Today Anton, Neve and I took the Seabus from Kabataş to Bostancı to visit some friends. Anton was very excited by this because he loves buses more than anything else, and Seabuses are big, fast and exciting! The 20 minute journey was far too short for him and here he is distraught that it is over. Near the jetty this little Roma girl spends her days hanging out with her mother who sells flowers. She tried to cheer Anton up by offering him a flower but, being completely ignored, laid it on the ground between them.

Anton having a paddy and ignoring the Roma girl offering him a flower.

I am trying so hard to take less pictures of the children but fear it is futile! So I decided that I would only use my  (well my Dad's actually) digital SLR in manual mode. Taking pictures with the instruction book in one hand is slowing me down a bit and I am hoping I will learn how to capture them better. I often end up taking photos on the vapur because we are all sat together with little to do. Anton uses quite grand gestures which I think he has picked up from Ville who has been turned into someone who gesticulates a lot by living in Turkey. It makes me smile to watch this tendency in Ville because it doesn't really fit with his Nordic appearance. In this sequence of photos Anton shows us how Ville's plane returned from Copenhagen.

The first chapter of Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence is entitled 'The Happiest Moment of My Life'. The first sentence reads; It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. Being in the physical museum facing the display case for this chapter, the one that contains an ear-ring and a curtain fluttering in the breeze, I began to think about what might be in mine. I also have a moment in time that I recall with happiness in which a curtain plays a part. When Ruskin (now 15) was 3 years old I was sitting in Ingleton village hall listening to Kate Rusby sing and watching him play behind a curtain. The curtain ended at the level of his knees and as he had taken off his shoes and was looking out of the window I was watching just his dancing calves. Having a small part framed in this way I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of his muscles and skin. It is the time when you are getting used to this little being who has been so close to you beginning a life that is separate. His response to the music and his thoughts were his own and I was filled with happiness and wonder that this person, having been so much part of me was beginning to take flight. That we were listening to Kate Rusby singing 'All god's angels' at the time definitely contributed to my emotion!

This happiness is of course tinged with loss and fear. It is hard to find snapshots of happiness that do not contain large doses of other, and sometimes contradictory emotions. The children make me incredibly happy but even as they are cuddling me and laughing I am looking forward to the quiet when they sleep and I can think for a moment without interruption. Just as I write this Matti appears, unable to sleep without Ville next to him. He curls around Ville and goes straight back to sleep. I once read that two things that make you happy can make you unhappy if you try to do them simultaneously. I try to remember this when I am trying to read when Matti and Anton want to involve me in a game. I should just take the happiness of the game and avoid the frustration of trying to do something that can wait. As I wrote this Anton cried out because his nappy had come loose and I stroked him back to sleep trying not to be impatient. And yet just taking happiness from the children and leaving aside other things is sometimes very hard. After having Neve I felt that coping with several more years of doing little else than childcare would actually leave my self-respect in tatters. Of course it should not, but being the facilitator that allows everyone else to develop can leave me feeling stagnant. A huge source of happiness for me is being able to talk about something I have read or seen to Ville. Another is the children's trust that I will indulge their want of me. The two are harder to combine than I thought they would be.

One of the best categories of happiness happens when you have achieved something or seen someone close to you push themselves and succeed. Today Ville is happy. It shocks me to see how different this spontaneous bubbling is from our daily decision to be grateful. He wrote to a friend today that he knows that this is one of the happiest moments of his life. I have noticed that when I am happy I tend to remember good moments, things going well and me as (reasonably!) courageous and successful. At lower moments the past seems to shift and the times of sadness worry and failure take the top recall positions. My history is rewritten by my current mood. And I forget so much so quickly. There have been so many moments with Ville and the children were I have thought 'I will never forget this moment' or 'I must never forget this moment' and I already cannot remember what I was hoping never to forget. The history of our family has been written so rapidly I want to capture some of it to keep. Neve's turn to break my train of thought and Ville is trying to stop the water pumping out of the washing machine reaching the wooden floor!

The happiness I found living alone in my tiny cottage in the Yorkshire Dales was quite different from the happiness I live in now. It was the happiness of a daily relationship with a beautiful landscape, of exercise leaving me exhausted and calm. This new happiness of love brings with it equal terror of loss. I might have once harboured a (very!) vaguely Buddhist notion that peace is best found by avoiding attachments but I have found my joy in having the courage to pin my happiness onto others and feel so attached that the edges of us blur. My heart and hope is, dangerously for me, walking outside my body in the form of Ville, Ruskin, Matti, Anton and Neve. Sickeningly sentimental and complete reality.

Since we brought Neve back to Turkey and the three children here are interacting with each other we feel as if our family has taken flight. We are not always at the centre of it any more, the children are developing relationships with each other independent of us. This makes me happy. I suppose its the beginning of the peace that will come when your role in their lives begins to retreat and you know that they will be ok without you. In the meantime I will reach out for all the happiness that is to be found in the skin of my family. I am bubblingly grateful!

The beginnings of what we hope will be a life-long friendship.

A moment of happiness outside the Museum of Innocence. Anton's cheek on my nose, two children in my arms.

Before my daughter was born in March I had never heard the terms 'attachment parenting', 'baby-wearing', 'extended breastfeeding' or 'co-sleeping'. Looking back I have done all these things simply because they felt good and received the least complaints from the kiddos: the path of least resistance and most relaxation. I don't feel I have done things the 'right' way, just the way that worked for me. All the recent furore over extended breastfeeding has got me reflecting on these things.

When my first son, Ruskin, was born nearly 16 years ago I decided I wanted a home birth. Many years earlier my sister Hellen and I were sitting outside the door when my sister Katrina was born, and I had no recollection of distress or panic. Moments after the birth we were able to see her tiny form and my mother's shining eyes. In order to justify this desire to myself and others, I read about positive experiences of home birth in the Netherlands and avoided negative literature. My son was born in the little attic flat where I lived in an experience that convinced me that following my instincts could be a very good idea.

I had painstakingly painted a cot for him with hundreds of tiny flowers, but as I sat gazing at him, placing him so far from me seemed an impossibility. For a few days I felt as though he would forget to breathe if I couldn't see his face or feel his skin. I breastfed him whenever he seemed to need it. For a few nights I went through a performance of placing him in his cot and then carrying him in my arms, singing and rocking when he wouldn't settle. I sat with him into the early hours so he could sleep soundly next to my heartbeat. Before the end of his first week I was just picking him up for his first night feed and keeping him beside me till morning. And if I was writing an essay (towards my degree) he was in a sling while I typed. Of course it would have been easier to write with him asleep elsewhere, but I was just no good at putting him down for long. Being a student I was not around any other young mums and just did what worked for me.

I breastfed Ruskin on demand till he was nearly two, when I began to feel sapped of energy by it. I remember when he was about 8 months old I was in the mother and baby room in Boots with several other mums when one of them commented that Ruskin was big for his age. Knowing that he wasn't particularly, and understanding her thoughts, I told her his age. All the mothers looked at me in disbelief  (and a little disgust) that I was still breastfeeding. I wasn't put off because feeding Ruskin made life easy and enabled me to be mobile, as well as being an incredibly lovely experience.

When Ruskin was about three I left his father and things became very complicated for a very long time. I felt enormous sorrow that I was unlikely to have more children. When I met Ville close to my 35th birthday he realised this very quickly, and we decided that we would try and have a baby despite the difficult circumstances we were in. I got pregnant 7 months after we met and had Anton at my parent's house at the end of August 2008. Another uncomplicated home birth.

This time I tried to have Anton in a basket on our bed so that we couldn't roll on him but soon slept with him beside me through the night. I found the first few nights really emotional as his existence seemed so fragile. I didn't want to sleep for fear of something happening to him. Ville was working long hours on a lap-top beside us in bed and I slept best when he was there watching. I quickly got to feeling that I slept quite well as I barely woke for feeds, I just moved towards him. It felt wonderful to give him the security of lying close to me through the night. The two and a half years of feeding Anton and sleeping beside him and Ville have, the odd moment of tiredness aside, been the most beautiful of my life.

When I gave birth to Neve (an unbeatably relaxed and easy home-birth)  this March I was completely decided that she was my last and that I would enjoy every moment. I cannot describe the pleasure of sleeping with her on my arm, her tiny, light body resting on my torso. I awoke to her fluttering arms signalling the need for nourishment. She still does not cry out in the night as I am alert to her hungry fidgeting. I was still feeding Anton at bedtime when she was born. I had thought that I would feed both Anton and Neve for a while, and had several precious experiences of this, but it was also draining. A week after Neve's birth my mum took him to visit his cousins and he has settled without feeding ever since.

One of the things that Ville and I are both enjoying with Neve is using a baby carrier a lot. I bought an ErgoBaby and it is fantastic. It feels as if I am holding or hugging Neve as we walk unhindered through the chaos of Istanbul. When we put her in it she simply curls up and goes to sleep. If she is unsettled it is the best way of giving her the security she needs to sleep deeply. We have walked for hours and hours without discomfort. I do not know how we could tackle the pavements here with a pram and yet baby-wearing is still fairly uncommon in Istanbul. Fellow baby-wearers usually wave to each other much as fellow Volkswagen camper drivers do.

The way I am raising our children has been a privilege and a luxury. It has depended on not working and having someone else bring in the money. This was the state through student loans when I was a student, and now Ville. It has also relied on us having very little materially, and at a certain point in a child's life the opportunities you can give them usually require money. It is important that women work. Children need to be nurtured but they also need to be raised seeing and believing in equality. Women have to feel able to make the parenting choices that will enable them to manage their own circumstances. Most women following their instincts, are surely going to raise children well, given the right support. Women are torn apart emotionally when their external circumstances don't allow them to do what they feel their children need.

Despite dedicating myself to the kiddos for the time being the residents of Heybeliada have hardly been impressed by my skills. There has been much muttering and head-shaking about my choices simply because they aren't the prevalent ones here. Advice has flowed.  It has taken me too long not to care. Advice when it is asked for is a great thing, but there would be no loss in getting rid of the unsolicited kind.

As caesareans have become the norm amongst the middle classes here the courage to follow their instincts is often curtailed from the start. The message that birth is too difficult and it is a surgeon who can best ensure the health of your baby negatively impacts the likelihood of making individual choices. People have been utterly bemused by my home births telling me that 'only the peasants would do that here'. Yet breastfeeding is still the norm here, people taking for granted that you are. Consequently I have never felt that I was offending someone by feeding close to them. Mothers even send their children over to watch!

I haven't ever felt that I have made the perfect choices (except about breastfeeding, but that's a no-brainer if you can do it). I could be doing this another way and it work just as well. I don't think being dogmatic about parenting is helpful whatever form it takes, though I will definitely continue co-sleeping, baby-wearing and breastfeeding as long as I am lucky enough to do so.

Visit the Facebook page of this blog

After a day of sunshine wind is now banging on the doors. These apartments are built for the summer when the Island population increases tenfold. The huge windows turn to paper in this weather. Anton and Neve are asleep. After a day of relaying between their needs the absence of their sounds is loud. And lovely. Anton is pink from the sun making his face more voluptuous than ever. And I am alone, which is very rare indeed. Ville is on a plane returning from a job interview in Sweden. I think he will wait at the airport for the first boat back to us, to share the news. We are both exhausted from the struggle to make ends somehow come close to meeting and this opportunity has made us both hope for an easier life. I will know in the morning.

Spending the last couple of days alone with the kiddos has brought home how it will feel if Ville goes back to working in an office. Since  he quit working for Amnesty International in Turkey when Anton was tiny, he has been freelancing and studying from home. Though he can't stop and play, he is always around and I haven't had to work out how to be independent here. And I really should have done by now.


Visit the Facebook page of this blog

Living on one of the Princes Islands you cannot help but spend many hours on vapur. When I leave Istanbul I think it will be the these trips that I remember most. The hour and twenty minutes it takes from Heybeliada to Kabataş is a chance to just be. There is nothing to be done but look out at the water, the pursuing seagulls, the fishing boats, the birds drying their feathers on the pier near Haydarpaşa, the changing skyline and the familiar silhouettes that have stood through centuries. You can drink tea and eat tost and feel your eyes closing.... Unless of course you have children. Our memories, and others memories of us, will be of rhythmic pacing with a baby, usually another child trailing behind. Matti's homework being done on the Sunday return to the city. Anton's cars lined up precariously on the stairs that for him are roads. Endless stories read to save fellow travellers from too much exuberance. And the occasional delicious moments when everyone is simultaneously sleepy. On the vapur I am very visible. People I have not noticed have told me how they love watching my children, when we have finally made acquaintance. They will remind me of incidents I have forgotten. Through the winter when daytrippers are scarce the commuters become a community. Everyone on the boat knows everyone else and vapur friendships are made. Many of the people I have come to know on Heybeliada spoke to me first in the companionable confines of the cafe deck. I love the holiday atmosphere of the 6.30 boat home on Friday, and the young men from the naval school sleeping, leaning in rows, on early boats. I love how early on weekdays commuters walk on and lay down to extend the night. Islanders have their own spot, unspoken and not worth a dispute, but true nonetheless. I love setting off in the darkness and arriving to sunrise illuminating the peninsula, unloading the kids into the bright morning air. On the days that I travel home sitting on the stairs, the vapur crammed with tourists I look forward to the conspiratorial nods of sleepy vapur friends next winter.

Vapur at dusk.

Ville reading to Anton on the vapur.

Mehmet, a 'vapur friend' and his son.