Crash courses

The days are filled with writing, of a purposive, industrial kind, as well as the usual demands of course materials and curriculum.  I feel at times as if all the skills of my erstwhile liberal arts education are being mobilised in a way that’s untypical.  Academic arguments typically gain their urgency under the pressure of deadlines functional rather than industrial and have consequences somewhere along the professional/individual borderline, unlike this sweep more institutional.

I have changed I think in the last six months from being the “nice” one among the industrial team to being just as pushy and determined as my more experienced colleagues.  Occasionally I say something which seems self-evident to me but at which I catch a glimpse of a wince across the face of a witness.  There are so many ways in which we think about our labour and our employment, and the reactive pragmatism of the union point-of-view can seem I think coarse to those with a more gently-shaped view of the workplace.  These moments remind me of the extent to which I would still in an ideal world put everyone at their ease all of the time, but tight timeframes and firm deadlines seem sometimes to push us all into a more military mode.  I talk a lot in meetings and wonder at this roaming persona that appears as an outgrowth of these experiences, as much me and not-me as a pregnancy.

Literal pregnancy, in contrast, is great.  Happily forced to take care of my health and plan rather more sensibly for the future than in the past, I am by any measure flourishing.  The harvestbaby continues to delight us all the way along her average gestational trajectory.  My passing with room to spare of the glucose tolerance test has been particularly comforting.  I waddle a little more and continue to heft the smooth protuberance of my passenger with growing familiarity, whose flurries of kicks, punches and headbutts can now be felt from the exterior by the señor, to his delight.  The fetal star-move which I experience as sharp elbow to the top of the bladder remains hers and mine alone to enjoy, however.

I didn’t expect to enjoy any of this, rarely having seen myself as someone with the physical strength or moral fortitude for the life of a parent, but things feel much different when it is the specificity of my coming daughter as opposed to the generality of a possible child.  It’s early days yet, these twenty-eight weeks, but I’m trying to make the most of them and store them firmly in memory too.  She deserves the fairest go we can provide, this baby-to-be, and for better or for worse I’m her mother lion.  It’s good, for her sake, to get over myself in time.

Beyond the boundaries of the body our house of dogs has assumed a dual caste: the housetrained and the not.  The puppies at nine weeks are more dog than dependent now, and hourly rechristen the poo palace that is their run with smelly eponymity.  (My first writings, more than four years ago now, on what this is like remain I think my best.)  We enjoy free running time with them in the later evenings and at weekends — last weekend with the added pleasure of visitors from Bromley.  The older dogs tolerate the pups’ liveliness with varying degrees of affection, aversion and disdain.  Fern’s initial running away from her weaned litter has evolved into a high speed, multi-routed game in which the tunnels underneath the porch form just one thoroughfare.  At the night the three still form the infantile pile, but with ears that prick and eyes that follow whoever passes by.

Outside of this house of dogs, I have the unfortunate acquisition of an off-road vehicle, thanks to being rear-ended at dusk not far from home last week (there is no term for a front-to-rear collision that isn’t smirkworthy, I’m afraid).  The combined powers of insurer and panelbeater will now decide if the damage is economical to repair.  I’m hoping for a yes: I’m terribly fond of my sixteen-years-old, 200 000 kilometres-done generic white Japanese vehicle.  The harvestgrandma loved riding in it and we took regular outings all over the peninsula and the plains when she was alive.  It’s a car wide and low, that handles exceptionally well and accommodates dogs with ease.  I’ve not long spent seven hundred dollars on new brakes and service.  I would prefer not to have to start again with whatever small amount I would get in hand were it written off at market value, poor old dunger, but that is not up to me, and it’s to my relief that neither I, my passenger nor the young couple that hit me were hurt in the collision.