The Cheeseblog

I was just going through our photos for the past week and realized how fortunate it is that I am the kind of person who does not lose her shit when things don’t go her way.

The photos, well, they’re haphazard because we bought a new camera. There was nothing wrong with the old camera, except that the little flip-top lid that held the batteries in fell off so we taped it shut with masking tape (couldn’t find the duct tape that day) and then, we were dealing with that and planning to do so for a while when somehow the display on the camera got smashed in so it looked like a Laser Pink Floyd show, which is not so convenient when you don’t have a viewfinder on the camera: “oh maybe I’m taking a picture of this adorable baby or maybe I’m taking a picture of a cat’s ass - guess I’ll have to wait until I’ve uploaded the photos to find out” and then it took us a week to buy the new camera because have you ever gone shopping with a shouty toddler?

It doesn’t take long before you are blushing your way out of the store in shame.

Saturday afternoon last, SA’s parents said, “go, do some shopping, we’ll stay here in case the kids wake up” so we went to London Drugs and bought a new camera and I love it, it’s grand, but I didn’t have any time to think about how to use it before the birthday party, Trombone’s, which we held on Sunday in the park with a couple of friends and a lot of family.

I had originally planned the party for Saturday but the Weather Gods said no, Saturday doesn’t look good, so I rescheduled for Sunday and then on Sunday holy HELL did the wind blow. Wow. We had these paper tablecloths on the picnic tables and they were wheezing with the effort of staying on the table, beneath the mustard and relish procured especially for the barbeque. We froze our asses off, only a few of us having brought sweaters or jackets. I just kept hoping for the best and thinking warm thoughts, which had a predictable Non-Effect on the actual weather.

Fresco had a bit of a cold, one that didn’t seem dire at the time but he was, nonetheless, underslept and whiny. Wrapped in blankets and strangely sourced sweaters and sweatshirts, we partied like only doting adults can and there was face painting and there were hot dogs and later, much too much later, cake and finally presents, doomed only to be enjoyed days later. Then everyone exploded from sugar and no napping and went home.

Monday arrived and I took my charges up to the park to meet up with the impeccably organized mo-wo, the dapper p-man and their sweet, socialized children who tried playing with Trombone while he wandered off and demonstrated his bubble wand to a small child and the child’s rapt father, then came back crowing, “I made some new friends,” and I refrained from saying, “because you ignored the ones that came here to meet us!” all the while Fresco dipping his homousy carrots in the grass and my sunscreen wore off and lookatthat it’s 12 noon no wonder I’m so hot, did I shower today? A thoughtful gift, which now lies comfortably on Trombone’s elephant pillow, was given in honour of his birthday and we traipsed home, while he did his now-familiar “That was fun! Let’s do it again!” playdate post-mortem which confuses the heck out of me seeing as he has usually spent the entire time ignoring his playdate playmates.

Tuesday, filled with promise; will we swim today with granddad and grandma? surely, son, we will, except oh, the pool is closed for lessons and your younger brother has developed a wheezy cough and your own nose is suddenly a tap so why don’t you head to the park for a swing and some ice cream, scratch that, the stand is closed, ah well, better days tomorrow, which is your birthday after all.

Then, today. The wheezy-coughed younger brother up at 4 am, then 5, some promising gifts on waking and then cinnamon toast, which wasn’t what he thought it would be (don’t ask ME what he thought it would be) then over to the grandparents’ for the annual Canada Day / Trombone’s Birthday Hamburger Party where we all ate hamburgers except Trombone who ate crackers and homous and Fresco who ate soup and cherries. During naptime I pulled out the perfect gift, which I had found the day previous at Superstore: a Tonka Dumptruck Flashlight Whoozit, where the flashlight shines into a motion control sensor and it makes the dump truck drive and dump its load, I mean is that PERFECT? considering he wanted a firetruck flashlight months ago, remember? I was so delighted to find it except when we took it out of its swanky packaging, it didn’t work. In the dark of the garage, it sometimes worked, but only half the time and the other half it just sat there, obstinate, staring at us. Finally, SA and I having agreed we would repackage it and return to the store because a $20 dump truck that doesn’t do anything a $5 dump truck can’t do is not a dump truck we need, he discovered the secret - the demonstration mode for the dump truck involved wires connecting the flashlight and the truck so in the store, the light appeared to make the truck move but in fact, the motion was controlled by the wires connecting them. Once the wires were removed when the packaging was discarded, the motion sensor itself was nothing but a cruel joke.

Angry at Tonka, we filmed a demonstration video that SA intends to upload somewhere and email to some cranky consumer show as well but in the meantime we had to put the perfect gift back in the trunk of the car and sure, Trombone doesn’t know any better, he’s happy with his Yo Gabba Gabba! spinoff book (yes, I bought one) but I did, I knew, and man, it chafed me.

Back to the photos from our new camera. Sometime last week I discovered that the settings on the camera were such that I was taking photos at the maximum resolution, 10 megapixels, which creates a file size of approximately 2000 Gigantos and so this morning I took a moment and reset the camera so that we were taking more reasonable, screen-shot sized photos. The uploading only took a few minutes instead of an hour and as the past few days scrolled by me quickly, I could see that there had been many moments that had fallen short of my expectations and yet I did not feel less than satisfied. So many moments I would have been justified in railing against. The snotty noses. The Windy Party. Trombone’s refusal to wash his hands after using the toilet. Tantrums and my own overgrown hair in my face and the shirt I just bought shrank in the wash. Beneath the frenzy, though, in the photos, there is a happiness on display, one that would have been impossible to plan or anticipate.

Maybe I am just too busy these days to stop and dwell on the imperfections of my life, on how my best laid plans are nothing but a ball of dandelion fluff in the wind. Or perhaps it is what I have always known but forgotten at times: perfection is not only achievable when reality matches my imagination but is also in plain view when I shrug my shoulders, smile anyway, take a deep breath, allow a third cupcake.

It is in the gaps between schedules. In un-plans. In the sunlight streaming through the car’s windshield while the children laugh in the back seat. In the sudden feeling of peace, the origin of which you don’t question. There it is, right there. Perfection.

I abandoned the weekly letter thing to Trombone a long time ago. Was it week 22 or something? I think I gave it up because I was lazy but in the past year, I have noticed it has been more difficult to exalt new developments in Trombone’s life. With every great development in life - for everyone, me included - comes a stage of pain-in-the-assness and where I’m at, my eyes are trained on minimizing the pain-in-the-assness rather than maximizing the incredible developments that emerge once the pain-in-the-assness is done.

When he was a baby, he developed skills like any baby. Rolling over! Sitting up! Talking! But since he turned (er, let’s fudge and say) 2 years old he’s been developing his personality, his *self* as well as his gross and small motor skills. That is the interesting part, the becoming a person part, the figuring out who he is part. But it is much harder to capture because it’s subtle and slow and when I stop to think about it, well, when *wasn’t* he the person he is now?

Three years ago right now I was starting to contract, watching Working Girl on the hospital TV, too nervous to finish my hospital meatloaf. It had been a sunny, warm day, much like today. Unlike today, I had nothing to do all day but stare at my huge belly and wish for it to pop out a baby.

Here are 10 things I love about Trombone, who turns 3! years! old! tomorrow.

1. He loves to pretend. We pretend to be animals, people other than ourselves, such as the little girl down the road that he loves a lot and very often we pretend to be restaurant owners and their customers. We sometimes travel to London by train, where we buy things like cookies and eye drops and chocolate.

2. He always says good morning to the people we pass on the street.

3. His contrary, independent spirit, which is still, for the most part, tempered by politeness.

The kid has been so polite and good natured that I am still guilty of saying, “Would you like to come and do this thing right now?” expecting obedience and then am surprised when he considers my request carefully and then says, “No thank you Mummy, I don’t think I would.”

Um. OK. Let me rephrase.

I don’t love this characteristic on a daily (or hourly) basis, but I love the mind spasms that go along with it. The sheer thrill of defiance is contagious. And watching him flex his muscles is pretty fun.

4. He loves music. When you play something he likes, he gets up on the couch and presses his head against the stereo speaker and listens intently, occasionally turning around to say, “Did you hear that? The man said, “helooooooo bayyyyybeeeee!” in his best Big Bopper voice. He has even come around to the awesome practice of making up different lyrics for songs. For a while he would accept no lyrical improvisation from me, which was sad because I love me some lyrical improvisation. But now, he’s all over it.

I joke about going crazy listening to the same album (or song) 8 (or 800) times a day but really, I am the same way with music that I love and I can’t begrudge him. I will play Barbara-Ann as many times as he asks me to because he needs to hear it that many times. Plus, now Fresco can say “ba ba ba!” along with us.

5. He has the memory of an elephant. Which is great if you are entertaining passers-by with your child singing “Barbara-Ann” but not so great if you are walking by a street that one time last year you went down and at the end you took out a package of cookies from a bag and gave him one and maybe you should just *check* your bag right now, just in case there are cookies in it because there were that one time.

Which is still pretty great.

6. The kid loves books. That hasn’t changed. All books, all the time. He keeps one on his spare pillow at night. Yes he has a spare pillow. He will only sleep on the mouse pillow but he keeps the elephant pillow next to the mouse pillow just in case.

7. He will eat a peanut butter, egg, and ketchup sandwich but will entertain no cheese other than parmesan. For his own reasons. Which we will never know.

8. I love his big, blue eyes and his straight, blond hair and his beautiful smile.

9. He is not quite on side with the idea of having a little brother, especially one who is so loud and who requires so much minding, but he is starting to act in a very brotherly, sweetly protective way. Sometimes when I am out of the room I hear him say something like, “Here you go, here’s a book, Fresco,” and Fresco says, “DAT!” and Trombone says, “That’s right, that’s a truck!”

10. A few months ago his nightly habit was to stop halfway up the stairs on his way to bed and holler down to me, “Enjoy the day, Mummy!” It came out of nowhere and was so sweet and randomly beautiful.

Happy Birthday, my sweet boy. Enjoy the day.

You know when you take a vacation and it’s so complete - so separate from your regular life - that you forget what happened before it, even how long it has been since you were home? It sounds, when I write that, like I had the kind of Awesome Vacation that frat boys take to Vegas, the kind where you take your own karaoke machine and drink gin and tonics in your hotel room till noon the next day but really I am speaking of our small, four-day vacation to Burnaby and subsequent return to our house in the Mizzle yesterday.

I came back and I looked at my last post here and it was 9 days ago! 9 days. I mean. I’m not on *hiatus* or anything.

Saint Aardvark’s parents are in town. They like to stay with us because we house their grandchildren, but at the time of flight bookings many months ago we were desperately tired and not optimistic about sleep training so we didn’t think moving our two children into the same bedroom to free up the guest room would be a best interests kind of thing.

My parents went to Scotland almost two weeks ago. They come back today. Their house in Burnaby is big enough for all of us to spend time in and also has a yard and also a strawberry patch.

Oh it’s fine, stay here, said my parents to SA’s parents. They get along. It is so convenient.

On Friday, the children and I packed everything into the car and drove the 20 minutes to my parents’ house. Grandma and Grandad arrived. And we all stayed there, together, until yesterday morning, eating pancakes and strawberries and bread and spaghetti and generally enjoying ourselves immensely.

My parents’ house is my old house, the house where I lived from age 2 - 19. So I am comfortable there, and happy and familiar. But usually I am there with my parents around. I know where the scotch tape is but I don’t go digging for it, I ask about it first. And we always, unless it is Christmas Eve, leave at the end of the day.

It is a strange thing to be in your mother’s house * when she is not there. To touch all the cutlery and the tea towels and look out the window over the sink and feel the history in the gaze, how she must have looked out over the yard when I was small, bigger, biggest, and now when we arrive with our two kids in tow. Washing clothes in her machine and hanging them on the line in the basement to dry. Wiping the kitchen table with a damp cloth. Waking up in that house again, hearing the birds chattering and the slap of running shoes on the sidewalk.

It was eerie, in a way. It was like she was gone. You know. Dead.**

And when you think things like that in your mother’s house while she is who-knows-where on another continent, it’s easy to get into a loop. This is what it will look like one day. One day she will be gone and he will be gone and all of this will be left exactly as it was that day, the day before they were gone. Thanks, creepy brain! That’s what I need to think about at 2 am while I lie in the most uncomfortable bed in the universe! (except for the hideabed at that old house where all those guys used to live. Yes, the Iron Maiden, that’s what I’m thinking of.)

In the dark of nightmorning, panic rising in my throat. But she can’t ever die. I need her. Followed by the devastating: but she will. And someday I will be the mom. And someday after that I will die. And my children will stand as adults in my kitchen, wondering what I saw when I looked out the window.

Believe it or not, these kinds of things don’t occur to me very often.

But. It’s just as easy to push those thoughts aside when you are surrounded by family and strawberries and the occasional sunbeam. Cross that bridge when we come to it, won’t we, says the soothing, sensible, Mary Poppins-like voice in my head. I suppose we will.

- - - - -

* Yes it is my father’s house too, but I specify my mother here because my father’s domain is the garage (and the garden) and I don’t spend much time there at all. I went in a couple of weeks ago looking for a scrub brush and actually got lost for about 10 minutes. A very organized filing system I’m sure.

** Because doesn’t everyone want to come home from a vacation and read about her eventual demise on her daughter’s blog? Definitely. ***

*** I mean, not that it will be a surprise to my mom that she will die someday but it’s not something we mention in polite company, is it? ****

**** Does the Internet still count as polite company? A topic for a different day.

Well, I enjoy *all* my comments. You spark my engines, you do. But this one was caught in the spam filter this morning:

“Your judgment pertaining to Aquarius Rules the Ankles is super gripping! Delighted studying it now and observed a few of the inputs evenly gripping.”

I love that my judgment is super gripping. And that the spammers took the time to put the title of the post they were spamming in the spam! They are so committed these days!

Another spammer actually found an old post, pretended to be a person researching things found in that post, sent me an email to tell me that the link in the old post was broken and wouldn’t I rather use [her spammy link] instead. Wow. Imagine what would get done is a spammer was the prime minister!

Speaking of commitment, Trombone is so committed to enjoying his treats that he just painstakingly ate the wafer from around his ice cream sandwich and is now delicately picking at the delicious ice cream part.

I just washed my kitchen floor for the first time since Fresco started crawling. Yes, he can run now. He is a fast runner, in fact, and a prolific climber. In development terms, the last time I washed my kitchen floor was a long time ago. I am a filthy person. But in other news, it only took 15 minutes to wash! Why don’t I do it more often?

I think in part because the floor is stone tile and the tiles are of a pattern that conceals dirt. They have swirls of grey built right in. Now yes, there was a giant splotch of brown in one corner that was from a coffee spill. And there were chunks of various rejected cuisine welded to another corner that were obviously courtesy of one child or another. But the rest of it, for the longest time, looked mostly all right.

One giant bucket of discoloured water later.

Now to hide the bucket before Fresco drinks it. Fantastik is not so good for the esophagus, I hear.

The year I was 10 years old, my world fell apart.

We spent the summer between Grades 5 and 6 in Italy, in the sun-bleached fields near my father’s home town. Every few days we drove an hour to the Adriatic Sea and dove in the waves and let ourselves dry in the sun. We would eat lunch at seaside restaurants where my parents would have the fish and I, the pickiest eater alive, always chose the pasta. Even though I was not fluent in Italian, I managed to spend quality time with my grandmother and cousins. There were barn cats and wild, runabout puppies that belonged to the farmer down the road and lots of brown children who never wore pants. My grandmother’s farm housed a couple of ornery chickens and a mean rooster, all of whom would end up cooked tender in a pot of tomato sauce before the end of the summer.

The blazing sun must have lasered my pituitary gland because puberty started stretching its fingers through my body while I lay blissfully unaware, flat on my back in the scratchy wheat fields, staring at the clouds through the boughs of an old tree. Paying no attention, I grew at least two inches that summer, straight up, as they say. The beautiful shoes we had bought in Italy didn’t fit when we got them home.

I missed the first week of school in September. Everyone stared at me when I walked in the classroom. I had left for summer vacation a cute, regular-looking Grade 5 student with slightly crooked teeth but I was returning a scarecrow of a girl, all feet and hands and loose limbs and pimples, oh the pimples, straddling my two worlds without a hint of grace.

Yesterday some of my facebook friends from elementary school found our Grade 6 teacher and then emailed me: OMG she messaged me back OMG she’s looking so good for 50+ OMG wasn’t she totally the best teacher ever! and I felt suddenly delusional, like, where was I? Where were they? Was it all in my head? Grade 6 sucked. Didn’t it suck for everyone?

You guys. Grade 6 was the worst year of my life.

I was in a different class than my best friend. She wrote me a letter while I was in Italy, telling me we probably wouldn’t be friends that year because it was too hard to be friends and be in different classes. True enough; she rallied the girls in her class behind her (and she had a week’s head start!) and I attempted a rally of the girls in mine (Nerd Army: represent!) and we spent the year fighting the useless fights of young girls.

Then: sometime after my 11th birthday, I got my period for the first time. All those pads and tampons and horseback riding to worry about.

Then: before the school year could fucking end already, I got chicken pox and missed two weeks of school, coming back with rashes and scars on top of my pimples. Come on. Really?

I remember all of that with a dull, familiar ache from having turned the memories from hand to hand so many times. What I remember with clear, sharp pain is my Grade 6 teacher.

She was a Very Attractive Woman. And she was disgusted by me, by my sweatiness, by my greasiness, by my inability to walk without tripping, by my slouch as I tried to shrink myself to a normal height again.

But wait, is that true? I felt ugly and I felt like she treated me unfairly because I was ugly and I hated her because she was beautiful and because she was nicer to the cute girls and boys in the class. But I also know that I was becoming a difficult kid, trying to process all that puberty. Maybe she was just being a teacher.

Except: she plucked her eyebrows bare and drew in new ones. And I remember thinking that she was psychotic for doing so. I might even had written something on the chalkboard about it. Or maybe not.

I hated her because I thought she hated me. I thought she was out-of-control mean to me because I was less than perfect. I thought she over-valued cleanliness and adorability. At a time when I was the starkest contrast imaginable to those values.

I reacted by becoming a (slightly) bad kid; by swearing a lot, by becoming more sarcastic than an 11-year-old had any right to be, by passing a lot of notes in class that said terrible things about people; things I didn’t even believe but wrote down for the shock value.

Ugly is as ugly does.

She reacted by giving me detention, telling other teachers about me, treating me like a bad kid.

I just wanted to know if I could still be loved, still be respected, still be treated fairly, if I was this different person, this mutant, pubescent asshole. And from her, the answer was ‘no.’ Why should it have been ‘yes’? She was my teacher, after all, not my mother.

(My mother. Who was not a talker, but a normalizer and not in the “don’t worry, everything will be fine” way but in the “let’s get on with things and pretend that never happened” way.

And of course my father, who was definitely not prepared to talk to his daughter about becoming a woman.)

It was unfortunate timing. My teacher was in front of me every day being well groomed and attractive just as it was dawning on me that there *were* pretty girls and that I was *not* one of them and that there *would* be people who would judge me based on my appearance, who had, in fact, been doing it for years, while I had been happily unaware because until then I had passed. I had met the standards, been one of the cute ones.

I was consumed by my new physical imperfection, emotional confusion and then rejection by people I had felt certain were trustworthy. Parents. Best friends. Teachers. The principal of the school who had loved me the previous year and now shook his head when he saw me in the halls. I wasn’t naughty, I was just ugly, awkward. Did that mean ugly and awkward were naughty?

Everything was all fucked up. And I was only 11. According to Judy Blume I had YEARS left of adolescence.

Somehow, my parents kept me around even though I know they were completely flabbergasted and annoyed by me.

And eventually Grade 6 ended.

My Grade 7 teacher was the best antidote to Grade 6. Among many other things - including a teaching style that just went well with my learning style - he gave me something to hold and look at and turn over in the light when I felt most dark. He wrote on my report card, “[she] has a wonderful sense of humour and I greatly enjoyed teaching her this year. And PS: cheesefairy - math is beautiful.”

This sustained me for many years. Oh thank god, someone saw through it, someone saw past my pimples and my bad attitude and found something to like about me and even threw in a good-natured jibe because I am OK, I am normal (in the good sense of the word) I can take a good-natured jibe and I am going to come out the other side of this. Beautiful or not. Popular or not. Someone I like thinks something I hate is beautiful. Anything is possible.

* * * * * *

We are in the last leg of toilet training with Trombone right now and I finally made the connection tonight between his terrible behavior this week and the fact that he is wearing underpants all day. And my own terrible 11th year. He is in that same awkward, in-between place where I was; he is becoming a boy, not still a baby, reaching out, testing, being as bad as he knows how. Will we still love him, especially when there is another baby right behind him, one who can step into his shoes and his pants and his shirts? What does it *mean* to be a big boy, anyway? Is there really no going back? Do I not have a choice? Why are your faces so eager when you look at me? What do you know that I don’t?

* * * * *

It makes me afraid for adolescence with my boys, remembering how scared and scary I was for those years. I wince thinking about my kids as teenagers. But I want them not to see the wince. I want them only to see the occasional hug at night, the porch light left on, the silent breakfasts. The unfaltering support.

Which I had, but did not see until just now.

I guess you don’t have to see something if it’s helping hold you up. The fact that you’re not flat on the ground is evidence enough.

* * * *

To sum up: Glad to have survived Grade 6. Glad to have two loving parents, no matter how I might have liked them to be different. Glad to have the time to sit and ponder these things, even if a deadline might be a good thing, in that I would stop writing and just post, already. Whether or not I think I have achieved salience.

…