I call it phantom bad mood. I was in a bad mood but didn’t know why. Kristine tried an approach that was rejected. Oh, you’re having a moment, she said.
‘Don’t even look at me,’ I said. She walked into the lounge. ‘Don’t think about me either.’
She wouldn’t. While she played with Angus I finished the dishes, splashing water on the floor and swearing. As I wiped up the mess I figured out phantom bad mood.
I’d been on the computer for an hour that morning. There are jobs I can apply for, all with different selection criteria. Applying for a job can take up to five hours and is mostly guess work. I’d made a few phone calls. The people I needed to talk to didn’t call back.
My mood was bad because I had to apply for work and though I enjoy writing, selection criteria is boring. Applications are tedious and demoralising, particularly when I’m one of thousands of people suddenly looking for work.
My mate Paul called me again, our fiftieth chat about moving to Melbourne. He was working the phones and email frantically, calling in every favour to secure me a job. It wasn’t working.
‘You’ve just got to come down here fella,’ he said, giving me feedback on improving my resume and profile on Linkedin. ‘You can write anything,’ he said. ‘But you don’t know how to market yourself.’
I felt bad, because he was working harder than I was to get me a job. I wouldn’t mind moving to Melbourne, but all I was marketing was free vegetables from the patch to neighbours.
At a party on Sunday, most people I talked to wanted to know about the job hunt. As I held my boy, the news I delivered was grim and honest. They seemed surprised that I’d hardly tried to find work.
Kristine’s father, Jim, wanted to know what I’d done to the house in the month I’d been unemployed.
‘If I come over will I notice anything different?’ he asked.
‘The wind blew one of the front gates off the fence,’ I said. ‘You’d probably notice that.’
I mentioned rebuilding the vegetable patch but didn’t tell him I’d mowed the lawns. There wasn’t much to talk about. He nodded before asking if Angus was sleeping through the night.
‘He’s getting better,’ I said.
Being unemployed allows me to spend a lot of time with Angus. He may be getting better at sleeping through the night, but six month old babies are unpredictable. You never know when they’re going to wake up, so sleep is often shallow and uneasy.
Angus had been waking up four times a night to be fed and held. By November he was waking up once, occasionally twice. In the morning he usually wakes up around five. Kristine pretends to be asleep. I pull the pillow over my head, hoping like an ostrich with its head in the sand that she won’t see me.
Angus spends about an hour in our bed before Kristine gets up to give him breakfast. I stagger out of bed about eight and head straight for the coffee machine.
‘What’s making news today,’ I ask Kristine.
When Angus is awake he requires constant attention. We are his entertainment managers. Usually it is easy, a different toy, take him outside, hold him, cuddle him and read to him. Kristine does the bulk of it.
Entertaining a baby can be frustrating, particularly when he won’t sleep during the day. It doesn’t matter what toy you show to an irritable baby. If he wants to cry he will.
We are behaving like babies. We sleep when he sleeps. We play baby games with baby toys and read books for babies. We prepare food for babies and eat it if he doesn’t. We talk like babies. Occasionally Kristine will cry when Angus cries.
He goes through a lot of clothes and bibs. Kristine does too, because when he eats and gets dirty, she gets dirty. His face becomes a montage of vegetable and drool, as does the highchair and the floor.
I don’t do much feeding. I don’t like drool anywhere on my body. When it happens I wash my hands or change my t-shirt.
‘It’s just drool,’ Kristine says.
Baby toys are unpredictable, just like babies. When the house is quiet and I’m trying to sleep, suddenly, without reason, a toy will chime or play a jingle. The tiny lion with the orange mane is the worst. Pulling its tail activates an insane laugh.
When it goes off by itself and the house is dark house, that laugh is spooky.
The longer I am unemployed, the better I am at being a dad. But Angus still prefers Kristine. I can hold him but if he sees her he will squirm to get away from me.
Kristine is food. I’m just his unemployed dad.
All babies prefer their mum until they are a bit older when Angus is around 2 years old is when you get to shine in their eyes. Are you moving to Melbourne? The people are a bit more evovled down there I think. Sorry Queenslanders. It’s a bit horrible up here in terms of professionalism. In government they tend to get rid of ethical people because it doesn’t suit their style. I got sacked for pointing out client abuse a couple of times in Queensland and the person who locked the disabled man in a cupboard got promoted. The service that won the award for best service provision failed to provide workers for three out of seven days a week consistently for years. And promoted a person known as a drug user to manager. Makes me wonder how bad the other services are.
