The pain of essays

I hate writing TMAs.

I've just submitted my second one. I was going to hold out, keep revising it, and submit it closer to the closing date (which is in 9 days), but the PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE got to me. So it's gone. And now I will attempt to forget it EVER HAPPENED.

Even with analysing the question, reading the assignment guidelines and considering my grasp of the subject to be pretty good. I think I've done a dreadful essay. I wrote an ESSAY PLAN, for god's sake. I haven't written one of those since I was 17, under duress from my extraordinarily evil English teacher. I wrote my essay plan weeks ago, long before I'd finished the block. When I came to writing the essay itself, I looked over my plan, nodded at my own amazingness and went ENTIRELY BLANK. I started writing randomly and somehow, it became coherant. I cut about 300 words out, rearranged it a bit, and decided that it was actually Quite Good.

Then doubt set in. My last essay was shocking. Well, it wasn't objectively, but to me it was shocking and I, originally, thought it was quite good. So, for several days, I have pondered and edited, and re-read units and decided I am dreadful. My essay, once something I could read, and follow and feel faintly proud of has filled me with ANGER. I can't even read it anymore, it's like I know it off by heart and the words just blend into a giant, glowing turd on the screen. Dread, unwholesome DREAD at seeing some painfully crap number appear on my student record again, has reared it's vile head.

So, I will attempt to wipe it from my mind as my tutor won't mark it for a couple of weeks. It's my baby's birthday tomorrow *yay*. Time to concentrate on the child, for once.

MOAR essays

I haven't written in an age. Mainly because nothing has riled me of late and I haven't felt the need to pontificate at length about religion or the perils of Amanda Holden. Since I last wrote, Blogger has changed 'backs off hissing'. I think it's a sign of getting old when websites change, and instead of embracing the new technology, you bitch and moan. It won't run on my phone anymore! Boo!

It is TMA time again. Already. They get closer together as the course progresses, though there's six weeks between the last one and the exam. My exam date is the two year anniversary of my ex buggering off, so I shall have a welcome distraction. I took a different approach to this essay, since my last one didn't work.
First, I actually wrote an essay plan. It was a very brief essay plan, but a plan nonetheless, and in doing so, I ANALYSED THE QUESTION. Second, I started writing somewhere in the middle of the essay because I literally had no idea how to start. It would seem to be a downside of planning an essay. You know what you want to say but then brain and hands do not connect. You end up spouting something that reads very much like a 6 year old's What I Did In The Holidays story. "Bowlby wrote about children who attach to their mummys because they love their mummy the most. But then they wake up and it was all a dream"
Ahem.

So, the bones of my essay are in place. I've used references to back up points, rather than just dumping them in the middle of a paragraph and hoping that's enough. I have Harvard referencing DOWN. I need to carve about 200 words off the word count, and rephrase some of it to answer the question a bit better, but otherwise, I *think* it might be better than the last one.

Submission deadline is in two weeks, so I have some time to DWELL and revise endlessly. I also need to do the other two mini-essays, one of which is 'how do you think you did?'. For which, I may just write this blog address.

Once this TMA is submitted, I'm a third of the way through the course. Huzzah!

The results

I scored 60%.

That equates to full marks for parts B and C, and 45 out of 85 for my essay. I got full marks on the writing skills elements.

I am a bit disappointed, I cannot lie. I nearly cried when I read my score, like a prick.

It's a pass 3, which is a C according to OU classification. I probably shouldn't be so disappointed. I can see exactly where I went 'wrong', even without feedback, and I need to try and work out how to fix it for next time.

My next essay is due on May 3rd. I'm halfway through the reading for it. I think this time I might try more formally planning it, rather than just mind-vomiting all over my laptop. I think I'll take my time, panic less and not be in such a massive anxious haste to submit.

In better news, I got 100% on my first iCMA. So in a surreal turn of events, I did better at maths than english!

For my next trick...

It's been a week since the TMA submission deadline passed and I wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Everytime I see I have an email on my phone, my pulse quickens. Then I remember that I only checked StudentHome twenty minutes before and my results weren't up then.

This week, registration for 2012/13 courses opened, so I've registered for my next course. K203 - Working For Health is 60 credits and level 2.

I'm also considering doing another level 2 course, of 30 credits concurrently. That one starts in February. I qualify for transitional funding and I want to get this degree. It's the most motivated I've been to do anything EVER.

See, times are a-changing. My eldest son has just turned three and will start preschool in September (if I can find him a place) and my baby is close to being one and steadily turning into a Real Boy. In a few months, he'll be old enough to stay overnight at his dad's.
I have more time on my hands than I did even two months ago when this course started.
I am coping fine with the current workload; even with the kids being ill and me having weekly dentist trips, I'm still two weeks ahead. I LOVE it, I'd recommend it to anyone in a similar(ly bored) boat.

But I really want my TMA results so I can see how dreadful I am.

The God delusion

I've been ruminating on the nature of faith recently. Partly because, although I identify as Christian, I'm not a very good one and I've been getting cross with various christian churches for taking issue with matters to do with love and sex. Also, because my boyfriend is an atheist, we have various debates about religion in general and this makes me question myself.
Although I was raised Anglican, and confirmed young, I have been questioning the existence of God since I was old enough to understand not everyone believed what I did. I went through a phase, at around 16 (when my incredibly devout grandmother died rather horribly) of wondering if there really was a God. This coincided with an AS level course in philosophy and ethics. I started to understand that if God existed, we couldn't compare Him to us. He was on a whole other plane, ethically, morally and physically. He was not human and to try and give Him human attributes to explain the suffering on Earth was ludicrous.
Can I explain the problem of evil? No, can anyone? If God exists, we were created by something which is happy to let us suffer. Some people believe we have to suffer to earn a place in Heaven. I believe we suffer because we have autonomy, the freedom to choose whether we hurt people or not. We have to die, it's population control. We're not perfect, or immortal. Natural disasters, I can't explain them. There is an argument that God, if he exists, could have created a perfect world. I can't argue with that.
But what we have is pretty fucking miraculous.
For example, reproduction. When I think of pregnancy and birth, in any creature, I can't explain how it's so perfect. Two people have sex and 40 weeks later (ish), out comes another human, completely different to any that has gone before. From two cells comes a baby, with a mind and a personality and a spark in it's eyes that tells you it is an intelligent being. That's a real miracle. And yes, science tells us how it works, and how the mother nourishes the foetus, and how the foetus develops and learns to breathe, to sleep and to eat before it ever comes out. But when you see a newborn baby, still covered in womb-yack and pale and screaming, you can think of the billions of tiny things that could have gone wrong in the last 40 weeks, and wonder how healthy children are ever born at all.

But that's all irrelevant, because I'm not expecting anyone to look at the nearest child and shout "EGAD! GOD EXISTS" and run and be baptised.
It seems faith is something you either have or do not have. You can find it, you can lose it, but you can't have 'a bit' of faith.
But faith is just a feeling. A feeling you cannot justify. You cannot PROVE what you feel and you cannot explain it. People expect you to - you tell an atheist that you believe in God and some will tell you to prove it. But you can't. Others just RUN AWAY from the crazy bible-basher. It seems incredibly unpopular to admit faith at the moment, like you're admitting to every crime people have ever done in the name of God, or sanctioning all the hateful bullshit the churches spout in His name.

It's like being in love. Nobody can tell you you're in love, nobody can expect you to prove that you're in love, and yet you are.

I feel God all the time. If I lost my faith, I would feel empty. Is this just a delusion? Some would say yes, but they could equally say all emotions are delusional. I don't need to go to church to feel close to God, I don't need a priest to intercede for me. Do I think my faith excuses me from every bad thought or deed? Hell no. Quite the opposite - my faith inspires me to be tolerant, and forgiving.

Attachment theory and attachment parenting

I've been doing some work on attachment theory as part of my course. It's particularly interesting as I have deliberately used the attachment parenting model for my children.
In brief, attachment parenting is being a giant hippy-mother. You breastfeed, co-sleep, baby-wear, focusing everything on nurturing the child. The idea is that a secure child is a happy child. It is the absolute polar opposite of that babynazi Gina Ford.

Every pregnant woman, and many women who haven't got that far, have ideas about how they will raise their child. With my eldest, I knew I would breastfeed, but that was it. I'd read up on the AP ethos and it didn't suit my way of thinking back then. I was going to have a natural labour, I was going to adore him from first sight, I was going to cope fine when I got back from hospital. He wouldn't need a dummy. I would never sleep in the same bed as my baby. I'd wean him at six months. Blah blah blah.

In the event, I had a natural labour, and a giant (9lb 1oz) baby a few days past my due date. He split me like I was a banana. I didn't feel anything much for him. The giant baby fed well twice and then went to sleep and refused to wake up. The paediatrician panicked because he hadn't established feeding and I didn't escape from hospital for 16 hours. I got home, and giant baby woke up and devoured me every half hour, all night.
My giant baby then developed awful reflux from his umbilical hernia. So, he would feed for 20 minutes, vomit up the whole feed and feed again for another 20 minutes. The health visitor assured me this was 'normal' and he was 'overeating'. HA! The paediatrician we later saw about his hernia told us that it was definitely the hernia causing the sick. In the mean time, I'd resorted to a dummy because I'd been convinced he wasn't actually hungry. At 10 weeks old, I cracked and started co-sleeping and a miracle occured: I started getting some real sleep.
However, the damage was done and I had moderate/severe postnatal depression. A traumatically fast delivery, sicky, hungry, clingy baby and periodically absent (through work) husband took it's toll and daily, I wished to jump out of the window and run far away. I didn't feel like he was my son, but that I was looking after him for someone else and they would come back and get him soon. Eventually I got help, but my eldest remained an insecure, screamy little boy until he was about two years old. I breastfed him until he was 22 months old (I stopped coz I was 7 months pregnant and my boobs were killing me) and co-slept until he was 2 and a half. He still gets in my bed at night, but I don't mind. He'll grow out of it.

With baby two, I vowed things would be different. Until my husband buggered, and then I didn't think about the baby much at all until he was about ready to come out. It didn't seem important. I had him at home, for minimum interference, and he was born in under two hours. When he was born, I felt nothing but love. That first rush actually happened and took my breath away. The first picture I have of him is him feeding, holding my boob with his little claw-hands staring at me like I am the GODDESS. I've co-slept since day 1, despite my mother trying to persuade me otherwise. I also babywear, which I didn't do with my eldest. It makes life much easier for a non-driving single mother; I just lob him in the sling and we're off. And he is a hilarious, social, happy child.

No two children are the same, but for me, attachment parenting has saved my sanity and produced at least one secure baby. I wish I'd done it from the start with my eldest. But, you live and learn.

On gay marriage

So, the Roman Catholic church is banging on about gay marriage and this is filling the newspapers.

I am at a loss as to why this is news.

The RC church is not exactly renowned for it's tolerance of homosexuality. I cannot understand why celibate clerics like dictating everyone's sexual practice to such an alarming degree, be it through with whom you're allowed to have sex, when or whether you're allowed to avoid STDs doing so. This is a church that demonises masturbation based on a wilful misinterpretation of a Bible story. Sex is shame. That's no way to live.
The RC church is a minority in this country - 13.5% of the total population, according to the 2001 census. That's roughly the population of London.
Even if the church had ultimate sway over government legislation, it wouldn't be up to the RC church to sway it. This country is Church of England. It went to great pains to rid us of papal rule several hundred years ago. Even now, to be Roman Catholic and royal is to forfeit your place in the succession. There is nothing in law to stop a non-Anglican MP becoming Prime Minister, but it hasn't happened yet.

The main thrust of the argument appears to be that marriage is an institution for the bearing of children, and that this underpins society as a whole. Only, you know, it doesn't. Bastard children no longer bear the stigma they did even as recently as 20 years ago. I may be a single parent now, but I got married long before I started a family. Marriage didn't stop my husband being an adulterous swine. Shotgun weddings are a thing of the past - women are now allowed to decide for themselves when, with whom and in what marital state they bear their children.
So, if people getting married are doing so for love, rather than to ensure their children aren't stigmatised bastards, what bearing does sexuality have on it? None.

Civil partnership is marriage without the name - it confers the same benefits and rights as a heterosexual marriage. It's just not allowed to be called what it is. This is an argument about semantics. But NO CHURCH owns the word, concept or actuality of marriage.

It's not as if ALL the homosexual couples in the UK are demanding to be married BY THE POPE. It is up to individual churches to decide whether to allow their ministers to perform the marriage. If I decide to marry again, not all churches will let me, as an Evil Shameful Divorcee, but I don't really care because it's the marriage that counts, not the venue.
Christianity has it's roots in love - love for God, love for each other.
And marriage is nothing to do with sex - marriage is the ultimate expression of love.