Late last week I sat down between nappy changes and stopping my toddler from flushing my mobile phone down the toilet to write my Christmas card list. I know I am running late, but I want to mail them this side of Christmas, and not pretend, yet again, that being Buddhist somehow excuses a) the lack of Christmas cards; b) my Zen-like tardiness in mailing out the aforementioned cards. I love sending Christmas cards. I love selecting the right card for the right person. I love trying to reconnect with people I may have accidently ignored for the whole of previous year. This is very important when considering these people could reciprocate my sometimes erratic behaviour and ignore me in return, or worse still, cut me out of their wills.
This happened to a friend of mine a few years ago, great aunt Agatha was accidently left of the Christmas card lift, and snip, my girlfriend was out the will. When a February heat wave carried away the cantankerous old lady, my friend lost not only a one in fifty equal share of the proceeds of a house sale in Croydon, but also the right to forage through the old lady’s wardrobe. She had been a doyenne of fashion during the 40s and 50s. The final straw for my girlfriend came when her conscientious cousin was seen a few weeks later at a function wearing a vintage Chanel evening dress. Do not underestimate the power of the Christmas card.
As I made up my list, I marked off those who would receive paper cards versus those who would receive e-Cards only. My e-Card recipient list is not just restricted to those concerned about their carbon foot print, and/or the wonton destruction of old growth forests in the name of a commercialised festival whose purpose most people have long since forgotten. A large part of my e-Card recipient list were people, well, people I had never actually met. They were friends I had made on online forums.
Now before you peg me as a square-eyed computer chick with a web addiction, I must point out that I do actually do have friends who exist in real life. I regularly have coffees, lunches and normal human interactions with friends and family. My child does not get neglected as I log into chat room after chat room. I do not confuse my name with my onscreen avatar. I can have a conversation without resorting to acronyms such as LOL, KWIM and LMAO.
However, with the advent of motherhood, I found myself spending more and more time in online forums. Forums I had previously eschewed as the domain of desperate housewives, seeking some form of form of grown-up conversation. I was never going to be like them. I would do “motherhood” so much better than those tragic, exhausted looking women in tracksuit pants.“Motherhood” for me was going to be an unending series of coffee dates with my girlfriends (two of whom got conveniently pregnant around the same time). We would sit around glamorously, sipping our lattes as our babies slumbered blissfully in their prams. I would not have time for online forums. It was all about organisation, right? After all, I had spent the last ten managing web sites, how hard could a baby be? Ha.Ha, ha!
My little man threw me his first curve ball the night after we brought him home. He cried for ten hours straight, and fell into an exhausted sleep for, oh, about forty minutes, and then proceeded to cry for another five hours. I was exhausted from my emergency c-section and I could not move, much less think. Things went pear shaped from there.
The “arsenic hour” in our home became the “arsenic evening”, it’s period stretching from anywhere from early evening to the next morning. At four weeks, after being told a million times that babies cried and I was being silly, I snapped. I put a hysterical call into the Paediatrician. Within days, my son was diagnosed with reflux and put on meds. The worst of the uncontrollable crying was over, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. My little boy’s weight started to plummet. At three months, we did a stint a Mother Baby Unit, if for nothing else, for me to get some respite. We knew something was not quite right with our boy, but we (including the doctors) just could not figure it out.
As soon as we left the Mother Baby Unit, I started researching online for my son’s symptoms. I knew I was not getting the whole picture and I wanted to be well armed with information as I dealt with an unending stream of doctors. On the internet, I found more than just information, I found forums. I found not just one other mother going through a similar experience, but whole communities of them! I found other mothers who were just as sleep deprived as I was. I found other mothers whose children were not gaining weight. I found other mothers who were equally as frustrated with medical fraternity and their lack of answers. I found other mothers with babies like mine. I was not alone.
Please do not get me wrong, my friends and family had come around to being quite supportive by this time. They knew we weren’t just making things up. I will for evermore be grateful for food on left our doorstep, not just once or twice, but so many times that it was like having daily smorgasbord. My husband took to calling just before he left the office to find out what had been left on the doorstep. I will also never forget the friend who dried ten loads of laundry while we were in hospital and brought me clean pyjamas for the first time in days.
However, none of them could understand what I was going through. They had happy healthy children who ate and grew even if one or two of them had trouble with sleep. I found their words of sympathy patronising and their attempts at comfort condescending. I found anecdotes of how other children had survived adversity frustrating because there was no assurance that my child would make it through. I want to make it very clear, my friends bent over backward to support me, I was just incapable of accepting support from them. It was me, not them. I had not come to terms with my son’s illness.
Curiously, I was able to reach out to and accept support from anonymous mothers who were on online community forums. The depth to which I depended on my own little virtual mother’s group came home to me when once I was in hospital with my little boy, I locked myself in a bathroom with my laptop and roaming internet USB key. I needed help and I found it online. I found comfort in chatting with other battle hardened hospital mums. They knew what it was like to be able to sleep through a hospital code blue while still being able to wake up in a flash for the slightest whimper from your own child.
Best of all, the forums are 24x7 and international. There is never the concern that you may be contacting someone too late in the evening. As we in Australia go to sleep, mothers in the US are just waking up. This is especially important when the little down time you may have is late at night.
It also meant that we could share information on medical protocols being tried in the US and Canada immediately instead of waiting for months for the information to be published in medical journals. Indeed, one of the drugs we used on our son was being tried by a Paediatric Gastroenterologist in Indianapolis, USA and the information would have taken months to get here if it had gone through the proper channels. We hospital mums really don’t care much for publishing accolades, we just want our kids to get better.
I was given advice on medication, dosages and the best methods of dealing with a child who had a condition that was poorly understood. It was information no doctor nor nurse could give me because they do not live with a sick child nor care for the child all day, every day. Only mothers or other primary caregivers know this information. With internet forums, they can share this information.
Another thing that has pleasantly surprised me about forums is the breath of topics. You can join a lively discussion on the appropriate colour and consistency of baby poo (I kid you not!) while contemplating on another thread as to whether baby name “Ella”is being completely overused in Australia. My most surreal online moment came when I was supporting one friend in Bristol UK with her separation from her husband, while another friend and I were cheerfully dissecting RPattz.
There are also certain advantages to online friends to real life friends. Online friends don’t call at inopportune moments and wake the baby. No one gets offended if it takes a few days to respond to an email. Last but not least, online friends never ask you if their bums look big in a skirt, jeans or whatever.
As with anything, relationships formed online are not perfect. Forums topics are not all about dancing through daisy covered fields humming “We all live in the yellow submarine”. Some forum interactions can be deadly and moderators are called in to wipe the blood from the virtual floor. Think of a cleanup crew at the MCG after Grand final. Controversial topics such as vaccinations, controlled crying and natural birth versus elective caesarean can bring out the worst in people. The anonymity that can breed such tolerance and compassion that allows a stranger to generously reach out to another can turn on a whisker to rudeness and plain nastiness.
The ubiquity of the internet also means that every nut bag and his dog is on it. You get some really strange people sending you some really strange stuff. I once had a person once tell me that my child had reflux because, wait for it, he was half alien. X-Files aficionados have not yet left the building. And there is some really bad information as well, especially on sites purporting to be serious and knowledgeable. Sift through the information carefully, and when in doubt, ask your doctor. You do pay them, so they might as well earn their keep.
My son has now turned a corner and I see light at the end of the tunnel. But I still hang out with my virtual mum’s group. I mentor other women who are going through what I went through. I support them and reassure them that they are not going insane. I share battle stories and success stories. I virtually hang out with the mums who were there for me when I needed support the most.
In most cases we’ve moved on from calling each other by our onscreen names. Though I may never meet SueEllen’s Mum from Brisbane, I still consider her a good friend. I will send her and her family a Christmas e-Card. Christmas for me, though I am a Buddhist, is a time for reconnecting and telling people you care. Or celebrating the birth of baby Jesus. I do love a good kid’s party.
