

Slim fingers that look like they could bend all the way back

Soft brown freckles that dapple her entire face

Non-symmetrical stains on her teeth and a hint of lazy eye (both add to her prettiness)

The skin-tone mole to one side of her cleavage

The way the makeup collects in the corners of her eyes because she laughs until the tears come

Nose rings – when will we give them up? Circles and sparkles

The lines around her mouth that have deepened but her skin looks finer

The red patch of excema on her arm, half hidden by a sleeve

Smooth, thin hair in a shiny black ponytail with a sparse fringe

Curly, thick hair that needs an undercut to be manageable

Eyes of aquamarine, true blue, dark blue, liquid brown, chestnut, greeny hazel

The slight lisp, enhanced by a tongue piercing

Her little feet in wedge heels. So busy!

Sometimes I think her hair is blonde, other times quite brown

The thin-etch of her teenage tattoo

Steady gaze from behind sparkly spectacles (but they aren’t glitzy)

Her compact competence

Have I ever seen her without eye makeup? Otherwise her face is bare, but it looks right

The angle of her chin, somehow like a lizard (not ugly)

Strawberry blonde hair, cornsilk, straight

Eyebrows

The cluster of her earrings

Her chubby cheeks: that expression when she grins but looks a bit unsure

She wears eyeliner flicks always. Except if she’s really tired or has a cold

Her gums above her teeth

The pout and curve of her lips, no longer pierced but you can still see the divot

A sibilant emphasis when she says certain words

Those teeth

Her nostrils

Her voice. All their voices. The words they use. Their accents

I ache to be in the same room for an hour with even one of them

My beautiful friends

clairevetica

poems, prose and pathways