Mumming.

What is that word again?

I think sometimes, as i look back — way back- before all this AI business going on, i think i take account of how and where and when i spent holidays, and who was I?

So, my active mommy year review is my pre-Christmas loudness (pardon all the unrelatables) - but my absolute logic was (in all the social media/vlogging) madness, is that if you could endure 30–45 min chatting up by people you don’t know, i could definitely write this.

So, the mommy to career ratio — this is definitely world-class Science, people.

So you have married. With all the bells and violin quartets, and doves and the long diva train - with an equally boosted bouquet down to hide the fact you forgotten your corset-petticoat and had bits hanging out with all the cake tasting (yes that was why), and now you had to deal with the fact that you need to hand out all the extra cakes in packets to all the tables. Open bar, maitre-d’ed tables — be-gloved service hand and foot to ALL the guests, handed exquisite surprises as you leave the marquee or indoor dance floor — both areas having food, drink and music handy to make merry for the 4 hours that you specified in the hand-delivered invites.

Probably, the dazzle and dampened merrymaking had readied you for that seriously long-awaited honeymoon, (well-planned aeons ago, with your du jour planner) and the sun and the sand -and the well-conditioned, typhoon-proofed room in the middle of the bahamas, or some French Indies, serving seafood the whole day.

Now, maybe we can catch up after the complete and utter madness of a Wedding prep, 20 months onwards since he popped the question -and that ring of 1,5 dazzler in all its pear-shaped blindedness. And you said yes, before thank you, and are you sure, and are you mad, and can i think about it -just went out of the window, in all its implication - because you thought, surely he was Not the marrying kind. Like i wasn’t. Ick. Tight little corner of compromise there.

But the ring, and the wedding preps -were super fab. So fab, it made the pages of whatever papers covered them. With the dress, and the double-stitched tailoring of his trousers and the trousseaus of fine fine couturiers that covered me in head to toe tulle and reams of lace and dotty silk and taffeta and then, finally your off-shouldered double-rows of dutch satin, in its flowing seriousness of “This was meant to Last, bitch, face”.

But somehow, that white gown became yellowed and off-white over the years, and collapsed into a mountain of boxes that kept well, but realises nothing ever again, until it is taken out and worn -and unlike the ring- you can’t really bear to re-fashion, or lend to a favourite niece, or give to your daughter to be ruined by her something blue, and maybe -it just lives on in the archival-paper-grade wedding albums (those do not yellow).

And whatever the moths didn’t get to, they won’t gnat at, and gnash into bits - and preservation after 30 years, would be more than the wedding prep allowed, and more than the honeymoon that followed, and more than the actual life lived afterwards.

Career — to-Mommying. (Is exactly notated here: Career m-dash, a longer and Mommying is with an n-dash, shorter.)

As the years go by, kids grow up - but careers will always be around, whether in a consultative, or a formulation of your own hybrid investment of time and skill, in a shop or a consultancy, or an art gallery, or an expat-moving business, or a career-workshopping weekend circle.

There are few and far between, the parallels that we draw from Family (& raising your little-yous) and Career (& raising you).

The ratio: (is not as golden as it appears), it goes a little something like this, finding years worked (x) to years parenting (y), and summing up total years doing (x + y), over x•y, (where numerator minus x = y) is (zero) circular if you worked, but it’s 1 if you didn’t work (where x = absolute 0).

It becomes personal - but it’s meant to understand the general thing that personal is internal perception : which is the real key — and not the actual years worked, or the actual years worked in a perceptable taxable communal local to global career to a working community or to family (your personal first-community, since marrying).

The shifting to another community, or marrying again -creates shifts in personal, but then in that instance, it’s work that remains constant. The formula then becomes (x+y), over x*y1 (y prime is the new situation) + x•y (the old situation, if still active, and if kids of first marriage are factored, and are dependants still).

Sounds complex? (Not yet?)

Factor in careers carried over to moving to a new place/ country / continent with 3–6 dependants, and 2–4 incomes juggled, and 4–5 income taxes filed per year. I don’t think people want to get married, (or have kids), at this point in the narrative.

The career factor (x) remembers: you are important at work, as you are at home.

The home factor (y) remembers: you are important here, but we can take you for granted since you are always always working. But, if you are here more, we are forcing you to work, so we can take you for granted more. (And we need more space, btw.)

Where this conversation takes place, is key. And that it does actually take place.

For everyone involved, cultures are a plus factor as well- if families cherish an open platform where issues are brought up, evolved, and progressed where updated, then people are okay with their ratios (as that is how things are settled at work). If that doesn’t happen, stay at home (you did not learn anything at work, and your pension will cover nothing but to ease the inexplicable silences that occur with your overbearing burden of a presence).

Is what we need to understand in the Dynamic of a Family. After all that wedding prep, and tiring honeymoon, and super-exhausting life of a family of a 3:2 (either, parent-to-child or child-to-parent ratios).

I think, as in all relationships, it is all complex carbohydrates - sometimes a little hard to chew, but easy on the digestive tract.

And now, it’s time for tea.