A different sort of Mother's Day present

This Mother's Day, Luka has decided to wean himself from breastfeeding. He's 15 months, he's definitely finished up, and I'm more than a little sad.

It's been a slow process really. Since he started sleeping all night (by some kind of freaking miracle) of his own accord by mid-February he dropped the night feeds. Then he dropped the feed after his daytime nap (which was great, as it didn't mean I had to express for Paul to feed to him on the days I was at work). But he had still been having his early-morning feed with great gusto until about 2 weeks ago. Then, suddenly, some mornings he'd want to feed, and some mornings he would complain, and just want a cuddle or to get up and play.

At that point, I kind of knew we were finishing up with breastfeeding. So for what is now his 'last feed', I took careful notice of everything.

I walked into his room, grey in the half-dark of early morning, to find him standing up at the end of the cot. When he saw me, he lifted his little arms up and I gathered his warm little face up to mine. I sat down on the chair next to the cot, badly aiming as usual and nearly falling onto the floor. I righted myself and tipped him sideways into the crook of my arm. It's a movement that I never thought would have become second nature, given how ridiculously uncoordinated breastfeeding was at first.

As I pulled my singlet down, he opened his pink mouth, wide, like a little bird that's seen food coming. Every time I fed him it reminded me of Sylvia Plath's wonderful poem"Morning Song" about being mother to a newborn: "Your mouth opens clean as a cat's". He began to suckle quietly, slowly opening and closing his eyes, and winding his fingers through my hair. He always pulled at my hair, it always hurt, and I never minded.

I stroked his arm, his cheek, his side. I registered every curve of him. Eventually, he was nearly asleep again, and just rested his warm hand, fingers splayed, against my chest. When he rolled off me, full, I stood up and laid him back into his cot. His eyes stayed closed, but he stretched in that wonderful "punching the sky" move babies have, then lay softly asleep.

And the next day, when I tried to feed him and he complained and just wanted to get up and eat toast, I cried. And I cried for a few days after, but I'm not going to cry any more.

I'd always intended it to be his decision when to wean, but I'd always assumed I'd get sick of breastfeeding before he did.

We had a very good run. I was lucky, and I acknowledge it. I had the usual scrapes, cracks and bleeding nipples but really, we got breastfeeding established early and relatively easily. I can't remember much about the days in hospital - apparently the day I gave birth I had lots of visitors, and I've seen myself smiling in the photos, but I don't remember any of it (possibly as I'd been awake for 36hrs, plus *oh yes* I gave birth).

But I do remember the midwives at Cabrini were a huge help (apart from the crazy Irish one that slammed shut all the windows in my room, proclaiming "You let in a fly, the baby die!")

I remember my favourite midwife stopping me when I was trying frantically to get Luka to attach and saying: "Look at him. See how he's looking up at you? He's getting to know who you are, what you look like, how you smell. Don't rush him." She moved slowly and with difficulty, and only had full use of one of her hands, but that woman could handle a newborn baby like she had 8 good hands.

Luka was a frequent feeder, sometimes getting up to 13 feeds in 24hrs (which, like a lot of Luka's habits, I thought was abnormal til I got on the ABA forums).

There were some seriously difficult periods of breast refusal that I didn't really talk about or let myself think about at the time. The first was at about 3 months where I had to force his head against me to get him to feed (in our house it became known as the "fighty feed"), but he was still little and I usually won, and was determined not to feel rejected.

At about 6 months he suddenly went through a period of feeding round the clock every 2 hrs, and then backflipped to screaming and screaming when I tried to feed him at night (though nothing else would settle him). Paul had to walk him around until he settled, and then sometimes I was able to slip him onto the breast, although usually it took several rounds of settling.

These aren't great dramas by comparison to what other mothers have gone through, but they were dramas enough at the time. I wasn't the sort of mother that falls in love with their baby at first sight. When he was born, I didn't want skin-to-skin contact, I just wanted someone to take him away so I could go to sleep. Feeding him was a big part of our getting to know each other. I wrote in my diary at the time: "I am learning to love Luka by breastfeeding him." If I couldn't have breastfed, I know I would have got to love him in other ways, but that was the way it happened for us.

We breastfed for 15 months, and I will miss it. I will miss his quiet body against me, the thought that I am nourishing him with no help from anyone else, and how useful it made me feel when I felt I couldn't do anything else right.

So, a different sort of Mother's Day present. We have lots of cuddles, still. But it's the end of something important.

We've come from here:

to here:

The boobs are off-duty til next time round. But I'm glad to have had this chance.

Sending them into the wild

This afternoon I will release The Poky Little Puppy and The Velveteen Rabbit into the wilds of Carlton.

Want to catch them?

Details are here for Poky Little Puppy

and

here for The Velveteen Rabbit.

Happy book hunting!

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec

From the favourer: "For me, it's a guidebook to the everyday; a framework for our immediate spaces; an elevation of the small things into special things; a gentle reminder that we create our own worlds everywhere, all the time, in all the smallest ways. Sometimes I read it just to reset my mind. It's a favourite because it makes new things possible."

Is it wrong that I decided to read this book next because the author has cool hair? It's in pretty good shape on the cover of the book, but there are other, even more spectacular versions:

And he obviously loves his cat:

So basically I was already rather fond of Georges Perec before I even started reading this collection of his non-fiction pieces. He's probably best known for his novel La Disparition - English title 'A Void', a novel of more than 300 pages that completely avoided using the letter 'e'. He also wrote a palindrome of more than 5000 characters!

The title piece Species of Spaces, is a gentle exploration of everyday surroundings and objects, starting with the page (that is being written on) and gradually moving outwards to examine the apartment, the street, the town, the country, the world, and outer space. Perec looks at common objects and places (the bed, the staircase) and the worlds we create around them. I suppose it's essentially a kind of philosophical exploration of our ordinary spaces, but it's written with such lightness that it's fun to read, rather than being...well...'improving'. Those of you who know me will know I'm a bit over Being Educated, so for me to persist with a non-fiction book it has to be accessible, and preferably funny. This book is often both.

There are lovely asides, such as the sub-section of the 'Bedroom' chapter, delightfully entitled: 'Placid small thought no. 1'. It reads:

"Any cat-owner will rightly tell you that cats inhabit houses much better than people do. Even in the most dreadfully square spaces, they know how to find favourable corners."

Some sections are quite touching, even if you can't quite pinpoint why: "We don't think enough about staircases. Nothing was more beautiful in old houses than the staircases. Nothing is uglier, colder, more hostile, meaner, in today's apartment buildings. We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?"

(Actually, I think the answer to this 'how?' is to live for a while in a residential college - most of your time is spent sitting, lying or hovering on staircases, not-quite-willing to part from new friends when you should have gone back to your room to study or sleep.)

Like Alain de Botton in The Art of Travel, Perec suggests ways to look at our surroundings in new ways - to really notice what is around us, rather than just assuming we have seen it before:

"Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless...antique shops, clothes, hi-fi, etc. Don't say, don't write 'etc'. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven't looked at anything, you've merely picked out what you've long ago picked out."

A section on tourism recalls Des Esseintes' discovery (in Huysmans' Against Nature): "Rather than visit London, stay at home, in the chimney corner, and read the irreplaceable information supplied by Baedeker" (a travel guide).

(An aside - isn't it funny how the more favourite books I read, the more they connect up? Or is it just that I remember books better if I write about them?)

Just as Perec can make a bedroom seem as vast as a planet, he can also make the world at large as relevant to us as our own bedrooms. Even though the keenest travellers will only ever see a fraction of the world's umpteen objects and corners, we each make our own world from what we do see. From cats in corners and beds to countries and continents, we create our own personal sense of "the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as a race without an end, a challenge having constantly to be met, not as the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors."

(I had a little cry when I read that passage.)

Species of Spaces is undoubtedly the centrepiece of this collection. The rest of the pieces in the book (some of which grabbed my interest more than others) all show Perec's love of play - both wordplay and playful writing. My favourite pieces are (typically) the more flippant ones - like his list of 'Some of the Things I Really Must Do Before I Die', which reaches point #37 ("Make the acquaintance of Valdimir Nabokov") and then promptly concludes:

"etc., etc.

There are lots of others for sure.

I gladly stop at 37."

There is a brief musing on American and French verbs - Perec notes that while the French have no verb for zip fastening (while Americans have the verb "to zip up"), neither Frenchmen nor Americans have a verb that means "to drink a glass of white wine with a friend from Burgundy, at the Cafe des Deux-Magots, around six o'clock on a rainy day, while talking about the non-meaningfulness of the world, knowing that you have just met your old chemistry teacher and that next to you a young woman is saying to her neighbour: 'You know, I showed her some in every colour!' "

A piece examining small, everyday things ('l'infra-ordinaire' or the 'infra-ordinary'), challenges the reader to "question your teaspoons." Ours are quite questionable, having been mostly nicked from cafes by Luka, when we give him our coffee spoons to play with and he tucks them quietly behind his knees in the pram, only to be discovered once we get home again. Perhaps we will be able to measure out his childhood with coffee spoons.

There are even examples of the intricate wordplay puzzles Perec would send his friends at New Year, and 'indexes' that place "Freud, Sigmund" between "Fat men" and "Fruit jelly".

But my favourite moment is in Species of Spaces itself, where a particularly impenetrable sentence displays a footnote sign "1." at its conclusion. Oh good, I thought, he's going to explain it and I won't have to look up any of the words.

I look down to the 'explanatory' footnote, and it reads:

"1. This is the best phrase in the whole book!"

Georges Perec: Word-tease.

And what was this 'best phrase in the whole book'?

I suppose you'll have to read it for yourself.*

*I can be a word-tease too.

Free kids books

I have a copy of Anne of Green Gables, Mrs Frisby & The Rats of NIMH, The Velveteen Rabbit (new Donna Green illustrated version) and The Poky Little Puppy to give away.

They're secondhand, but in pretty good nick.

Would you like one?

Email me at greenknowe@hotmail.com and I'll send it out to you. But be quick! I've registered them on Bookcrossing (hence the post-it notes and bookmarks you can see in the photo). In a week, any unclaimed books will be released into the wild, where they will roam free and forage for readers of their own accord.

_______________________

* Anne of Green Gables has been snapped up already - 3 books left...

** Mrs Frisby has been claimed - 2 books to go...

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

From favourer #1: "I have memories of reading The Catcher in the Rye in the boarding school library at age 14. I laughed so much that other students glared at me. This book was a big surprise and I felt complicit in its naughtiness. I had met a new friend."

From favourer #2: "I loved The Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield at 16, 21, 27 and 30 years of age. It is the only book I have read more than twice and each time I return to it, it reminds me that growing up is tough no matter what age you are."

J.D. Salinger's recent death brought this book to the forefront of my mind again, so it seemed a good time to read it. It's unusual in the list of favourites as it's one of only 3 books that got more than one vote from my friends and family (along with Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee).

I've been trying to remember when I first read The Catcher in the Rye. Like most people, I know I first read this it in high school. I've been trying to narrow it down.

I texted my friend Nil, as I remembered us reading it at about the same time, but that happened with lots of books during our teenage years, and didn't necessarily mean we read it for a school class. But she thinks we read it in class with Mr Swanson, which puts it anywhere between 1994 (Year 8) and 1998 (Year 12).

I think I can narrow it down a bit more - I've worked out I must have read it before Friends started, because I distinctly remember not knowing how to pronounce "Phoebe". Given that Friends premiered on Aussie tv in 1996, I guess I was between the ages of 14 and 16 when I first read the book.

Now that I've got it down to a 2-year timeframe, I've forgotten why I thought it was important to work that out.

Oh well.

I remember that at the time I first read it, Holden Caulfield both fascinated and annoyed me, and that my friends and I adopted some of his slang in our conversations for quite a long time. Goddam phonies.

Salinger's 1951 novel (first published as a serial in 1945-6) is narrated in first person by Holden Caulfield, a 17-year-old who has just been kicked out of (yet another) high school. Holden is the classic disenchanted youth - he finds fault with everything in the world as it is handed down to him. Family, friends, movies - almost everything makes Holden feel depressed, lonesome, sad, or is labelled "phony" (his worst insult). Instead of waiting a few days to slink home to his parents when the holidays start, Holden gathers up a fairly substantial wad of cash and escapes to New York for a few days. He pesters old flames and old friends into seeing him, drinks a bit, encounters his first prostitute, obsesses about his family, and generally spazzes around for a bit. He wants to run away from what he sees as the superficiality of everyone around him, but he can't leave town without seeing his beloved younger sister Phoebe again.

The novel is told in flashback by Holden in the present day, but I had actually completely forgotten his implied situation at the very beginning and end of the book. On re-reading, it came as a bit of a surprise, but I still found it quite unimportant, which may explain why I forgot about it so quickly in the first place (sorry to be vague but don't want to SPOILER and all).

Holden has some vernacular. His derisive comments about everyone and everything are often hilarious, and despite the very dated 1940s slang, the rhythm of his speech sounds like my friends and I when we were teenagers, and still sounds like the teenagers on my train:

"Where I lived at Pencey, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms. It was only for juniors and seniors. I was a junior. My roommate was a senior. It was named after this guy Ossenburger that went to Pencey. He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey. What he did, he started these undertaking parlors all over the country that you could get members of your family buried for about five bucks apiece. You should see old Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing alter him. The first football game of the year, he came up to school in this big goddam Cadillac, and we all had to stand up in the grandstand and give him a locomotive - that's a cheer. Then, the next morning, in chapel, he made a speech that lasted about ten hours. He started off with about fifty corny jokes, just to show us what a regular guy he was. Very big deal. Then he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God - talk to Him and all - wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs."

While The Catcher in the Rye has long been held up as a kind of rite-of-passage read for every sarcastic teenager, I wondered how (if?) Holden resonates with teenagers today. I was reading the book on the train with a few high-school students seated around me, and they started to talk about the book.

Girl #1: "Did you do Catcher in the Rye last term? Holden's pretty mad hey."

Girl #2: "He's interesting and stuff, but you wouldn't want to be his friend or anything."

Boy: "He really hates phonies."

So I suspect nothing much changed since I read him in high school - you either think he's badass or you want to tell him to shut up and take your Prozac.

I didn't really embrace Holden as my teenage anti-hero. Mainly, I couldn't stand the fact that he felt justified in passing judgement on everything and everyone, but it never occurred to him that he could be less than perfect himself. I also found it pretty hard to feel sorry for a cashed-up kid having a fancy-free weekend in the big smoke. But it didn't make him, or the book, any less fascinating at the time.

On re-reading it, Holden still annoys the crap out of me. His complaints are so relentless that sometimes I found it really depressing (to use a Holden word) to know that each time I picked up the book, I was going to have to spend time in his company again. It took me until page 161 (out of 192) to feel something for him other than annoyance, but when someone has pissed you off for so long, a moment of emotional clarity actually has more impact. And in true Holden style, it is understated:

"Then all of a sudden, I started to cry. I couldn't help it. I did it so nobody could hear me, but I did it. It scared hell out of old Phoebe when I started doing it, and she came over and tried to make me stop, but once you get started, you can't just stop on a goddam dime I was still sitting on the edge of the bed when I did it, and she put her old arm around my neck, and I put my arm around her, too, but I still couldn't stop for a long time. I thought I was going to choke to death or something. Boy, I scared hell out of poor old Phoebe. The damn window was open and everything, and I could feel her shivering and all, because all she had on was her pajamas. I tried to make her get back in bed, but she wouldn't go. Finally I stopped. But it certainly took me a long, long time."

The Catcher in the Rye interests me in different ways now that I read the book as an adult. I'm interested in how Holden admires children for the qualities he finds in them that he doesn't find in adults. His ideal job (although typically, he mis-remembers the song) is to be the 'catcher in the rye': to 'catch' children before they fall off cliff of childhood into the abyss of adulthood.

I'm interested in the way Salinger has Holden completely oblivious to parts of his character, but allows him quite an insight into other parts: "...what scares me most in a fist fight is the guy's face. I can't stand looking at the other guy's face, is my trouble. It wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded or something. It's a funny kind of yellowness, when you come to think of it, but it's yellowness, all right. I'm not kidding myself."

I'm not entirely sure if I like The Catcher in the Rye. But I can't deny that for the second time in my life, it compelled me to finish it in only a couple of sittings, and that I'm still thinking about it, and still looking up articles about it.

And I especially can't deny that I've had the "Comin' Thro the Rye" on the brain for at least a week:

Reading to himself

Luka's worked out how to climb. This puts my bookshelves in mortal danger. Along with most of our possessions.

He's also worked out what you do with books after you've climbed up and got them off the bookshelf.

You turn the pages, you say something, you point a bit, you say some more stuff. Sometimes you make a "wheeee!" noise.

Nothing to it.

10 YA books you must read?

Viewpoint Magazine has put out a call for the 10 adolescent fiction books you think are "must reads":

"Ernie Tucker has been writing reviews of adolescent fiction in English in Australia for many years. In his final review he selected ten adolescent fiction books every teacher should read. These are his ten titles:

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit (1975)

The Nargun and the Stars by Patricia Wrightson (1973)

Of a Boy by Sonya Hartnett (2002)

Josh by Ivan Southall (1971)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (1977)

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by MT Anderson (2007)

A Swift Pure Cry by Siobhan Dowd (2007)

Falling by Anne Provoost (1997)

The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)

Loose Lips by Chris Wheat (1998)

He apologises for having left out sixteen other authors and is happy to argue for his choices.

What would be your ten must reads?

What would be your students' ten must reads?

Let us know at education-viewpoint@unimelb.edu.au and we will compile a select list that could be used in a library and classroom or as a source for discussion. Start thinking!"

I've been thinking about my list. It is inevitably personal, all over the place, and involves forgetting Very Important Books. But I think Tucker's list is probably the same. (Would you class 'Of a Boy' as YA? And I don't think he's separated children's fiction from adolescent fiction. So I'm not going to either, because it's too hard.)

So anyway, here are my 10 (not in any order):

The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston (1954)

Earthfasts by William Mayne (1966)

Black Juice by Margo Lanagan (2004)

Holes by Louis Sachar (1998)

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier (1974)

Came Back to Show You I Could Fly by Robin Klein (1991)

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)

A Cage of Butterflies by Brian Caswell (1992)

Climb a Lonely Hill by Lilith Norman (1972)

I've tried not to make it too 90s-centric (but I WAS a teenager in the 90s, so Brian Caswell, Robin Klein, Gillian Rubinstein and Gary Crew keep wanting to take over the entire list). The more I look at my list, the more I want to fiddle with it, take some books out (then put them back in again), try to work out what to do with trilogies/series, wonder if I'm listing books emotionally rather than intellectually, notice there are hardly any recent titles in there, and give up on the whole thing.

But I'm going to email it to Viewpoint anyway. Email them your own list (oh but also post it here so I can see).

Perhaps if enough of us do it, we'll cover every important adolescent fiction book ever written.

Right?