Sometimes I see people who aren’t there, instead of the people who are.

I pass some random person in the street, and for a brief moment I know it’s someone familiar – and it’s always someone who couldn’t possibly be there, because I know they’re in another country. Then my brain catches up and I see that there’s barely even a likeness. But for that fleeting moment there is such a strong connection that I cannot think about anything else, and when it’s gone, there’s always a sense of loss.

A few times this summer I “saw” colleagues from London. I remember several similar occurrences from when I first moved to Sweden 16 years ago. It says something about the strength of the sensation: even now I can remember where I was walking (outside my high school) when I “saw” one of them.

Interestingly I have never “seen” the people I used to see most often, or the people I missed most, but acquaintances whom I hadn’t even thought much about before moving.

I recall posting some time ago about how becoming a parent hasn’t really changed me. I have to modify that statement a bit. I have changed. I have developed patience.

At root I’m not a particularly patient person. I twitch with impatience when I cannot walk up the escalator because people are standing in the way, or when the people in the queue in front of me cannot find their way around their own wallets because the wallet is stuffed with junk.

But now I have learned to sit quietly in a dark bedroom for 20 minutes (or longer, on a bad day) doing nothing but waiting for Ingrid to fall asleep. And that’s after 10 minutes of bedtime story + lullaby. It was hard in the beginning, but now I manage to wait it out without any real frustration, night after night.

Hmm, I just had an idea – audiobooks! Why haven’t I thought of that before? Thank you, blog.

I’m a big fan of babywearing and I’m a bit sad that I’m not slinging Ingrid any more. (Some time this spring she decided she didn’t like it any more.) But I still get a warm fuzzy feeling when I see another baby sitting in a pretty woven wrap or a cuddly stretchy one or a comfortable ergonomic carrier.

When I was out with Ingrid in a sling and we met other parents doing the same, we’d always smile at each other. Sort of like a secret handshake. Now I still smile at such parents whenever I see them, even though they don’t notice me.

We’ve been watching Firefly on DVD. Yesterday we saw Jaynestown. One of the side stories in this episode was about how Inara was hired by the local magistrate to “make a man” out of his 26-year-old son. Inara did what Inara does, and that was that. Afterwards, though, the son was wondering why he didn’t feel any different – didn’t feel any more like a man. I’ve been feeling the same about motherhood.

Somehow I had been expecting that becoming a mother would change me. That I would feel different, that I would feel like I was a different person. Perhaps not overnight… but surely a year would be enough time for any changes to take effect?

But I still don’t feel any different. I don’t feel that my role in life is to be a mother. I don’t primarily identify myself as a mom. My life has changed, of course, in the sense that I spend my time differently, have a different set of priorities, etc. But I myself have not. I am my old self but with new things in my life – not a new self.

Did becoming a parent change you?

Working from home on Fridays is getting harder and harder. I just cannot get much done during the day while Ingrid is gently and politely requesting my attention every 10 minutes. I make sure to keep up with email etc, but that’s about it. The bulk of the work gets done during evenings. I’ve got four evenings and eight hours of work, so I have been doing about two hours of work every evening. Which is fine, and I do get a lot done – those eight hours are the most productive ones I have all week. It is quiet, nothing and nobody interrupts me, and I can concentrate fully.

But it does mean that I don’t get much else done in the evenings, because by the time I’ve put Ingrid to bed, had dinner, and worked two hours, it’s about 10 o’clock.

Blogging frequency in particular has suffered. Work is not the only reason, of course. The other part of the equation is that I have gotten into a habit of blogging late in the evening. I think I need to change that, because this way there is too much chance that it just doesn’t happen at all. I may not be able to work while I am constantly interrupted, but I should be able to write a blog post piece by piece.

One of my pet peeves is food crumbs. I cannot stand them. I can deal with dust bunnies on the floor, dirty windows, cat hair, food stains on baby clothes, or a mess of toys all across the floor. But there is something that just makes food crumbs inherently disgusting to me. Food remains on the table, food crumbs on the floor or in the kitchen sink, and badly washed dishes – they just make me cringe and want to clean up, no matter whether it’s in my own home or someone else’s. I’ve visited one household where the kitchen table was so dirty that I had to make an effort to sit and eat there. (Luckily that happened a few years ago and I have no reason to believe I will ever be invited there again.)

(There’s no real point to this post. Just wanted to tell you.)

I stopped following daily news years ago. The vast majority of news stories are superficial, irrelevant to my life, and filled with negativity. I don’t buy newspapers, don’t watch the news on TV, and most days don’t open a news site either. (I keep up with the big stuff by reading The Economist to make sure I’m not completely ignorant of what is going on in the world.)

My news avoidance has become more pronounced over the past year. Firstly, of course, I have less spare time. But now I also find myself actively avoiding the news, because so much of the headline news is about bad things happening to people.

Some kind of wiring deep in the brain must change when you become a mother. I find it almost impossible to read/see news or books or movies about children being harmed or dying. Getting sick, run over, mugged… The closer the children are in age to Ingrid, the more the stories affect me. I feel tears coming up, and a sense of vicarious grief / panic / distress. I have to turn another page or walk away. If I don’t, I can all to easily imagine what it might feel like to have that happen to my child. And I cannot face that. I stop myself the moment I feel my thoughts going in that direction, because if I continue, I will be overwhelmed.

I’m officially a year older today. As with all my recent birthdays I sort of knew it was due some time soon, but then in the rush of everyday things I lost track of it, and again it took me by surprise when the day arrived. Fundamentally my birthday isn’t that important to me. Even so, it could have been an excuse for a party, but almost all the people I might have wanted to celebrate with are in other countries, so this was just another day. But all this talk about birthdays has made me think about cakes, so I think we might compensate for this tomorrow and buy a small one.

I’m a year older than I was last year, which is of course true for all days… but today the digits rolled over and my new age starts with a 3. That actually makes me feel a bit old. My mental age, the age I think of myself as, has been “mid-20s” for quite a long time now. So inside I’m not aging by a year but by over 5 years, overnight. That’s a bit of a shock.

Another statistic: there will be (or has been) a point some time this summer, I don’t know the exact date, when I will have spent half of my life living outside of Estonia. 15 years in Estonia, 9 in Sweden, 6 in the UK. Hmm, I just noticed: if I wanted to continue the series, I should move to a new country this summer and stay there for 3 years.

When I am too busy, I easily forget meals. I don’t even notice that I’m hungry, or sometimes I do notice but just tell myself that I’ll eat “soon”. Then I suddenly realise that it’s two o’clock and I haven’t had lunch, and my stomach is growling and my blood sugar is far too low. As a result I’ve had trouble keeping my weight – if I don’t take care, I lose weight. (While that may sound like a good thing if you have the opposite problem, trust me, it’s not.) I’m taking special care now that I’m breastfeeding, because I need to eat enough not only for myself but also for Ingrid.

Two things help me make sure I get enough food. One is to ALWAYS have food at hand. If getting food means interrupting whatever interesting and important thing that I’m doing to take the lift down to the cafeteria and queue to get a muffin and then get back up, well, that’s just too much work and won’t happen. But if all I need to do is to open a drawer, the equation changes. Of course this only works if I actually want to eat whatever I have at hand, so there must be choice, which is why I have a well-stocked snacks drawer at work. There’s always at least two kinds of cereal bars, and one or two kinds of dried fruit, and I usually bring fresh fruit or yoghurt with me every morning.

The other is to remind myself to eat. I actually have reminders in Outlook at work that simply say “Eat”. One at 11, one at 13 for lunch, and one at 16. My colleagues have been laughing at me for years about these (different colleagues over different years) but it really works. I call this my food and sleep clock, or in Swedish mat- och sovklocka. (The food and sleep clock was invented by Skalman, a green turtle in a Swedish children’s comic. He listens to his a bit more slavishly than I do, though. I don’t fall asleep in the middle of the day.)

I never swear. Well, never is a slight exaggeration – I know I swore in public once about 2 years ago, and I’ve probably done it a handful of times at home during recent years as well.

The thing is, I just don’t get the point of swearing. To me, swearing is an expression of impotent, inarticulate anger. I am not angry very often; if I am angry I’d rather do something about the cause than swear about it; and if I want to express my anger then I usually have something more specific to say about the cause than call it a f***ing f***er.

I keep wondering why other people swear. What satisfaction does it give them? In my experience swearing doesn’t even defuse the feeling or the situation, it just winds people up more.