Mother Fluker

A Migrant Mother's Musings

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Resorting to the Opium of the Masses

A sad fact of having a small child in a new and far flung place is that with no family nearby to call on for babysitting, one's evening social life is a little curtailed. It's not that we don't ever go out, but nights out together are much fewer than they were in Glasgow, and tend to require some advance planning. Spur of the moment stuff is definitely much harder. I had breezily thought that I would organise a babysitting circle among the new mothers I got to know, but this plan backfired a bit because almost everybody here does have that established family network, and their nearest and dearest are only to happy to help them out. Babysitting circles work on the principle of reciprocal need, so I need to meet more people in my situation, which as yet I haven't.

I feel jealous of people with close local family ties, and not just because I am missing night-time sorties, but for the impromptu ad hoc help that just oils the wheels of life in general. I spoke to another mother yesterday who confessed that she has never taken her son to the supermarket, because her parents and in-laws are desperate to spend time with him and all live locally. Having just returned from the military-style advanced planning operation that taking a toddler to Coles involves, there was more than a little muttering after she had left. Ditto the mother who palms her offspring away to her parents from Friday to Sunday every week, enabling actual partying until the early hours followed by LIE-INS.

It's not that I am averse to leaving the H with other people, but that person really has to be somebody he knows extremely well if it's in the daytime, plus I can't afford to pay babysitters $20 an hour to sit in the house while he sleeps at night. So while friends help us out from time to time, the net result of the situation is that we spend a lot more time at home in the evenings than we used to.

The knock-on effect of this is that we have started to watch a lot more TV. Yeah, we should probably use the time more creatively, but after an average day's toddler-wrangling, TV is an alluring option. As Australian terrestrial tv is mostly rubbish and riddled with advertising every ten minutes, we splashed out on Foxtel. Foxtel is also mostly rubbish, but a bigger selection of rubbish, from which occasional gems can be salvaged. The stuff is so old, though. The Bill repeats are several years old, and as for the Parkinson re-runs - one day we'll tune in to find that he's interviewing Disraeli or William Shakespeare. Foxtel is currently showing repeats of Stars in Their Eyes from 1996.

DVDs are the alternative amusement, and a kind person has recently introduced me to the delights of 24. Somehow we completely missed out on 24 fever when it swept the UK. I suspect it must have happened when we were away travelling for a year, and thus missed out on chunks of popular culture, current affairs and in-jokes. But having had someone mention it again, I borrowed series 1 on DVD and have been horribly engrossed since. Kiefer Sutherland. Object of desire. Indeed.