Positive thinking

What a difference a day makes.

24 hours before taking these joyful snaps, I was pushing a pram along Drummond Street and wiping away tears with a paper towel (we are out of tissues). That was three for three: I had already been in tears earlier the same morning during two separate phone calls. Call it pregnancy hormones.

Or maybe they were cumulative tears. You know sometimes when you don’t even realise the pressure is building up until it’s too late and you’re in full-on meltdown mode and it’s embarrassing, because the tear-soaked paper towel is leaving little bits of paper-fluff on your face for everyone on Drummond Street to see? Maybe it was that. There has been a lot of pressure in our lives lately, and I hadn’t really even given myself the opportunity to think about it all at once, so I hadn’t realised it was all getting the better of me, until Meltdown Morning. I was that frog in the pot of water that didn’t notice the water heating up until it reached a good, rolling boil.

But sometimes a teary meltdown is good for the soul, wouldn’t you agree? I got it all out of my system (and into the paper towel). It forced me to take a look at what was going on in my life and restock. It forced me to open up to Mr B about how I (had only just discovered I) was feeling. And I remembered that it was ok to ask for help, sometimes. So I did. And I got the help I asked for. Why am I still so slow to realise these things?

To celebrate my new and improved positive outlook, not to mention the amazing spring weather, Madeleine and I took the tram out to St Kilda the next morning for a bow-legged run on the sand and a paddle in the (freezing! but she didn’t seem to care) water. Madeleine toddled up and down that beach like the four-week veteran of walking she was. Or even, her proud mother could say, just like a veteran of, oooh, six weeks. (Madeleine is a very advanced child). She chased some seagulls too. Toddlers do that.

Later we shared lunch together in a grubby, nondescript cafe, and I earned my World’s Worst Mother award by treating my baby to a meal of chicken nuggets, chips and cherry tomatoes. Having already completely ruined her nutrition for the day, we followed this up by sharing a choc-nilla milkshake at Crafternoon on the way home. Madeleine drank hers down to the very end, making the slurpy noises you’d expect to hear in a 1950s diner. It was all kinds of cute.

Tomorrow we will eat healthy food. And I will keep smiling.