Wellbeing Thread - who's in?

i've said i'll cook for all the kids and my sister on sunday and i'm a bit stressed. have a load of casserole beef in the freezer and a slow cooker so thinking something involving those and some ale and a lot of cheesy mash might cover it.

i love having people around here and doing my bit and it's good for me and ds but i get quite flustered about cooking good enough food and what if it's inedible etc. i always feel good about it afterwards though so have pushed myself to say i'll do it. it also kicks my bum to tidy up having people round as it's for a reason - making it nice for guests rather than drudgery itms.

this is all a bit random to post here but i'm under strict instructions not to apologise so will resist doing so and post

oh, in the rockies. canada. tis very lovely. starting to snow now though, so i suspect my beautiful view is about to disappear again.

where are you madwoman?

i', just reading 'out of my mind' because dd1 lent it to me - it's about a girl with cp and complex needs who has no voice until she gets a computer for speech at 11. not quite the same thing, but it just echoed a bit, as it deals with that sort of invisibility. it's a young person's read really (and i susoect the ending is going to be super-cheesy) but does touch on having a lifetime's worth of thoughts and words and never sharing any of them. obv it's based around disability rather than gender, but the idea is similar, i think.

i try really hard not to do the apology before i state my opinion thing, now. it is so difficult though. v ingrained that that's how negotiations are made. it does seem to be much more prevalent with women, but there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and different roles and negotiating styles/ leadership etc. heaven forbid i might appear competent.

it is beautiful here today. the clouds have lifted and the sun is shining on fresh snow on the mountains.

Btw ... I wish i could remember where on earth this is from, but there's a scene I remember in a book, where this woman realizes that no-one has ever asked her what her thoughts are. For me it connects to all the stuff about women, especially women who don't work outside the home or who don't comform to social ideals of beauty or whatever, being made invisible/silenced. Imagine never being asked what you think.

Thank you, that is very kind. I am dead chuffed you like this thread, I didn't know how it would go.

I do agree with you about apologizing - it is something I get evangelical about when I am teaching actually, because it really is mostly women who begin responses with 'sorry, I'm probably wrong but ...' and it is, as you say, not great. I think (to steal terminology for Jeffries), that it's a trope we use to show we're properly deferent women. Annoyingly it is rewarded by listeners a lot of the time - we get taught that it is emotionally intelligent to be constantly prefacing what you say by acknowledging how partial and insignificant your view is. But I think cumulatively it can be pretty unemotionally healthy for the speaker!

I didn't think what you wrote sounded wanky at all, btw.

Oh and I'll put the book on my Christmas list. Thanks :)

LRD I don't think that self-indulgent or depressing. I thought it was very thoughtful. None of your feelings about your niece are daft and I think the world would be a much better place for thinking and planning before having children.

Actually as part of our wellbeing thread - and thank you LRD for starting it, probably my favourite MN thread ever- I think we should ban apologising for our posts. We should be able to discuss sex or nudity or anger or desires or whatever without worrying about how our posts are taken or that we might upset the thread or bring it down or whatever. It's not very wellbeingy if we need to bottle our emotions up. What are your thoughts? :)

I should add that my friend with 4 under 3 had twins and then must have fallen pregnant within 3 months of each birth. She is also a mormon with a blog and everything.

Oops, that was both self-indulgent and a bit depressing.

On a more positive note, I have finally done what I've never done before, and read a whole serious feminism book from cover to cover (it's Jeffries' Beauty and Misogyny), and it was great. So much less difficult than I was expecting, too - I mean it was thought provoking and I didn't understand it all, but I did feel as if I wasn't completely in the dark. It was really, really interesting and uplifting and definitely good for making links in my mind between the sort of anxieties I had when I started reading the Resisting Femininity threads and the sort of gaps in my life I could feel when I started this one.

It's brilliant, I really recommendin it to anyone who's not read it.

It kind of is. It's daft - I've got a baby niece and I am so thrilled, and my brother sends me lots of lovely videos and pictures of her (we can't get to see them as they're overseas and we can't afford the flights, but they'll be back in the UK early next year). And I want to be just excited and thrilled but TBH I find the videos really hard to watch. Sorry, being daft here.

I think the best thing for me to do at the moment is just be aware I can learn and plan, and I'm sure it will stand me in good stead for later on. In practical terms this thread is good for making me think how to take some time for me and work on the stuff that makes me feel good, instead of wishing it away - because I don't want to do what comradejing mentioned her friend doing (and what I've seen people do), where they get so broody it's hard for them to acknowledge that having a baby is hard work and not just unvaryingly wonderful.

at least it's not screaming at you yet then. the broodiness i mean.

Oh, sure, I agree the right time for some people is young. I wish it were easier to have babies younger.

We both sound fence-y, but it's hard not to see the bad and good sides of whatever people do.

(I'm pretending this has staved off the broodiness, btw. ).

i agree but you do have to keep an open mind to the fact that for some women in their own time might mean young and they might know what they're doing and what will make them happier.

it used to be assumed we had to be married/have babies young to be happy/ok/successful which was tough on those that wasn't right for. i wouldn't like it to go to the other extreme where you have to be older, wealthier, mroe educated and have been to x amount of continents before you have children/get married or you're wrong.

i recognise the phenomena of must have a baby to be happy and make up for the past/get secure/be safe etc and yes i agree that's sad and worrying and problematic. some people just are 'older' in that sense though and it's what they want and need or it happens and they genuinely make the best of it and enjoy it despite it wouldn't necessary have been the way they planned it.

i sound very fency

You're right, there are lots of positives to look at.

FWIW, when DH and I got married his parents were saying 'oh, they're so old, isn't it wonderful they've finally found each other, she will want to start having babies right away!' because to them I was quite an old bride at 25. Lots of other people told us we were too young (especially DH who was 23). It does vary a lot from culture to culture what people think.

I suppose what is worrying is that I believe psychologists have observed that women (and men, maybe, I don't know?) who had difficult childhoods often want to start families earlier, seeing it as a sign and source of security. I can understand that. But it must also make some people vulnerable. I hope that doesn't come across as judgmental - but I do think it is a bit worrying how some girls get this strong message that the best thing they can do to show they're grown up, is to have a baby. I wish we could make it easier for women to have babies in their own time (and especially I wish it weren't stigmatized to have babies at university), but at the moment it's obviously not very easy. A mate of mine was 23 when she had her (very much planned and wanted) first and still got some very rude comments from her GP.

Sorry, I'm digressing hugely ... not thinking very clearly today.

perhaps he'd have been clueless about it too and both of them a bit clueless of how they were meant to do it so they will have muddled through on their own terms and found ways and a relationship that generally works for them rather than grappling with expectations though lrd. pros and cons to all i suppose.

the thing is as well that maybe she'll have this really rich and vibrant life and career bloom in ten years time when she'll be younger than i am now with children much older and not needing her much and not having to worry about houses/money etc because they've been established for a long time etc whereas i'll be nearing fifty with a teenager.

i like to think that it's just different timing for some people and they go on to have their youth years later. when i used to teach scuba overseas i'd sometimes have much older people come on courses like a couple whose children had grown up and they'd realised they didn't want to be stuck where they were anymore so they totally changed their lives and decided it was time for them now and were travelling around the world together really heart warming.

I cross posted and now need to make a face at 4 under 3! I knew a woman who had 3 children 10 months apart and I thought that was hectic enough.

I will blame this thread if DH has to suffer another round of 'but please can we have a baby at this totally impractical time?'.

I do like male and female nudes in art but I agree about naked real servers being really off-putting. Apart from anything else I know a painting isn't going to drop stray chest-hair in my coffee! I think personally, I don't like anything that looks exposed because you sort of know how it feels, which isn't nice. But being nude also reminds you of just lying around being unconcerned about your body, so sometimes it makes you feel less body-conscious.

I also find it amusing/awful that when my mate was teaching Modigliani, she had to explain why the women are painted with pubic hair ... some of her students assumed it was 'normal' in art to remove it. But she thinks it was quite good for them to see nudes that weren't porn-style naked.

saf - I'm so glad you slept better!

That girl sounds like some of my schoolfriends. I remember hearing that a girl I went to primary school with got married at 17. She's still with him and people always say they seem very happy. I can't quite get my mind around it. I suppose the thing that scares me is I know how useless I would have been at setting up any kind of equal relationship at 17. Doesn't necessarily mean she is, I know.

crikey. i don't think there is an age that i could cope with 4 under 3!

Saf... I'm just 26 :o though I do like to think of myself as travelled and well lived in that short time. My school friend, who must be at least 6 months younger, had 4 dc under 3!

i wonder if i could manage to arrange a book club in this village? i like people too and there would be all sorts of characters. i think here i'm probably seen as the 'she's generally lovely but she seems a bit mad/weird/strange/something suspect' one. i guess i'd have been in danger if i lived in the time of the witch trials but as i get to know more of the mums and people they are mostly all a harmless and generally lovely and quirky in their own ways too and not really the potential pitch fork wielding wife-folk i might have been a tiny bit expectant of them being

i shall give that some thought. it's like when people talk about starting up feminist groups in their area, i'm very impressed with them doing it and braving who on earth might turn up and what it might be like. hugely impressed by people who've started feminist groups off of the back of posting on these boards and discovering stuff.

i was inadvertently a bit rude to someone though hopefully they didn't take it that way at an afterschool play community thing the other afternoon. i asked her how old she was and when she said something like 23 my chin nearly hit the floor and i was genuinely shocked. she has lived here forever, she's applied to be on the pta, she's only ever had sex with one man, her husband, who she met here in this village and they've never moved away or gone and done anything outside if you like. she's a mum to 4 yo twins. both me and another friend who is a bit older than me and not native english were like wow! you're SO young i didn't realise and both of us with a kind of sadness in our voices. really rude and i immediately dug myself out and stuff but i just couldn't believe that she was 23 - my immediate response was that blimey i was living and working overseas on a year out of my education that age.

it is remarkable really that we talk about things and situations as if they were the olden days but lots of young people are still living these situations. you forget if you go and live in cities and be around students and travellers and stuff for years that it's not all like that.

apologies for the massive tangent. i finally got a decent night's sleep last night and my head has switched back on with a vengence.

sal i'm so glad you wrote your second post to me. i was already head screwing a little over that hmm face and dithering my head about what you meant when i read you saying it should be a smiley amazing the difference those little faces can make!

at genetic mysteries madwoman and yy to babies! especially teeny ones - i worry i'll turn into one of those old aunties of the family who virtually rugby tackle each other and young mothers out of the way to get hold of the baby all long fingers grasping the infant! hmm. i've only got one - it's a bit stingy really - just the one? it's great but good lord i only got one year of baby for my whole life? i'm 36 and i think basically it's the second wave of the biological clock here.

i'm a bit like that with dogs though too. on my walk this morning this guy was in a hurry to go after his young dog had been playing with mine and he obviously has trouble getting her to come back when she knows he's going to put the lead on and i could see him struggling so i ended up staying and subtly showing him how she would come back if you got down on her level and gave her motivation. i didn't like to see him stressing and she was a lovely thing. so it's 50/50 if i turn into the mad dog lady or the baby grabber.

thereal i agree that naked is not good. who realistically would want dangly bits with their morning coffee? the objectifying naked men and standardising our sexuality to uggish slathering over objectified human beings all made to seem identical doesn't appeal. i have quirkier tastes than that and the human being bit is pretty key

the singing is lovely - go for it those who said they'd like to - feels so good to be singing again honestly. it's so nice to make really use your voice and we do lovely warm up exercises that really lift you and get you breathing nicely and feeling good. would definitely recommend it as a wellbeing exercise.

i'm surprised you ever let her leave, jing.

and how utterly utterly bizarre that you know/ knew someone who invented penis tricks. the world is such a bizarre place, it amazes me no end.

in the very small isolated village we used to live in, we had the usual smattering of women - nurses, teachers, lawyers, cooks, bankers, civil servants, nursery workers etc, but we also had a cage dancer and a russian princess. it was very jolly. book club was awesome. i do so love people.

but i have to go and google mary cassat now...

My friends mother has a beautiful nude painting of herself. It is very, very tasteful and arty. She is on her front and turned away so it could be her but it could be someone else. I would love one of myself done in a similar way.

I really think everyone should wear clothes when serving food. Blergh to just an apron.

A stealing, lying, cheating, womanizing, misogynistic arse of a man I know in Beijing was one of the original puppetry of the penis men. He 'invented' about 5 different tricks for the show and gets around 5 grand a year in royalties. You need a very large penis even flacid and the ability to get hard on demand and no shame

Saf I'm very jealous of the singing. I loved it at school. Sounds fantastic. Very wellbeingy :o

Mad bless you for accosting women in supermarkets. I still remember a lovely lady who once came and helped me as I waited for a taxi and dd was going mad as she (and I) were exhausted through lack of sleep. When the taxi driver came and wouldn't help me get my stuff in his car she gave him a right telling off whilst jiggling dd until she fell asleep. I asked her to come home with me :o

I avoided the puppetry of the penis because I thought I'd never be able to look a penis in the, erm, eye ever again without wondering if it could bend itself into the Eiffel Tower. It'd kill my sex life, too much snortling.

Ahem.

BABIES! I want another one. DS is coming out with a new word every day now, and playing the most hysterical games, and being such a little boy and not at ALL a baby, that I want another one. Must get a job first. But wow, it's got to happen (the job) this year, so I can imagine having a baby in the next eighteen months, ish.

As for nudes: mnn. Some I like. Oddly, (or perhaps not oddly!) since I became a mother I have found pictures of mothers and children incredibly moving. The lactation room (special place for pumping milk) in my work had these Mary Cassat prints that made me all 'awww' and made me want one in my house, for the first time ever. Normally I'm a landscapes/seascapes kind of person.
Anyway, that appreciation was possibly homone-induced, but people who capture just how divine children are immediately post-bath are talented artists, in my booki.

you dye your pants? that is awesome.

naked waiter

nudity is an odd thing. i actually find 'nudes' in an artistic sense really interesting, and quite often contemplate a purchase, (they don't have to be perfect, i'm not sure what the appeal is, maybe an honesty/ nothing to hide thing?) but the 'real thing' as in an actual living breathing someone, held up for objectification and delectation is something else altogether, and it makes me a bit squeamish. actually a lot squeamish. men or women. that's just too honest.

actually, i find female nudes more appealing. in fact, less than a week ago i was contemplating a naked self portrait. in the bath. in a sort of foetal position, bizarrely. and quite why this thread reminded me i have no idea. i haven't got an artistic bone in my body, but for some reason i spent a good hour wondering about the process.

why is that? someone psycho-analyse me please? is it plain old prudery? am i threatened by real naked people, but pictures or sculptures are ok?

mm, no, can't be quite right - have spent the odd period in a naked health spa place wearing nowt. it was faintly bizarre, but not threatening.

it is something about the the gaze/ invitation to gaze, but i can't quite put my finger on it.

i've spent several years avoiding that penis-art show, for example. i can't think of anything worse than spending an hour focused on a penis that looks like the taj mahal, or wahtever.

i am a prude, aren't i?